Hearthside: A Cabin Morning Routine For Calm Focus

Your day can go sideways before you even stand up, and most of the time it starts with a screen. From a quiet 4 AM cabin morning, we share the routine that helps us feel calmer, healthier, and more focused: delay the phone, get outside, and let real morning light set your circadian rhythm. We talk about cortisol as a useful stress hormone when it rises the way nature intended, and what happens when you stack artificial light, notifications, alarms, and bad news on top of it before your brain is fully awake. 

We get practical about stress reduction and sleep hygiene: why blue light first thing can leave you wired, why blue light at night can crush deep sleep, and how simply keeping your phone out of the bedroom can change your rest. We also dig into grounding, fresh air, and deep breathing as easy habits that help your nervous system downshift. Even if you live in a city, you can adapt the same ideas by getting to a window, stepping outside briefly, and building a phone free buffer at the start of the day. 

From there, we connect “low cortisol living” to real life: outdoor work, building fires, staying physically active, and eating a clean diet that keeps energy steady without a crash. We share why coffee quality matters, how mold in coffee can contribute to jitters, and why we care about organic, regeneratively grown, tested coffee. Finally, we zoom out to seasons, sunlight, birdsong, and why routines rooted in nature can be hard to give up once you feel the difference. 

If this resonates, subscribe for more grounded routines and practical natural health ideas, share this with a friend who wakes up stressed, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What’s the one change you’ll try tomorrow morning?

Transcript

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Pre Dawn Cabin Check In

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Good morning everybody. Welcome back to the cabin. Welcome back to the hard side. It's early right now. Very dark inside. Full moon actually, so it's quite bright for for this time of the day. It's about four o'clock in the morning right now. Got some pretty decent weather today. I think I'll get a fair bit of work done on the sugar shack. Need to get that thing done this week. So start off with a tea first thing in the morning. And don't have the indoor fire going right now, but I've got the fire going outside in the outdoor kitchen already so that I can cook breakfast. And then have a chag out with coffee. Right after that, before I get to work. Callie's curled up in the freezeway. She's finding it a little bit too warm out here in the main part of the cabin right now. It's a little bit of humidity, so the cabin wasn't that cold overnight. But it was a little bit lower than it has been lately, at least, because it's been quite warm. In fact, I had a friend up and for uh one night and he tried to sleep in the loft and found it too warm. So I ended up taking the mattress down and laying it down by the fire uh the wood stove. Not with the wood stove running, but down at um cabin main level so that he could uh get a better sleep. But of course then Callie saw him on the floor and joined him halfway through the night and stole one of his socks. Anyway, nice time of year starting to cool down a little bit more during the day, and the humidity's starting to lift, so I can see fall in the air. You can see the uh plants are starting to get tired. The leaves are starting to curl up a little bit and a little bit of color change already as well.

Sunlight And Your Circadian Rhythm

SPEAKER_00 1:55

I try hard not to start off my day picking up my phone or going to my computer. It's uh it's not the best habit to get into. It's not healthy at all. Not the only reason, but one of the reasons I do do this is because the sun's not up, and I find that that's the best way to wake up. So you find my voice a little bit groggy, for example, first thing in the morning when I'm recording these podcasts. But with the sun not being up yet, I'm able to step outside and look into the rising sun to set my um circadian rhythm. And it actually raises cortisol actually first thing in the morning. It's a it's uh kind of a response to fully wake you up and prepare you for the day, the challenges of the day in the past, when uh nature was a bit more of a threat. You needed to be fully, fully uh aware and able to react to things quickly. So it's a bit of a cortisol spike, but it's a healthy one in the morning, and that sunlight in your eyes is what sets you up for the day. So when I'm doing these podcasts and the sun's not quite up yet, um I'm not as functioning uh quite as well as I would be later in the day, and I'm not speaking quite as clearly, but it allows me to get this work done and then uh maybe get some editing done and then head outside, get that sun in my eyes, and then uh get to work. That's what I like about cooking the outdoor kitchen this time of year, because that sunlight or the morning light is uh I'm absorbing that as I'm making breakfast instead of being inside in the in the dark. And that's a big reason I do live this lifestyle. It's it's the health aspect. Uh, it makes me feel a lot more uh more healthy. In fact, if I'm inside uh working too much on the computer, uh, especially if it's multiple days in a row and I've been doing a lot of that this summer, as you can see, the amount of content that I've been producing and getting products like Chaga and some other products that we've got coming out soon. And uh writing my first book, starting this podcast, all of those things are taking a lot of time. So spending more time, and there's been sometimes there's been many days in a row that I've spent 10, 12 hours in front of the computer, which I feel horrible at the end of that period. So I have to get outside and get some work done. So that's um what I call low cortisol living, uh working outside. In fact, I didn't appreciate that when I was younger, when I worked on a roof doing uh sheet metal work. That was something I wanted to get away from. And then once I did, I realized that was a much healthier lifestyle, working outside every day, being exposed to hot and cold and sun on my skin, on my face, and in my eyes every day. So this life that I'm living now, very hard, I would say physically, all the work that I have to do. Like I'm going to be working on that sugar shack today. I'm gonna try to finish off that longbow that I started making. And I've got um a lot of firewood to start cutting for next year. I'll start doing that, probably leaving a little bit today, but definitely next week. And uh that's physically demanding, but it's um way healthier than sitting in front of the computer of like haven't had real back issues since I started working physically again. But sitting in front of the computer, I get neck pain and a little bit of back pain, and it even affects my sleep. So I try to not, like I said, spend too much time in front of the computer and try to be more active outside. Um ideally, you know, a full eight hours just moving, steadily moving around outside doing chores, or if I don't even have it's always chores to do, but if I'm focused on doing something else than long walks with my wife and Cali.

Why Phone Light Raises Stress

SPEAKER_00 5:53

So cortisol for anyone who hasn't looked into is basically your stress hormone. And it's it's not an enemy, you'll hear cortisol, well, and it can be cortisol is uh not it's not a bad thing to have some cortisol, but you don't want high cortisol. But it is what gets you out of bed and it's what sharpens you when something's actually wrong, like something is uh threatening you, you need to have a spike in cortisol in order to deal with that. It's kind of like adrenaline. Get that adrenaline rush that allows you to fight or flight. It's um it's similar to that. So your body's supposed to get a clean, healthy jolt of it right when the sun comes up, or like I said, get outside and get that first real light in your eyes, and that spike is supposed to be the thing that wakes you up and gets you moving. So that's the system working the way it's designed to work. But what most of us do instead, and I did this for, like I said, years and still occasionally do, is we wake up in the dark or in a dim room with the blind shut, the first light we actually get isn't sunlight, it's a phone screen, which is worse than what it used to be when we had flipped the artificial lights on, especially if they were what do you call it, uh blacking on that, the you know, the long tubular lights, white light. I find that horrible. But having a phone or an iPad or even a computer four inches or twelve inches away from your face, that's not the proper light. I know it's easy just to pick up that phone, especially if you got a bunch of notifications, especially if you're still working and um have a job where you're required to look at those notifications. But those are hard to avoid, but obviously you try to minimize those or push them off a little bit later in the morning. But having um a news app on your phone, or I think like Apple or some of them just have it automatically, that's what the what the default is set at that you get um news. I've shut that off. I've never shut it off when I first get a phone, basically. I don't want to see that. I don't want that stress first thing in the morning. So that result is that instead of one clean natural spike, of course, all from the sun, getting out and looking at the sun, you're getting a second artificial spike from stress and from other people's problems before your feet have really even hit the floor or you got outside and touched the ground, which is ideal.

Grounding Fresh Air And Simple Rules

SPEAKER_00 8:21

Grounding. You should look into that. Yeah, just putting your bare skin on the earth or on something natural, ideally, outside, fully connected to the earth. It's hard for your body to tell the difference between the two spikes. But the problem with the artificial one is it stays that stays elevated. It's not just that jolt, it's it stays that way if you stay in front of your screen. No, I didn't know any of this when I started doing what I do now. And um, I'm actually I wouldn't call myself an expert on it, but I certainly know a lot more about natural health than I did even a year ago, and especially 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. But I did know that when I was in the city, drowning in debt, running a business with too many employees, business that was falling apart. The first thing I'd do every single morning was check my phone. And before we had cell phones, I would pick up the phone and there was a line that you could call to get the weather, and I would sit there listening to that. But I would also be uh planning out my cruise days, so that that was very, very stressful. I kind of feel my whole body brace even before I got out of bed, just waiting for that. In fact, back then I still woke up by an alarm clock. Now I haven't used an alarm clock in 15 years, probably. I naturally get up early, so um, even if I am planning on leaving like early for a trip or something, need to get up early or like three in the morning. I can still just tell myself that, and I will get up without an alarm. But that alarm that most people wake up to is uh you tense, and that's why there's a snooze button. You try to get five more minutes of sleep, even though that's not going to be effective. But it's it's stress. That's the thing that's hitting you, that cortisol spike when that alarm goes off. Well, we moved out here, we moved north. Started before that, even though we moved up here when I built the cabin. It wasn't really a choice at first. There's no signal half the time, anyway. Still isn't. So checking a phone first thing wasn't really an option, wasn't really um useful if there was nothing there for me to be notified. But I mean you get you get like one bar, and sometimes it spikes to two. I don't know why. So sometimes there's notifications when I wake up, but generally not, not until I turn on the Wi-Fi at least. Now, what I'd noticed when I it took a while, it wasn't overnight, but I noticed after a few months of that that morning just completely felt different. I was much less stressed in the morning, calmer. Didn't know really the science behind it, but I knew it was definitely true. Now obviously I got a phone that works more often than it did for at the first cabin because I didn't even have a Wi-Fi option there, for example. So now that I'm here, I try to keep that rhythm, even though you know if I go out on the porch, I do have a better signal there than almost any. Well, it's only a couple of spots on the property, the highest parts of the property that I have a slightly better connection. But the point is that I don't consciously do that. And now I try to keep that up and I and appreciate the position that I'm in, because I know not everybody could just wake up, step outside, and just listen to basically silence if there's no wind and the sun's not quite up yet, the birds haven't started chirping. It can be like completely silent, other than that stream you can hear slightly. A little waterfall to the right of the cabin. You can hear that a little bit, but that's it. That's just completely uh stress-relieving to me. I know not everybody has that. So anyway, point is to consciously seek that out. And maybe for you, maybe if you're living in a city, you actually have to put on some noise cancellation headphones and listen to maybe my videos, um, the especially the hearthside videos, uh, that are either silent or just have soft background music, or have nature sounds, or fire sounds, fire crackling in the background. That's maybe a good way to do that. Try to at least get to a window and look outside. But better if you can step outside, touch the earth, and get some sunlight in your eyes and get some fresh air in your lungs. So I think that's probably number one rule. Just try not to look at a blue screen first thing in the morning.

Fire Making As A Daily Reset

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Obviously, try not to look at a blue screen before going to bed either. That's also horrible. It disrupts your circadian rhythm and it does not promote deep restful sleep. So I used to take my phone into the bedroom, in fact, and that was my alarm clock. The problem is if I woke up anytime during the night and was curious about the time, I'd reach over, touch the phone, look at that blue screen, which was disruptive, see the time, and then decide if I was getting up or not. I changed that only about a year ago, actually. I knew how not only disruptive that light could be, but also that the um electromagnetic field around the phone is not healthy for you. Especially if it's connecting to Wi-Fi all night. So I don't take that into the bedroom. I just bought one a tiny little digital, it's still it's digital, uh, but it's a little clock that only shows the time. So there's four numbers on there, and they're red, not blue. When I touch that, it's not even on most of the time. You don't even see it, so I just lean over, touch that, and it comes on. And it's non-disruptive, but it gives me the time without getting a blast of the MF and and a blue light. So I that's I'd highly recommend that if you uh can so the phone stays somewhere on a charger somewhere far away from where I'm actually sleeping. So first thing I do in the morning, don't look at the screen, look outside. Second thing is I actually get outside. I always doesn't even matter what time of year it is, how cold it is, how hot it is, how buggy it is, I get out there and get my bare feet on the ground, even in the winter. And it's uh you gotta be careful with that. I did that. Went for a little walk in the snow uh a couple of winters ago, barefoot, and then on a really cold day, and ended up really kind of frostbiting my my uh soles of my feet. It took me like a week to for them to fully recover, so I'm not do that, but anyway, you can get outside with some shoes on and just touch some trees or whatever. So that's the second thing I do. And then, like I said, do some deep breathing exercises so I can get that uh fresh air in my lungs as well. And then next, I usually get the fire going, either feed it if it was going overnight, depending on the time of year, and that'll start soon if I have a fire going inside. And uh that, like I said, will be soon, not the bedroom fire, but uh the main cabin fire, the the um cook stove will have that running overnight. I'll what I'll do typically stoke it, but damp it right down so it's not producing much heat, because I don't want it to be too hot in the cabin when I'm trying to sleep. And then uh when I woke wake up, there's still still coals, so I'll just open up and give it some air and throw some wood on there, get some kindling on there. And that's much easier at that time of year to get my tea going and and then breakfast because the stove is already warm enough. I don't have to go outside and try to heat up a kettle in order to pour some tea or jag. So that's just stoking it at this time of year. I actually have to start a fire. So that's that third thing that I do. And I like that repetitiveness and I like the actual work is like if you just get up and obviously living in a modern house, you turn on your electric or gas stove and uh put a kettle on. That's so much faster. Like so much of what I do is so much slower, and you and it's really not practical for somebody that uh has to go to a job at a certain time and get home late. Uh, this lifestyle is very difficult for that if your everything is manual like that, especially cooking and cleaning when you have limited water and uh everything is cooking and heat is provided by firewood, means you have to cut that fire, but uh just maintaining the fire takes a lot of time. So, but I like that. I like the repetitiveness of it, I like the physicality of it. It um just makes me feel like I'm getting some activity, physical activity and mental activity always, first thing, but always every day and throughout the day. Getting your hands active, getting them working, getting your spine aligned by focusing on keeping it, keeping yourself upright, not sitting there hunched over looking at a device in your hand or sitting at a computer leaning forward.

Breakfast Routine And Clean Energy

SPEAKER_00 17:45

And then after my tea, typically start getting into cooking breakfast, and for me it's again pretty straightforward, usually ground meat of some kind, so ground venison often or more often, then ground bear, and then uh grass-fed beef typically, and then some eggs from our chickens, and then uh usually some sauerkraut or or kimchi with that as well, and then maybe an hour after that, depending on where I am, what I'm doing. Um, but usually wherever I'm working, I typically have a fire going, so I almost always get a coffee and andor chag it going. But usually well, coffee, one coffee a day, pretty much every day. And sometimes that's with chag, and sometimes it's with that's my basically my morning routine. I'm trying to get active as soon as I can or as early as I can, but I'm also trying to enjoy that first part of that morning and try to relax before I get into it. Now, when I do all of this, I don't get a crash. I've never been a napper. I've never sat down or laid down and had a nap in the middle of the day. And the only few, very few times that I've ever tried that uh just makes me feel horrible. I it doesn't make me feel rested at all. I don't even understand the concept of napping, actually. I know it's very effective for a lot of people and they find it not only useful, but maybe necessary. I just can't do it at all. And I don't know if it's because my adrenaline's up once I get going and it just stays up throughout the day. I stay active and full of energy. But it's also my diet, too, uh, because I eat clean. I don't get any jitters from poor quality coffee, which is very common, which is I'll share that that we've been working on sourcing healthy, organic, regeneratively grown coffee for years. We've been searching for this, and we've tried a couple few brands, more than a couple, few brands, and we've finally settled on a a small roaster that we found that we're doing a a large run with so that we can sell some of it to you. So one of the keys to it is not just that it's regeneratively grown on small farms and and it's or um organically grown without chemicals. We also tested for mold because there's a lot of mold on a lot of coffee. So that's a concern and it caused some jitter. So that's part of that routine that I have that keeps me healthy and avoids those spikes. So having coffee only in the morning, so that um by evening the caffeine's fully gone from my system, eating healthy food, so I'm not getting inflammation caused by seed oils and preservatives and other uh chemicals like glyphosate that's on a lot of food. And uh just staying active, flushing all that out of my system because I'm burning a lot of calories throughout a day. And drinking clean, clear water too. Uh, what else do I do? I mean, obviously, chores. There's always something to do. There's always chores always, well, my projects have been ongoing. Still building the infrastructure of the homestead, so that's taking me a lot of time, a lot of my days spent doing that. But other than that, I spent as much time, almost all my free time is spent with my wife. And obviously, Callie's always at my side and at our side when we're together. So that's uh yeah, my typical routine. I try to keep my phone away from me as much as possible, unless there's something actually critical

Mold Free Coffee And Food Toxins

SPEAKER_00 21:24

that I need to be aware of. I try not to have it on my body, and I try to put it off to the side somewhere where I'm not thinking about it. Now, this obviously the routine does change a little bit depending on the season. So in the summer, obviously the sun's up earlier, so I can get that sunlight earlier. Maybe, maybe this is actually why my routine does shift as much as it does. I actually wake up just as early in the winter, despite the fact that the sun won't be up for hours, but that's when I find I get a lot of my work done, a lot of that video editing and book writing and stuff. Yeah, a lot of screen time. I still try not to do that first thing in the morning, but because I'm up so much earlier than the sun, I actually can have do both. I can have that relax, relaxing period, then get some work done, and then get outside. Summer is a little bit more difficult because the sun's up so early, depending on the peak of the summer, uh around June 20th-ish. That period of summer is so light so early that I tend not to get much work done at a computer because I like to get up, like I said, get that sun on my eyes and get going. So that's uh that changes, I said, throughout the season. I love the spring, especially when like say uh April and early May, no bugs yet, but lots of birds have returned from the south. And it's uh very they're very vocal in the morning. That bird sound, I find that very invigorating as well. That really helps me get to my uh days started with um and a reduction in that first cortisol level starts to drop immediately when I start hearing that. So that's something probably I miss more than anything when we're uh when it's winter and it's cold and dark later, and there's hardly any birds because things flown south, which is why we started flying south a couple years ago, spending more and more of the winter in the south. A big part of that is it's not just warmth and you know getting away from the cold and the snow, it's mainly sunlight and wildlife bird song. It's uh it's very noticeable when you head south or spend uh your winter up here and then head south and see what how much of a difference is, and you realize how important that is. Now, what I'm happy about, I really appreciate is that I've now been doing this long enough that this has become such a routine that going back to say a job or moving in into town or into a city, I think would be well, I've decided, my wife and I have decided that we couldn't do that. We um we just this is so important, this routine is so important. We still feel so much healthier and less stressful, less stressed by living this and for this amount of time that I can't see ever going back. I know that people don't really understand the importance of all this routine that I'm talking about, especially being more attached and more um having nature more accessible, that fresh air and that sunlight and that um the healthy living, like the the better foods and all that stuff. It's become so important. Once you have it, you realize how much better you off you

Seasonal Shifts Birdsong And Winter Sun

SPEAKER_00 24:53

are. But most people don't even get to that point where they can experience long enough. That's why a lot of people go away on weekends and go to the country. But a weekend is usually not enough time to set be for that to become routine, to set a new pattern and to fully relax. It takes longer than that, takes weeks, I would say at least. But once you've been doing it for years, you realize that it's pretty hard to go back. And there's a lot of things that you'd have to make a decision to sacrifice in order to take this path, like to live this life, because you realize that's worth it. The things that you then, in other words, like when you're living the city or you're used to a lot of noise or or poor air quality or poor water or poor food or whatever, that becomes your normal, and you just accept that. And yes, you still are surviving, obviously, and might even uh be somewhat thriving, but not to the same level that you could be. I think it's almost impossible to understand that until you actually try it for a little while, try a change in your life.

Chaga Immunity And Detox Reality

SPEAKER_00 25:55

It's a big part of why I do what I do, or why I share what I share. And another part of this is that um your immunity is compromised. That's why like people wonder why I don't eat more vegetables and so on. And I I did for years. I had a more balanced diet, and I realized that a lot of the things that we consume, like a lot of the medications, especially obviously pharmaceuticals, are because we've done something else different or wrong in our life, typically. I mean, there's obviously diseases that you can't control, but a lot of them are environmental control, environmentally caused. And all of the supplements we take, so the antioxidants we take, all of those are more because we have stressed our bodies out and we need now remedies for that. So all the natural remedies that I've even talked about and I do talk about, and a lot of people really, that's their whole uh brand, essentially, is holistic natural remedies for things, verbal remedies. They're not necessary if you're doing all of these things that I'm talking about, and you're and you're living a fully healthy lifestyle and paying attention to everything you put in your body and on your body and environment that you're in. Um, so this Chaga, for example, that I use and that I sell, that's one of the highest autoimmune or immune support products, natural products in this case, that are available to us. They're not necessarily necessary if you're living a healthy lifestyle. Now, one caveat is that when you're ingesting you're inhaling a lot of smoke like I do, one of the hormones, some of the uh ways we deal with pollutants, is we have a response to toxins like that. And our bodies, everybody's got a different ability to do that. Our genes are a little bit different that way. Some people are better at clearing those toxins than others. And uh, I actually had some genetic testing done, and I have a gene that suggests that I don't deal with claw toxins, I don't clear them out of my body as efficiently as most people. So things like Jaga help me with that. But if you're living in a city and you're breathing in that poor air all the time and you're eating poor food and you're drinking not the best liquids, including alcohol, then you need to detoxify. So that's where these products come in. So you try to eliminate as many toxins as you can, and then you try to offset them or to heal yourself with as many natural remedies as you can. Anyway, I'll talk more about that in the future. It's not the podcast to do that on. Anyway, I could ramble on for hours, but I really need to. I've had my tea now, had my tea just as I was about to start this, and yeah, I'm about to um get breakfast rolling. It's actually 5.30 now. So yeah, I'll have my breakfast and then I'll have a probably relax for a little bit longer. Step outside. I've already stepped outside and the sun's not up yet. Full moon is, but the sun's not up yet. Once it does, another half an hour, I'll take another little stroll outside and then I'll have a coffee and then I'll get to work. Get get my body going. I'm sitting here, I can feel and see my shoulders rolling forward as I'm talking to you. So I gotta get out there, get the back, and get some hard work done, do some lifting, maybe move some firewood around or some lumber. Anyway, that's it.

Building Community And Signing Off

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Um, I really appreciate you guys, by the way, hard side members. It feels like a community. I'm trying to get it set up in one place that we can talk to each other. So it feels like more of a community is one hub that we can all message back and forth, even amongst yourselves, and especially amongst yourselves. I think that's important. I love um having a community of people that feel the way I do and want this type of content. Hate calling it content, but from me producing it, that's what it is. And just uh being more nature-inspired and be looking for more of a relaxed lifestyle. So I just love that you guys are are joining me for that and that we're becoming this community. So I get I'll let you know. I'll send out an email when I have something set up, uh one central hub, like I said, so we can communicate and have a community. I don't know. I'd like to hear from you actually whether where the best place for that is either on the website or whether we just set up a Facebook community group that we can all join and talk amongst ourselves on. I know probably a lot of you are on Facebook. Anyway, I will talk about that future. So, like I said, I do appreciate you and I appreciate that you're taking this journey with me. But I gotta sign off now. So thanks for listening. I'll see you back here at the cabin next time. Take care.