In one of the chapters of my life, I was a bartender. I worked late hours and slept in a lot.

In another chapter, I was a school teacher who needed to wake up at 5am to drive an hour to school. Falling asleep at night was an anxiety riddled hassle fest.

I have always instinctively felt like a night owl and thought I would never be able to go to bed early or wake up early. This caused me years of insomnia, grogginess, anxiety from having to force my self to go to sleep.

In 2013, I started hacking my sleep. Calcium/Magnesium supplements, cherry juice, melatonin, and a glass of red wine I would ingest. Long ice baths, limiting TV time to 30-60min and keeping the lighting in my place to a minimum after 9pm.

I’ve been using this evening routine for the better part of the last six years. Not only have my sleep habits gradually improved, I now appreciate and embrace sleep.

Yet, the main outcome has been the discovery of my productive hours. For the past eight months my body has been waking me up between 5am - 6am. Sometimes I ignore my body and continue to sleep, restarting my sleep inertia cycle, and that leads to grogginess, a topic for another post. But I when do get up, I have my most productive days.

I get up, stretch a bit then I sit down and meditate. For the most part I use guided meditations, tracks with solfeggio tones or music for me to get into a flow and recently a handful of guided meditations to align myself to a specific purpose. I do snooze a bit sometimes but I set alarms as fail safes.

After 20min of meditation, I get up and make coffee. I pour myself a cup and start writing in my journal. Sometimes it’s just one line, other times three or four pages. Thoughts, ideas, goals, motivation, dreams from the night before and anything that passes through my mind, I jot down. Then, I read for 30-60min. I get up, look at my white board and break down my day. Not everyday is perfect, but I carry out this routine for the most part 4-5 days a week. My sleeping patterns have vastly improved, but it has taken a lot of conscious effort.

How are you sleeping? How are you priming yourself for sleep?

What are your productive hours? Are you resting enough? Are you taking care of yourself?

Comment or ask me anything about sleep and productive hours below.

There are moments I find myself lacking creativity, in thought, in life practice, for a new song, a blog post, sometimes even when I’m cooking. When I feel that lack, that emptiness, drained of all original thought or conceptual feeling, only one thing has cured me over the years: reading.

Reading centers me again. For years it was fiction or historical accounts, with the last two years a bit more focused on the personal development side. This year I’ve gone back to fiction and added more biographies of historical figures whose lives intrigue and inspire me.

Then a word I have to look up or a sentence fragment sparks me. I highlight it, I copy it in my journal and I repeat it to myself over and over. All with a smile on my face and my mind scrolling at the speed of light on what I can create with it, what does it mean to me.

Heck, even a Men’s Health magazine on my iPad during a long flight delay recently had me screen shoting quotes, recipes and recommendations, once again getting my mental chemicals going.

Read. Read a little. Read a lot.

If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or CEO, it is highly recommended you read. Read about your business, your market, read about general business success stories. Read about the successful people in your generation and the prior ones. Read about people and things that fascinate you.

Read for knowledge, read for fun, read out of curiosity, read for your life. Read to get unstuck, to come up with new ideas, new business practices. Ideas can come from reading a fiction novel that has nothing to do with your company but a new perspective, a new point of view can materialize.

Read for wisdom, for guidance, to heal and free your soul. Do it to battle anxiety, pain, suffering, trauma, read to forgive yourself and others. Read for joy, enlightenment and for overall good vibes.

There are some great apps out there for reading or listening to audio books on the go. Audible is great for listening on the go(keep an eye out for membership and book discounts), but if you have a library card checkout Hoopla and Libby, both have lots of great titles for free. RBDigital App, available for both iPhone and Android users, for free periodicals.

What are you reading these days? Leave a comment, tell me your titles, ask me what I’m reading.