A.A Ambassador | Alexis Fernandez-Preiska On Self-Love, Mental Health + Making Manifestation Work For You

You’re a fitness professional, a best-selling author and the host of an incredibly popular podcast. Walk us through a typical day in your life—what goes on behind the scenes, and do you have any wellness rituals you swear by?

Every day for me is different, so I normally don’t have a set structure for the entire day, which can sometimes be hard to stay consistently productive across all my tasks. So, for me, it is crucial to have a morning routine, to set myself up for the day in the best mindset.

I wake up at 5:30 am on most days (sometimes earlier), I exercise, have coffee, shower, meditate, and get ready by 7:30 am to start the day. I do not access my emails or scroll on social media until 8:30 in the morning so that I don’t deplete my attention stores, as I know how engaging in these behaviours can leave your attention and energy drained for the remainder of the day.

Your first book, Be Bold, centred around ‘manifesting your dream life’—a topic that has been gaining traction for quite some time. What would you say is the biggest misconception that you’ve encountered about manifestation? Or that people tend to get wrong when they first start trying to manifest?

The biggest misconception would be that you just have to think about something and it will happen. Mindset and having an open optimistic view are key to making things happen for you, but action and inspired action, are what will get you there.

When you take action on something, even the smallest little habit, increasing your ability or skill level becomes more and more achievable. When you take action on things and try things, you meet people, create opportunities where before there were none, and you learn lessons to get you further.

For me, the best way to manifest something is to take some sort of action every single day, no matter how small. It could be simply waking up every morning earlier, and that will set off a positive change of events that you may never have expected.

Your master’s degree in neuroscience has helped you to teach others that our ‘thoughts are chemicals’. To help others to control their thoughts, what are your top three changes in daily actions and behaviours aimed at positively impacting mental health?

There are so many behavioural interventions that can be used to change how you experience your day and life. My top three would be:

Create a morning routine

This is so you no longer have to make basic decisions every morning. There is no longer deciding what time you wake up, whether you will or will not move your body, if you will eat breakfast or what. No.

You now have a set schedule of non-negotiables that you do for yourself, and you have not eaten into your decision-making quota. The more decisions you use up in the morning, the harder it is to dedicate mental energy to making decisions later in the day. Don’t waste it on basic decisions. Use routines instead.

Do not become a slave to your device.

We have an attention problem society-wide. Use your device, don’t let it use you. All notifications should be switched off, except calls and maybe text messages.

Limit your time on social media to three minutes at a time because these apps are designed to deplete your dopamine. When dopamine is chronically low, it makes you less willing to do things. It lowers your motivation. So, working on a difficult or tedious task becomes harder, and you have no drive to do it. Meanwhile, you still want to feel good, so instead, you seek quick fixes of dopamine (or feel-good highs) and that is why we keep returning to our phones every couple of minutes to get that feeling we are seeking.

This causes the issue to get worse and worse, and before you know it, you are stuck to your device. Don’t check it in the first few hours of being awake, so you get healthy levels of dopamine through sunlight and movement and limit the time spent on devices. Use a timer if needed. Your willingness to do things and drive will increase significantly once you implement this.

Move your body every single day.

You don’t have to ‘work out’ or ‘train hard’, but increased blood flow to the brain, which is achieved by raising your heart rate through exercise, is one of the best things you can do for longevity, brain health, and to reduce your risk of neurodegeneration.

A strong blood and oxygen supply to the brain is what helps keep brain regions communicating properly, and aids in sleep quality and in memory consolidation and learning. This can be achieved with just a few minutes of higher-intensity movement and is strongly linked to lower levels of mood and anxiety disorders.