Circadian protocol · working with the subconscious
The day is built in five windows. The rest is execution.
The brain is not equally available all day. It has moments when it lets itself be written to — on waking and on falling asleep — and moments when it only executes. The routine below places each practice exactly in the window where your physiology works for you rather than against you.
It is 18:38 — you are in the Evening block (closing the loops). The bar spans the day from 05:00 to 05:00.
Today's foundation · Asteya
Non-stealing
Measure just once today how long you spent on your phone. Change nothing, resolve nothing — simply learn the exact figure.
18:00 – 21:30 · closing the loops
Evening
Whatever is still open at ten o'clock runs in the background all night.
Low warm lamps, ceiling light off, screens at their dimmest.
Each item with its concrete first step written beside it.
No judgement and no justifications. Observation only.
If you do drink, at least four hours before sleep.
The whole routine at a glance
All 26 steps of the day, in order. Click a block to open it together with its mechanisms.
The morning session
The morning's three practices, chained into a single seventeen-minute sequence. You start it once; it moves from one to the next on its own.
The visualization protocol
10 minutes · 6 steps · morning and before sleep
Step 1 of 6 · 2:00
Descent
Close your eyes. Inhale through the nose for four, exhale long for six. Let your shoulders drop and your jaw unclench. Force nothing — just come down one level.
Guided breathing
Five and a half breaths a minute. The longer exhale engages the vagus nerve and brings heart rate into phase with breathing. The default choice for the morning, before visualization.
Your declarations
Personal — about you and your behaviour, not about other people.
Specific — a statement you could verify beats a decorative one.
Believable — if the claim is too far from reality, the brain produces the counter-argument instantly and the effect reverses. For long distances use “I am becoming”, “I choose”, “I practise”.
The last 28 days
Today, by block
A day joins the streak once you have checked at least 40% of the steps. Your data stays in this browser, on this device only.
Backup
Everything you have checked and written lives only in this browser. Copy the text below and keep it somewhere — it is the only safety net if you change phones or clear the browser's data. To restore, paste the text back into the box and press import.
Sleep hygiene · applied chronobiology
Sleep is not the pause between days. It is the half in which the writing happens.
Everything the routine does during the day — the morning light, the focus block, the evening visualization — is settled at night. This section is the operational part: how to calculate your bedtime, what exactly is lost when you cut the night short, where the problem sits in your habits, and what to do at three in the morning when you are awake and should not be.
The bedtime calculator
Sleep comes in cycles of roughly 90 minutes. Waking at the end of a cycle is far easier than waking in the middle of one, even after slightly less total sleep.
Cycles run between 80 and 110 minutes and vary from night to night, so these times are approximations, not fixed targets. The rule that matters more than all of them: the same wake time every day, Saturdays included.
The map of one night
Deep sleep gathers in the first half of the night, REM in the second. That is why the two ways of shortening a night do not cost the same thing — switch the scenario and see what is lost.
23:15 → 07:00 · 7 h 32 min · deep 85 min · REM 116 min
The two processes that decide when you fall asleep
Sleep pressure accumulates from the moment you wake, in the form of adenosine: the longer you stay awake, the higher it climbs. The circadian alerting signal is an independent wave, driven by light. You fall asleep easily only when pressure is high and the alerting signal has come down — hence the two classic mistakes: the afternoon nap, which discharges the pressure, and evening light, which keeps the signal up. The wave's evening peak, around 20–21, explains why you feel energetic right before bed; it is not a sign that you do not need sleep.
The sleep hygiene audit
Sixteen factors, ordered by how much they weigh. Answer honestly — the score is only useful if it is real. At the end you get the three things to change first.
Your chronotype
Chronotype is largely genetic and shifts with age. It is not a preference and it is not corrected by willpower — it is accommodated. The test below is indicative, not clinical.
The sleep diary
Fill it in each morning, from memory and approximately — minute-level precision does not matter, the two-week pattern does. It is also the instrument any sleep specialist will ask you for.
Sleep efficiency is time asleep divided by time in bed. Consistently below 85%, together with daytime sleepiness, is the classical signal worth discussing with a doctor. Above 90% is normal.
The “I am awake and I should not be” protocol
The central rule of cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia: the bed must stay associated with sleep, not with the effort to sleep. Every hour spent awake in bed weakens that association.
Eight things people say that do not hold up
It is not fully recoverable. A long Saturday lie-in reduces the sleep debt but does not fully repair the accumulated attentional and metabolic deficit, while the shift in hours moves the circadian clock one to two hours later — hence Sunday insomnia and a heavy Monday morning. The effect has a name: social jetlag.
It helps you fall asleep and prevents you from sleeping. It is a sedative, not a sleep inducer: it shortens latency, then suppresses REM in the first part of the night and produces micro-arousals in the second, as it is metabolised. The result is a night that looks complete and does not restore.
Statistically, almost certainly not. The proportion of people with a genuine short-sleep genetic variant is estimated at under 1%. What actually happens: performance declines steadily, but your perception of your own performance declines with it — you get used to the deficit and take it for your normal state.
Melatonin is a timing signal, not a sedative. It tells the body that darkness has fallen; it does not produce sleep by itself. It is useful mainly for shifting the clock — jetlag, night shifts, a delayed clock — in small doses taken some hours before bed. Large doses taken at bedtime generally do less than the people taking them hope.
The effect is the opposite. Long stretches spent awake in bed lower sleep efficiency and weaken the association between bed and sleep. Paradoxically, one of the most effective interventions in insomnia is restricting time in bed, under supervision — not extending it.
You fall asleep despite it. A lit screen produces light and variable sound all night, which means repeated micro-arousals and less deep sleep. If you need a sound background, choose something constant and without a picture.
Simple snoring is common. Snoring with breathing pauses that someone else has noticed, with a choking sensation or with severe daytime sleepiness, is something else: it is the sign of sleep apnoea, which is diagnosed and treated, and which untreated raises cardiovascular risk.
REM sleep, where most dreams occur, is the phase in which the day's emotional processing happens and distant associations form. This does not mean every dream carries a message to decode, but it does mean that cutting REM — through alcohol or by waking too early — costs precisely where the subconscious material is worked.
On supplements
Magnesium has modest evidence, mostly in people who are deficient. It does no harm, but it replaces nothing on the list above.
Valerian, passionflower, glycine — inconsistent results in studies, probably a small effect. They are not dangerous, but they are not worth substituting for a change of schedule.
The general rule: no supplement compensates for a chaotic bedtime or for light at eleven at night. The correct order is behaviour first, supplement possibly after. Any supplement goes past a doctor if you take other medication, if you are pregnant or if you have a chronic condition — melatonin included, since it interacts with anticoagulants and with diabetes medication.
When it is no longer sleep hygiene
The signals below are not solved by a routine and should not be ignored. Each has a treatment, and some of them carry serious consequences if left undiagnosed.
Yama and niyama · Yoga Sutra II.30–32
Ten foundations everything else stands on
In Patanjali's system, the first two of the eight limbs are neither postures nor breathing — they are how you treat others and how you treat yourself. They come before the practice for a simple reason: a good technique inside a disordered life does not produce much. Each foundation is given here with what it asks, how it is commonly misread, its one-day practice, and the exact place it appears in your routine.
Literal meaning
a-himsa — the absence of the wish to harm
What it asks
The first of the ten and the only one held to be absolute: in the classical commentaries the other nine are ways of honouring it. It is not only about physical violence, but about the intention to harm — through words, through silence, through withdrawal, through irony. The point most often missed in modern practice is that it includes the person practising it: brutal inner speech is still himsa, only turned inwards.
How it is misread
Passivity dressed up as kindness. Not saying a necessary truth so as to upset no one is not ahimsa but avoidance — and its consequences hurt more, only later. Ahimsa asks you not to harm, not to disappear.
The modern counterpart
Self-compassion does not lower performance. Research consistently associates it with more persistence after failure than self-criticism, because it does not add shame on top of the mistake — and shame, unlike guilt, pushes towards hiding rather than repair.
The one-day practice
Catch one sentence today that you say to yourself and would not say to a friend. Rephrase it out loud, the way you would say it to someone you care about.
The evening question
What did I say to myself today that I would not have said to someone I care about?
Where it appears in the routine
Literal meaning
sat-ya — fidelity to what is
What it asks
Not merely refraining from lies, but refraining from distortion: not by exaggeration, not by omission, not by the silence that leaves a false impression behind. In the classical hierarchy satya is subordinate to ahimsa — a truth spoken in order to wound stops being practice and becomes a weapon with an excuse. The order matters: first do not harm, then do not distort.
How it is misread
Brutality presenting itself as candour. “I just say it as it is” is usually ahimsa broken under cover of satya. The test is simple: who does the truth you are telling serve?
The modern counterpart
A journal that flatters measures nothing. Data about yourself is only useful if collected honestly; a tracker with false check marks is worse than no tracker, because it produces the sensation of progress without the progress — and you make decisions on that.
The one-day practice
Write in your journal today exactly what happened, including the steps you did not do. No corrections, no softening explanations.
The evening question
Where did I round the truth in my own favour today?
Where it appears in the routine
Literal meaning
a-steya — the absence of taking
What it asks
It extends far beyond objects: other people's time, taken through lateness or meetings without an agenda; their attention, taken through interruptions; their ideas, taken without credit; the credit for someone else's work. In the classical reading the root of theft is not greed but a sense of lack — which is why asteya is healed by santosha rather than by control.
How it is misread
Petty bookkeeping. Asteya does not mean counting every favour and settling every receipt, but not building on what you have not earned.
The modern counterpart
The most frequent theft in a modern day is from yourself. The hours taken by scrolling are not a break — they are time removed from somewhere else, almost always from sleep, which is the one interval where what you learned during the day gets consolidated.
The one-day practice
Measure just once today how long you spent on your phone. Change nothing, resolve nothing — simply learn the exact figure.
The evening question
From whom — myself included — did I take time today without asking?
Where it appears in the routine
Literal meaning
brahma-charya — moving in the direction of what is essential
What it asks
Often translated as celibacy, its practical sense is the economy of vital energy: not squandering it on stimulation that leads nowhere. It does not forbid pleasure; it forbids dispersal. Read for someone who does not live in an ashram, the question is not “what do I give up” but “where does my best resource leak, daily”.
How it is misread
Repression. What is repressed returns amplified, and usually at the worst hour. Brahmacharya asks for direction, not denial — energy moved, not blocked.
The modern counterpart
The measurable counterpart is the dopamine baseline. Frequent free spikes lower the perceived value of everything that requires effort, and the effect shows up in hours, not years. Hence the rule that the phone stays off in the first hour of the day.
The one-day practice
The first hour of today, with no screen at all. No exceptions and no “just once, quickly”.
The evening question
Where did my energy go today, and what came back?
Where it appears in the routine
Literal meaning
a-pari-graha — not seizing from all sides
What it asks
Not gathering more than you need: objects, but also goals, plans and options held open. The last category is the most expensive and the most invisible — every possibility kept “just in case” consumes attention on every day you do not use it.
How it is misread
Ostentatious austerity. Refusing what you genuinely need is not aparigraha but the same fixation on objects with the sign reversed.
The modern counterpart
One visualization scene and one main task are not poverty of ambition but the condition of execution. Attention split across five goals does not produce a fifth of each — it usually produces almost nothing of any.
The one-day practice
Choose one goal today that you will carry forward, and write down explicitly what you are postponing in order to carry it.
The evening question
What am I keeping open without using?
Where it appears in the routine
Literal meaning
shauca — purity, clarity
What it asks
Body, space, food and, in the classical reading, the contents of the mind. The point is not hygiene in itself but that a disordered environment produces a disordered mind: outer order is the cheapest lever on the inner kind. Dinacharya, with its tongue scraping and its bath after the massage, is shaucha applied at the scale of a morning.
How it is misread
The perfectionism that leaves no room to live. A desk that must be cleared before anything can begin becomes a refined method of postponement.
The modern counterpart
Visual clutter in your field consumes attentional resources even when you are not looking straight at it. That is why the phone in another room works measurably better than the phone face-down on the desk.
The one-day practice
Five minutes of order in one place only: the desk, a drawer or the inbox. One place, taken to the end.
The evening question
Which space cost me attention today?
Where it appears in the routine
Literal meaning
sam-tosha — complete contentment with what is
What it asks
Neither resignation nor giving up on goals. It is the capacity not to make your state conditional on the result arriving. This is where the central paradox of the practice sits: santosha is cultivated while you are still pursuing something, not after you have obtained it — otherwise it is never cultivated at all, because the list does not end.
How it is misread
Forced positivity. Santosha does not ask you to deny what is hard; it asks you not to add, on top of the hard thing, the dissatisfaction that it is hard — the second layer, the avoidable one.
The modern counterpart
Specific gratitude activates reward circuitry more strongly than the general kind, and the effect is larger written than merely thought. The three morning gratitudes are santosha operationalised into a seventy-second format.
The one-day practice
Let today's three gratitudes be about things less than an hour old.
The evening question
What was enough today that I failed to notice?
Where it appears in the routine
Literal meaning
tapas — the heat produced by sustained effort
What it asks
The root of the word means “to burn”. It is neither brute willpower nor a programme of sacrifice, but the acceptance of the discomfort that accompanies any real transformation. Tradition is explicit here: without tapas nothing changes, however correct the technique.
How it is misread
Productive self-flagellation. Tapas that breaks ahimsa is no longer practice but exhaustion with a spiritual vocabulary. The distinguishing sign is simple: tapas leaves energy behind, exhaustion consumes it.
The modern counterpart
The 90-minute block is the modern form. Sustained effort, with its discomfort, is the very condition of plasticity: the brain does not consolidate what was easy, and the error signal during difficulty is what triggers learning.
The one-day practice
Take today's 90-minute block to the end without checking anything. The discomfort at minute twenty is the signal, not the problem.
The evening question
What discomfort did I avoid today, and what did the avoidance cost me?
Where it appears in the routine
Literal meaning
sva-adhyaya — drawing near to oneself; the study of texts and of one's own person
What it asks
It has two faces: the study of texts larger than you, and the observation of your own patterns. The second is the hard one, because it asks you to look at yourself without defending and without accusing — two reflexes that both fire at the same moment.
How it is misread
Rumination dressed up as introspection. The difference is checkable: svadhyaya produces an observation and one small change; rumination produces only more rumination and, at the end, fatigue.
The modern counterpart
The evening review — three wins and one lesson — is the format that stops rumination precisely because it is bounded and it closes. The structure is not a simplification, it is the mechanism: what has edges comes to an end.
The one-day practice
In today's review write one single lesson and stop there. No explanations, no justifications, no context.
The evening question
Which of my own patterns did I recognise today?
Where it appears in the routine
Literal meaning
ishvara-pranidhana — placing what you do into something larger than yourself
What it asks
It does not require religious belief to work. In the practical reading: you take the step completely, then release the outcome, because the part of the outcome that does not depend on you is real and it is large. It is the last of the ten and, in the commentaries, the one that closes them: once you have done everything that is yours to do, the rest is no longer your business.
How it is misread
Fatalism. “What will be, will be” is not surrender of the outcome but abandonment of the step — the comfortable half of the practice, taken without the other.
The modern counterpart
Anxious attachment to the outcome keeps the threat system online and degrades precisely the execution that would produce the outcome. Step 6 of the visualization protocol — you give thanks, then let the scene go — is ishvara pranidhana put into practice in one minute.
The one-day practice
Today, after the visualization, check nothing connected to your goal. No statistics, no messages, no signs.
The evening question
What did I try to control today that was not mine to control?
Where it appears in the routine
The ten-day cycle
The foundations rotate: a different one each day. The squares show the last ten days — filled means you checked off that day's practice.
Yoga · Ayurveda · Taoism
The same day, read by three cultures
Long before chronobiology existed, three traditions had already divided the day into periods with distinct characters and built routines on them. They are not the same map and they do not validate one another — but they overlap in places worth looking at. Below you can compare them directly, then add to your routine the practices that survive an honest reading.
Three maps of the same day
Pick a map and click any period. The marker follows the current hour.
Evening
18:00 – 21:30 · nowLight sensitivity rises, melatonin waits for the dark.
The map the whole site is built on: five windows defined by light, cortisol, sleep pressure and attention cycles.
What is your constitution, in ayurvedic terms?
Prakriti is a traditional framework for self-observation, not a diagnosis and not a medical category. This is a short, indicative version: use it as a lens for looking at your habits, not as a label. None of it replaces seeing a doctor.
Dinacharya — the classical order of the morning
The sequence as tradition gives it, from waking to the first hours. It is not meant to be done whole: pick two or three elements and keep them for months.
Ritucharya — what changes from season to season
Ayurveda describes six seasons; below they are grouped into four, with the current one highlighted.
Spring
- Wake earlier, move harder than in winter.
- Less dairy, sweetness and heaviness; bitter, astringent and pungent tastes.
- The classical period for gentle cleansing, not aggressive fasting.
Summer
- Cooling: sweet, bitter, astringent. More fluids.
- Avoid direct sun between 11 and 16, and hard effort at midday.
- Lighter meals; training early morning or in the evening.
Autumn
- Warm, oily, cooked, regular. Less raw, cold and dry.
- Daily abhyanga — the season in which it matters most.
- More sleep and a stricter routine than in the rest of the year.
Winter
- Fuller, cooked meals; digestion tolerates the most right now.
- Daily movement, without exception — otherwise heaviness settles in.
- Warmth, oils, spices. Wake a little later than in summer.
Yama and niyama — the ten guidelines
The first two of yoga's eight limbs, the ones that come before the postures. Each is given here with its translation into your day, as this site builds it.
Non-harming
Truthfulness
Non-stealing
Right use of energy
Non-grasping
Cleanliness
Contentment
Heat, discipline
Self-study
Surrender of the outcome
Four Taoist principles, applied
Action without forcing
Alternation, not static balance
The economy of energy
Naturalness
Read before practising
Ayurvedic preparations are not covered on this site and are not to be taken on the strength of an internet page: some imported products have been found to contain heavy metals, and others interact with medication. Any supplement goes past a doctor first.
Inversions are avoided with cervical spine problems, glaucoma and high blood pressure. Viparita karani, the only one recommended here, is gentle — but if pressure builds in your head or eyes, bring your legs down.
None of the above is medical advice. These practices belong to the lifestyle category; symptoms need a consultation, not a routine.
The foundation
Six mechanisms the whole routine rests on
The plasticity windows
The brain is not equally malleable all day. On waking and on falling asleep it crosses the theta band, where the critical filter of the prefrontal cortex is weakened. Anything important to install goes there — the rest of the day is execution, not programming.
Vivid image and deed overlap
Detailed mental imagery activates largely the same visual, motor and emotional areas as real experience. That is why mental rehearsal consolidates circuits — not because the universe answers, but because the nervous system practises.
Attention is a filter you program
What you explicitly declare relevant becomes a criterion for perceptual selection: you start noticing openings that were there all along. It is perceptual priming, not magic — but the practical effect is considerable, and it is why a written intention beats a thought one.
Dopamine is the molecule of pursuit, not pleasure
It is released in anticipation of and effort towards reward, not only on receiving it. That is why free morning spikes — scrolling, notifications — lower the perceived value of every real task that follows.
Emotion is the importance tag
The amygdala modulates hippocampal consolidation: what carries emotion is written deeper. A visualization without emotion is a film the brain has no reason to keep; one with emotion is a memory of a future.
Sleep is the write phase
Slow waves transfer from hippocampus to neocortex, and REM recombines and makes distant associations. Whatever was active last, before sleep, has priority. The last twenty minutes of the day are worth an hour from its middle.
What is solid and what is metaphor
This field is full of claims that sound scientific without being so. So that you can use the protocol with judgement, here is the separation:
- Solid: the effect of morning light on the circadian clock, the role of sleep in memory consolidation, activation of motor and visual cortex during mental imagery, the effect of if–then intentions on follow-through, respiratory control over vagal tone.
- Reasonable, but less firm: the exact figures (90 minutes, 10 minutes of light, 16 hours to melatonin) are averages, not constants — they vary with chronotype, age and season. Treat them as a starting point you calibrate.
- Useful metaphor, not mechanism: the reticular activating system as a filter that brings you what you declared. The observed phenomenon is real (selective attention and perceptual priming: you start noticing what you marked as relevant), but the popular explanation oversimplifies a structure that mainly governs arousal level.
- Genuine overlap between tradition and chronobiology: the main meal at midday, a light early dinner, waking before sunrise, the lengthened exhale as a calming method, slow touch as a relaxation practice. Here the two vocabularies describe the same measurable effects in different words.
- Traditional framework, without a physiological counterpart: doshas as substances in the body, energy circulating through organs at fixed hours, nadis as anatomical structures. These are old classification systems, finely observed clinically, but they do not describe physiology as we measure it today. Use them as maps for self-observation; do not use them as diagnosis.
- Unproven: the idea that visualization attracts external events. What can be defended is that mental rehearsal improves readiness, reduces hesitation and raises the probability of action — and action produces the result. Visualization without step 5 (the concrete action) correlates in studies with less follow-through, not more.
Further reading
- Matthew Walker — Why We Sleep (sleep, consolidation, REM)
- Andrew Huberman — morning light protocols, NSDR, the physiological sigh
- Norman Doidge — The Brain That Changes Itself (neuroplasticity)
- Peter Gollwitzer — research on implementation intentions
- Stephen Kosslyn — the neuroscience of mental imagery
- Bluma Zeigarnik — unfinished tasks and working memory
- James Clear — Atomic Habits (identity through accumulated evidence)
- Joe Dispenza — a popular source for visualization practice; useful as a protocol, to be read critically where it explains the science