Most men lose the day before it starts. They wake up. Reach for the phone. Scroll. News. Notifications. Someone else's opinion about something that doesn't matter. By the time their feet hit the floor, their energy already belongs to someone else.
I used to be that guy.
Not anymore.
I. The morning belongs to you
I'm up at 5 everyday. Haven't set an alarm in 10 years. Body just knows.
First hour is completely inward. Meditation. Breathwork. Sometimes I'll listen to something powerful... an audiobook, a passage, something that sets the frequency before the world gets a vote. Today the meditation sent shivers down my spine. Not the gentle kind. The kind where your whole body lights up and you know you've tapped into something real.
Then I walked out the front door into pitch black countryside. Misty. Dark. January air. The kind of morning where you can't see 10 feet in front of you and it doesn't matter because you're not going anywhere specific. You're just moving.
No phone. No music. No podcast. Just me, the cold, and an hour of silence.
And I thought about the average bloke right now. Still in bed. Hungover. Or worse... awake, but already scrolling. Letting someone else's algorithm decide what he thinks about before he's even brushed his teeth.
The gap between those two mornings isn't small. It's the gap between two completely different lives.
II. Pendulums and your Energy
A pendulum is any collective structure that feeds on your emotional energy. The news. Social media. Celebrity drama. Political arguments. Corporate culture. Even family dynamics sometimes. Anything that hooks your attention and drains your frequency without giving anything back.
Most people wake up and immediately plug themselves into half a dozen pendulums before breakfast. They check the news - anxiety. They open Instagram - comparison. They read a message from work - stress. And they haven't even left the bedroom yet.
You don't fight pendulums. You don't resist them. You just stop feeding them. You become indifferent. Not angry, not righteous about it. Just quietly unavailable.
That's what the morning window is really about. It's not a productivity hack. It's an energy protection strategy.
Between 5 and 9am, while the rest of the world is asleep or unconsciously handing their attention to algorithms, you have a window where your energy is entirely your own. No one's asking anything of you. No one's pulling at your frequency. The pendulums are quiet because you haven't switched them on yet.
That window is sacred. And most people give it away for free every single day without realising what they've lost.
III. Brain rot is REAL
There was a study at the University of Munich. They gave people a cognitive test, sent them away for a 10 minute break - some just sat there, some scrolled Twitter, some watched YouTube, some went on TikTok — then tested them again.
The TikTok group's prospective memory dropped. That's your ability to remember intentions. To hold a plan in your head and follow through on it. The thing that separates someone who builds something meaningful from someone who just talks about it.
And it wasn't about the content. Another study found it didn't matter whether people watched science videos or cat videos. What mattered was the swiping. The act of endlessly flicking through short form content... that mindless, agency-free consumption was what degraded cognitive function.
Think about what that means for your morning.
If the first thing you do when you wake up is scroll a feed (any feed), you're not just wasting time. You're neurologically downgrading your capacity to think clearly, hold intentions, and follow through on your goals. Before your day has even started.
No one talks about this. They talk about morning routines and cold showers and journaling prompts. But the single highest leverage thing you can do for your morning is simply not pick up the phone.
I don't touch mine until midday most days. And the difference in clarity, in creative output, in the quality of ideas that come through during deep work... it's not subtle. It's like operating on a completely different frequency.
IV. The Deep Work Window
6 to 9am is where the real work happens.
This is when I write. When articles get built. When ideas that have been sitting in the background crystallise into something worth sharing. No distractions, no calls, no emails. Just creation.
Your brain is freshest here. Neurologically, this is when your prefrontal cortex is most active, your willpower reserves are full, your capacity for complex thought is at its peak. And most people burn this window answering emails and sitting in meetings that could've been a message.
I treat this window like it's non-negotiable. Because it is. Everything I've built... the business, the content, the coaching, the momentum - traces back to what happens in this 3-hour block more than any other part of my day.
Somewhere in this window, usually around half seven when it gets light here in the UK, I'll walk. Nothing intense. Coffee in hand, fresh air, easy pace. Let the ideas breathe. This morning it was dark misty lanes in the countryside with no destination. Just movement and silence.
By 9am I've meditated, created, moved, and done something uncomfortable. The rest of the day is easier because the foundation's already been laid. The hard part's done. Every decision after that point flows from a grounded place rather than a reactive one.
V. Living in real life is beautiful
Yesterday my brother and I went on a Lindy walk. A walk with zero plan. No destination, no route, no agenda. You just start moving and see where it takes you.
It had been raining all morning. We parked up, stepped out of the car, and the sun broke through. Just like that. Clear sky, warm on the face, perfect timing.
We walked for hours. Found a coffee spot we'd never been to. Stumbled into a beautiful restaurant for lunch, locally sourced meat from the butcher's, proper tallow chips.
No phones out. Just two brothers walking and talking and being present with a day that kept giving us exactly what we needed exactly when we needed it.
At one point I looked at my brother and said, "We are so lucky."
And then I looked to my right.
The street sign said Lucky Lane.
Now you can call that coincidence. But when your frequency is clean and your awareness is switched on, these things happen constantly. Synchronicities aren't rare mystical events. They're what reality does when you're actually paying attention instead of being buried in a screen.
That's the thing people don't realise about living more offline. It's not about restriction. It's not about being some monk who rejects technology. It's that when your attention isn't being hijacked every 30 seconds, you start noticing things. Patterns. Timing. Little invitations from reality that were always there but you were too distracted to see.
Once you see it, you genuinely can't unsee it.
VI. Look around you
Walk through any city centre on a Saturday morning. Really look at people.
The posture. The glazed eyes. The low energy. The heaviness. Shuffling between coffee shops and screens with this vague sense that something's off but no idea what it is.
That's not the default state of a human being. That's what happens when someone has more screen time than life time. When their dopamine system is so fried from constant stimulation that real experiences feel flat by comparison. When they've spent so long consuming other people's lives that they've forgotten to build their own.
Compare that to how you feel after a morning of meditation, deep work, and walking in nature. Or after a Sunday where you were fully present with people you love, eating real food, moving your body, laughing at something that actually happened rather than something you watched.
The difference isn't marginal. It's between two completely different human experiences.
And the mad thing is... the second version is available to everyone. It doesn't cost anything. You don't need a coach or a course or a hack. You just need to stop giving your mornings away and start protecting the window that sets the tone for everything else.
VII. High Agency is a frequency
The idea that your quality of life is determined by how much you believe you can influence your own outcomes.
I know guys running businesses, managing teams, closing deals, operating at a level most people can't comprehend. And the ones who sustain it, the ones who don't burn out or lose themselves in the process, all have one thing in common.
They own their mornings.
High-agency people don't wait for permission. They don't scroll for motivation. They don't need the conditions to be perfect before they start. They protect their energy, they show up for the deep work, and they trust that the path reveals itself to people who are actually moving.
Low-agency people outsource their attention to whatever's loudest. The news decides their mood. Social media decides their self-worth. Other people's timelines decide their pace.
The morning window is where agency is built. Not theorised about. Built. Through repetition. Through the daily practice of choosing your own frequency before the world tries to choose it for you.
Every morning you wake up and go inward before you go outward, you're training yourself to operate from intention rather than reaction. And over time, that compounds into something people can feel when they're around you. Call it presence, call it energy, call it magnetism (it's the same thing). It's someone who's running on their own frequency instead of borrowing one from a feed.
VIII. The Momentum is the point
People think the goal of a morning routine is productivity. It's not.
The goal is momentum.
When you start the day aligned... when your first hours are spent in silence, in creation, in movement, you build a wave that carries you through everything that follows. Conversations are better. Decisions are clearer. Creative ideas arrive without forcing them. You respond to problems instead of reacting to them.
And that wave compounds. One good morning becomes a good day. A string of good days becomes a good week. A month of good weeks and you look back and realise you've built something real while everyone else was still trying to figure out why they feel stuck.
This isn't about perfection. Some mornings the meditation doesn't land. Some mornings the writing feels like pulling teeth. Some mornings you wake up flat and have to push through the first hour before the rhythm kicks in.
That's fine. The practice isn't about getting it right every time. It's about showing up to the window consistently and trusting that the momentum builds whether you feel it in the moment or not.
Yesterday was sunny when we stepped out of the car. By the time we sat back down, it was raining again. Perfect timing. Not because I manifested the weather. But because I was in a state where I noticed the timing instead of missing it.
That's what this whole thing is really about. Not controlling reality. Just being present enough to dance with it.
The 5-to-9 window isn't a hack. It's not a trend. It's the difference between designing your life and sleepwalking through someone else's.
Protect it.
The rest takes care of itself.
— Achilles
