For “Routine Excellence,” GQ asks creative, successful people about the practices and habits that get them through their day.
Five nights a week, at 8 p.m. Eastern, journalist Chris Hayes finds himself in the exact same spot: in his New York studio to record MSNBC’s nightly news show All In with Chris Hayes. “That’s as hard as a routine gets, aside from a play on Broadway,” the 44-year old said recently over the phone. April marked a decade of “All In” being on air, and as Hayes’s profile has grown over those ten years, so too has his list of projects: he hosts the podcast Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast, he’s contributed pieces about political and social issues to The New Yorker and The New York Times, and is currently working on his third book, which is about the commodification of our attention. This means that as his workload has increased—and the pace and content of news have both gotten more chaotic—Hayes has had to get even more dialed in the routines that ground him. Here, he talks about watching NBA basketball as a form of de-stressing, walking as a spiritual practice, and how he stays emotionally invested in a line of work that can be emotionally desensitizing.
GQ: Leading up to that light going on for your show, what does your daily routine look like?
Hayes: A big part of the routine is creating the conditions so that I can be really locked in and alert at 8 p.m. So the mornings can vary, but either I get up with the kids—or my wife Kate does, and I sleep in. If I do get up with the kids, I will do breakfast and then drop off, and then I'll come back and I'll usually go back to sleep. In a normal life at the age of 44 as a father of three kids under 12, I would probably get into bed around 9 p.m. But the TV schedule means that I get home at 10:00, and there’s still performance adrenaline and it's hard to get to bed before midnight.
Most days, I will work out from noon to 1:00. It makes a huge difference in my energy level and mental health. Then there's 30 minutes where I will probably eat. 1:30 is usually our editorial call. Unless the weather is terrible, I do the call while I walk the three-mile loop around Prospect Park with my dog. I find that walking really helps me create, think, and brainstorm. There’s another call at 2:45 when we go through the segments.
The afternoon is usually a combination of reading stories, and tracking the news further. I might try to carve out 90 minutes to write, to work on my book. Then my kids come home, which is great, because I can help them with homework or I can run 'em to a practice and things like that. That's a huge post-COVID transformation for me.
You mentioned performance adrenaline. Do you have anything you do at the end of the day to decompress?
My honest answer is a glass of wine. I used to drink a cup of coffee during the show, which is deranged. But again, I wanted to have a maximal amount of energy. I've stopped doing that because it makes getting to bed harder. And I've been trying not to have a glass of wine every day. I'll come home and catch up with Kate. I watch a lot of sports. I find the ambient noise of sports very soothing. I watch a lot of West Coast basketball on League Pass. And sometimes I’ll watch streaming TV—although not that much because I'm so brain dead at that point that the most basic plot is a little past my capabilities. People moving back and forth chasing a ball are in the sweet spot.
You do the shows five nights a week. So Saturday and Sunday, do you wake up and feel naked without the routine? Or do you feel blissfully liberated?
Much, much more the latter. One of the great things about my job is that my work product is extremely transparent and concrete, and exists only that day. Sometimes I'll be on vacation, and we'll be somewhere in a hotel and by the pool and you'll see a mom or a dad have to take a work call. It’s a classic trope: A big client is having an emergency. If I have a day off, I have a guest host, and I'm not doing the show, which means I don't have to work that day. (With some exceptions. I just had a week where I was supposed to be off but was doing the show because of Donald Trump’s indictment.) It also means on the weekends, I don't have, you know, “a federal court has issued a ruling and we have to file an emergency brief” or a doctor who has someone go into labor. The flipside is that the unrelenting, metronomic regularity can wear on you after a decade.
You’re working live TV, which I can imagine is pretty stressful, and on top of that, you've worked at a time when I feel like the news is particularly stressful. What have you learned about managing that stress?
The workout, the walk, sleep, and time with family is key. If there's a day in which I get a good amount of sleep, I get a workout in, I get fresh air, and I spend some time with my kids—cuddling my five-year-old in my lap and helping my nine-year-old with their homework—and Kate, I feel embodied and present and happy. If those things start to slip, it starts to feel overwhelming. The first five years of TV, I think my body was in a constant state of heightened adrenaline. I had a very high resting stress level. That has come down with experience. But it’s a tricky thing. For psychological and physical well being, I think you have to develop a little bit of distance from the news, because it really will take a toll. But if you develop too much distance, then you've lost something essential about yourself. When you cover a mass shooting, it should be really upsetting. If you’re not upset by it, something is lost. But at the same time, you also have to protect yourself emotionally, because we cover a lot of mass shootings. So processing that is a big part of dealing with the stress.
What ways do you have of processing that?
The show itself. If I didn't get to say my piece on a lot of this stuff, I would be less mentally healthy. Particularly when things feel really wrong or outrageous or upsetting. I have the rare privilege of being able to say that to millions of people. The podcast, when we're able to do longer conversations about topics that are in the news, that's also super helpful.
To go back to not losing something essential about yourself, how do you not let your heart become hardened or normalized to tragic news?
There’s little things I do. I try to check out of the news a little bit. I tend to take Twitter off my phone on the weekends. Just saying, “I'm gonna create a little bit of a dividing line between reading the news all day for my job and on a day off or vacation.”
But I don't think I have a great answer. There’s a certain kind of gallows humor that I think people that work in high stress environments tend to develop—folks in the military, people in the court system, public defenders, prosecutors, police officers. There’s a newsroom gallows humor too. Humor is one coping mechanism.
But, fundamentally, there's an earnestness that I've always possessed—and that I think probably some people find offputting—that you have to hold onto no matter what the cost of it might be psychologically. It’s the engine of what I do. I am not pretending to care about things. I'm not pretending to have views, and I'm not pretending to be upset by things that I'm not really upset with. To the extent that I succeeded in detaching that into pure performance, I would be doing something that felt inauthentic and icky from a sort of moral perspective. But I think that would ultimately probably read as such and be bad for the whole thing that I'm doing.
So I feel lucky in that there's a fundamental integrity, even if I'm dividing the private life and public-facing parts. I am the same person on TV as off. If I'm at a bar with my friends talking about the news, I'm saying, perhaps slightly profaner language, the same thing that I'm saying on TV. If you lose that, you're in trouble.
You studied philosophy in college, and you grew up religious. I'm curious if either of those disciplines has influenced your way of thinking about routine.
The closest thing to a kind of enduring, sacred ritual is the walk. For my entire adult life, the walk has been a central part of how I process the world. I don't meditate, but to me, that's my version. It’s probably the closest to some form of ritual or practice.
What feels spiritual to you about it?
Your attention is just tuned in different, interesting ways. There's a form of consciousness, daydreaming, and rumination that comes from the gentle stimulation of the world and the movement that is a specific experience that's not necessarily producible in other environments. It feels like a state of consciousness that is slightly removed from quote, unquote “normal” consciousness.
As well-read as you are and as many interesting people as you've interacted with, is there one thought or lesson or person or quote that has most influenced how you think about productivity and discipline?
There’s a line that a professor once said to me—it might have been an econ professor that I was actually profiling after I got out of college. He said, “Time is the one resource they're never making any more of.” There's all kinds of things that could change in terms of the material aspects of your life. But the one thing that won't change is time. That’s finite and that's capped, whatever it is gonna be. That’s been really influential.
The other thing I would say has been really influential is Martin Hägglund who wrote this book, This Life, which I did on the podcast. It’s a meditation on the implications of materialism, secularism for how we think about the meaning of life. One of the ideas is that the finitude of our existence on this earth is what makes it so valuable. There's no way to detach the value of it from the fact that it's passing. So he argues that in the bittersweetness, melancholy, and nostalgia that makes up the moment of looking at your napping daughter's breath moving in and out and thinking that she’s older than she was and time’s passing, that in that moment you're basically experiencing heaven. I’ve found that to be a useful framework, that idea that you can zoom in and lock in on that preciousness as an experience of heaven. Especially as someone who feels anxious and obsessive and nostalgic at the passage of time.
I could see that being a nice counterweight to the green light going on at 8:00 p.m. every day, which probably has a propulsive energy, driving you forward.
Exactly. I think I already had that predilection before this job and the rush every day—the tipping forward, the countdown that is every day—dominated at my perceptual level. I don't even know if I could have given this interview five or six years ago. I’d be too distracted during this period to focus on talking to you. A recurring stress dream is that it is 7:58 p.m., I’m at the wrong place, and I'm not dressed.That sense of a deadline is totally suffused into my subconscious.
In the essay you wrote for The New Yorker, you write about how, thanks to the internet, we can hear other people talking about us more than we ever have before. Ten years into “All In,” what do you understand about the noise of feedback that you maybe wish you'd known when you started?
The single biggest change over the course of the ten years is how dependent my sense of self is on external feedback. Through a combination of luck, privilege, and fortune, I had gone through a lot of life being relatively high-performing and getting external feedback that was positive. That wasn't true in some circumstances. Like in high school basketball, I was not a particularly good player and got not good feedback, which was not fun. But the seduction of that—and I think this is the seduction of social media—is that the more that repeats, the more you get used to putting your value in that. If there's a lot of that that's positive, then you are seduced into it, from almost an adaptive perspective. It can really mess with you. Which was my experience early on the show.
What I've been able to do is over time truly detach my sense of self-worth and craft and even confidence from that external stuff. It’s been a very intentional, long, effortful process to do that. But I have achieved quite a bit on that trajectory. You cannot control what people think of you. You can't control whether people like you, or control whether they want to watch your TV show.
You can control whether you're doing a good TV show or you're doing stuff that's entertaining, compelling and dynamic and you’ve gotta be aware of that.
But those are different judgments. Those are judgments you can think about yourself. You can develop a sensibility of, “That was a good monologue” or “That was a good interview.” That is a judgment that has integrity because it's a judgment you're rendering that’s informed by the 10 years of work you've done so that you're not just saying, “Well, it doesn't matter what I do.” It does matter! It’s just that the metric you use to evaluate how good it is and and how much it matters is a metric you define for yourself about the value of the work and what you're trying to do.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
