Protocols Over Willpower
Second Level Thinking · Issue 54
I’ve just finished Andrew Huberman’s Protocols. Here’s the operating system I’m actually running: the levers that matter, the ones I’m getting after myself, and the handful worth stealing.
Everything I’ve written to you about this year, from judgement under uncertainty to taste, leadership and the discipline to subtract, has a dependency nobody likes to admit. It all runs on hardware. On a nervous system that’s either regulated or frayed, a brain that’s either rested or fogged, a body that’s either a platform or a liability. You can own every mental model ever written and still make poor decisions at 3pm because you slept badly and are running on your fourth coffee and a spike of cortisol you mistook for focus.
So this fortnight I want to go to the substrate. I’ve just worked through Andrew Huberman’s Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body, cross-referenced against a few years of the Huberman Lab podcast and, more usefully, against what I actually do every day. And I want to give you the honest version. Not a book report, but the operating system I’m running, where I’m leading from the front, and the small number of changes that would give most people the biggest return.
Let me start with the line I wrote at the top of my own notes, because it’s the whole philosophy:
Feel it, then convert it. Losers wallow. Winners take what they feel, even when it’s uncomfortable, and transmute it into action that’s good for them and the world.
That’s the frame. Everything below is just the machinery that makes it possible.
The Real Insight: Protocols Beat Willpower
Here’s the thing most people get wrong about health, and what Huberman gets profoundly right: we treat it as a motivation problem. If I just wanted it more, tried harder, had more discipline, I’d be fitter, calmer, sharper. That’s backwards, and we’ve covered why before: you fall to the level of your systems, not rise to the level of your goals.
Huberman’s contribution is to take that truth and make it biological. He strips the mysticism out and hands you protocols: specific, mechanistic, repeatable actions that work with your physiology rather than against it. You don’t white-knuckle your way to better sleep; you control light and temperature and the machinery does the rest. You don’t summon calm through willpower mid-meltdown; you exhale in a particular pattern and your own nervous system stands down in seconds. Put simply, stop trying to feel different, and start changing the inputs that make you feel different.
The master input is light. Light sets the clock.
Bright light in your eyes early, dim light late, and your circadian rhythm falls into line: your cortisol peaks when it should (morning, for energy and focus), your melatonin rises when it should (night, for sleep), and your mood, your appetite and your attention all ride on the back of that single rhythm. Get the light right and half the other problems solve themselves. Get it wrong and no supplement will save you.
That’s the paradigm. Now here’s how I’m living it.
How I’m Getting After It
I won’t pretend I’ve suddenly overhauled my life off the back of a book. The honest picture is that a lot of this was already locked in, which is partly why the book landed the way it did. It explained the why under habits I’d built by feel, and some of it I’m actively layering in.
The morning. This is the block I protect most fiercely, and it maps almost exactly to what Huberman prescribes and what Arthur Brooks described when we covered winning the morning. I train early with a rotating split through the week of gym, running and cycling, with one genuine rest day. I like being lean and light for the productive hours that follow, not weighed down by a big breakfast. I keep the first meal deliberately sparse: eggs, salmon and avocado, protein-forward, nothing that sends me into a slump. I’m deliberate with caffeine: one or two small flat whites, no more, and I delay the first one until at least an hour after waking. The one I’ve genuinely added from the book is getting the light in my eyes outside, early, before the day’s noise starts. It’s the single highest-leverage thing in the entire protocol and it costs nothing.
Focus and stress: the phone is the whole game. If there’s one villain in the modern attention economy, it’s the device in your pocket, and Huberman is blunt that controlling it is the highest-ROI move available. Not managing it. Controlling it: its location (another room during deep work, not face-down on the desk), its apps (delete the worst offenders outright), its settings (greyscale, notifications off). I do deep work in silence; music only comes out for low-effort tasks where it can’t cost me anything. And the two tools I lean on to shift state on demand are the ones I’d most want to hand you:
The physiological sigh. Two inhales through the nose, one long exhale through the mouth. It’s the fastest way known to science to bring your arousal down in real time. Three of them and you can feel the edge come off.
NSDR (non-sleep deep rest). Ten to twenty minutes of a specific guided protocol to restore focus after a genuine slump. Better than a nap, and you don’t wake up groggy. The free versions are on YouTube.
Both of these are, really, the physiological version of what we explored in the Inner Game issue: quieting the interference so the capable part of you can operate. Gallwey taught the mindset; Huberman gives you the switch.
The body. My base is simply movement: walk, move through the day, don’t sit like a stone. On top of that, Huberman’s cardio guidance is refreshingly undogmatic: pick one weekly pattern and run it. Roughly 45 to 75 minutes twice a week, or 30 minutes four times, or 20 minutes five times. The exact shape matters far less than choosing one and keeping it. I hang strength and longevity work off that, with mobility and stretching after sessions (the bit I’m worst at and working on). On the nutrition side, the one addition I’ve taken straight from the research is fermented foods daily. The gut-health evidence is genuinely strong and it’s an easy win.
Sleep and light. Fix the screens before you reach for a single supplement. That’s the order of operations, and most people get it exactly backwards. A hard screen cut-off before bed, dim and warm light in the evening, and filtering the short-wavelength blue light that tells your brain it’s still midday. Use NSDR or a calming routine when the brain won’t switch off, rather than lying there marinating in it.
The mind. This is where health stops being about the body and becomes about growth, and where Huberman meets everything we’ve said about goals. Motivation, he argues, follows a felt sense of urgency, and urgency comes from seeing the gap between where you are and where you want to be clearly, not from fantasising about the win. That’s mental contrasting, and it’s the engine under the WOOP framework (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan), where you spend most of your effort on the obstacles, including your own limiting beliefs. And the reframe I keep coming back to: lean into frustration. It isn’t failure. It’s the signal that you’re at the exact edge of your ability, which is the only place learning actually happens. Errors aren’t the cost of growth; they’re the trigger for it.
Why This Is the Real Second-Level Move
Here’s why I think this issue belongs in this newsletter and isn’t just a wellness detour.
We spend enormous energy optimising our thinking: the frameworks, the mental models, the decision processes. Almost none optimising the machine that runs them.
The highest-leverage improvement to the quality of your judgement might not be another book on judgement. It might be getting your light, your sleep and your nervous system in order.
That is the ultimate second-level insight. The biggest lift to your leadership, your creative output and your patience with the people you love may come from making sure the judgement you already have actually shows up when it counts.
This is, underneath, the same lesson Brooks gave us about suffering being the teacher, and the same one that sits under grit. Discomfort, the cold, the frustration, the hard exhale before the hard thing: none of it is the enemy of the good life. It’s the raw material. The discipline isn’t avoiding what you feel. It’s feeling it fully and converting it into something useful before it converts you into someone who wallows.
What I’d Actually Have You Do
If you take nothing else, take these, ordered by return on effort, biggest lever first.
Win the light. Get sunlight in your eyes, outside, within an hour of waking. Even five minutes on a grey day. Then kill the screens and dim the lights at night. This one habit regulates sleep, mood, energy and focus simultaneously. Nothing else here comes close.
Exile the phone. During any work that matters, put it in another room, not face-down where you’re working. Delete the two apps you know are stealing your time. Greyscale the screen. This buys back more focused hours than any productivity system.
Learn the physiological sigh. Two inhales through the nose, one long exhale through the mouth. It’s free, it’s instant, and it’s the single best tool for taking yourself from frazzled to functional on demand. Use it today.
Pick one cardio pattern and commit. Not the perfect one, one. Twice a week long, four times short, whatever fits your life. Consistency beats optimisation every time.
Protect your sleep before you supplement it. Hard screen cut-off, cool dark room, warm feet. Fix the inputs before you buy a single pill.
And if this resonates and you want the full manual rather than my highlight reel, read the book. Protocols by Andrew Huberman is the most useful, least preachy health reference I’ve come across. It’s organised by system, grounded in mechanism, and genuinely actionable. Pair it with a few episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast on whichever area you most need to fix.
Parting Shot
You’ve spent years sharpening how you think, but when did you last do anything deliberate about the machine that does the thinking? And what’s the one input (phone, sleep, movement) you already know you’re getting wrong?
