Kill your snooze button
If you want to turn over a new leaf, start a “new day” in your life and in your marriage, start in the morning, before the sun comes up.
Don’t let the first hour of your day happen to you.
You are made in the image of the Creator.
You are a creator too.
You have created the current life that you now wish to change, and you can exercise your creative agency to build new habits, beliefs, behaviors, and mindsets.
Start with the first hour of your day.
If your day goes to hell after 7 AM, at least you have that first hour behind you where you decided what needed to happen, and you made it happen.
That’s a win.
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Start as small as you need to.
If your life is too chaotic (and your psyche too fractured) to put together a whole hour, create the first 15 minutes. Or the first 5 minutes. There is no place too small to start bringing loving order to your day and start to shift your consciousness.
Dr. Jordan Peterson famously tells people to start making their bed every morning.
If your life is too chaotic and you don’t feel like you’re in control of your life, you have to drive a stake in the ground somewhere. Don’t just float through the next 20 years getting buffeted by the chaos.
Put a stake in the ground by choosing a time domain and an activity that is small enough that you can absolutely commit to it.
When you drive a stake in the ground and stop negotiating with that one thing - you just say “I’m going to get up in the morning and … (describe your stake in the ground), no matter what.”
Let’s say you’re really fractured and you don’t have much self-control.
The time domain that you can exercise your creative agency over is limited.
Surely you can tell yourself to do something for a few minutes, right?
Or ONE minute?
Maybe 30 seconds?
“I’m going to get up in the morning and spend ONE minute praying for wisdom”.
“I’m going to get up in the morning and make my bed every day”
“I’m going to get up in the morning, get dressed, and go out for a walk”
It doesn’t really matter how or where you start, as long as you start in the morning with one small step that you can commit to repeating every day.
Build from there.
Get up at the same time every day
If you need to heal your life, one small shift that will help is to get out of bed at the same time every morning (at least 5-6 days per week).
A lot of your bad habits come from you seeking ways to regulate your nervous system.
Good sleep goes a long way towards helping you regulate your nervous system, which makes it much easier to break bad habits.
To fix your sleep, you have to get up at the same time every morning.
You also need 6.5 - 8 hours of sleep. A consistent rise time will force a consistent sleep time.
Set your alarm for the same time (at least 5-6 days per week) for 90 days and watch your life change.
Stop hitting the ‘snooze’ button on your alarm.
Men: do you hit the snooze button on your alarm?
Put a stake in the ground and stop negotiating with this.
Just stop.
What you’re communicating to your wife, to God, and to yourself when you “snooze” your alarm is “I prefer the pleasure and comfort of the moment over the plan that I made 8 hours ago”.
When you hit the snooze button, you’re telling your wife that you can’t even keep a small commitment that you made to yourself last night.
When you drive a stake in the ground and you say “no more snooze button”, here’s what I predict will change:
You will have more sex and a more intimate marriage.
A feminine woman will lose attraction, respect, and emotional safety with a man that she perceives as ungrounded, flighty, impulsive, pleasure seeking, and weak.
When your wife sees you habitually choose comfort in the moment over sticking to the plan, it communicates to her nervous system that you are not safe.
This subtle shift in your wife’s nervous system is operating at a subconscious level. She is probably not even aware of the fact that she is less attracted to you because of your snooze habit, but I guarantee you that is the case.
How can she trust you if you can’t trust yourself?
She will subconsciously close off to you because of what you are communicating through your impulsive hedonism that you demonstrate with your snooze button.
She will close off her heart and she will close her legs.
This is a relatively high price to pay for 9 minutes of subpar slumber.
When you stop negotiating with the alarm clock, it sends an important safety signal to her feminine heart, she will feel safer with you, and trust you more, which leads to greater attraction and intimacy.
You start to respect yourself
Your identity (the way you think about yourself) begins to change when you see yourself keep your word to yourself.
Your subconscious mind begins to notice that “I’m someone who does what they say they’re going to do”.
On the other hand, if you start every day by letting yourself down, your sense of self begins to reflect that.
If you don’t respect yourself enough to stick to the plan you made when you set your alarm, who else is going to respect you?
You’ll grow in your masculinity
I’m just going to come out and say it: using a snooze button is a feminine trait.
Masculine energy is grounded, steady, and decisive. Feminine energy is more intuitive, variable, and chaotic.
If you want to grow in your masculinity, put a stake in the ground on this.
Put your alarm on the other side of the room so that you have to get out of bed, and stop hitting your snooze button.
Tomorrow morning.
It’s not that deep?
It’s not that deep man, I can hear you protesting.
It’s just 9 minutes!
It’s deep enough that it affects you and your wife’s nervous system and your own sense of identity, so I’d say it’s deep enough.
Starting your day—every day—by letting yourself down and breaking an agreement you had made with yourself the night before is one small and steady step you can take on the pathway to hell.
On the other hand, you can put your whole life together if you start in the morning.
It’s deep enough.
Beat her up
Out of bed, that is.
A masculine man will want to routinely rise before his wife.
I can imagine some life scenarios where this isn’t practical (let’s say you work a night shift), but in the vast majority of cases, you’re going to want to be out of bed before your wife.
No one in your home wants to get up and know that the king is asleep. It's hard, yes, but you have to accept this.
Bear your cross.
When she gets out of bed, you will want to have set the frame for the day.
Ideally you will have:
Worked out
Spent time in prayer and meditation
Read the Bible
Made coffee
When your wife is the first one up on a regular basis, it sends the wrong message to her at the level of her nervous system.
To heal your marriage, you will more consistently embody your masculine energy and she will step into her feminine energy.
When she has be the first one out of bed to face the day, she can’t soften and relax into her feminine energy.
Get up (no snooze) at least 15 minutes before your wife and set the tone for your home.
Soak your home in prayer in the quiet of the pre-dawn morning.
Get up and lead.
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Create the first hour
There are a lot of things that happen in the course of day that you have no control over. You will have to be flexible and respond to things that come your way.
You can largely create the first hour of your day and stick to it.
Sit down and ask God to help you map out what the first hour of your day could look like.
Here are some activities that will help you get your day off to a good start.
Movement / Sweat. Get moving. You're going to be tired. Movement is the key. Bright lights help too. Don't get coffee until after you've moved. If your workout is later in the day, start with a lymphatic massage or a stretching routine for a few minutes.
If you're struggling to get your workout in, due to work, kids, etc. , the early morning is the time to do it. My life changed radically when I started working out consistently first thing in the morning.
Read. Early mornings are for reading the Bible. Get on a Bible reading plan, and stick to it. Read at least one chapter mindfully. You will learn to love it.
Pray. Early mornings are for praying. Tell God what you're feeling. Talk to God. You don't have to shout - He lives in you, so He hears you.
A posture of prayer: I find it helpful to get down on my knees to pray. It helps me stay in the spirit of prayer and humility. I have a little blanket I put on the floor of my library, and I get down on my knees, facing east, and put my forehead on the ground. I find it helps me settle into a posture of prayer and it's less distracting.
Consciously turn your heart to the Father and surrender your will to him.
A simple place to start is gratitude and confession. Thank you God for these specific blessings in my life. Here are the challenges I'm facing today, and here are my fears and shortfalls. What do you want me to know?
Meditate. If prayer is talking to God, meditation is listening to God talking to you. After you finish talking to God, listen for Him to talk to you. Spend 5, 10, 15 minutes or more listening to God. Quiet your mind and listen for the still small voice of God.
Journal. If your life is a mess, you probably don't know what exactly is wrong. You're out of sorts, upset, and anxious, and you "kind of" know why, but you haven't really made it clear even to yourself.
Journaling helps you sort things out. I simply write the date at the top of a page, then I write "Dear God... and I just write what comes to mind. Don't overthink it. I'm often surprised to learn things that I write in this fashion. Things come up that I wasn't really aware of.
This makes you aware of them, now you can start to bring them to a healthier place.
I try to write a full page, and I sign off with ... "In Jesus' name, may it be so, I love you, Patrick".
Obviously - the list above takes more than an hour. You don’t have to do all of this.
My life was coming apart badly due to 30+ years of addiction. My thought patterns and mindset was absolute trash and chaos. I have had to work extremely hard to build good habits and change my life. Maybe you’re not as badly broken as I was, so you might benefit from a smaller dose of change to your morning routine.
First Hour / Last Hour
Getting the first hour of your day dialed in is the first step towards building good habits and stopping bad habits.
I coach my clients to create the first hour of their day, then create the last hour of their day.
Out of 16 waking hours, now you’ve taken radical responsibility for two of those 16 hours.
The first hour and last hour of the day are the biggest drivers of your mental, spiritual, and emotional health, and it’s absolutely critical that you begin to lead yourself in this area.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew.
Start with the smallest change that you can 100% commit to, something you can and will do for at least 90 days.
After that change has been integrated, begin to stack good habits on top of that.
Gradually increase the time over which you are exercising creative control.
After the first hour and last hour are under your domain, you will have clarity, confidence, and vision to begin to create more of the life that you want.
If this resonates with you, I expand on this kind of coaching in my mentorship community for men, called The Good King.
