“There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.”

~Mindy Kaling

It takes ENERGY to create beauty from nothing. But what if doing Life takes all you’ve got? Toni Morrison famously wrote at the “edges of the day.” Edges? What edges? David Sedaris says you must sacrifice one area of life (work, family, friends, or health) to be successful. Two, if you want to be super successful. Seriously?

The annals of literature are full of speed freaks and alcoholics who delivered their literary masterpieces in drug-induced altered states. Stephen King says he wrote his bestseller Cujo intoxicated on cocaine and blackout drunk. Ayn Rand admitted to taking massive doses of amphetamines while writing Atlas Shrugged, working for days without sleeping. Paul Williams told me he penned “some of the most famous codependent anthems of the 1970s” higher than the Hollywood sign just a few hills over from his house.

Wouldn’t it be nice if us mere mortals could do that—forgo rest and recovery and live like immortals while churning out global hit after hit? But is that the best idea?

There’s no one way to eat, drink, rest, or live. Each of us writers needs to find our balance of nutrition, sleep, exercise, and even meditation and personal boundaries to best fuel up to fill up the blank page. Getting intentional with self-care with these time, health, and sanity-saving life hacks makes for a sweeter song.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

“Linda! Turn that shit off! It’s three in the morning, for God’s sake!” Jesse moaned. “If you’re going to set the alarm this early, you know the rule: Get it on the second fucking beep!”

“Sorry!” I cried, leaping out of bed with such force I tweaked my lower back. “Ouch! No worries. I’m good!” I sang as I pushed the OFF button. “I had that nightmare again, babe. But this time, Seal was nice!” I kissed the cheek of my already sleeping husband and lay back for a minute, trying to hold onto the last wisps for clues. This was a breakthrough—the possibility of an interview with the singer Seal. Enough to get me a literary agent. I’d been dreaming about my favorite rock star for months. But instead of the usual horror, where I’d feverishly chase him through a Hollywood party only to have him disappear like cigarette smoke in the night sky, this time Dream Seal had met my eyes and said a simple and glorious, “Oh! Hello, Linda.” Dream Seal knew my name!

I’d been obsessed with the British singer-songwriter since “Crazy,” from Seal’s debut album, became my anthem three years prior. I’d never met the man, but his voice, his lyrics, his shoot-for-the-stars commitment to total mastery made me feel invincible.

As Seal sang about miracles happening and how we’d never survive without getting “a little crazy,” my own crazy goals—specifically the one about saving forests of trees—felt doable. At least while awake. It was nighttime where my story lines got all jacked up, and I became a groupie stalker, and Seal my frustrating fugitive.

Except, the chase had ended! My dream progress had to be a sign, right? Careful not to stir Jesse as I slunk out of bed, I tiptoed downstairs to my desk, a harvest moon pouring through the picture window like an MTV music video. Seal is going to be in my book! I lit a candle and said a prayer of thanks before starting my pitch letter to Seal’s representation.

You’d think I would have been a walking zombie with all this middle-of-the-night theater, but on the contrary, I was buzzed. Friends marveled at my lack of sleep and output of daily woodchopping. But outside of being fueled by my mission, there was nothing mysterious about it. In my mind, my endless energy was thanks to keepin’ it raw.

Lee Child

I’ve noticed over the years that I do my best work when I’m hungry. When I’m physically hungry, to the point of being able to feel it. I thought it was just me, and then I happened to read a scientific paper with new research that said that when we’re hungry, the creativity center in our brain lights up. It’s an evolutionary inheritance.

A million years ago, when we were hungry, we came up with a better plan to catch the next woolly mammoth. We’re trained to do it subliminally and atavistically in our brains. When we’re hungry, we become more creative. If I were eating, for instance, I would be happy. I wouldn’t need to hunt something down.

“Here comes the watermelon killer!” Thomas One Wolf teased as I entered his yard for a Feast Way potluck. Neighbors were setting up, their red faces glistening from having just exited the sweat lodge. As they grazed on the usual fare—mac ’n cheese, Fritos and bean dip, coleslaw, barbecued meat, baby carrots with ranch dressing, and Jell-O, cornbread, and Oreos for dessert—I knew my fruit salad was safe. Despite the tropical colors glowing from the glass bowl in my arms, no one ever made a move to feast on my dinners.

“You have the weirdest diet I’ve ever seen,” Thomas said as I spooned pineapple and mango into my mouth.

“You’re just jealous,” I said. “All of your coffee guzzling can’t compete with the natural high I get from grapes.”

“Sour grapes!” he shot back, dunking a cookie in his mug of black coffee—his second pot of the day—and waving it in my face before broadcasting, “Never trust a tea teetotaler!”

It’s not that I didn’t have a conventional sweet tooth. I was the granddaughter of German bakery owners and could inhale a plate of snickerdoodles faster than you could say, well, “snickerdoodle.” (Ever pound on a neighbor’s door in search of old Halloween candy? No? Yeah. Me, either.) But our rural life and big-city dreams required reserves of energy I wasn’t willing to piss away.

Mostly vegan, my primary source of fuel came from whole, unprocessed foods like raw fruits and vegetables. It helped that Jesse’s diet was as strict as mine. When you don’t let meat, dairy, alcohol, sugar, sodas, coffee, chemicals, smoking, or drugs of any kind—not even an aspirin—pass your lips, you’re pretty much a freak or a bore, at least back in the nineties, before our weird ways became hip. Luckily for me, our marriage was based on a mania for smoothies and salad—a near-total compulsion for crisp greens drenched in extra-virgin olive oil and lemon. Soy cheese, too, during those hog-wild special occasions.

Raised on organic meals made from scratch, once I’d moved away from Mom’s healthy table into the Delta Gamma sorority house at USC, every meal was a smorgasbord of fat-and-sugary delights, and I promptly gained the dreaded freshman fifteen. Did they really expect us to learn portion control around unlimited quantities of Cap’n Crunch, waffles, and eggs Benedict—all before noon? I was so exhausted I missed half of my first classes! Until I started eating 90 percent raw. Feeling once again shot out of a cannon in the mornings, nothing short of a fruit famine could lure me back to the dark side of pancake brunches and late-night pepperoni pizza runs.

But every magic potion comes with a price. How could I date normally with my purse full of raw veggies and a list of dos and don’ts as long as a line of celery sticks to the moon? I was no picnic to take out to eat. And God forbid anyone took me on a picnic! I hated being so high fucking maintenance (except at my vegan Thanksgivings, my time to shine!); no boys ever matched up to the “health-o-meter” in my head. Which is why, when Jesse and I met at the health food store and discovered a mutual passion for produce, it was love at first bite.

In New Mexico, our strict diet seemed to pay off. Even while chopping wood, carrying water, and building our cabin amidst monsoon rains and relentless spring winds, Tosh, Jesse, and I never experienced a hint of the common yearly cold or flu. I simply didn’t need as much sleep and felt more nourished by the sleep I did get. So, when our alarm sounded at 3:00 AM, I could pop downstairs, sit down to my book, and turn on the soothing sounds of Seal—grateful for another chance to speak my miracles and get a little crazy.

Geneen Roth, the first to link compulsive eating and dieting with deeply personal and spiritual issues, has authored ten books, including the New York Times bestsellers When Food Is Love, Lost and Found, and Women Food and God.

I have gone through many different kinds of diets: vegetarian, pescatarian, vegan, macrobiotic. Most people don’t realize that it’s possible to feel better because they’ve been eating what they’re intolerant of or allergic to and never come into balance, where they realize, “Oh! This is what it feels like to be me when I’m not craving, craving, craving something because I don’t feel good.”

Recently, I have been focusing on Life Force. Aliveness. What increases your life force, your presence, your energy, your vitality, your radiance? And what depresses it? That’s when what to eat becomes a much easier decision. In the process, you learn so much about yourself because you’re really paying attention. You’re honoring and cherishing your truth, the being you are.

Maria Shriver

I eat very differently than I used to. I eat blueberries. I put BrainON or MCT oil in my coffee and in my shakes. I take supplements that I never used to take. I’m stricter with my sleep. I go to bed earlier. I meditate every morning. I try to eat more protein and fats. I try to cut back on sugar, although it’s really hard for me. I have a real sweet tooth. People say, “Do you actually do everything you say religiously?” I’m like, “No!” You can find me walking through an airport, and if I smell those Bretzels, I’m in the line.

Martha Beck

Sugar has a heroin-like effect on the brain. I was addicted to food the way heroin addicts are addicted to heroin. I identified with drug addicts so deeply. I used to coach at a methadone clinic in Phoenix because if life coaching works, it should work for a homeless heroin addict, right? I’d say, “I think you’re supposed to feel the way you feel when you’re on heroin. You just have to find what makes you feel that way.” Reward yourself with something other than food. Find something that gives you that feeling. For me, it’s painting or writing. But when a nutritionist adjusted my food away from a vegan diet to one with more protein and fat, it was weird. I was obsessed with food, with sugar, for decades. And suddenly, the cravings were gone.

I once went into a complete physical crisis because of a lack of sleep. When I was doing my dissertation, what I found was that women could have everything but sleep. We’re massively sleep-deprived. I did all-nighters at least twice a week, with babies and everything. I read studies that said women today talk about sleep the way junkies talk about drugs. Now I think one of the great powers of the feminine is the power of rest.

Rest? Quite the concept, Martha! I looked up the definition on Dictionary.com: “the act of ceasing work or movement in order to relax, refresh oneself, or recover strength.” Hmm.

“I don’t understand how you can sleep on the floor!” Jesse said, seeing me grab a blanket off the couch mid-conversation and snuggle up to Brodie on the carpet. “Don’t you want to go to bed?” Nah. When Mama was done and had to snooze, there was no time to lose.

Never wanting to miss a thing, I’d always tried to squeeze too many things into a day. Naps? Even as a kid I was a morning person and a night owl, so who needed them?! But with the added demands of parenting—making almond milk takes a good two hours, and the cleanup, omg!—I accepted that when my lids got heavy and my brain shut down, nothing could be gained from faking it or pushing through. By default, I was starting to respect sleep. Even daydream about it. Not so much the nighttime kind—don’t mess with my writing hours! But I’d started collecting stories about famous nappers like Einstein, who was rumored to nap on top of getting ten hours (!) a night, and Thomas Edison, whose schedule of three to four hours nightly I could relate to more. (How fascinating that his invention of the light bulb was the one thing that more than anything else has interrupted all our sleep.)

Not everyone has the luxury or ability to fall out in the middle of the afternoon, but because I wrote from home and had time off between Tosh’s school drop-off and pickup time, I learned to feel good about catching an hour’s shut-eye after lunch. My family then got the best of me. For my book to have what was left, fruit fuel alone wasn’t enough.

Arianna Huffington, founder and CEO of Thrive, founder of the Huffington Post, and author of fifteen books, including instant international bestsellers Thrive and The Sleep Revolution.

I’m totally committed to my sleep. Ninety-five percent of the time I get my eight hours. I wake up feeling fully present and recharged.

The idea that we need to power through even when we’re exhausted is a myth. We can see this most especially in sports, where sleep has become a competitive edge for top athletes. I see so many people suffering unnecessarily from lack of sleep.

We also see it, of course, in our political leaders, with candidates bragging about being sleep-deprived. I think we need to get to the point where parading your exhaustion like a badge of honor is no longer celebrated.

Danielle LaPorte

Something happens to me after 9:30 PM where I’m like, “I can still do more. I can fit more in.” I’ve been noticing it a lot lately. I’d like to say, “I’m good this week,” but it’s not true. It affects my capacity to write. I have to trick myself into saying, “If you go to sleep, you’re going to be a better writer tomorrow.” It’s not a trick because it’s actually how it works.

I can vouch for the curative fueling effect getting the right amount of sleep has on my writing. When I get my solid seven hours, my ideas are clear. This is how precise I’ve noticed it to be. I know what to cut. And I can write longer. There’s that bewitching time at 3:00 PM where you get that natural dip. If I’m not well rested, I’m done at that dip. If I’m well rested, I just need some water and a piece of fruit. And I can write clear-mindedly until about five thirty to six.

Guru Singh, revered teacher and third-generation yogi, spiritual leader, and author of many books, including his memoir, Buried Treasures: The Journey from Where You Are to Who You Are.

My wife and I go to bed early, between nine and ten. I bring through my best writing during the ambrosial hours, which is from 3:00 to 5:00 AM. There are several things available during that time and a couple of things that are unavailable, like the distractions present throughout the rest of our day. Anybody that has ever gotten up early to do something finds they can get multiples done during that time.

In the ambrosial hours, since there’s nothing else going on, and the visible rays of the sun are not stirring up all of the things you think about, the things you see, the things you relate to, the people you know, your mind is more of a blank slate. Many writers, musicians, artists, and the greatest scientific minds get up early in the morning to utilize those sweet hours of the morning in order to achieve that which they couldn’t otherwise.

To be really practical, it’s easy to get up early if you drink a lot of water before bed. You’re going to have to get up early in order to pee.

Another trick is that I don’t eat anything sweet after sundown. If you do, your brain’s going to be super active before going to sleep. It won’t have enough rest by the time the ambrosial hours come around to be able to get up. You want to stay away from foods that turn into sugars and carbohydrates. If you eat anything after sundown, it should be green leafy vegetables or a green drink.

Diet is very important, as is drinking lots of water and movement, like yoga. But what’s equally important is to set an intention before you go to sleep. Give yourself an assignment—a dreamtime command. Tell yourself you’re going to wake up early, and you’re going to have these ideas that you’ll immediately write down. That’s why The Artist’s Way talks about “morning pages.” Early morning hours coordinate the universal mind with your mind so that you have access—like connecting to the internet—to the vast reaches of universal concepts and ideas and answers to questions and solutions to problems.

If you’re a caretaker or parent and already exhausted, go to bed earlier. Work up to it, starting ten or fifteen minutes earlier. Then the next week, ten minutes earlier still, and so on. In three weeks, you’ll be in bed a half hour earlier. That half hour is going to give you a lot more rest because the sun’s energy as the earth rotates is coming towards you after midnight. But it’s going away from you before midnight. So, the kind of sleep you get before midnight is worth multiples of the amount of the kind of sleep you get after midnight.

Fake lights are also a problem. For a million-and-a-half years, early humans went to bed with the sun and worked with firelight or candlelight. Fire casts shadows. But when you have a room filled with incandescent lights, there are no shadows. Everything is lit, backlit, front-lit, top-lit, bottom-lit. The brain, used to functioning in a world of shadows, is suddenly confused because it’s only been out of the world of shadows for the last, say, 120 years. When you get up in the morning early, and you start to use the infrared light of the sun, which is invisible light, you have access to those deep recesses of your genetic history, of your cosmic history. This is where true creativity comes from.

Napping notwithstanding, the downside of having a lot of natural energy was that it was easy to push it. Overdo, over-give, over-commit. I still said yes to too many people and invitations until I saw it hurt my writing, at which point I wised up quickly. When people-pleasing stops feeling like a payoff, boundaries become easier to embrace—even, I dare say, occasionally fun!

Elizabeth Gilbert

I said yes to everything until I had a nervous breakdown. I so wish I could’ve learned to protect my time differently. But I had to get sick, strung out, and broke, and then realize I was of no service to anybody, including myself. It’s hard for me. I’m a pleaser. I go through life wanting everyone to be made satisfied by my presence in their life. I spent years never saying no to anybody because I have this terrible fear that they would be terribly disappointed. That they wouldn’t like me as much.

You know what I found out? My worst fear was absolutely fucking true. There’s a reason I didn’t do it for thirty years. People hate it. There may be some level at which they respect you a little bit more, but mostly they’re just mad in a way I am when people say no to me: “Wow, she’s changed. She’s kind of a bitch. Oh, she thinks she’s better than us.”

The trick is you have to let that be. You have to sit with the discomfort that comes with the no without trying to rescue them from their disappointment: “I see your disappointment, and I’m going to let you have your disappointment. My no stands because I’m aware of the limits of my human energies, and the limits of my capacity, and the limits of my mortal life. And I can’t do everything. I’m sorry.”

It’s a muscle. You have to get in shape for it because it’s really hard. I still don’t find it easy. But I absolutely find it necessary.

Dani Shapiro

When you have an hour, make it a sacred hour. Do anything that will keep you plugged in to the work. If you can do that every day at the same time, it’s amazing what can happen. When I wrote my first novel, I did this for my first couple of books—three pages a day, five days a week, fifteen pages a week, sixty pages a month. If you adhere to that discipline, you could have a draft of a novel in half a year, which is nothing in terms of writing a novel.

I always tell my students to touch their projects every day. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have the whole day to do your work—sometimes those are the worst days, actually, where you have the whole day, and suddenly it’s gone.

I didn’t have any problem “touching my project every day,” as Dani says. Writing had become a passionate force of habit, one of life’s non-negotiables. Another thing that was second nature to me was getting out in nature.

“You’re always so high when you come home from your morning walks!” Diane said, her bedhead of a blowout cascading around the coffee mug in her hands. We were visiting her place in La Quinta in the desert, and while everyone was still asleep, I’d left for ninety minutes to watch the sunrise while walking the golf course at the base of the purple mountains.

“Huh? I am?” I answered, aware that my morning exercise habit, where I walked outside wherever I was and marveled at the beauty around me and thanked God for my blessings, always filled me up on the inside. Still, I was unaware it was so obvious on the outside. What mother doesn’t need time away from her family? I loved my people hard, but Jesse and Tosh were live wires themselves, and I couldn’t wait to run out that door every morning to be alone and soak up some stillness before the mayhem commenced. It also gave me the chance to contemplate the chapters I’d been nurturing for hours already.

“Yeah. You’ve always been like that,” Di said. “Coming home blissed out. It’s just your thing.”

Endorphins, it turns out, are pretty much everyone’s thing—including Di’s, who, despite being an Olympic sleeper, is a hardcore lifelong competitive athlete. Getting your heart rate up does a world of good, increasing blood circulation and metabolism as a flood of neurotransmitters like serotonin or norepinephrine leads to lower levels of depression, fatigue, and stress. (See, kids, that runner’s high from track practice really can beat out a drug high—without tearing through your lunch money!)

Kelly Noonan Gores, writer, producer, director, and star of the award-winning Heal documentary, host of The HEAL Podcast, and author of the book Heal: Discover Your Unlimited Potential and Awaken the Powerful Healer Within.

Nature is always my go-to. Anytime I feel the slightest illness, stress, or spinning in my head, I step outside and put my feet in the earth, barefoot on the ground or in the sand. “Earthing” [the title of another book and documentary] is so important, especially when I’m in the overstimulating environment of a big city. The negative charge of the earth lowers your blood pressure and inflammatory markers. After twenty minutes or so, it does all these amazing things for your health, taking you out of stress mode and into rest and repair mode, opening you right up to that space where creativity happens.

God love him, forever the optimist, Guru kept prescribing meditations for me as my practice ebbed and flowed. But more and more I argued that my writing felt like meditation, which Guru concurred. Thus, moving my body outside where the only things talking to me were my story lines and songbirds was my preferred writing break.

Deepak Chopra

Meditation increases our connection to creativity because, done properly, it takes you beyond thought. Meditation allows you to go to the source of thought, which in Eastern wisdom traditions is called consciousness. Consciousness is that which makes any experience possible, including the experience we call thinking, and of course, perception and everything else associated with the mind. And yet, meditation decreases mental activity and ultimately transcends mental activity, where all creativity lies.

Our choice to protect our art may be the most meaningful decision we make. But we can have the most enviable eating, sleeping, and self-care habits, and our books still won’t get finished if we’re not vigilant with time management. Sorry to be a downer. I know we covered time in its own chapter. But our habits and relationship to time are forever intertwined, so let’s briefly revisit this topic.

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve hosted over four hundred driven, brilliant, healthy, savvy, and abundant writers at my writing retreats. As disciplined as they are, time issues are the number one challenge that trips them up, stalling their momentum and putting the brakes on their flow. And I’m right there with them.

If I’m not careful, I’ll get pulled into the Time Suck to End All Time Sucks of entertainment consumption. My son, who lives nearby and knows all the best movies, can turn nearly every night into an excuse to watch some must-see something, which inevitably leads to me staying up too late, eating too heavily, and impeding my own creative productivity.

But it inspires my writing! Fills my creativity well! I need to know what’s out there! It’s family bonding time! Check yourself, is all I’m saying.

Get a load of these stats: The average American—who we’ve already assessed is chronically sleep-deprived—takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant while watching an average of five hours of TV every day! I was nearly in that camp years ago, as a “Time Debtor,” one who robs tomorrow’s energy for today, not unlike those speed freaks and alcoholics at the start of this chapter.

A friend who’d been attending meetings at Debtors Anonymous told me I was living with something called “terminal vagueness”: the inability to see yourself and your situation clearly, which can result in bad habits and denial that can shorten your life. Two of my biggest productivity killers at that time, checking online news every hour on the hour and watching both The View and Oprah every day, wouldn’t kill me, though they weren’t likely to take me to Bestsellerville, either.

I was lucky; my now-hubs (who clears four hundred emails before I get up and has never been late for an appointment in his entire life, I shit you not) lovingly shamed me into tracking my time on a graph, breaking up my day into fifteen-minute increments. Truthfully, he was super cute and took three hours on a Saturday to build me time-tracking spreadsheets while painstakingly teaching me how to use them—nearly effing impossible. Thankfully, there are apps for that now. The sixty all-nighters I’d pulled the year before I met him to save my home, my kid, and my career after Jesse and I divorced (a story for Beautiful Writers II) was not something he thought I’d live through again.

The result of my tracking? Whoa. A hefty chunk of my life had been passing me by while my already tired eyes watched other people living their lives on screens.

Ann Patchett

My time “secret” is no television, no social media.* In the spirit of honesty, we do have a TV in the house, but I don’t know how to use it. I’ve always hated television. People tell me about all of these amazing series and how the best writing is on Netflix, and I read the serious reviews in the Times. But I just think, where would I find the time to binge-watch a TV show? And, if I wanted to pick up a hobby, I don’t want it to be based around my eyeballs. My eyeballs are exhausted. I don’t want to stop reading so I can watch a series!

My son, husband, and I now have a standing movie-night date at our house (Sundays following dinner—yay!). Even Tosh, who helps run a thriving business he co-founded, now sees the benefit of scheduling our fun. Pilots and surgeons follow checklists to save lives. Professional athletes never stop studying the fundamentals to keep their play at its peak and their careers vibrant. Getting back to the basics of taking care of ourselves, our time, and our art makes our “off-time” one of the most creative acts of all.

__________________

*Ann doesn’t have her own social media accounts, but Parnassus, the bookstore she co-owns, does.

11

Cookin’ with Gas

Productivity, Mindset, and Energy Hacks