 If you're a student and you're struggling with trying to find the intersection between getting your work done and getting good grades and staying sane and not being clinically depressed, there are a few things you should do every single day that have made a big difference in my life. I want to share what those are in this video here today. What's up guys? Alex Hine here over at Modern Health Monk. So before we jump into this video, I've put together a downloadable resource that will help, which is a free journaling worksheet. It's the first link right below this video, and it'll help you figure out how to get your life together, how to design the life you really want, not just in school, and what to do every single day to make that happen. So check it out. It's the first link right below the video there. Now the first thing that I would recommend is what I call prioritizing the anchor. It's like when you look at productivity advice, there's like, we imagine it as this pyramid. There are all these things you could be doing. And very often, if you're watching a video like this, you're looking for productivity hacks, right? You're looking for tactical advice. But in any field, whether it's becoming an Olympic athlete, whether it's becoming the best engineer, whether it's becoming some other icon, it's never the tactics that make you the best. It's the foundation. And the foundation really of productivity combined with mental health is health, right? Really the anchor is your health. And I would say the biggest thing is sleep, eating a whole foods-based diet, and exercising four days a week. So wherever you are on the spectrum right now of success to feeling well, whatever that ratio looks like for you, the foundation of mental health is always going to be actual health. So if you're sleeping six hours a night because you're trying to get top grades as a STEM student, you're betraying yourself by thinking that this bargain with the devil to sleep two less hours per night, hoping that the added productivity is worth it. I think you're probably delusional and that the diminished returns are going to add up very, very quickly. Or that, you know what, grabbing that In-N-Out burger really quick or that Popeye's chicken or the Chick-fil-A because it's easy, is better than that whole grains meal or the Mediterranean meal or sweetgrain, some salad shop. It's only going to work in the short run until it doesn't. So for me, prioritizing the anchor means you're getting close to eight hours of sleep. You're eating whole foods at every meal and you're regularly exercising for 45 minutes, four days a week. Those are the non-negotiables for health of any kind, especially mental health. Now the second thing that's really tactical is having what I call self and study blocks. This is how I got through doing a doctorate while also kind of maintaining my health and also building a really successful business at the same time. So it's a pretty high performance in all three. Of course I suffered in some ways, but I want to show the exercise that got me through. So this exercise basically involves taking out a sheet of paper and you're going to fold it up into a little square and you're going to divide one side of the paper into personal and the other side into school. So I'll show you. I get it to be about this small, all right? This is like a visual to do list, personal here. And then on the other side, we just do school. And then basically I would break it down into having three hours dedicated to school. So I would write down, for example, Biomed foundations and let's just say like test prep. These are my three tasks that I have to study or work on today. I would label them, you know, in priority. So then I would know what to do for that day. And from there, as soon as I finished the Biomed, like I was in a cafe studying, I used kind of a visual method to check it off, which is just like an OCD checklist thing. And then Biomed is done for the day and it's done for the day in the checklist. So one side of the sheet would be my school to do's and the other would be the personal to do's. So on the personal to do's, it would say something like I knew at some point during the day, I would have to meal prep. I knew that today I would need to go to the gym. And then I knew that today I wanted to just hang out with friends, let's say, and that would just be for the sake of fun and de-stressing. There's no real to-do list here. It doesn't have to be one, two, three. I just know that at some point during the day, these are the things I need to do for my well-being. So every day I created this kind of functional to-do list where one part is school and then one part was personal. And basically this is like my playbook every day. This is how I lived for four years, knowing that if I just do both things any time during the day, I would do well in school and I would do well mentally and in terms of how I felt. So this became my Bible, this little shading exercise that I came up with during grad school. Now the final thing is what I call putting in your three hours. So we talked about this core sort of ritual that I used to balance both by being crystal clear deliberate on what I have to do on both sides, right? Performance and wellness. But in terms of school, the number one metric I made sure I tracked was putting in three hours a day of studying. Three hours a day of work or studying, really, but it was mostly studying for grad school. Now there's a book that I love called The Slight Edge and the author talks about an exercise he told his little daughter when she went to college. He said, if you just put in XYZ hours per day, you can do whatever you want. Have fun, go out, go to the gym, do whatever. But if you put in those couple hours a day, you'll do fine. In retrospect, I found out that was the exact exercise I had for myself, which is to have a digestible metric. For me, three work blocks, each work block being 50 to 60 minutes. And if I did that, I knew I would be great. So trying to fit this in at any time during the day, as well as these, became the goal for the day, the mission. Now for me, this was very, very helpful, especially going into undergrad. I did a combined half pre-med and half environmental degree at Clemson University. And the first semester was full of those sort of pre-med reader classes. And I went from a high school that was competitive, but I didn't work that hard to getting destroyed. I mean, I got a 1.9 GPA my first semester in college because I was in a competitive major and wasn't used to studying three hours every single day when there was not a test. Now those next semesters, I got a 3.9, a 3.7 to a 3.9 from a 1.9. So I was completely unprepared, unknowing how much work had to actually get done. And when I shifted to the three hour a day ritual, every single day, seven days a week, I destroyed my classes going forward. And go figure, I wasn't actually working that much more on a daily basis or studying more, but I was making sure I was deliberate about hitting that benchmark every single day, rather than haphazardly or a couple of days a week, I was doing it every day and that's what made the difference. So I find that if you can juggle the anchor and this ritual of one part personal and one part achievement, you'll be in a rare error. Someone who both does well professionally and someone who doesn't end up with a nervous breakdown or health problems or just so severe depression that you're medicated by the time you finished school. Many students are, but that's been the ritual that has made the biggest difference for me. You guys can check out a similar ritual, that first link, which is a journaling exercise and a series of journaling emails that will help you do the same. And before you guys go, I have two other related videos on this topic right there.