Quick and dirty explanation of morning routines (even batshit ones)
Quick and dirty explanation about what they ARE
Free one, long one today. But first:
Housekeeping:
Sunday’s calisthenics workout will be at the pull-up bars at the Parade Ground in Prospect Park SOUTH. Sunday April 19 NOON. Map. By baseball field 5 kinda
Calisthenics Week all NEXT WEEK on this newsletter.
What’s up with morning routines?
Target on them in this NY Mag piece the other day. It covered long “esoteric and baroque” routines, mostly chick stuff: makeup super-application, dark wellness/red light, copper plates, chicken lamps. The story is thorough and well-reported and contends with these routines at eye level. The writer, Zoe Dubno, is a novelist, and the story flows like a fiction writer’s extracurricular: substantive, fast, unencumbered by received wisdom, incisive. It’s one of those satisfying novelist magazine pieces that feels like watching Kobe Bryant jog at half speed.
The story is better than most on these topics, since it doesn’t parachute in or stress-test these routines’ efficacy, or display its disdain or lack of interest in these topics. There’s no virtue-signalling lede here where the author says, “I don’t care how I look.” There’s no nerd professor explaining that “actually none of these things have been proven in long-term double blind studies to have any effect.” The writer doesn’t say this is all vanity, or stupid. The paper doesn’t shoehorn almost anything in about politics. One line jumped out at me:
“Some of these supplements are unregulated peptides she mixes herself and then injects.”
About these peptides’ relationship to the law. Not the best descriptor since a number of these peptides are probably going to become legal/regulated very soon. And when they do they won’t change and will remain either as dangerous as they were or as harmless. The choice of unregulated here feels like a MSM appeals to authority to make the complicated world of health regulation simpler. If it’s illegal, don’t do it. Deep cope. The way health is approached in newsletters (this one, and others) or through TikTok or podcasts is more laissez faire—not bullerproof either. (If you want my take on peptides that can be found, in depth, in this newsletter.) The truth is somewhere in the middle.
Overall sick read. I love when NY Mag/Cut writes about what people are doing. The evolution from Emily Weiss’ now quaint routine to like copper tuning plates is fucking wild. It asks why is this going on? Lily Sperry, from Health Gossip, friend of Snake Super Health, was interviewed. From the story:
When I asked [Sperry] why she engages with these practices, she said, “I think it stems from a desire for control. And, you know, in our current global climate, it’s just very chaotic. So to return to the body and to ourselves as a site of control is comforting for some people.”
This was a common theme among the women I spoke to.
I do wonder.
Below is a more… esoteric and skeptical and data-based set of explanations for what’s behind these long morning routines. From the inside. From the caverns of dark wellness, from someone who had a long morning routine way back when and who has a short one now and who has seen it all.
I think there are a few reasons behind all of this.
They work. But why?
The simple and boring explanation for morning routines is that interventions work, as a rule, for a while. These routines “work” either because they are novel interventions, because they are morning routines, because they may contain beneficial interventions, or because of the placebo effect. Likely all four. I’ll explain.
Novelty
The first is novelty bias. Doing anything—adding collagen to your coffee and/or standing on a vibration plate and/or putting on makeup for an hour and/or using a chicken lamp—prob. yields its maximum result in the the first few weeks/months. (Interventions like myofascial release, show most of their effects in the immediate term.) Doing something actually does something.
In this case the Chad math is the interventions’ immediate results feel so good and the immediate effect is so real that individuals don’t notice as much when “results” taper off, or if they’re “wasting their time.” Plus when it tapers off it gives people reason to do extra, which evolves these interventions into long, two-hour morning routines.
Pace
Maybe this is anchoring bias? Morning routines have legit psychological benefit regardless of the type of intervention. Doing something tactile every morning consistently is good. It’s about the container. These routines’ expressed purpose is to take control of your health, which has a pacifying effect. But beyond this, you move slower in the morning with a routine. Following one makes a person feel unhurried—maybe even rich. A long morning routine is rich people shit. It’s the act, not the intervention.
Some of this should be taken in context. Any tactile routine beats the normal morning ritual of rolling out of bed and going on your phone until you leave for work.
A Chad read might be doing a bunch of bullshit in the morning is good for the mind. (If I just jumped rope and cut 10 oranges every morning for a thimble-full of juice I would probably feel awesome.) But we can take this further. The busywork, the physical rituals, these mean something. There’s “peace” or pacification or presence in there. We can point to research that shows cleaning leads to more parasympathetic activity than just meditating. (Which is why monks do it.) Chads = monks.
Real
The third explanation: there are actual benefits in these routines’ interventions. There are a handful of specific interventions that do the heavy lifting. Red light, movement work (maybe through a vibrational plate, which beneficial when combined with Tai Chi tbh; maybe jumping around, arm swinging, push-ups), nutritional nourishment, sunlight. These things aren’t nothing.
Figuring out what parts of the long routine can be isolated as the effective intervention is tough. When there are 100 interventions introduced at one, and diet isn’t kept constant, you don’t know what works. I’m a big fan of ad-hoc, anecdotal clinical data, especially when there’s a lot of it (bodybuilding), but in these instances, nothing is isolated, and so you don’t know what’s “working.” (TBF one could say the same about normal diet and health behaviors: there are so many inputs. Often times it leads to any change being characterized by healthy user bias.)
The breadth of these routines makes it hard for outsiders and fun for participants. It’s more fun to use a vibrational plate than to skip; it’s more substantive to use chelated magnesium spray over pumpkin seeds at lunch. There’s a professionalization here: this is for people with time and money. All this said, just because it’s tough to scientifically isolate effective interventions from fluffier ones, doesn’t mean the interventions don’t work. These people are not doing nothing. This is real.
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Placebo
The fourth explanation is the placebo effect. Probably the most important factor. Per research, if you believe something works then it will. (Actual line from the study: Placebo treatments reliably reduce pain in the clinic and in the lab.) Speaking generally, and barring acute issues. But it’s been studied. If everyone you follow says salt water spray helps, and if you spray it every morning as part of a long routine, and you enjoy that routine, then it might help. Not acutely, not all the time, not for specific issues, obviously. But in the case of a normal working person’s morning routine, then, yeah, I bet there’ll be some benefit. Even if it’s every expensive, esoteric, even if it’s “just” making you sleep better at night, even if it can’t be teased out in a lab setting. Maybe it just makes you feel accomplished or relaxed.
Bonus: The feedback loop
To be sure, some of the people in the story have to do this stuff for work, or because they live in New York/LA/Ottawa and have peer pressure, or because they enjoy it/it’s their thing/their gig.
But there are also reasons beyond utility here. These routines are clearly not all about what they do. Much, if I can analyze a bit, is about meaning and satisfaction. Esoteric health is a great hobby to have. There’s a rich feedback loop to these routines and their components. If you have a “health issue” you can find 100 people with answers and test each one of them out and even meld their solutions together. You can even find answers and solutions with philosophies behind them that make you think about life. Maybe “good skin” is not about product, but cellular energy? Maybe it’s about sunlight? Maybe it’s about stress? The deeper you go, the more there is to learn, and the more rewarding it is. There aren’t as many ritual behaviors anymore. Chasing health through the margins is rewarding on an intellectual level in a way few things are.
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The structure behind this
There are reasons behind this mishegas, of course. Morning routines evolving from 10-min workouts and some product to orgone accumulators and 200 tubs of pills, over the course of a decade, is wild. Buying peptides from a nurse on Instagram. Who does this?
Some of this is structural/modern life. People are going all the way to get a 1% improvement in either looks or health because they need to. If you don’t have a system set up, work mortgages both. Sitting around all day staring at a screen, being inside, being on your feet, getting seed oiled and dehydrated. You end up looking like Nick Nolte. More than this, there are no structures in place for people to get healthy in this country. Rich or poor, it’s up to the individual. It’s a complete wild west. Everyone is on their own and so people have been taking their health in their hands. For 90 minutes a day. Shouldn’t we have expected this?
There’s also a Lindy explanation: People have been doing this forever. We only think superficial lookmaxxing is new. Come on. Who was Cleopatra if not a looksmaxxer? In Charles Willeford’s Woman Chaser, from like 1961, the main guy’s mom does four hours of ballet and stretching a day and like only eats celery. She’s a character in a novel, but still. The difference is these marginal, city person behaviors seem more important and real now because of media fracturing and the lack of monoculture. We’re in an age where small digital trends take over for a few months and more people know of obscure things than they have before. It feels new but it isn’t.
The explanation: It’s New Age
Indeed it’s part of modern life. For me the best explanation comes from this interview, with Prof. Tomer Persico, on a related topic. He argues the hippies moved onto New Age—the progenitor if not actual expression of many of the esoteric practices in the story—to make up for powerlessness, to deal with life. Relevant passage:
One theme of your new book is the rise of the New Age phenomenon.
A mass phenomenon erupted in the mid-20th century: highly individualistic, anti-establishment religiosity that focused on experiences and emotions. It turned away from the Western traditions, away from the various forms of Christianity, and drew heavily on content from the East. New Age was truly subversive in those years, because it was also against the political and social establishments of Europe and the United States. Drugs, communes, hippies.
Who were against the system.
And in a very committed way. Those people truly transformed their lives, hence the name “New Age.” The movement faded in the 1970s and 1980s, when the hippies grew up and became lawyers, without the revolutions of the 1960s having succeeded as they had wished.
So the system is stronger.
What happened was that the system learned how to deal with these people. They wanted to be true to themselves and express themselves authentically, and the capitalist system learned how to respond to those needs in the form of the products it offered them. If I want to be natural, I buy Teva [literally, “nature”] footwear, for example.
In other words, you can fill a void or define yourself through consumption, not necessarily of something material. You can be a consumer of a belief or a way of life. You write that New Age became a tool in the hands of capitalism.
New Age became a series of products for people in search of self-fulfillment and transformation. Workshops and courses were offered of a kind never seen in the history of the religions familiar to us. Taking a potpourri of elements from a range of sources, New Age turns them into a product, such as workshops in fasting and reincarnation. It reaches grotesque levels, in which one supposedly learns how to “suck in abundance from the universe.”
Like in “The Secret.” If you believe you’ll have a Porsche, and hang a picture of a Porsche in your house, you will have a Porsche.
Yes. The idea is not to change the way the system works but only to teach you how to navigate within it. At the heart of New Age lies an ethic of authenticity, which we all share today. We all want to be true to ourselves, to avoid betraying what’s most important to us and gives meaning to our lives.
What’s the solution for those who aren’t able to love what they have or to imbibe abundance?
There are spiritual techniques that work. Just because the market learned how to exploit the whole spectrum of beliefs for its needs doesn’t mean that you can’t find pure gold in it – but the search becomes more difficult. …
Instead of changing the rules of the game for you, New Age becomes a kind of release valve for a pressurizing system and allows the system to go on battering you.
I think this is a key text. New Age as a life system is a way of staying natural in an unnatural world, and navigating in it when we stray. These routines are armor: The interventions or techniques “work,” like Persico says. And because they work, they’re a release valve for getting through the day or the decade.
My bias, but when I read the story I thought of these routines as the inverse of yofukashi, the Japanese word for “revenge bedtime procrastination,” in which you stay up until 2 so as to actually have time for yourself. In these morning routines normal working people get to do something for themselves during normal business hours, before work. They get to feel healthy. They got to look better. Some of these techniques work. This isn’t scrolling or eating a plum. These are things with ideas behind them, yeah.
But the routines mostly felt to me ways for people to escape what they do the rest of the day. (Some of it also felt like a way to deal with secular life, which has no answers for getting older.) What we’re seeing in this story and on TikTok when we watch hours-long morning routines is the end result of decades of people figuring this stuff out themselves in a world with no net.
Health?
So these routines are either about work or literal routine or about meaning or about health. The first three we can leave alone—not my business—but to the people searching for health we might ask… is it working? How healthy are you if it takes you two hours to get ready for the day? If you melt down if something has seed oils? This isn’t a gendered thing. It’s like this with lifters and male biohackers and esoteric wellness fellas—it’s even worse with these freaks. There’s that viral tweet where the guy canceled his podcast recording because he didn’t drink honey tea and had a bad ouro sleep rating, vs. Pavarotti singing to an arena every night on a fifth of Jaimeson. (I can’t find the tweet.) Is being so specific and high maintenance really “healthy”?
The good, usually below-the-paywall news here, is that there’s an end-game. Don’t prune your routine just because someone says it’s dumb—fuck them; figure it out yourself—but you definitely can cut it by 80% and experience the same meaning and results. If you’re not a “beginner” and you don’t have acute health issues, you should automatically and organically be able to evolve out of severe length. If you’re not stiff as a board in the morning then that means the stretching worked and you can taper. If your skin got decent and has enough collagen and you have good lycopene in your diet then you can excise some product or powders or pills and move into maintenance. If it’s work or you love it then keep on. But to me the goal is to wake up on synthetic sheets at a Holiday Inn or somewhere compromised feeling 100% and looking like [name your aesthetic hero here]. That’s the highest level. And it’s doable. (More than this, having a shorter morning routine means you have more time to chill and to work out and to, I don’t know, eat right. It gets easier and easier.)
What’s next
But maybe it’s less about health than purpose. I’ve been into this shit for a while. Writing this up I looked at the morning routine I wrote up for Health Gossip only a year ago, linked up top. Long. My current routine is way shorter. I don’t even know if it’s a routine. I feel better doing what I do now: Some days I don’t do shit, some I do some. Some of this is because I’m out of the acute phase (of red light avoidance, serious postural muscle work, skincare stuff) and so the results are in the rear view. Some is priorities: other stuff matters more to me. I’m chasing that.
What’s next
It’s prescriptive to say you should get healthy to do something with your newfound health, but it’s also true. You should. Not in the trad productive way. But after a while, unless this is your job, this shit is navel gazing, and makes people fragile. I get it, it’s a tough world. But finding out about this stuff, to me, seems like a gift. You enter one phase and then move into another. The practical explanation is maybe you just set up a min-max travel routine, maybe you veer your diet more into skin resilience (so your whole day is a morning routine), maybe you work out lagging muscles or tendons so you feel balanced and active.
My Chad math here is that long routines are during certain periods very meaningful. They have acute benefits that can’t be measured or teased out by reporters and editors. We live in a wild west of health and many people are in the acute phase, and sometimes one problem begets another. Shit is real. But as with everything in health, it breaks down at the edges.
If this shit works, then eventually you won’t need it. And once you stop the real questions arise.
Am I actually unhealthy? Or am I used to running in place? Do I like having this purpose? Do I really need to be fixed? What am I getting healthy for? Why do I keep thinking about health? Is there more to life than this?
Not questions I could answer. Thanks for reading. More next week. Consider a paid sub.
SAMI REISS
chads = monks!! yes! chop wood carry water meal prep repeat
I love how you bring in the ritual of it all, and the inherent value in that. I’m religious about my morning routine, but only because I genuinely love it and how it makes me feel. Plus, every part of it is low-cost or free. Simplicity and consistency work wonders.