Episode 7 - The 5am club is cancelled. Add THIS to your morning instead so you can get more done
This week on Call Her Brilliant
I learned to do a smokey eye on an 8 year old…and then asleep on the couch at 2:25 in the afternoon
How you start your mornings matters, for your brain, your body, and your business
So today we’re unlocking what your brain really needs in the morning so you can stop forcing focus and feel in control of your day again
TRANSCRIPT
This week on Call Her Brilliant, I learned how to do a smoky eye on an eight-year-old and then fell asleep on the couch at 2.25 in the afternoon. How you start your mornings matters for your brain, your body, and your business.
So today, we're unlocking what your brain really needs in the morning, so you can stop forcing focus and feeling control of your days again. Let's do this.
Welcome to Call Her Brilliant, the podcast for ambitious women building businesses and lives that refuse to be average.
You got the gold stars and turn that grit into step-by-step success, but you're ready for more if only your capacity wasn't the bottleneck. You want focus, freedom, and a brain that can actually keep up with your ambition.
That's more than mindset, more than strategy. From athletes to entrepreneurs, we're trading burnout for peak performance science. So you can create a life that's brilliant by design.
Last month, I fell asleep on the couch at 2.35 in the afternoon. I'm not normally a napper unless I'm sick, which I wasn't, but it had been a day.
We were in Edmonton for my eight-year-old's first cheerleading competition of the season, staying at my parents' house, and we had to be downtown Edmonton for 7.30 Saturday morning to meet her team, which is about a 30-minute drive from where we were
staying. But before we even got there, I had to get Allison up and into her uniform, do her cheer hair, which involves two braids on the front that crisscross, and a high ponytail that's teased, and this big cheer bow on top.
Plus, this year, they have elite makeup. The girls love it. Think, like, drag for eight-year-olds, honestly.
It's this smoky gray eye with eyeliner and a wing covered in silver sparkles, mascara, and bright red lip stain. It looks adorable when they all have it on. Allison loves it.
She always wants to have it up in front of the mirror once her makeup's done. But I am not a morning person. Allison is definitely not a morning person.
Our routine on a typical morning, I have down to a science. I know exactly how much time we need to get up and get out the door to school. But this cheer morning was adding a ton of new variables to my start.
First, we had to get up way earlier than normal. I got up at 5.30 so I could get myself dressed and have a cup of coffee before I started waking Allison up.
And my plan was to get her ready and still have time to do my own hair and makeup before we had to leave at 7. That didn't happen. I ended up going to the competition day one in my cheer mom sweater looking rough that day.
Plus, I'm not really great at doing makeup. I've basically been doing my makeup the same way for the past 10 years. I upgrade my products every once in a while, but it's the same basic pretty simple look.
I love bright makeup on other people, but it's never been something I've been particularly good at, or that I've had a lot of practice doing. And let me tell you, doing makeup on someone else, especially a cranky 8-year-old, is hard.
We had practiced a couple times in advance. I even actually went over to Sephora and paid for them to give me a tutorial, which was super helpful. They showed me step by step how to do it.
Mine never looked as good as theirs did, despite all my practice and videoing, but it was super helpful. Because of all my practice, I thought I knew how long it was going to take me in the morning to get this all done.
But that morning, I was not on my game. I had to redo her hair twice because it wasn't cooperating, which made us rushed. And my husband's hovering, giving us the countdown of when we have to leave.
And I'm just feeling more and more stressed trying to do her darn makeup. We did make it on time, but there were tears from both of us. Thank goodness I had makeup remover handy when her mascara started running.
She competed. She did great. We were home by one again that afternoon at my parents.
I was planning to visit a friend in town that afternoon, but instead, I fell asleep on the couch by 2.30 because I was so spent. We don't always have control over our mornings.
Sometimes you have to do cheer makeup on an eight-year-old and put off getting coffee until 10 a.m. Some days start reactive.
You show up at your office and a colleague is hovering at your door as soon as you sit down because there's some fire to put out. But a lot of the reactivity we have in our days is more in control than we think.
And we can set ourselves up in our brains, our bodies, and our businesses for days where we feel in control by creating a morning routine that really works with our brains and our lives. Here's what I mean.
Last fall, during peak cootie season, my husband was complaining for a couple of days, that his throat was bothering him.
I gently encouraged him to make a doctor's appointment after he made his 20th exaggerated sigh of the day from the couch, but he said he was fine.
So of course, the next morning we get up, it's a school day, I'm trying to get Alison up and ready, our normal routine, and my husband comes upstairs from where he starts work earlier than we get up, and he wants me to make an appointment online with
the doctor because he doesn't know how and his throat is really bothering him. Now I'm stressed, trying to get Alison going, and trying to multitask, making her breakfast, while I mess around with the booking app to make an appointment.
Other people's priorities are the number one thing that messes with our energy and our capacity in the morning. I avoid checking my work e-mail as a rule in the morning.
I know that if I check it while I'm brushing my teeth and there's an urgent e-mail from a client, it's going to set me off. One, because it's probably not urgent, and I know that, but the e-mails always make me feel like it's urgent, right?
And now I'm thinking about how to reply while also trying to manage the rest of my responsibilities in the morning. No wonder my daughter and I are screaming at each other before we get out the door.
I'm stressed, so I'm short, which makes her short, and we're fighting over whether she needs to wear a tuque. But it's really easy to get caught up in reactive mode in the morning.
Yes, I could have told my husband to wait an hour until I had Allison off to school, or got him to help her while I booked the appointment.
But then that messes with my brain's capacity too, because I'm delegating and coordinating what I need to do and what they need to do.
Or I grab my phone because I need to check the Wednesday school email that goes out every week, because sometimes there's a last minute thing, like, today is Wear Sparkles for Squirrels Day, and my kid forgot to tell me.
But then I don't just check that message, right?
I start checking work emails, and all of a sudden, instead of my focus staying deep on the project I planned to do that day, once I got to my laptop, I'm answering emails while I pack lunches and feeling rushed and behind before my day even starts.
We live in a world that's designed to distract. I'm not anti-technology. I love what it gives me the capacity to do.
But I also know that our brains evolved for thousands of years without computers, without that constant input of the TikTok scroll and email notifications and team chat beeping at me every few seconds.
I learned recently that our phones not only keep track of our screen time, they count how many times you pick up your phone and just check it every hour. And that is shocking.
If you haven't looked at this before in your screen time report, I suggest you do.
I use this data now with clients to calculate their genius hour, the hour of the day where you're biologically wired for deep focus and elite level work, because if you are picking up your phone every two minutes, you are definitely not in deep
focus. That scattered reactive focus that's making us grab our phone, and check our emails, and do all of the things, and not really get into that deep flow state in the morning.
Here's the other problem with morning routines for high achievers, especially women. We've trained our brains, our wiring, to manage what's urgent.
And that's not bad in the short term, but let's be honest, it's not just today we're rushing and putting out fires. It's every single day, right?
Our brains are used to sitting down and going, to tackling what needs to get done, to plowing through, to being in that reactive mode. That's normal. That's what we've been taught to do.
So now our biology is used to that constant go, go, go rush. Our habits have developed to sit down and put out fires, and our wiring is used to reacting.
But that's not a long-term strategy, unless your goal is burnout, especially if you're looking for the next level of impact, that deep focus, not to check as many boxes as I can in productive mode, but purposefully productive, where you're not just
getting things done, you're getting them done well, and in a way that feels good. Mornings matter. But most of the advice we get doesn't work, especially for women, because it was designed for the brains of men.
Early on in my private practice, I was at my limit. I had hired more help. I was doing all the right things, time blocking, trying to be as efficient as possible, and I still never had enough time.
Then one day, I was listening to this podcast from a woman, business owner that I really admire, who was going to be doing interviews with five entrepreneurs about their morning routine.
And I thought, yes, this is going to be the thing that fixes my productivity problem. They're experts. They're running multi six and seven figure businesses.
Because maybe it's my morning routine that I need to fix. It didn't help. It made things worse.
Because four of the five people she interviewed were men, and the one woman she interviewed didn't have kids. Their lives were wildly different than mine and my brain. And they gave advice like, just get up earlier.
One man says, I get up at five so I can get two hours of work in before my family gets up. Okay, I thought, I'm not a morning person, but I should try this, right? I'm willing to try anything at this point.
So I started getting up earlier, forcing myself to become more of a morning person.
But then when I woke up at five, my daughter, who was a toddler at the time, just started hearing me and waking up early, unless I went and hid in the basement in the dark and worked as quietly as possible so not to wake anyone else up.
Plus, even though I was getting up at 530, I was still going to bed at midnight, trying to squeeze more in, and I was just getting more and more exhausted.
The other advice they shared on this podcast was things like get up and go to the gym for an hour in the morning. I wish I had time to go to the gym for an hour every day, let alone in the morning.
Or one expert had this expensive sauna they sat in, or they talked about how they did morning meditation. And none of those things are bad. Exercising is good for you.
Doing all of these things that are good for your focus and your brain and allowing your cells and your body to regenerate, whether that's more meditation or working out or maybe a sauna, none of these things are bad on their own.
But they didn't work for my life. The experts, like I said, were mostly men, who even if they had families, they had partners, wives, carrying that mental load in the morning. Or they had big teams.
So, they'd finish their discussion of their morning routine, about how they don't stroll into the office until 9 o'clock to start their day, but then they'd acknowledge that the team had already been there for two hours working, right?
That wasn't my reality. It wasn't realistic for me at that point. It wasn't realistic for my brain or my business.
The morning routines promoted by men don't work for women. Our biology is different. For instance, women on average need more sleep than men, because our brains work more, which is not surprising.
If you've heard me tell the story of how our last family vacation, my husband saunters on to the airplane with just his passport and his iPad, and I had two carry-on bags, one full of snacks to keep my family fed for six hours, the other full of
different screen-free activities to keep everyone entertained for six hours. All that mental multitasking of planning for just that little trip, that we do so much more as women than men tend to.
Not always, I know, but in general, that is what our society is expecting of us. So that is what we do.
And that mental multitasking takes brain power, which means we need more sleep as women, especially once we start to hit perimenopause in our late 30s. Brain fog associated with perimenopause is highly correlated with sleep problems.
Which makes sense, right? If I'm having night sweats and I'm not sleeping, of course I'm going to have more trouble with focus and concentration and memory and not feel sharp. Our habits as women are different too.
Our rhythms.
I don't have the luxury of two hours to myself in the morning because at this stage in my family, in my business, even if I wanted to get up at five, I'm not going to bed at eight o'clock to get enough sleep because I'm still driving home from
cheerleading or girl guides or whatever activity is happening in the evening with my family. And our wiring is different. Women think differently. Perfectionism, being the responsible one, the hard worker, all that matters in our mornings.
It's why we get swept away by other people's priorities. And again, not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something that we want to feel in control of, not that we're constantly reacting to. Here's what your morning routine should do.
It should make your life easier. That's the core of a morning routine. You wake up with a finite amount of brain power each day.
Every decision you make, every single thing you check off your to-do list, drains some of that power. Yes, we can do things to recharge your brain power throughout the day, but how we start sets the stage.
If we're starting our day rushed, behind, reactive, it's burning a lot of resources fast. Your morning routine should make your life easier.
It should protect your capacity for what matters, and it should activate that deep focus that allows you to get things done and get them done well.
So you can have those days where all of a sudden it's lunch, and you're like, oh my gosh, I got so much accomplished, and it felt good doing it. So here are two keys that we're going to talk about today when it comes to morning routines.
Key number one is eliminating the stuff that unintentionally drains your capacity. Clutter is an excellent example of a capacity drainer in the morning, not just physical clutter, but mental clutter.
When we were up early that day for my daughter's cheer competition, part of what made it so mentally draining was we weren't at home. We were at my parents' house. I was doing her hair and makeup at the kitchen table where the lighting was the best.
My brain had to work harder to figure things out because our brains are what's called contextual learners, which means we're constantly taking in information from our senses to help us make decisions.
It's one of the reasons, for instance, that your bed should only be for sleeping.
If sometimes you work in bed or you watch TV or you sit there and scroll on your phone, every time you lay down to sleep, your brain has to reinterpret that sensory information.
Does laying down in my bed mean sleep, or does it mean get out my phone and work? Right? Being in a new environment for the morning took more energy for my brain.
I had to ignore a lot of visual clutter. And not saying that my parents' house is cluttered necessarily, but it was new stuff for my brain, right? Everything looked different, so my brain had to work harder.
Clutter, in your morning, is going to do the same thing at home, too.
If I get up and I have a pile of dishes in the sink from last night, or laundry's half done, or I get to my desk and there's sticky notes everywhere, my brain has to do a lot of extra work to ignore all that information.
And that takes energy, especially for women. Clutter activates a stress response in women faster and more intensely than it does in men.
No wonder I'm annoyed that our counter is currently covered in valentine's crafts from last week, but my husband just keeps putting stuff on it, and so does my eight-year-old.
We've got plants and keys and toys and all this junk accumulating from the long weekend right now while I'm recording this. Think about this. Where can you free up capacity in the morning by reducing clutter?
Maybe at spending five minutes before you go to bed the night before, putting away your kid's fort that they've made in your office over the weekend, like mine do, so you can start Monday feeling focused.
Or maybe you sit down and do a quick brain dump and write out everything that's taking up mental space before you start to get your brain feeling more expansive.
Or maybe clearing the clutter is turning off notifications in the morning, which brings us to the next thing to eliminate in your morning. Phones.
I read a study that found people who work with their phones next to them, even if your notifications are off, are more distractible than people who work with their cell phone in another room. Phones are distracting.
They are designed to be distracting. All those notifications and fun apps pull your focus, and they give your brain little bursts of dopamine and other neurotransmitters that make your brain feel good, so you want to keep using it.
Phones also make us instantly accessible. It feels like we should respond, right? The number of times I get an urgent email on Saturday and roll my eyes, I know I'm not going to respond.
I trained my brain not to, but I certainly feel like I should respond, right? As soon as that subject line says urgent, even though it's Saturday morning and no one's really working, and nothing I do is actually urgent.
I remember hearing this story from Adrienne Dworkson of their Run Light Clockwork program. She was talking about how her team was rushing to meet this deadline and staying up late until someone on her team says, We're not creating oxygen here.
And I think about this all the time because it's such a good reminder. For most of us, myself included, nothing I do in my job or my business is really life or death. We are not creating oxygen.
If I take an extra day to respond, it will not ruin anyone's life. But my brain, thinking I need to be responsive and reactive to my phone 24-7 is a problem.
If you've ever forgotten your phone and you felt like you were missing a limb for the day, you know what I'm talking about, right? Phones can mess with your brain in the morning. Consider how you're using yours wisely.
Decision fatigue is another factor we need to manage in the morning with our routine. Something that sounds silly, but is honestly brain saving for me in the morning, is picking out my clothes the night before. We've all been there, right?
You're standing there in your closet, staring at your racks of clothes, and you hate everything you own, and nothing is comfortable, and nothing fits, and all of a sudden it's 20 minutes later, and you're still wishing you could just wear sweats to
the office. If I had to pick my clothes out in the morning, I reliably hate my body, I hate every fabric ever created, and I hate everything I own. So I pick my clothes out the night before.
Often, actually, I pick out two outfits, a nice outfit, that if I wake up feeling good, and I know I will feel confident for the day I wear it, and then a backup outfit that I know I can wear no matter how I'm feeling in the morning.
This little shift saves me so much decision power in the morning. Ask yourself this. Where am I leaking decision power in the morning?
Debating how you want to take your coffee or what you want to pack for lunch or what you want to wear. Make your mornings easier by removing as many of these decisions as possible. I do little things like I set my coffee the night before.
I pack as much of our lunches as I can the night before. I set my clothes out the night before. The more of that basic stuff that doesn't really matter that you can make easy, the better.
Your whole day doesn't have to be boring. I don't want that either. But we want to be able to save capacity for the things we care about.
Not wasting it deciding if you want almond milk or creamer in your coffee today. Which brings us to key number two for an elite morning routine.
Emphasizing the stuff that activates your focus, that creates sharp thinking, that makes you feel on once you get to work. Which brings us to this week's Smart Women Doing Smart Things. Smart Women Doing Smart Things.
Today we're talking about Emma Watson, my favorite wizard. We all fell in love with her as Hermione Granger, and now she's transitioned from acting to saving the world.
In 2014, she was appointed a UN Goodwill Ambassador, advocating for gender equality. Then in 2019, she was appointed to a G7 advisory board for women's rights.
She models, and she's on the board of a luxury brand group where she activates for sustainable fashion. Interesting thing, I learned about her morning routine that's non-negotiable, journaling.
She shared in this interview I was watching with Vogue, that if she could only take two things with her when she travels, it would be her passport and her journal.
And what she does every single day is in this journal, she writes down three things that were fun from the day before, three things that were kind, either she did something kind or someone else did something kind for her, and three things she did
well. What I love about this as a neuroscientist is that it's repetitive. It's something she always does, which is a great way to tell her brain it's time to start her day. I call this a focus activator.
A focus activator is something designed to tell your brain it's time to focus. If you've read Atomic Habits by James Clear, it's like a habit queue.
He gives the example in that book of if you want to work out after work, make sure you leave your workout clothes on your bed so you come home and you see them, you're more likely to work out.
Works the same way to get our brains focused in the morning. A focus activator can be written, like Emma Watson's. It can be visual, like maybe putting your favorite mug on your desk every day before you start work.
It can be something somatic, like taking a few deep breaths or doing a brief meditation. Here's what's important. You want this focus activator to be something you do every day, like Emma Watson's journaling, and you want it to be unique to focus.
If you journal sometimes before bed and sometimes at the start of the day, that's okay if your goal is journaling, but not if you want that journaling to activate your focus.
It needs to be something that you do right before you start work, so that over time, your brain learns, oh yeah, I do this thing, I journal or I meditate or whatever it is. That tells my brain it's time to get into focus mode.
The other thing I love about Emma Watson's journaling habit is it's also what's called a contextual cue.
Remember how our brains are contextual learners, constantly taking in information from our surroundings to make decisions, especially if you're someone who travels a lot for work.
I love to have my home office, for example, is set up the exact same, so that my brain always knows when I get to my desk, that is where I do my work. I don't work sometimes at my desk or at my couch or at my kitchen table.
I reliably work at the same place. But a lot of us don't have that luxury.
If you travel for work, having something like a journal that you always bring with you is a really great visual context cue for your brain that I put out this journal on my desk wherever it is in the world you're working, and it's how I get focused.
I use my full focus planner. That's the journal I use. It's Michael Hyatt's full focus planner as my focus activator, and it's a contextual cue in my morning routine.
If I'm working at home or in my clinic or if I am traveling, I write out my priorities for the day. I don't journal like Emma Watson does, but I do write out my big three priorities every day, and that is how my brain gets focused.
Another thing I love about Emma Watson's journaling habit is that it's focused on reminding her brain of her wins. We are excellent as high achievers at focusing on our mistakes and discounting our wins.
I'll always remember the year I did my TEDx talk. I forgot about it when I was doing my yearly review in December. The talk was in April.
I worked on it for months. Eight months later, I was reflecting on my successes that year, and I forgot to write down the TEDx talk. And I know I'm not alone.
Having a morning routine that not only tells your brain it's time to focus, but reminds you of your brilliance is a great way to start your day.
Interesting, when I was researching unique morning routines of brilliant women, lots came up about skincare. Emma Watson has a morning skincare routine too. I'm not interested in the specifics of skincare.
I do care a bit more about mine now that I'm in my 40s than I did in my 20s. But as a neuroscientist, I like a morning skincare routine because it could be a good thing for your brain.
Back in episode one of this new podcast, we talked about your Monica vs. your Phoebe brain, your executive control network vs. your default mode network.
Both are important, but they're a different kind of focus. The deep focus that most of us need to do that really high level cognitive work where we're in flow, that's default mode focus.
We're pretty good as high achievers at getting into that Monica brain, really detail oriented, right? We're not as practiced at letting our ideas hit flow, because those networks are in direct opposition.
When we turn our Monica brain on, it turns off that Phoebe brain, that default mode network.
Adding something to your morning routine, like a repetitive skincare routine, could actually be a fantastic way to activate that default mode network and get your brain in flow, because repetitive tasks, especially ones that use both hands, are a
great way to activate that creative, expansive flow state brain. When you think about your morning routine, don't just think about efficiency. It's important.
We want to conserve capacity for our important work, but we also want our morning routine to be about activation and expansion, to be about elevating your cognitive capacity for the work you want to do.
Emma Watson's focused on expansion in the morning. She's wiring her brain to focus on progress over perfection, on her wins, not her mistakes, and she's giving her brain what it needs to activate her genius.
That's why she's this week's Smart Women Doing Smart Things. Smart Women Doing Smart Things. Okay, let's finish off with a quick round of Brain Fact or Fluff.
Brain Fact or Brain Fluff. Where we separate neuroscience from nonsense, whether that viral brain hack is backed by science or just Instagram sparkles. Today, we're talking about the 5 a.m.
club. The idea that was definitely promoted on those business podcasts I was telling you about, that I thought would solve all my productivity problems. The 5 a.m.
club is the idea that if you just get up earlier, you'll get more done. Here's the science. A study at Stanford University found productivity sharply declines after you've worked 50 hours a week.
People in that study who were working 70 hours a week were actually getting as much done as those working 55 hours a week.
Not saying you should work 55 or 70 hours a week, but what's important about this study is that more hours does not mean more productive. Here's another study. Iceland moved 2,500 people to a four-day work week.
Their productivity did not change, but they reported less stress and better work-life balance. More hours does not mean more productive. And you know this, right?
If I magically added 10 extra hours to your day today, you would fill them up instantly. So would I. Because time isn't linear.
It's neurological, and that wiring matters. When we get up early, when we decide to join that 5 a.m. club to try and push more out of our day, we often sacrifice sleep.
Your brain needs 7 to 9 hours. Real sleep. Not laying in bed thinking about your to-do list.
Actual sleep. Sleep is when memories consolidate, when you form new memories, things you learn during the day. It's also when your cells restore and heal.
And when we get less sleep, we are less focused and less productive. Especially for women. Especially once we get into our late 30s and early 40s, we need that sleep.
You also have a genius hour that I mentioned earlier. A 60-minute almost-feels-magical window of the day where your brain is biologically wired to perform best. And it is probably not at 5 a.m.
If you are using your genius hour for the right tasks, you're going to be more productive than getting up three hours earlier ever will. 5 a.m. club?
Not designed for the female brain. It's not necessarily your body's peak performance time.
And if you're sacrificing your sleep to get up early, it's going to have a long-term impact, not just on your productivity, but on the health of your body and your business. This has been Brain Fact or Fluff. Brain Fact or Brain Fluff.
That's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Dr. Nicole Byers, and this is Call Her Brilliant.