The First Five Minutes Protocol - part one.
Winning Your Day Before It's Begun. - Reading time 6 min.
The most important 5 minutes of your day happen before you remember your name.
When you wake up in the morning are you one of those people who jump straight out of bed-full of beans, and dive out the door head-first into a 5 am run?
Before you recall your own identity and before your responsibilities and your problems have loaded.
How does that work??
I am talking about the first window that appears immediately upon waking.
This window was recognized as an important one by the Stoics, and they knew it existed much easier then any of us moderners do today because of the digital age of distractions we live in.
The ancients didn’t have the same noise, they had a different quiet that enabled deeper inner reflection and what’s ironic, is that we today long to achieve or certainly reclaim that inner reflective ability and the peace that comes with it.
That tells us a lot about who we fundamentally are human beings.
We were never intended to operate on this earth as masters-of-mass production and competitive speed.
Now it’s all about who gets to the top first, who makes the most money, who’s got the greatest influence and who has the worst…. I mean, the most viral trend-setting attitude.
What the…?
We still want real lives with real deep-seated meaning despite all the plastic faces and so-called happiness roll-a coasters.
Everything we own and do feels like it’s made to break down, nothing is well rooted anymore would you agree?
A good place to start unravelling this porous existence is to learn about the first five minutes window.
Not that knowing about it and applying it will be the cure-all to every other thing you believe needs attention in your life, but it’s a small action that begins the ball spinning differently, and that’s what I want to focus on with you, small steps that build big results.
Image by Canva
Why the First Five Minutes Are Neurologically Different.
We are now going to examine four areas that will help clarify.
The hypnopompic state:
This is what the first window is called between sleep and fully waking.
Unique Receptivity:
Why the brain is uniquely receptive to intention in this window.
Colonization of the Early Window:
How modern smartphones have colonized this moment and what it costs us.
Intuition:
What the ancients understood intuitively that neuroscience now confirms.
The Hypnopompic State.
Every morning before your eyes open, your brain passes a neurological threshold known as the hypnopompic state.
It’s an interesting name but it refers to the transition that happens when you pass between deep sleep and full wakefulness. This occurrence bought to mind the idea that death is likened to being in a deep sleep, because when we are there, none of know we are.
This window is brief, about two to five minutes only where your brain waves are still running slowly and your prefrontal cortex is not yet fully online - a case of ‘still loading, please wait’ or nowadays, ‘still processing’ or ‘still thinking’, but the information cache is only a quarter full.
During the ‘still loading phase’, the brain is operating predominantly in theta wave activity.
Heard of it?
Sounds funky like some wave formation that happens in crowds at football games, except the theta wave refers to a frequency associated with deep meditation.
When in a state of this kind of meditation, the brain is open to creative insight and hypnotic suggestion meaning that for just those few minutes each morning, your brain is open like a candy store in a way that will not be repeated that same day, until, you enter sleep once more that night.
How’s that for intriguing?
What’s more, what enters through that little window hugely matters.
You might be wondering how anything that passes through can be controlled when you are not yet running on all four cylinders to start with at that time.
And that’s a good point.
Purposeful thought that might be planted during the hypnopompic state is certainly different then thoughts formed at midday.
Centuries ago, there was no neuroscience to explain this, but it was something that was grasped, the understanding that these two times were not the same for instigating purposeful thought.
So, somebody like Marcus Aurelius for instance didn’t opt to wait until breakfast to set his intention for the day.
He did it the moment consciousness returned.
Unique Receptivity.
Ahh, the prefrontal cortex. The part responsible for rational thought, decision making and self-regulation.
If this area of the brain is damaged or underdeveloped this is why we see persons with learning challenges or difficulty managing simple daily tasks like socializing or determining danger.
The cortex itself takes approximately half an hour to reach full waking capacity after sleep, so during the first five minutes we are talking about, it is operating at reduced capacity, which at first sounds like a disadvantage, but is in fact a profound opportunity.
Without the prefrontal cortex’s usual filtering, critical analysis and habitual thought patterns running at full power, intention set in this window bypasses much of the mental resistance that normally greets new ideas.
A commitment made in the first five minutes, before the day’s anxieties, obligations and distractions have assembled, carries unusual psychological weight which brings us to another point.
When athletes are about to compete, they practice visualization beforehand.
People who love to be mindful and reflective, choose to meditate at dawn and also why the Stoics wrote in the early morning.
Most people though fill the window with a phone screen and when it’s put like that - how depressing in comparison.
Colonization of the Early Window.
Here’s something sobering.
The average person will check their phone within 90 seconds of waking.
Doing that immediately floods the hypnopompic window with notifications, news, social comparison, email anxiety and the priorities of other people.
No wonder there’s more and more complaints about headaches and mental fog along with overall body aches and pains before the sun has even hit people’s faces.
The brain still in its most receptive state, absorbs all of it before a single intention has been set.
And that’s important to highlight so read it again.
The brain still in its most receptive state, absorbs all of it before a single intention has been set.
The cost of this is not merely distraction.
It’s something more fundamental then that.
It is the surrendering of your first conscious moments to an algorithm designed to capture your attention rather then actually serve you your wellbeing.
Unbeknownst to you, you have given away the most neurologically valuable minutes of your day before you have even decided who you intend to be.
Intuition.
It was two thousand years before the first EEG machine measured a theta wave.
This machine measures electrical activity of the brain and is used to help diagnose things like epilepsy and brain and sleep disorders.
Before such devices the Stoics had built a simple morning practice with profound effects that today neuroscience can validate in remarkable detail.
I’m sure the ancients would have been blown away with the technology we have today, just as we feel rejuvenated by techniques that because they were put into practice so long ago, makes it seem like we have in many ways forgotten how to really listen to ourselves and hence we want to grab hold of what feels to be a lost deeper existential truth.
We’ve become so advanced in our day and age that we have literally pushed fundamental truths to who we are off the cart to make way for ‘growth’. But to what end? To the point we have lost connection with not only ourselves but each other?
It’s like uprooting a strong tree and hoping it will continue to live in a bucket of water without the necessary minerals and nutrients.
It looks good, its looks decorative, modern, advanced from not relying on raw ingredients to how we function in mind and body, we have made a change, right?
And that’s the big question here.
How right is something before it’s actually wrong?
Or certainly, how wrong does a right thing have to look based on larger opinion, before we finally cotton on that the change was made out of greed and deliberate ignorance and all we want is the former back again?
The insistence of the Stoics on beginning the day with specific intention prior to conversation, food and any external input maps almost exactly onto what we now understand about the hypnopompic state and prefrontal cortex activation timing.
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