The Power of Beating Up the Sun with Rick Shugarman

The simple act of waking up with the sun changed everything for Rick Sugarman. What started as a desperate attempt to create more time during a business crisis transformed into a life philosophy that bridges physical wellbeing, mental clarity, and spiritual growth.

Rick reveals how "beating up the sun"—his term for a morning routine that aligns with sunrise—creates a cascade of benefits far beyond the single hour invested. By shifting just one hour from the end of his day to the beginning, he effectively tripled his productivity while discovering profound inner peace. The magic happens through alignment with our natural circadian rhythms, the solitude of early mornings, and the friction-free nature of simply stepping outside to walk.

As someone who once thought yoga was "weird" and spirituality even "weirder," Rick's journey from skeptic to practitioner carries special weight. His transformation wasn't just physical but sparked a spiritual revolution that helped him recognize and create space from ego-driven thinking. This evolution from resistance to embrace offers hope to anyone questioning whether mindfulness practices are accessible to them.

What makes Rick's approach uniquely powerful is its emphasis on making personal growth easy rather than heroic. Most of us are already stretched thin with responsibilities—we don't need another demanding regimen. Instead, Rick advocates for extending timeframes, maintaining curiosity, and finding sustainable practices we genuinely enjoy. This philosophy forms the foundation of his books about creating lasting change without superhuman discipline.

Whether you're facing uncertainty, seeking productivity hacks, or simply longing for more peace in your daily life, this conversation illuminates how small, aligned actions can create dramatic shifts in both inner experience and outer results. Try rising with the sun—you might just discover a whole new relationship with time, self, and the world around you.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Rick Sugarman
• 3:15 Rick's Background and Expertise
• 6:20 Facing Business Crisis and Uncertainty
• 7:44 Beating Up the Sun Morning Ritual
• 16:35 Making Change Easy, Not Superhuman
• 21:58 The Spiritual Revolution and Ego
• 26:39 The Science Behind the Pause
• 27:21 Closing Song: Breaking the Circuit

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back everybody to the truth about addiction. I'm super excited about this interview. It's on the shorter side and I have told you guys that because I have a monthly recurring speaking event in Los Angeles, I am going to be able to release a lot more episodes consistently, because at my speaking events, not only do I do different versions of my keynote every time, but I have different speakers who share amazing parts of their story, their successes and failures in life, love, parenting and work, so that we can all connect on a deeper level and understand that there is a pathway through our pain using a more universal application of the 12 steps of recovery. So this gentleman I'm about to introduce came and spoke at my most recent event, so you're going to get about 15 minutes of my interview with him, and he's an amazing speaker and a really fascinating human. And he's an amazing speaker and a really fascinating human, extremely smart. So here we go. I'm reading his bio.

Speaker 1: 1:15

Rick Sugarman is a yoga instructor, growth coach and entrepreneur whose work bridges the physical, mental and creative aspects of human potential. As the founder of Beat Up the Sun, he explores the transformative power of morning rituals, yoga and mindfulness to cultivate clarity, resilience and purpose. The phrase beating up the sun refers to a morning routine of being up and moving with the sun as it's rising. Like most transformations, it was born out of necessity. It was born out of necessity Before stepping into the personal growth space.

Speaker 1: 1:48

Rick's career spanned multiple industries, from real estate, investing and construction to teaching high school mathematics in underprivileged settings and two years as a professional musician.

Speaker 1: 1:58

As a real estate investor and business owner, he honed the discipline, vision and adaptability needed to navigate uncertainty. As a math teacher, he developed a deep appreciation for structure, problem solving and guiding others toward breakthrough moments. And as a lifelong musician, he embraces creativity as an essential tool for personal evolution. For most of his life, rick thought yoga was weird and spirituality even weirder. He knows firsthand what it's like to be spiritually disconnected and has experienced in real time the profound impact that a deeper connection with nature, presence and the universe can have. By integrating these elements, he has seen how they can supercharge not only inner peace and happiness, but also professional success, financial freedom and personal relationships. Leveraging his background in education, rick has created a step-by-step introduction to yoga on his website, beatupthesuncom, which he gives away for free. His aim is to make yoga accessible to beginners of all abilities, guiding them from their very first pose with confidence and an immediate sense of I can.

Speaker 2: 3:19

Let's dive in dead. But perfection's just a game of make-believe. Hey, gotta break the pattern, find a new reprieve.

Speaker 1: 3:30

Breaking the. Rick is not just a yoga expert, although you're going to learn a few things about yoga when I speak to him. What I actually think is amazing, rick, is that there was a long period in your life where you thought the whole shtick about yoga was bizarre and that a spiritual way of living was even weirder, and I can relate to that. I'm always interested in people who are averse to woo-woo things. If you will, I don't even think yoga is woo-woo. There's so much science behind how good it is for us, but depending on your framework and what you've lived through and where you've come from, these things can seem really out of the box, and so to make a shift and become so passionate about yoga is fascinating. So we're going to talk about that. But you're also a growth coach, and I love I call myself a coach now too, which, by the way, is really strange when you start off by saying doctor of physical therapy and then you transition into coach.

Speaker 1: 4:41

I'm going to talk about identity collapse. I love the things you can put in front of coach. I want to talk about identity collapse. I love the things you can put in front of coach and I really love that you put growth coach, and you're also an author. That's another thing I really want to talk about with you up here, because what you chose to write about and how you chose to write is really interesting and really different. And you're also an entrepreneur, because here I am just judging you going. Ok, this guy has the most amazing body. He just teaches in Malibu in the middle of the day and has a six pack, and he's just some yogi floating around Meanwhile. It's like no, actually I have financial freedom and I've designed my life so that I can be self-supporting and be able to put things that I love and find joyful at the front. So I'm sorry for judging you and I'm so grateful that you're here. Rick, please come up to the stage for this interview.

Speaker 3: 5:44

Yeah, come up to the stage for this interview yeah, I'm so happy you're here hello hello.

Speaker 1: 5:57

What's happening, rick? Okay, we know the theme of the evening is faith in uncertainty, whatever that means to you. Can you take me to a time where all hope was seemingly lost in your life?

Speaker 4: 6:18

Sure. So in 2019, one of the businesses that I was passively involved in Required me to take an active participation role, and so I was very busy I always stay very busy and so now to bring this new aspect into life, it became. It seemed insurmountable, and the risk days, based on the way the debt was structured, was very substantial to me. It was a debt that I wouldn't be able to cover on my own, and so everything else that was building was subject to Going up in smoke as a result of this.

Speaker 3: 6:56

What did you do?

Speaker 4: 6:58

Yeah, the I had to create time. That was a problem is I didn't have enough time, so I was working in real estate investment primarily, and working, working, working. Just just kind of like what you think of when you think of a Wall Street banker, a similar work structure and the way that I ended up finding to create time is what I call beating up the sun. And beating up the sun is a morning routine of being up and moving outside with the sun as the sun is rising, maybe 6.45 or 7.15, getting to work at 8.30, where the inbox is already full and you're at the same pace and the same getting out of the gate with everybody else.

Speaker 4: 7:36

When you get up with the sun, many things happen that are very unique and are unexpected. So, when the sun sets, it's calming, it's cooling, it's beautiful. It's the end of the night and the circadian rhythm attunes to that and it triggers us. Okay, it's time to produce melatonin trigger that it's calming, it's cooling, it's beautiful. It's the end of the night and the circadian rhythm attunes to that and it triggers us. Okay, it's time to produce melatonin trigger that it's time for sleep. But the sun rises, warming, it's invigorating, and you see this substantial change in temperature from the cool dark morning through the rising sun, and you get this catapult out into the day, and so that energy is a massive, massive creator of efficiency that creates time.

Speaker 4: 8:16

What also is happening is to get up earlier. You go to bed a little earlier and at least in my case and I know many people's cases our kind of least productive time or maybe not as good behavior kind of happens at the end of the night, and so cutting out that last hour and adding an happens at the end of the night, and so by cutting out that last hour and adding an hour at the beginning of the day was like adding three hours to the day. What is also happening is you have the world to yourself, and so people who have I had trouble to find time for peace and to clear the mind and to create that space that we need to get centered and to get clear by going out and having the morning all to your. There's nobody there, nobody's taking advantage of disadvantage, very few people and so you have the world all to yourself, and so in this hour that I do this morning walk, I'm just getting clear, I'm getting relaxed, and then that space in that stillness Getting clear, I'm getting relaxed, and then that space in that stillness, the answers just start showing up. The Solutions to your day's problems are getting answered right there, as opposed to like the typical work routine for me was 830 am, emails, emails, emails, respond to this. Respond to that.

Speaker 4: 9:27

By 11 am I'm finally done with all that, just task work. Now I get to start to think, and then lunchtime comes, and so I haven't even started executing on a solution to a problem of the day. Really it's just tasking. But here I'm solving the problems first, and then, with the solutions, I'm now in everybody's inbox. So everybody else is now marching to the beat that I'm setting, his inbox. So everybody else is now marching to the beat that I'm setting. And so by 7.30 am I've got my exercise in, I've got 7,000 steps in, I've got the energy of the sun catapulting me, I have the clarity, I have the solutions, my inbox I'm not getting the inbox bombardment and now I just start executing. And so, executing at 7.30 with that energy and that clarity. By the time that 10 am comes, I've crushed the day, and that change was what put hours of time back into my day, even though technically it was just the shifting of a single hour.

Speaker 1: 10:26

How many people listening to that are like that sounds amazing. I'm never going to do that, honestly. I mean, it's so rare Like that's available to all of us, right, which is amazing and really important that you're bringing up. Time is going by too fast. How do we make it stop? How do we make it slow down Literally? You're giving a solution to that, and most of us will do. We make it slow down Literally. You're giving a solution to that, and most of us will do nothing about it. What made you decide to try that? Was it an idea that came from intuition? Did you pray about it? Did someone suggest it? Did you read it in a book? Because how did you get the idea and then the diligence to stick with it and have such good results? Now you have a stack of evidence to go well. This is really working for me.

Speaker 4: 11:20

Yeah, big time, big time. So I was watching some Tony Robbins at the time and what happened was I got really enthusiastic and excited and there was a clarity that came to me where I just started kind of seeing the path forward out of the uncertainty. And I was so excited about the path forward that I was seeing that my mind was like a dog in a kennel, just barking at me at 5 am, like get up, get up, let's go, like get up. And so I just wasn't tired, and so it was literally just enthusiasm that started that. And then, after doing it, I started to realize like eight different benefits that we just kind of walked through. That happened with it. At which point, when the enthusiasm wears off, these other things were enough.

Speaker 4: 12:04

But all of the so growth coach, all of my personal growth is based on easy like really really really easy, easy, easy. And so one of the things about the morning routine that makes it easy easy is if you think of the friction. Let's take a common routine. Okay, I'm going to get fit. I work full-time job. That means I'm going to get up at 545, go to the gym for an hour, do a hard workout four times a week Very common type of a goal for someone to make All the friction to. You know, maybe you put makeup on, you want to present well at the gym, you have to get dressed, you have to get to the car drive park, there's a cost involved with the gym membership locker room. I haven't even started lifting yet. Sometimes you know, at the beginning it's fun, but after a little bit it can feel like, oh, like I've got to go do these lifts again and you're not looking forward.

Speaker 4: 12:55

There's all this friction, the morning routine. Literally I roll out of bed and I put like a hoodie on and I put these shoes on and I like stumble out, I put my AirPods in and some music on and I walk and by like block three. We all know what it feels like just to get a little momentum. Once we just start moving a little bit, we want to move more and it feels good, and so by block three it just starts feeling good. So there's almost no friction in the process.

Speaker 4: 13:22

And so when you wake up, when the alarm goes off and you wake up and you normally might quit or not want to do it, after week three let's say all it's just all the frictions been removed, because all you're doing is okay, all I have to do is roll out and put a hoodie on and put my earphones in, listen some music, start walking and then, by, like block five, by block six, the Sun starts to rise and it starts to get a little warmer and that energy starts. And then, like you're, you're party, like it's like, and then you're partying Literally, you're partying at block 10, let's say and it's incredible.

Speaker 1: 13:55

OK, I want to say what's coming to mind, right, because you're bringing a lot of things up. One of the things you're bringing up is in recovery. There's this saying you can't think your way into right acting, but you can act your way into right thinking. When we are afraid, when we have resistance, it doesn't matter what it is. It could be about fitness, a job that we might want to leave, a marriage that we're unhappy in. If we try thinking our way out of the problem, it usually doesn't work. It just usually doesn't work because we're running on fear. We're running on that. There's no intuition there. There's a sense of fight or flight. The nervous system is highly activated. It's very difficult to get a clear download of what to do, but if you can act your way into right thinking, sometimes the action reveals the next right thought or the next right thing to do. Right, so you're sort of like I'm going to, I got to download, I'm going to try this thing, I got inspired and now, by doing it, you've accumulated a stack of evidence.

Speaker 4: 15:12

This is really really beneficial, way more than it is annoying or difficult, Right mean it's, it's awesome, like, by minute 30 into it you are having a great time, like it's, you're having a party with yourself outside, getting in tune with the cycle of the universe. And you know from the spiritual context, like, and what is? There is nothing more natural than rising with the sun and then setting with this there's, that is the most natural thing there is. And so if you think about, oh, like, why does it make sense? Well, if you harmonize with the pattern of the universe, what do you think happens?

Speaker 1: 15:54

yeah, tell me about your book okay.

Speaker 4: 15:58

Okay. So two books One. The first one is on creating habits that last and the second one is about that inevitable time when we create the habit and then you start to slip a little bit and it can feel like the beginning of the end and the worry about quitting and feeling like a failure shows up. And so the first one is called Sustaining Change and the subtext is a guide to goal achievement for the rest of us, crossing out superheroes, and the basic idea is that most of the people who teach us personal growth are superheroes because they've done the work and they've accomplished it. That thing that all of us are going to them to learn from accomplished it, that thing that all of us are going to them to learn from. And most people are already being superheroes in their job. Putting food on the table as a parent, full on superhero there just isn't that much superhero left to then go and do all the habit formation and development and to go get to the gym at 6 am every single day, like I'm sorry the, the single mother with two kids working two jobs, that is that is superhero. If she can do that. Most people don't have that much superhero left in them, and so the purpose of this book is to suggest and offer what is my solution to personal growth, which is getting it really easy, like making it super easy, and some of the fundamental features of making personal growth easy.

Speaker 4: 17:29

One is to delay the timeframe. Oftentimes a goal will say I want to lose 10 pounds in two months, and so in order to do that, we've got to do something pretty intense that we might not really like doing. But if we delay the time frame, then what we can do is bring in many, many more options. We could still do that intense thing, but we could also do it walking, or we could do it I mean, we could fill in the blank with so, so, so many things that could get us where we want to go. And the difference is that the intense thing let's say that you do the two month thing and you lose the 10 pounds most likely that intense thing is not sustainable for the rest of your life. So what you're most likely not doing is is is as evidenced by all of the yo-yoing um most likely what you're not doing is developing a habit that is going to carry forward.

Speaker 4: 18:16

For me, I don't really care about two months, I care about what's going to happen after the fact. And so when we define the goals in the book, part of the lesson is to not just say I want to lose 10 pounds in two months, but to say I want to lose 10 pounds in two months and then define what happens after those two months so that we get ourselves really thinking about the long term, coaching us then to extend the two months, so that we get ourselves really thinking about the long term, coaching us then to reduce the two or, excuse me, extend the two months, maybe even remove the time frame and, as we do that, starting to identify all the different things that we can do, and then have a period of curiosity. And in this period of curiosity we're going to try like 20, 30 things, talk to tons of different people, and what we're going to do in the process of curiosity are start looking for things we like and when we find the things that we'd like, those are the things that we're going to keep doing, because what we're going to do is take the discipline out of consistency, the discipline out of habit building, because we're doing it, because we like it and look forward to do it. We do it because we want to do it, and when we accomplish that, it gets easy, it gets super easy. And so that's the big point and many people, if you have a conversation in this regard and you get specific with a person's specific situation, there's a lot of mental blocks, which I totally understand, but they're almost all debuggable, and so part of the message is don't focus on how, yet Focus on what, and then, if you even maybe just having a coach like even me, I have blind spots everywhere, and when I sit with someone in kind of a coaching capacity, they uncover the blind spots and it becomes really obvious. That happened in Costa Rica for me, and so, anyway, that's like a big part of it.

Speaker 4: 19:57

We want to make it easy.

Speaker 4: 19:58

We want to be curious, slow down, find things that we like and look forward to that. We could believe that we would do five years from now very realistically do five years from now and then, as we start to build these patterns, staying curious, continuing to layer in new things and then being very flexible. If you take a goal, that's, I want to go to the gym five times a week, 6 AM, ok, five times a week. If you go four times, you didn't meet the goal. If you say I want to go to the gym three times a week and maybe if I get a fourth one in, I'd like bonus, it's four times either way. One's a bonus, one's a failure. And so by giving a lot of space in the definition of the goal, giving yourself all these different ways to win and then inviting curiosity as part of the process, so that when you go, hang out with your friend and just have coffee and kind of talk about what their routine is, that counts as a part of the process and that's a fun thing to do, that's enjoyable.

Speaker 1: 20:54

It's so fascinating listening to this because where I am today I can hear that and be like. That makes so much sense and it's beautiful and it's so clear. And then I think of my story, right riddled with trauma and chaos and an obsession to be loved by everything outside of me, loved by everything outside of me, and I'm thinking. I'm thinking of the woman who doesn't just have resistance from the weight of her responsibilities in the world, but the internal resistance of the beauty and body standard, of the punishing, critical internal dialogue and the massive amount of work that she has to unpack and overcome in order to create space.

Speaker 1: 21:45

For what do I find easy and enjoyable? What can I be curious about? I mean, when I think of my intuition, when I was having that experience in my marriage and I could hear the sound of her voice for the first time in three decades through practicing listening, not only is there a difference in my physical body when I'm in intuition versus in my head space, right, I mean it feels very expansive, but it has the four c's, it has has the quality of uh, it's clear, the voice is clear, it's calm, it's curious and it's compassionate, but I couldn't hear it at all when I was shaming myself. So I just want to talk about that and be really honest, right. That like this is amazing, and at the same time, there's some deep work to be done to even get to a place where you can live this way, let alone hear what you're actually saying, right?

Speaker 4: 22:48

and and to relate entirely much deeper like there is a spiritual revolution that took place through this process that I attribute the greatest, my personal growth, I think is and very surprisingly so, because my whole life I thought of spirituality. I basically ridiculed it, maybe, to say it nicely, I love this and I thought yoga was super weird and woo, woo and not into it.

Speaker 4: 23:15

I grew up, I was in, I was just play soccer and hockey and just American sports. That was football on Sunday. You know, that's just yoga and like peace and calm and like meditation, stillness, like get out of here and and so around the same time 2019, my sister got me Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth and I started to read a little bit and I thought there was something to it, but I also thought it was crazy and I had a very love, very hate relationship with it. But the premise, the basic idea of the book, is to give a working definition of ego. And the basic spiritual definition of ego, as the book explains, it is a false sense of self. So we define ourselves through comparison, through possession, through past, through future, uh, want, desire. All of these things are born out of the ego and it took I had to write an 88 page summary of the book to break it down to like understand it, because I had no spiritual and like underpinning at all. So it was a new language and so, after doing two years of the work on the other side of it, I gave.

Speaker 4: 24:21

I became very good at recognizing my ego. But it was super painful because I have been super, I am super egoic and like it's a daily practice that if I don't stay on it it can, like get out of control very quickly. But learning how to become aware of it and then learning how to create space so that I could make a decision, that didn't go automatically with it, but to become conscious and to take the seat of the observer, to relate to what you were saying earlier in that space, when you sit in the seat of consciousness and you get space from the ego, focus comes through there, clarity comes through there, and in that focus and that clarity, things start to get easy. And so it wasn't until that started to happen for me that things could start to get easier. And like the ripple effect into professional life, career, financial freedom, like all of that came like.

Speaker 1: 25:29

Like that doesn't happen without me learning how to create space between me and my ego yeah, and I just want to, for a second, like, just take the woo-woo out completely, which, by the way, I don't think any of this is woo-woo.

Speaker 1: 25:44

This is how I live, but for the skeptics in the audience, on a brain level, when we are operating out of ego, fear, lack, our conditioned mind, our trauma, whatever you want to call it, we are more or less in a sympathetic state in the nervous system.

Speaker 1: 26:07

We could also be in what's called fawn or freeze, which is other levels of sort of dissociating, but for most of us we default to uh-oh, like this person's coming for my shit, right, I've got to get the sword out, I've got to fight, fight for the death. And by taking space, however, you do that. However, you do that if it's going for a walk, if it's rising with the sun, if it's meditating. What's actually happening is you're calming yourself down and getting into a parasympathetic state, which is rest and digest. But what that does is it allows the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of our brain that gives us logic and reasoning, to fully function. So we actually make clearer, better decisions when we take a second right. So you can call it whatever you want to call it, but there is power in the pause. That's another practical tip you can take with you.

Speaker 2: 27:19

Thank you Waking up. I hear the desperation call. I turn my back and hit my head against the wall. Don't need a crucifix to take me to my knees. I'm whipping my mistakes to jump over the grief. Breaking the circuit, making it worth it. Oh, sick and tired of the voice inside my head never good enough. It's leaving me for dead. But perfection's just a game of make believe. Hey, gotta break the pattern. Find a new reprieve. Breaking the circuit.

Speaker 3: 28:07

Making it worth it all. I am ready to make a change. I am bigger than my pain. There's no deep inside. I gotta let the light.

Speaker 2: 28:30

I can be brave and afraid at the same time. Practice self-compassion, start to calm my mind, taking tiny steps to loving all of me. Just the process, cause it's gonna set me free, breaking the circuit.

Speaker 3: 28:52

Making it worth it. I am ready to make a change. I am bigger than my pain. There's no deep inside. I got the the life. Gotta gotta gotta break it or fake it till we make it. Gotta gotta gotta break it. Come on One, two, three. I am ready to make a change. I am bigger than my pain. There's no deep inside. I gotta live the life. I am ready to make a change. I am bigger than my pain. There's no deep inside. I am bigger than my pain. There's no deep inside. I got the the vibe.