My 6-Step Morning Protocol for a Better Day

Want to make your own morning protocol? Download Arthur’s guide to help you get started.

How you start your morning sets the tone for your whole day. In this episode of Office Hours, I share the science and habits behind my “Mad Scientist” morning routine, a six-step protocol I use to lower negative affect, boost positive mood, and make mornings a time of focus and flow.

I introduce the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), explain why morning mood matters, and show you the research-backed habits I use to improve mine. 

In this episode, I cover:

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• Why your morning starts the night before with an early bedtime

• How witnessing the sunrise can help manage poor morning moods 

• The reason I don’t use the alarm clock on my phone 

• Why I exercise first thing

• How to build a grounding spiritual or reflective practice (even if you’re secular)

• Why delaying your morning coffee can improve focus and energy throughout the day

• The high-protein, tryptophan-rich foods I eat for breakfast 

• Why you need to protect your most productive hours of the day 

• Listener questions on staying compassionate while protecting yourself and whether anger is linked to unhappiness

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We’d love to hear any feedback you have. Please email us at officehours@arthurbrooks.com. And please leave a review on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening! 

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Referenced:

• Leadership and Happiness course

• How to Build a Life

• The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life

• Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales‍

• Arthur’s PANAS quiz

• Self-Reported Depressive Symptoms and Stress Levels in Healthy Young Men: Associations With the Cortisol Response to Awakening

• Brahma Muhurta: Everything you need to know

• Influence of early rising on performance in tasks requiring attention and memory

• A controlled study of dawn simulation in subsyndromal winter depression

• Genome-wide association analyses of chronotype in 697,828 individuals provides insights into circadian rhythms

• Sleep More and Be Happier

• Associations of chronotype with anxiety, depression and insomnia among general adult population: A cross-sectional study in Hubei, China 

• The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Going to Bed Early

• Affective Responses to Acute Exercise: A Meta-Analysis of the Potential Beneficial Effects of a Single Bout of Exercise on General Mood, Anxiety, and Depressive Symptoms

• Exercise effects on depression: Possible neural mechanisms

• The effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive function in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis

• Zone 2 cardio: What is it and why is it trending online?

• 9 Benefits of Walking After Eating

• Dan Buettner’s website

• How Does Prayer Help Manage Emotions?

• Brief, daily meditation enhances attention, memory, mood, and emotional regulation in non-experienced meditators

• Global and regional alterations of hippocampal anatomy in long-term meditation practitioners

• How to pray the rosary

• Caffeine acts through neuronal adenosine A2A receptors to prevent mood and memory dysfunction triggered by chronic stress

• Sarcopenia

• The bovine protein α-lactalbumin increases the plasma ratio of tryptophan to the other large neutral amino acids, and in vulnerable subjects raises brain serotonin activity, reduces cortisol concentration, and improves mood under stress

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

• The experience of flow and subjective well-being of music students

• What’s Missing from Empathy

• How to Stop Freaking Out