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There’s a beautiful simplicity in devising a plan and then sticking to it without deviation. I didn’t have to make decisions every step of the way. I didn’t have to agonize over whether I should eat X or if I shouldn’t eat Y; I just had to color within the lines

There’s a beautiful simplicity in devising a plan and then sticking to it without deviation. I didn’t have to make decisions every step of the way. I didn’t have to agonize over whether I should eat X or if I shouldn’t eat Y; I just had to color within the lines.

your body doesn’t lie to you per se; it’s just that you’re ill-equipped to properly interpret your body’s signals.

Tom said it like this: “When you think you’re done, totally done — you have at least five more reps.”

…a certain level of discomfort is unavoidable when losing body fat. You will experience hunger, fatigue, and mood disturbance when using body fat to meet your body's caloric needs for extended periods.

the difference between a beginner lifter and a more advanced one isn’t just about having more strength or better technique; it’s about the ability of the mind to properly interpret the body’s signals.

There comes a point during a hard set of squats, for example, where it gets very uncomfortable. Your muscles are burning, you’re gasping for air. The less experienced lifter receives those signals and thinks “I have to stop now, or I’m going to get seriously injured.” The more experienced lifter gets the same signal, but they know it doesn’t mean they’re about to die; it means they’ve got five more reps

Even when physically present, Huberman can be hard to track. “I don’t have total fidelity to who Andrew is,” says his friend Patrick Dossett. “There’s always a little unknown there.” He describes Andrew as an “amazing thought partner” with “almost total recall,” such a memory that one feels the need to watch what one says; a stray comment could surface three years later. And yet, at other times, “you’re like, All right, I’m saying words and he’s nodding or he is responding, but I can tell something I said sent him down a path that he’s continuing to have internal dialogue about, and I need to wait for him to come back.”

When they fought, it was, she says, typically because Andrew would fixate on her past choices: the men she had been with before him, the two children she had had with another man.

Another friend found him stressful to be around. “I try to be open-minded,” she said of the relationship. “I don’t want to be the most negative, nonsupportive friend just because of my personal observations and disgust over somebody.” When they were together, he was buzzing, anxious. “He’s like, ‘Oh, my dog needs his blanket this way.’ And I’m like, ‘Your dog is just laying there and super-cozy. Why are you being weird about the blanket?’”

A significant body of work has investigated the effects of acute exercise, defined as a single bout of physical activity, on mood and cognitive functions in humans. Several excellent recent reviews have summarized these findings; however, the neurobiological basis of these results has received less attention. In this review, we will first briefly summarize the cognitive and behavioral changes that occur with acute exercise in humans. We will then review the results from both human and animal model studies documenting the wide range of neurophysiological and neurochemical alterations that occur after a single bout of exercise. Finally, we will discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and missing elements in the current literature, as well as offer an acute exercise standardization protocol and provide possible goals for future research.

As we age, cognitive decline, though not inevitable, is a common occurrence resulting from the process of neurodegeneration. In some instances, neurodegeneration results in mild cognitive impairment or more severe forms of dementia including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or Huntington’s disease. Because of the role of exercise in enhancing neurogenesis and brain plasticity, physical activity may serve as a potential therapeutic tool to prevent, delay, or treat cognitive decline. Indeed, studies in both rodents and humans have shown that long-term exercise is helpful in both delaying the onset of cognitive decline and dementia as well as improving symptoms in patients with an already existing diagnosis

Rumination is a form of perserverative cognition that focuses on negative content, generally past and present, and results in emotional distress. Initial studies of rumination emerged in the psychological literature, particularly with regard to studies examining specific facets of rumination (e.g., positive vs. negative rumination, brooding vs. self-reflection, relationships with catastrophic thinking, role of impaired disengagement, state vs. trait features) as well as the presence of rumination in various psychiatric syndromes (e.g., depression, alcohol misuse, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, bulimia nervosa).

Awareness is what you’re aware of, what your attention is available for, what you’re keeping track of or tabs on. An object outside your awareness can’t be responded to — at least not directly — because when you’re unaware of something, you don’t know it exists or is there right now. The same goes for mental objects. You can have thoughts or processes in your mind that other parts of your mind are not aware of. When you are aware of objects, you can account for them. You can avoid banging your head on an open cupboard, or avoid banging your mind on an uncomfortable thought. Awareness has a size: it can be expanded to include the whole room, or contracted to just these words you’re reading.

Awareness helps give you space between a stimulus and your reaction to it.

if a problem or emotion feels overwhelming, it can feel as though we’ve become the problem or emotion; we’re inside it; it almost feels like there is nothing else; it dominates our mental attention. Eugene Gendlin in his book Focusing describes how you can distance yourself from your problems just enough that you can think about them clearly, while still giving them your attention. Expanded awareness is how you do this. It allows you to have a more ‘objective’ or ‘outside’ view of yourself, your problems, and your environment. It feels as though things are close enough to see in vivid detail, but not so close they obscure your vision. But unlike certain(!) meditative practices, there’s no dissociation. Alexander Technique is inherently anti-dissociative. A mental object becomes just one of many objects, both mental and physical, included in your awareness.

In meditation, you’re expanding awareness of your inner thoughts/mind; in Alexander Technique, you’re expanding awareness of the physical space around you.

Awareness of your body helps with movement, muscle tension, performances like public speaking or music, and can even help with knowing how you’re feeling and what you want. Practising this kind of physical awareness helps with things like muscle tension and posture as a byproduct. Alexander Technique is not about posture — posture ‘just happens’ when you have expanded awareness.

If your normal reaction is stimulus→response, you can expand your awareness to notice the stimulus and then you have space to either react or decline that reaction. The pause is where you can give consent to a reaction, or not. We spend a lot of time just going with our first reactions, which may contain inner conflicts or tension. Acting while you have a conflict is uncomfortable, yet happens all the time. Our first reaction may not represent all of our opinions and desires.

This is much like how ‘true/authentic self-expression’ is not just saying the first thing that comes to your head — because that may or may not be what is most true to you. We can feel loss of self-expression both in situations where we just go with the first thing that pops into our head (feels out of control, inaccurate to deeper thoughts/feelings), or where we only say what we think is ‘proper’ to say (feels like it denies part of ourselves). True self-expression is about having free choice in what you express, instead of railroaded into a narrow band of expression.

consider when you’ve picked up something to fiddle with without realising. You didn’t consciously intend for it to end up in your hand, but there it is. There was an effortlessness to it. Now, that’s a case where you’re unconscious of it and just reacting. Maybe you picked it up because you’re nervous. In this case, perhaps the reason you picked it up without noticing is that it was outside your zone of awareness. You may have been paying attention to a conversation, and not your hands. But this kind of non-‘deliberate’ effortless action needn’t be automatic and unchosen, like a nervous fiddling habit; nor need it require redirected attention / collapsed awareness, like not noticing you picked up the object. You can be fully aware of what you’re doing, and ‘watch’ yourself doing it, while choosing to do it, and yet still have there be this effortless “it just happened” quality. For most people, the moment conscious choice is involved, the ‘trying’ or ‘doing’ process takes over: you are now deliberately performing the action, in order to get the result that you decided on. In Alexander Technique, you learn how to have choice without the accompanying deliberate/conscious performance aspect. You make choices, but after the choice is made, the effortless process takes over.

If you juggle, you may have had this experience: you don’t try to catch each throw, your hand just moves to where it needs to go. (This is especially obvious if someone throws a ball at you without warning. Your unconscious mind does a split-second calculation and moves your hand where it needs to go.) Likewise if you play tennis. Fiction writing can also have something of this experience. You can find yourself surprised by what comes out of your own characters’ mouths. You’re ‘watching’ them; they ‘have a life of their own’. When editing, many writers switch modes where they ‘make’ their character say something (it feels like you created the dialogue, rather than the dialogue coming from outside you). But with non-doing, you can edit in a different way: instead of putting words in your characters mouthes, you can decline their first response, pause, and then see what else they might say.

Suppose you do actually want to pick up that ball over there. But you don’t want to ‘do’ picking-up-the-ball. The solution is to set an intention. [1] Have the intention to pick up the ball. [2] Expand your awareness to include what’s all around you, the room, the route to the ball, and your body inside the room. [3] Notice any reactions of trying to do picking-up-the-ball (like “I am going to march over there and pick up that ball”, or “I am going to get ready to stand up so I can go pick up that ball”, or “I am going to approach the ball to pick it up”) — and decline those reactions. [4] Wait. Patiently hold the intention to pick up the ball. Don’t stop yourself from moving — stopping yourself is another kind of ‘doing’ — yet don’t try to deliberately/consciously move. [5] Let movement happen. After you’ve declined all the ‘doing’-type actions, if you still have the intention to pick up the ball, you can find yourself naturally moving to bring about the state of the ball being in your hand.

with some practise, you can find yourself having plenty of space to think about other things, or feel the space of the room, or attend to sensations in your body, while performing the effortless motor action of picking up the ball.

You can think of Alexander Technique as coming in 5 steps, or 5 key ideas: 1. Intention 2. Awareness 3. Pause (take a moment instead of react) 4. Non-doing (actively don’t ‘do’; decline ‘doing’) 5. Spontaneous, effortless action

The perceived ‘self’ is an amalgamation shaped by quasi-independent personalities influenced by genetics, upbringing, memories, and trauma. Much of our behavior is driven by animalistic passions and irrepressible emotions.And I think that’s what we hate: We hate not being the boss of our own heads. We hate not being in control. The puppet wishes to overpower the strings—parts of her own body—that keep her upright and sensible.

Girard told us that imitation is the texture of the human experience, that we are constantly orchestrated by desires, and that we are fluid beings who are always becoming more like who we look up to. So, in this light, trying to become the best version of yourself creates an impossible loop: You need the best version of yourself to exist so you know what to strive for in order to become it, but the best version of you can not exist if you do not become it first. Chicken and egg.

the marionette can not be its own puppeteer; that would be a paradox. Trying to improve the self is like Narcissus staring at his reflection: Neither you nor your reflection—who you want to be—changes. You can not improve yourself by staring back at yourself in the same way that a mirror can not become a portrait.1 Self-deficiency implies that external help is needed. You are imperfect at best. You can not produce something from nothing, multiply without a multiplier, or draw straight with crooked lines.

Instead of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, perhaps we are meant to self-deny so we can make room for a Savior. The reason is in its name: Christ-ian, meaning Christ-like, suggests that we shouldn’t be imitating or striving to be some imaginative best-version-of-myself, but rather, someone completely external and objectively Good to the perfect degree.

I'm not sure I agree with *everything* you wrote above, but as I've gotten older, I find myself turning less to self-help books, articles, etc., and more to just hanging out with friends and family.

Bioré markets some of its products in the U.S., but its ultra-popular facial sunscreen contains bemotrizinol, a chemical filter that’s popular overseas but has not yet been approved in the U.S. The substance is on a short list of those that Dobos told me have the strongest case for FDA approval—it’s widely used around the world and very effective at absorbing UV rays. Another ingredient at the top of her list is bisoctrizole, a favorite in Europe, which she said degrades more slowly in sunlight, is less readily absorbed by the wearer’s skin, and helps stabilize other UV filters when mixed with them, potentially improving their efficacy

Experts suggest spending several days without setting alarms and just waking up when your body naturally wants to, which you can try over a three-day weekend.

The more you go back and forth between early and late bedtimes, the more likely you are to struggle to fall asleep when you need to.

reward yourself for waking up early on a Saturday: Plan a morning walk, brunch or a call with a friend, or watch your favorite TV show while you eat breakfast.

In 2017, Americans spent $3.5 trillion on health care — a level nearly equal to the economic output of Germany, and twice as much as other wealthy countries spend per person, on average. Not only is this a problem for the people seeking care; it’s also a problem for the companies they work for. Currently, about half of Americans are insured through an employer, and in recent years companies have borne the financial brunt of rising costs. Frustrated, many employers have shifted the burden to workers, with average annual deductibles rising by more than 50% since 2013.

In dozens of interviews with families I heard about doctors shaming low-income moms for buying dollar store ramen noodles instead of pricier fresh vegetables. I talked to teenagers who were gaining weight while dealing with depression or anxiety and whose doctors told them to cut carbs. Families described doctors who rushed conversations, grabbed bellies or made jokes about kids’ bodies.

What should the obesity guidelines say instead? Stop classifying kids and their health by body size altogether. This would involve a paradigm shift to weight-inclusive approaches, which see weight change as a possible symptom of, or a contributing factor toward, a larger health concern or struggle. These approaches focus providers on addressing that issue rather than managing weight loss. This means looking less at the number on the scale and talking more to families about their health priorities and challenges. Can they add healthy foods rather than restrict calories?

We cannot solve anti-fat bias by making fat kids thin. Our current approach only teaches them that trusted adults believe the bullies are right — that a fat body is just a problem to solve. That’s not where the conversation about anyone’s health should begin.