Staying Afloat

20 Life Hacks for Musicians

We recorded this one in Spain, where the sun was shining and we sat down to make a whole season's worth of podcasts in one go. In this podcast Mish and I list the practical things that have helped us balance this ridiculous career we've chosen.

Listen to the podcast here

Some of these life hacks need money, some need time, and we're fully aware that not everyone has those luxuries. But hopefully there's something in here that might help you stay afloat too.

The Basics

1. HANA: Making the bed. This is the first thing I do when I get out of bed, and it sets me up pretty well for the day. It's one small thing that's done, and my life is already a bit tidier. It gives you a natural dose of dopamine - who doesn't love free drugs in the morning.

2. MISH: Sleep. Mish doesn't really have a morning routine because her ADHD brain craves the opposite of routine, but the one thing she's committed to is sleep. There's tremendous pressure to get up early and hustle through the morning, hit the gym, do your perfect breakfast, but when you're a musician doing varied tasks, you're going to need the sleep for when you're not allowed to sleep. We didn't sleep properly for seven weeks on our last tour. When Mish got back, she was sleeping until 10, 11, 12 for a couple of weeks and still didn't feel caught up. Get as much sleep as you can when you can, and allow your body to rest when it tells you to - especially when you're female and your body's going through a cycle every month.

3. HANA: The sleep kit. I really struggle to get to sleep, so I have a little sleep kit that I take everywhere with me. These things tell my body it's time for sleep: pillow oil, lip balm, mouth guard, eye mask, and my earbuds with a sleepcast to hand. Though I should mention that on the Combichrist tour, while everyone else was being violently shaken about in those coffin-shaped bunks, I had the best sleep I've ever had. Turns out I need to be bounced around like I'm in an earthquake simulator to get proper rest. Rock me, Satan.

Food and Body Maintenance

4(a). MISH: Supplementing. Mish takes quite a few supplements each day, and her top one is magnesium - we don't have much in our food because the soil's completely depleted, but it's a natural relaxant for your nervous system. Her partner Gary takes one at night and sleeps really well because of it. She also recommends spirulina for omegas (especially on a vegan diet), turmeric as an anti-inflammatory, and for hormonal cycles: agnus castus, evening primrose oil (make sure it's not made with animal gelatin if you're vegetarian), and mugwort - though be careful with that one if you're trying to get pregnant or already are.

4(b). MISH: The killer smoothie. Mish's smoothie is absolutely ridiculous. If she just had that all day, she wouldn't need anything else. Vegan protein, fruit like bananas, her own seed mix (flax, sunflower, pumpkin seeds), cacao, reishi mushroom which is amazing for anxiety, a pinch of cinnamon for metabolism, peanut butter, and then soy milk and water. She buys really cheap fruit from the greengrocer that's going off, chops it up and freezes it. Since she started doing this, her energy levels have been amazing, she doesn't feel hungry until afternoon, and she's noticed the difference in her skin and anxiety. If your gut's not happy, your brain's not happy, and the two need to work together.

5. HANA: Food prep and planning. Dara and I have quite a simple diet. We eat the same thing every day for breakfast and lunch - I make overnight oats for breakfast and usually have Huel for lunch. Then we do the same meal on various nights of the week. That means we always know what we're eating, we never buy surplus stuff, and we never have things in the cupboard that are tempting to eat. Both of us feel the need to keep quite tight control over our diets, so it's really good when we know exactly what we're eating and buying. It saves so much time as well - I'm all about controlling decision fatigue. When you're in flow as a musician, breaking that flow is genuinely annoying. If you plan your whole week's food, you only need to go shopping once and only need to do the prep for certain things.

6. MISH: Cutting back or cutting out alcohol. In the music industry, we're completely encouraged to be rock star drinking and doing drugs, and it can be fun in your twenties. But Mish thinks the amount of time we spent drinking and partying could have maybe been put to slightly better use. If it's something that you feel might be cutting into your life too much, get some help or talk to people about it. There's a great book called Quit Like A Woman - it's all about how the alcohol industry markets alcohol towards women and how disempowering it can be, how bad alcohol is for the female body. For Mish, cutting out alcohol was a massive life hack. She's never felt better. You sleep better, you know what your real energy levels are like instead of fueling yourself onwards at night with drinking, and genuinely you write more songs and they're better without the booze.

7. HANA: Huel. I go on about this every podcast and they're not even paying me, which is just rude. By the time I get started with work, sometimes it's lunchtime already, so I don't like to stop and make myself lunch in the middle of the day if I can help it. Huel is a nutritionally complete supplement, about 400 calories for a meal replacement, quite tasty, and costs about £1 per serving which is cheaper than most meals. It's not the most joyful meal of all time, but at least your body's getting the nutrients it needs. You can get it in bottles now - nearly every service station has Huel, so you know you're going to get something quality instead of another pasty or some chips. It also makes you feel safe. I like knowing I'm going to be able to eat, and sometimes on tour I feel anxious that I don't know what I'm going to eat next. When my mum and I recently went on a multi-day hike, knowing I had Huel in my rucksack was really comforting because I wasn't sure if there'd be supermarkets selling vegan food.

8. MISH: The vocal nebuliser. If you're a vocalist, get one. It's a small contraption that nebulises water with saline solution - you breathe it in and it keeps your vocal cords clean and healthy. Mish's vocal coach Mary Zima taught her this. She was doing death growls and screams every single night on tour, and this meant she could use it before going on stage, sometimes even pop off stage to breathe between heavy sections. She didn't get sick the whole tour and could sing every night. They're about £30, mine's lasted ages, and you use it in the studio too when your voice starts getting gravelly.

Mental Space and Routine

9. MISH: Scheduling the next fortnight. This is something Mish did in therapy because she was getting really overwhelmed with work. Every day felt like these monumental, long task lists including cleaning and life stuff, plus work sessions and recordings. Her therapist got her to write down how many hours each thing would take and schedule her whole week. It was brilliant business coaching. She schedules everything - cleaning tasks on Mondays, exercise sessions, yoga - so she knows when things are going to happen and she's not just running around doing bits of stuff badly or escaping to clean the bathroom when she doesn't know what else to do. She used to do it for one week but would make that week insane, so now she does it for two weeks and works in two-weekly cycles. When she's on the final week, she's scheduling her next two weeks. It tells you that you've got more time than you think you have, stops you getting distracted, and means you become really efficient and complete tasks quicker.

10. HANA: Setting an alarm for medication. This might seem basic, but my life has changed ever since I set an alarm. I used to always get to 10pm and think, oh shit, I haven't taken my pills. I don't always have the luxury of this but now if I'm at home I have an alarm set for 8:30pm and I try to make this a non-negotiable. If you're not on medication, this can also apply to some habit you really need to get under control - meditation, calling a friend, whatever. Setting alarms can be really beneficial, especially when your routine's all over the place.

11. MISH: Daily breathwork. Mish has just completed a certificate in breathwork coaching. She realised there was a massive connection between singing, mental health, and breathing. Breathwork is using different breathing techniques to change the emotional state of your body and either relax or wake up your nervous system. The great thing is it takes two to four minutes, or twenty if you want, and you can do it anywhere - in the back of the tour van, in the green room, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. If you're always on the go and full of cortisol, breathwork can help you step away from that really quickly. She recommends YouTube channel Breathe With Sandy (and he's really fit, which is a bonus). There are different types of breathwork for every situation - to energise you, relax you, manifest, let go of things, declutter your brain. It's about creating space, and often that space gives you the ideas you've been searching for.

Movement and Exercise

12. HANA: Wearing exercise clothes all day. I understand not everyone has this luxury, but my huge hack is to put on exercise clothes when I wake up and not get changed out of them. When I was younger, I'd go to the gym, have a shower, get changed, and it would take up so much time. Now I just get changed in the morning, and that means I can do little bits and pieces of exercise throughout the day whenever I feel like it. You also just move differently when you're wearing exercise clothes.

13. MISH: Yoga and walking. Mish's main source of exercise comes from hot yoga twice a week if she can. It's helped her so much with movement and posture - being a musician can be quite gruelling on the body, and she's found she needs a solid back and strong core. Hot yoga includes breathwork and meditation as well, which is fantastic. If you can't get to a hot yoga class, any yoga is good, or just go for a walk. Walking is one of the best things you can do. You can listen to a podcast, walk with a friend, get a cup of coffee. Mish likes to do walks where she's manifesting and thinking about dreams. Sometimes walking in silence is great - if she's trying to finish a song and is stuck on lyrics, she'll go for a big hour-long walk up the downs, and by the time she comes back, that song is usually finished.

Learning and Growth

14. HANA: Learning new things. I think we live in a time where the need to acquire knowledge is less and less. We have information at our fingertips, AI is referred to as the second brain, and it really cuts out the need to think a lot or remember anything. I always look back to the film Wall-E where all the people never have to do anything for themselves and they're just blobs on a spaceship. I feel like if we're not careful, that could be us in terms of our intellect. A big thing for me is learning - I'm doing Spanish every day at the moment. It's really great for my brain and memory. Even before Spanish, I was doing daily language learning with German. We're never too old to study or acquire new skills. Being a musician already sets you apart because you're practicing, constantly learning new songs, and having to memorise them - music is a language, so if you're learning music, you are learning.

15. MISH: Having a hobby that gives you joy. Music is ridiculous and takes up all the time it can if you let it, but it's really important to have another hobby. When music is your job, it can be a bit of a slog and you can never feel like you've completed - there's always more to be done. Mish recently completed a thousand-piece mushroom-themed jigsaw puzzle and absolutely loved it. Maybe it's reading a book, painting class, live drawing, walking, some kind of sport. Just make sure you've got something that's really fun, because that element of play will feed into music being more fun.

16. HANA: Having a trashy book. I read a lot of books for work, education, and inspiration, but my big hack is to also always have a trashy book on the go. I always have about five books going, and some of them will be quite highbrow, but I've realised that sometimes I just want to veg. I find it easy to get distracted when watching stuff, whereas when you're reading a book it's more interactive. So I always have a book that's really easy to read and that I can just switch off with.

17. MISH: Affirmations and manifestation. Affirmations are positive mantras you say to yourself on a daily basis. The best time is either first thing in the morning or last thing at night when you're between asleep and totally awake. It's a way to reprogram your subconscious with more positive thinking. We make our own affirmation tracks to meditative music we've made, or you can just go on YouTube. Choose about ten things you want to be true or where you feel like you're going. My favourite is "these hands weren't made for working" which just makes me laugh, but you can also do things like "my life is full of abundance" or "I am overflowing with time and money". If you keep listening to them, you can trick your brain into thinking they're true, which helps you attract the lifestyle you want. Apparently doing affirmations for 60 days is enough time to reprogram your subconscious. Will Smith famously said the secret to his success was daily affirmations.

18. HANA: Mnemonics. I like to think of these as anchors in your brain for learning new things. This applies to my language learning - if there's a word I'm really struggling with, I think about what it might mean to me. As a child, every musical note from the scale had its own character and personality and colour for me. I just assign personalities to things - if I'm struggling with a word, I always try to take a little time and think "how will I remember this?"

19. HANA Burden yourself with accountability. I've always done this and it really helps me stick to things, because otherwise you can have ideas and time goes by and you never get them done. There's a sense of pride when you tell people stuff that makes you think you can't be seen to fail or give up. Before I wrote the book for Wednesday's Child, I told the PR company I was writing it, so I had to write the book. My most recent one is that I'm working to be a personal trainer - I've told everyone this, and now I'm telling everyone on the podcast. I signed up for a course about five months ago and I haven't made time for it yet, but I am planning to do it. When you tell people, they check in with you and ask how it's going, and when it's out in the open, the doing of it seems less daunting.

20. MISH: Surround yourself with inspiration and beauty. In Mish's music studio, she's cut out loads of little pictures - her with best friends on stage, with her manager, with musicians she's worked with. She's got a vocal booth with Polaroids stuck all around the window, people have signed inside the booth whenever they've worked there, pictures of her dogs, lyrics stuck all over the walls. She's that person who needs to see things. It makes her feel inspired and shows her she's done things and achieved things. If you don't have the option to put things up on walls, just go outside and be amongst nature. For Mish, it's a necessary part of being an artist - if you don't feed your soul, you're not able to put out as much good music. Absorb the beauty around you, whether it's a beach, a country park, or even just the city. Mish loves getting a cup of coffee and going for a stroll. She lives in Brighton near the South Downs, and her favourite thing is to look on the map, see which parts she hasn't visited, and go explore. If she's writing a song and goes for a walk with it going round and round in her head, by the time she comes back from that walk, the song usually feels finished, or at least a lot smaller.

Tour-Specific Hacks

The handbag essentials. When you're a working musician, your handbag is basically a survival kit. Sunglasses, nail clippers (you cannot be caught on tour without nail clippers), contact lenses, screwdrivers (both types), jack to mini-jack converters, USB connectors, those little screws for inside mic clips, ibuprofen, sun cream, quetiapine if you need to chill out, earplugs (for loud gigs and for sleeping in rooms with nine other people), hair ties, and - this is crucial - toilet roll or some kind of paper, because you never know when your tour van's going to be parked in some Asda car park and you'll need to brave the woods.

That's it for this week. Hopefully you've found something in here that might help you stay afloat too.

Listen to the full Staying Afloat episode of Wingspan: The Highs and Lows of Being a Musician wherever you get your podcasts.