The Night Before Rule: Claim Authority Over Your Mood - E154

manage their mood. Don't ever think that you're separated from the potential of being a high performer. There's a high performer version of you.

“Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you?”

That your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears, and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise? How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleep walking mode and label it as life and reality. Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the makes sense with Dr. JC podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into that rule as the shot caller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that

you look at things that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up. Let's rise up, and let's make sense of why and how shift happens. Great morning humans, great morning world. My name's Dr. JC Dornick. I go by the dragon. It's just such a pleasure to be with you today. Today's topic is called stop managing time and start

“managing this instead. We're going to go over something that we call the night before rule,”

and we're going to talk about claiming authority over your mood. We're going to talk about mood management today. I just owe so much of my life. I might even tell you that I owe just being here in

general to my ability throughout the years to get better and better. Never perfect at managing my

mood. Here's what this is going to be about today. We're going to talk about stopping the idea of letting our environment dictate our results. We're going to learn how to claim authority over our mental state and build from my book and interface response system that actually works. We can help so many people learn tools and strategies, but that doesn't mean they'll be able to follow through and do it. So we're going to talk about why today. So in this episode, I'm going to explain why

productivity is not always a time management problem. We get very enveloped and time blocking and time management could also be a state management problem. We're going to unpack how the night before rule, which I'll teach you, determines whether you wake up reactive or intentional. Park that for a second and just decide, have you decided to be reactive or intentional this day? Or have you already begun the process of being reactive? Or did you make a decision to be intentional?

What is your stance right now? And we're going to talk about why borrowing happiness from tomorrow sabotages our success and how mastering your internal environment makes you truly unfuck with a bull in 2026. That's one of my chapters. I have a chapter in my book about becoming unfuck with a bull. And that is about having agility. That's about resilience. That's about perseverance. But what is mostly about is setting yourself up for that state. Because when you decide to be unfuck

with a bull, it doesn't mean that the fucking is going to stop. It just means that you're deciding

“what it's going to mean to you, which is the only thing that you have a decision in. So you can have”

the best strategy in the world. You can have the best business plan, the best productivity system, the best calendar structure. But if you wake up reactive, tired, emotionally scattered and already behind this starting line, that strategy means nothing. It becomes almost worthless. I always say that learning and knowing is nothing more than a distraction in the absence of action. So if we decide that we're going to do something because we learned it at a seminar or a podcast or we read a

book and we don't follow through, it's typically not that you can't do it. It's that you didn't

work on the who first. It's who you are that determines how well what you do works. So the problem is

your state or your mood. If you peel it back, that's the precursor. So today we're going to go deeper than your typical productivity hacks. So if you're looking for productivity hacks, you'll get a couple today. But we're going to go deeper. We're going to peel it back a little bit further and work on the thing that is really, really predicating your ability to do it. We're talking about internal environment authority here today. The discipline of managing your mental state,

before the noisy world starts influencing it. So we're going to talk some about some morning routine, but also evening routine because here's the real takeaway today, everybody. And this represents one of the major tenants in the makes sense ecosystem and that is this. Who you are determines how well what you do works? And if you stay with me until the end of this episode, I'm going to share with you what I call the night before rule. And that's just a simple

powerful shift that ensures you stop borrowing happiness from tomorrow and leading your day with intention.

morning and they say things like, "I'm just not feeling it today. I'm not feeling good today.

“I didn't sleep well last night. You know what? I didn't sleep well last night, but I didn't use”

that as a platform this morning." Sometimes people say today's already off, but here's the truth that high performers eventually learn. And when I say high performers, I'm not separating you from other people when I say that. A high performer is just somebody that's learned how to become unfuck withable and set up their mood and manage their mood. Don't ever think that you're separated from the potential of being a high performer. There's a high performer version of you.

So when I say high performers have eventually learned that mood is not a condition.

Now that's pretty controversial to say mood is not a condition because when you're in a bad mood,

don't you kind of feel like it's a condition? It's actually a managed state and that means that you have a say in your mood. So the next time you find yourself in a good mood or a bad mood, just contemplate and entertain the fact that you had to say in that. And that in turn means that your day is up to you. So how Elrod was really the pioneer of the morning. He wrote a book called The Miracle Morning, which I read and that played a big role in becoming up with what I call my great morning rise up.

“And he just said, "When the morning win the day." And that's what he meant by it.”

It's up to you. You have a say. The people that accomplish extraordinary things in the world, which there's a version of you that does that, you might be in that state right now, whether it be business, leadership, health, relationships, are rarely the most talented people. In fact, if you read books about successful people, you'll see that they very often tell stories that they had to work harder than everybody else. I mean, my great friend, Jim Quick, who's

enormously successful, was the boy with the broken brain. He had to actually learn how to learn, because he didn't have the skill sets that most of us had. Think about that. They're really the most talented. They're simply the ones who learned how to manage their internal environment before the world gets a chance to manage it for them. I talk very often about the game of life. And I have a chapter in my book called "Decoding the

Game." I like to look at life and gamify it. I don't know about you. It's fun. One of the things that I can do when I gamify it is be the game player. But sometimes, if you wake up in the wrong state, and you don't handle your mood management the right way, you might think you're playing the game, but the game ends up playing you. Makes sense? And the people who accomplish extraordinary things know all this stuff. So I want you to think about your internal environment. I didn't

come up with this idea. I knew the concept of it, but I never called it mood management until I

started reading books from Arthur Brooks. Arthur Brooks, fantastic, fantastic author. He's got a new book coming out and he's written a book, a fantastic book with Oprah. He's a happiness researcher. What he teaches us extensively is that happiness isn't something that we chase. Happiness is not like a destination. It's not like an accomplishment that we chase. It's something that we manage intelligently. So this is about becoming the dominant force and shot caller of your day and managing

things intelligently. Now that doesn't mean that you're stupid if you're not managing things intelligently. It might mean that you just don't know. What we're going to accomplish today is you're going to know, but what happens next is either you just keep going or you start growing. So Brooks describes happiness as a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. But those things didn't just show up automatically. We think that they do. This is what's interesting about the human condition and how we wake up in the

morning. It's almost as if we learned to wake up at some point and see if it's going to be a good day. We take our finger and we put it up and we say, is this a good day? Like the day is going to let you know.

“Well, here's the thing. If you do use that strategy, the day will let you know. States like enjoyment,”

satisfaction, meaning, show up, and then you're going to learn how to regulate your emotional state after they show up. That's a sticky game to play. If I wake up in the morning and I make an assessment of the day before I claim control of it, well, what's going to happen is the day's going to look very similar to an element that was worrisome challenging or hard the day before, because your brain boots up like a computer. And when your computer boots up, just like this

computer I'm looking at here or this phone, it doesn't boot up anything new. It boots up what you were using last. Your brain works the same way. So, in other words, mood management is the

So, most people try to improve their lives by managing time. I know this because I teach time

blocking and time management is a big, big thing. Get organized, manage your time. And there's so many different courses on time blocking, the latest productivity apps. And we make to do lists and task lists. You know why most people don't have to do lists in their pocket? It's because they tried it and they didn't follow through. So, there's a lot of great strategies and there's a lot of great

“books on strategies. But productivity is not primarily a time management problem. And that's what”

we're talking about here. It's actually a state management problem. If your emotional state is chaotic overwhelmed, reactive, or drained, everything becomes harder. So, if my emotional state has those elements. It's chaotic. It's overwhelmed, stressed. I told you before about my struggles with anxiety. It wouldn't go away in the morning. But if my emotional state is like that, the things that we're talking about doing become harder. So, doesn't it make sense right now to consider going and

working on your emotional state before? Even simple tasks begin to feel heavy. Decision making becomes harder, creativity becomes harder, writers block by the way, as somebody that writes every day, has a lot to do with my emotional state and my mood. So, before I sit down to write, I do some other things. For example, if drinking water and listening to a positive podcast, listening to some music or meditating or exercise gets you at a better emotional state,

wouldn't it make sense to do the tasks that will be easier to do? Like react to adversity and things like that after you've gotten in the right emotional state? So, decision making becomes

“harder, creativity, harder, relationships, harder to navigate, anybody relate to that?”

Now, I can tell you, honestly, I drove all day yesterday. And I didn't sleep last night and we've also got a lot of challenging personal things going on. We've got a very close friend of the family dying. We've got some sick parents and we've got a lot of stuff going on. So, my emotional state is already taxed. So, I can't afford to go through my sleep habits and my morning routine and rely on those. I wouldn't have made it here today. Even though I did everything perfectly

and I made it here today, I still have a little bit of that emotional state. But what I can tell you is that we're almost 20 minutes into being together and I feel better. My emotional state is feeling better. So, I've figured out something that helps me with my emotional state while I'm in action and that is speaking to you and that is recording these podcasts live. Have you ever felt like just doing nothing? Isn't that interesting? You know, I just feel like doing nothing today.

I need a day off. Those are those simple tasks that sometimes get tough and that's because you're moved directly influences your perception of reality. So, when somebody states, I feel like doing nothing today. Can you hear in those statements that there's a perception of reality? So, if I wake up and I think that the day is dreary and it's going to be a tough day, I might be more prone to saying something like that because my perception of reality is tainted because I didn't take

command of it. So, we're entertaining the idea here of getting more enjoyment from not taking a day

off of life, but from taking a day on. I always make a decision in the morning, take a day on.

“When you're centered in life, challenges look like opportunities. That's what's interesting”

about somebody that is kicking ass in life. They will claim that they enjoy the suck. They enjoy the hard things. It's like a joy for them to do it. And that's because things look differently when you're centered and you're clear. So, we're talking about getting centered and clear before we do things. It's almost like the challenges in life and I have this feeling right now. It's a lot of hard things that I have ahead of me today. The challenges in life look like training

reps. Oh, and they're training reps for a building personal growth. When you're deregulated, though, or dysregulated, those same challenges or even easier ones can feel like threats or impossibilities when you're dysregulated. So, we're talking about getting regulated first,

which is exactly why in my book, I teach the interface response system and why it becomes so powerful.

You know, when we decide to make an assessment of our brain and our thoughts and understand and embrace where all those thoughts came from, our mother father teacher preacher, the program at in condition nature of the brain, that's step one. So, when I do that in the morning, and I know that all of the thoughts and feelings that I'm having, just like my heart beats, my brain thinks, I don't have to buy into them. I don't have to participate with them and make my identity.

great, got all that, but I'm going to do something. I'm going to go into action right now,

“and I'm going to decide the way things are going to be. So, that's what the interface response”

system is for, and why it's such a powerful thing to learn. If you read my book once again,

when you join our free mastermind on those topics, that stuff's going to be on autopilot. That's a good autopilot to have, to allow yourself to dispute and contemplate things. But there's a more important part of all of this. If your internal environment is dysregulated and chaotic, I could give you the interface response system. Once again, I could give you a tool and a strategy, but it's going to be much more difficult to run. I could say, here, go to the gym.

It's going to make you feel better. But if your emotional state is off, and it's harder for you to get to the gym, now you have to have grit, and you have to work harder, and that's difficult

for people. But if you can get yourself in the right emotional state and manage your mood prior

to looking at that task, it's not going to be harder. So for me to run the interface response system and say, when somebody comes at me or criticizes me, or something doesn't go my way, it's easy, and it's fun because for me, it looks like training. It looks like building muscle in my life. So your perception gets distorted or even shut down when you're emotionally disregulated. So your pause capability is your ability to say, okay, I hear you what you're saying, but you're

going to put it on pause cognitively distance yourself from the stimulus that happened and your knee jerk reaction. Your perception gets distorted or even shut down and your pause capabilities

we could. Your processing becomes emotional. Think about what that means. If I stop myself,

and I go, well, what do I actually think? But I'm still emotional about something, and I start

“to process things. My emotions are going to dictate a lot of what I think that we've got to get”

that stuff under control. In my relationship with my wife, if one of us has heightened emotions about something, we try our best to say, hey, let's table this for another time. I don't think I'm in the right state for this conversation, and we try to respect that decision. If not, what will happen is as you can pose something that is perfectly logical and the other person, they turn into what's called yeah, but they'll say, yeah, but they'll say, yeah, I hear what you're saying, but so if you

think about it, when you bring your butt into an equation, what's happening? You're emotional, you're emotional, and you're letting it dictate it. So mood management stabilizes the operating system of the interface response system. It stabilizes the operating system that the interface response system and your whole perception and reaction system runs on. And if you don't do that,

“that's why you're out there trying so hard to do things and not getting anywhere. It's the”

difference between reactively living and intentionally living. So there's essentially two ways that people move through life, and that's you and I, we're either moving through life reactively or intentionally. So reactive living means that your environment is determining everything and there's no intentions in it. It means that you are living in reaction to your environment. You wait for the environment to tell you. So reactive living is thoughtless because you're just letting your operating system do the job.

You're handing the keys of trust over to your operating system, which we know is not really ours. It's what we've acquired from experiences in life. That's great, but has also been programmed and persuaded and conditioned into our minds from our programmers, our mother-father, teacher, preacher. So we can't hand the keys of trust over to that and expect to get a great result. Could be a stressful email that you get that ruins your mood, traffic may be. A bad comment can

ruin your mood and your focus. So your state is constantly being pushed around by circumstances. If you're reactive living, you're a victim of circumstances. And hoping that the circumstances get better before you get better. Your circumstances change when you change. And that's called intentional living. So intentionally living flips the equation. You decide the emotional baseline that you bring to the day. You decide. You could say it out loud. And from that centered place, circumstances become

things that you respond to versus react. And the difference between reacting and responding is there's a thought process that goes on with logic and rationale in connection with your greatest desires. Circumstances become things that you respond to, not things that control you. Nothing controls you when you decide to respond versus react because it means that you have a saying it. That's called mental sovereignty. So let's talk about the night before rule. Here's where most people miss the

talking about morning routines. Whether you do them or not, that's a big thing. We meditate. We exercise re-read. We journal. We do cold plunges. All of that stuff. Podcasts. We listen to podcasts. We do

“podcasts. Great, great stuff. But remember who you are determines how well what you do works.”

But here's the reality. Who you are when you're doing those things meditating, exercising, journaling, cold plunges determines how well what you do works. So your morning routine doesn't start in the morning. It starts the night before. Now just sit with that for a second. How could my morning routine start the night before? Now we are starting to load the logic and rationale into your head and you understand why. It's because who you are when you wake up for your morning routine

determines how well what you do works. So if you stay up late at night, we have something in our house called twilight hour. The hour before we go to bed, no technology, family. We don't let anything in our brains that could affect our sleep and also remember we go offline when we sleep. But whatever you go to bed with might wake up with you. So we like to go to bed in the right atmosphere. It's a great way to improve your relationships too and spend quality time with one another. But if you stay

up scrolling, social media, watching, stimulating content, eating junk food, that's another big thing. Drinking alcohol or substance abuse or flooding your brain with dopamine,

you might feel temporary pleasure. But here's what Arthur Brooks says that you're doing.

He says that when you do that, you're borrowing some of the happiness that is available to you the next morning when you do that stuff at night. So the cost shows up the next day in the following way. You might wake up with brain fog. And you think that it's just that day. You might have low motivation, irritability, increase irritability, increase reactivity, wake up on the wrong side of the bed.

“That started before you went to bed. And I can't tell you how important this is and just try it,”

challenge yourself. I didn't sleep well last night, but I went to bed the right way. You didn't just lose sleep. You lost clarity, patience, and emotional stability. And the morning routine matters, but if you don't do a proper healthy night routine, the morning routine can get washed out. But let's talk about the morning routine. When you wake up in the morning, your brain is still transitioning out of the dream state. There's this little teeny fragile moment where your brain

goes from offline to online. And you'll know it. And I always challenge people. What are the

greatest things you can do is start from a place of gratitude, because that pauses your program from booting up. There's that moment where your brain, which mysteriously goes offline and you stop thinking during sleep, you dream, but you're not thinking. You're not consciously there. It's different part of your brain takes over. But when you wake up in your eyes first crack open and you start to boot up your computer, that's that transitioning state. You're moving from

dream state into baseline reality. So that's called the hypnopompic window. So your mind is extremely impressionable. Just like when you're a little kid listening to your parents during that time, when you're just coming offline to online. You are either going to listen to the boot up of your program or you're going to take control of it. And the easiest thing for you to do and you can start doing this immediately is just capture that moment and say thank you. And you know what's

interesting when you say thank you in the morning to your brain and your groggy and you haven't even woken up. Your brain will instinctively ask for what I do this every morning. I say thank you and I don't even have a context other than I'm programmed it's a habit. I say thank you. And my brain says for what? So you know what I start to do? I start to answer that question for this, for that, for this, for that, the roof over my head, this comfortable bed, my wife, my children,

my health, shower, opportunity, challenges, whatever you want to do. So that's that hypnopompic window.

“There's really like 30 to 60 minutes in the morning that you have to claim control. That is like”

basically you setting the tone and programming your nervous system for how you want to interpret reality and function that day, but it begins with that first like five seconds. And the reason

why that's so powerful is anything that's going to boot up if you don't do this is not present.

It's from yesterday. It's either a worry about the mysterious future or you're worried about something that you just haven't let go of yet. But if you say thank you and you ask yourself for what you are in the present, you've unwrapped the present moment. And that is that first couple of seconds, but you really want to have a routine that claims control in the first 30 to 60 minutes of the day. And I take this very seriously and it's why I've been doing this for years and years and years

now. If the first thing that you do is check your emails, socials and you know you're not supposed to do this. But sometimes we do this instinctively. If it's the first thing you do is check your social

going to be good that people like your posts and people are viewing you and saying hey that's a

great post or the email is you got the job well we're so happy for you you just want a million dollars.

“Pretty rare that that's what comes through the feed. You're going to get an update on the”

war and I ran. First thing in the morning, you're going to get an email that says you owe a bill. You're going to see social media about people that are claiming to be perfect and you're not. That's what happens in the morning if we don't claim control. So obviously stay away from that stuff, stay away from that stuff. So don't make that the first thing that we do. There's a lot of value and not using your phone or putting it on do not disturb and only using it for an alarm. But if you're

the kind of person that checks it, then you might want to come up with an old school alarm system.

If you intentionally set your state through movement, breathing, reflection or gratitude,

that was the thank you. What you do is you begin the day and what I call author mode. That's what I love about writing is it comes from the creative process. It's from me and then it happens. So I like to look at the boot up of my brain. I like to go into author mode and that's the difference that changes everything in your life. So let's talk about this in closing this idea of becoming unfuck with a bull in 2026. What a fun goal for 2026 to become unfuck with a bull.

So the modern world right now, making assessment, become conscious and aware, arm yourself with the awareness that the modern world is designed right now, strategically to hijack our attention and destabilize our mood to put you in reaction mode so they can lead you somewhere. You've got that working against you. If you're not taking control of your mood in the morning, it is going to be very, very beneficial for them if you don't take control of your mood because

they're experts at it. Obviously our health is important in our mindset, but one of the most valuable assets that you own today is your attention and everybody wants it. Everybody wants it. I'm grabbing your attention right now and I appreciate that and I'm grateful for it,

but make sure that you are filtering where you're putting your attention. I always say what we consume,

we assume. So whatever you're putting your attention to every day actually ends up messing with your intention, doesn't it? So the modern world is designed to hijack your intention and destabilize your

“mood. That's why there's news cycle, social media, constant notifications. So if you don't consistently”

and consciously manage your state, something else will, that's a takeaway for the day. This is why emotional discipline becomes one of the most valuable skills of our time. One of my mentors, Dr. Wayne Anderson, he says the true cause of disease upstream from the upstream is emotional mismanagement. Before all disease, emotional mismanagement. So this is talking about this amazing skill of emotional discipline. It's a muscle that we should work on over time. The goal is not to avoid

adversity by the way. That's foolish. The goal is to become unfuck with a mobile buy adversity. You want to get to a place where adversity is a fun challenge, just like a kid playing a video game. Whenever they face adversity, they get excited. What if we looked at adversity as opportunities and training to become unfuck with a ball? By the way, you cannot become unfuck with a ball without adversity. If there's no adversity, there's no training. You cannot build your muscles without

any weights in the gym. If it was just an empty room, you cannot build your muscles. Become unfuck with a ball by it. And that means that your center stays intact even when the world becomes chaotic.

“No matter what, that's what I love about Tal Ben Shahar's book. It's called Happier No Matter What.”

And what does that mean to you? I'm going to be happy no matter what. I'm going to work on becoming happier, stronger, more resilient. Work on my perseverance and my interface response system. No matter what. That no matter what means bring it. Bring it. Serve it to me on a platter. It's going to make me stronger. So here's the core lesson. Consider minimizing the idea of trying to control every detail in your schedule. Most of them are out of your control. Start learning

how to control your state. Everybody knows that we can't control what happens. We say shit happens. We can only control how we respond. So it doesn't make sense to work on the state from which that response comes from. If the outside world is filling up your schedule, that doesn't work. Because the person who manages their mood will outperform the person who simply manages their time. Anytime. And you can see this in any work environment or any social environment. It doesn't

matter how smart or skilled somebody is. It's the person that has good mood management skills

getting the best results in living their best life. Once you learn how to stabilize your internal environment, clarity improves. Decision making improves. Relationships improve. And suddenly,

the interface response system that I'm teaching you in my make sense book becomes more powerful.

“Remember, who you are determines how well what you do works. So what we're saying here is”

is if we work on the who not only will the do become easy or but you'll get better results from it.

Because who you are determines how well what you do works. Because now you're running it from a

place of awareness instead of reaction. So let's face it at the end of the day. Your results are rarely determined by what happens to you. They're determined by who shows up to face what happens

to you. That version of you is largely shaped by the way that you manage your mental

mood and your mental state. So tonight instead of saying what do I need to get done tomorrow? What you're going to say instead is who do I want to be tomorrow when I wake up? Because once you answer that question in that way, you can begin building the habits at night that are going to

“make the version of you inevitable in the morning. This journey if you want to get started starts tonight.”

And when you master that, life begins to make a lot more sense. That's it for today. To support the make sense with Dr. JC podcast, be sure to subscribe, like and share as well as follow the make sense sub-stack for free daily quotes, live streams and blogs. And remember, learning without action is just another form of distraction. If something hit home when you learn something today,

“give it away. That's the only way it's going to stay. See you next time.”

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