I am extremely fortunate. In fact, we all are, and if you started reading just for a chance to derive my privilege from this click bait title, I hope you at least go away with an understanding of this fact; we are the richest animals in history. The luxurious wonders of technology that we enjoy at nearly every level of the social hierarchy these days wouldn’t be worth trading for a king’s wealth of five hundred years ago. I live next to a homeless shelter that I’m humbled to walk past daily. When I pass by, I can often observe most people there captivated by a small backlit touchscreen lying in their palms’. A high speed, handheld computer with sixty-four gigs of storage and wireless connection to the internet would rock the minds of the brightest engineers of 1990, yet today they’re available to all. Although royalty may sound pretty good from where you stand, all the gold in ancient Rome couldn’t get Starbucks delivered to you in ten minutes, or plan a remote vacation without moving your feet, or send your voice around the world in the time it takes us to make a phone call. The confidence that we wear on our sleeves in public is a representation of tremendous societal progress that has assures us no need to fear for our safety in the presence of strangers. A short time ago, equivalent piece of mind was priceless.
Now that we’ve practiced some daily gratitude, let’s talk about disease. It isn’t news to you that mental health is commonly mishandled by one of the most diverse populations in all of medicine. While children under five were the main risk group for polio, and now COVID is particularly dangerous to the elderly, depression affects those of all ages, and race, gender, or status won’t keep you safe either. Although we live in the most efficient age of yet, the clearest constraint to mental health is one that no one can get ahead of; time. My father has drunk three ounces of orange juice every morning since the regime, because he believes that a few milligrams of vitamin C are a hack to his immunity. Everyone wants a time sensitive prescription like this. Sadly, I don’t have any silver bullets to present to you. Caring for your state of mind can be like taking care of a puppy, it feels great when you’re super into it and everyone is cheering you on, but if you take a day off you wind up with pee-stained carpets, torn up house plants, and pissed off roommates. I’m not saying you must meditate in a full lotus every day to keep from getting depressed, just like you shouldn’t strap the puppy to your chest 24/7. It’s more about keeping an eye on it. I’ve found routine to be imperative in the process of improving any area of life, but I believe that all routines must be closely coupled with graceful deviation. This entrepreneur sums it up perfectly when he describes the tendency of high performing individuals to create superstition around their routines. In his words, “That’s bad!” and it’s hard to argue with a mustache like that. I think I’ve pontificated enough, so I’ll get into the meat of this post now. A word of caution; this is free advice, so to you it may be worth just what it costs. Here are the lifestyle changes I’ve concluded to be pivotal to my mental health:
Stress is inevitable. Everyone has a stress hack that doesn’t actually work. I don’t care if you give up all your possessions and become a monk, your baseline will even out, and one part of your day will be comparatively more stressful than the rest. Stress is not bad. If it weren’t stressful to hear a fire alarm, many would burn alive due to their lack of urgency. Of course, listening to a fire alarm all day would be harmful. There is a point where the amount of stress that compels us to useful action converges with the amount that is physically and mentally destructive. Most functioning people are teetering throughout life somewhere within one standard deviation of the mean of our populations stress levels. The system I’m giving you with this post is for anyone whose found themselves way outside those bounds with no idea how to get back. So, stress is not good or bad, but a necessary evil. When I view stress as a misfortune that’s been cast upon me, I feel powerless. But when I look at it as information coming from the choices I’ve made in my own best interests, I realize my agency in the transaction. Accepting the fact that you elected to take on stress in exchange for something of value is the key to navigating level one. This is because understanding the reason you are experiencing stress allows you to plot that instance either between or outside the upper and lower limits, and then logically decide if that experience it worth it’s yield. I hope this system is useful to you, because I think it’s important to simplify what’s involved when situational stress becomes nuanced. Remember, you’ve ended up in this state for a reason. Evaluate that. Lacking such a system, I often used to find myself submitting to stress and allowing it to normalize in my mind. Accepting that was dangerous and eventually landed me with above average stress levels on a regular basis. So, it feels good to play with the idea that we opt into all our stress, but what if we plot a point that we can’t opt out of? I think many of you will find that your most stressful encounters are of such high yield that you can’t part with them. This is where the tail end of level one’s theory comes out; we all have a threshold for stress. If you think of yourself as an empty cup, then the threshold is the rim. When the cup is full, more stress won’t do you any good so it’s in your best interest to cool down and allow it to empty. The core teaching of this theory is that if your job, lifestyle, and choices subject you to frequent stress, you are still free to observe your relativity to the threshold. Watch it carefully. In his moving commencement speech titled “This is Water”, David Foster Wallace describes our duty to perform such periodic checks on ourselves, and the discipline involved in making a habit of doing so. If you’re able to do so for an extended period, you’ll end up with a dataset representative of your average stress levels over time. You may be surprised to find that you, (the cup), are often more than half full and very seldom less. This is an epidemic that I think Bill Burr illustrates when explaining to his wife how he seems to, “go from zero to a hundred in two seconds”. If you’re idling at seventy-five, you shouldn’t be surprised that your “regular” stress is consistently too much. Empty the cup. It’s possible some of your stress has been miscategorized as “regular”. It’s ok to submit to the stress when you must make a living or your family is depending on you, but if you don’t tread lightly, you won’t notice when the cups halfway full for no reason. Make your business to take inventory of this and find low hanging fruit that you can pick to lower your baseline stress little by little. Here are a few sneaky ones that I used to carry around in my “regular” stress basket, and have found tremendous relief from leaving behind:
It’s possible that your baseline stress has been indefinitely elevated due to inconsistent blood sugar levels. This may be due to the excessive levels of grain-based carbohydrates that commonly dominate our diets. I don’t have a diet to sell you, and I don’t plan on discussing the highly nuanced field of nutrition with you today. I’d much rather leave you with the simple adage that you are what you eat. This method can be further simplified to the advice; “eat real food”. Peter Attia provided useful parameters for that when he said, “If it comes in a package, it’s probably not food”.
When I was a teenager, a friend I respected told me with pride that he watched the news every night over dinner, and I remember feeling sheepish for not being able to tell him the same went for me. It’s funny how perspectives can change, as I feel the exact opposite now and am still guilty of the charge. It is my firm belief that most of the free media available to anyone with cable or internet does not aim to inform, but simply to solicit a reaction. I will not be elaborating much on this topic. It will be obvious to you if you expand your regular stress checks to cover your hours of leisure. I’d only like to give a gentle reprimand that if you are investing your spare time in consuming content that works you up, you should be skeptical of that. For some helpful methods you can read chapter six of Tim Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Workweek” or check out his blog post on the matter.
Stimulants are a remarkable discovery, but if you haven’t found yourself marveling at that fact in recent, you may be misusing them. However, I am not here to present a review of the literature to you. Google around about the effects of caffeine and you’ll be able to find sufficient information to confirm any narrative you’d like. I’m only here to tell you my experience, which is that I felt fine as a coffee drinker, but after quitting I feel much better. I’ve been all over the spectrum on this one. In my days of working in an office where there was free coffee, I would certainly drink my fill. I had a roommate in college who always kept a bottle of caffeine pills around, and they sure did come in handy. I’ve also been on the controlled side of things where I would allow myself a coffee at breakfast and lunch exclusively. None of these phases were crippling to my health or energy, but without any caffeine I just feel better. I’d like you to simply consider the shot clock that begins decrementing every time you spike your energy with caffeine. Observe yourself in this state and imagine what your baseline stress would be at if you could leave that dependence behind. That’s available to you if you want it. Here is a guide that was useful to me when quitting.
Now we’re going to take things in the opposite direction. Level one was about managing stress. You’ve sourced all your stress and consciously chosen to keep some of it. Being able to identify and triage stress is a vital first step towards feeling better. This is akin to a boxer’s agility training. It is imperative for them to learn to avoid being struck by their opponent. But the boxer is aware that they will inevitably get hit, and they prepare for this as well. Level two is about enduring stress, because if you’re always an empty cup you may find yourself ill prepared when stress does rear its ugly head. Therefore, I think it’s important to purposely experience stress with the intent of learning to better control it. I also think subjecting oneself to unpleasantry teaches self-confidence and mental resilience. Please explore level two with those qualities held firmly in your minds eye. Setting out to build self-confidence will allow you to increasingly break through barriers you once believed yourself incapable of conquering. This not about self-torture, but rather self-actualization. I play with the inputs I’m about to share with you and plenty others, just to continuously test my resilience and find out what I’m capable of. It’s not so important that you push yourself to the limit, but rather that you come to understand how far off your limit really is. Biology is quite clever in this way. Discomfort is the brain signaling the body to conserve energy that will be useful for protecting the life of the organism. In other words, “STOP”. This served us well when it was possible a predator would catch us by surprise at any moment. Conserving energy by avoiding that stress allows you the bandwidth of an empty cup should you need to run for your life. So, if you’re safe from becoming something’s dinner, you may find value in some of these techniques for building up your stress tolerance:
Let’s begin again with diet, which is much more than just eating less. Changing how much you eat can be useful for controlling one’s weight, but the full range of nutritional benefits are only realized by also controlling what you eat and when you eat. Notice that in level one I suggested, “eat less carbs,” rather that flat out, “eat less”. There is an important distinction there between dietary restriction and caloric restriction. A third one known as time restriction completes Peter Attia’s framework of the three levers. Time restricted eating (TRE) has become mainstream by the moniker intermittent fasting in recent years, but I would still consider it the most underutilized tool in the realm of dieting. I’d encourage anyone experiencing stress to go down the rabbit hole of TRE just to take in some of the astounding research. I think this lever goes perfectly with level two because it is a slider, not a light switch. You can fast for twelve hours per day, sixteen, or twenty-four. You can have breakfast four times a week and skip it three. You can eat what you’d like one day and then nothing the next. There is no shortage of strategies out there and each one is a test of your true potential. If you think this is something you can’t do, that makes it the perfect test for you to start training yourself to believe you can do much more than you think. Hunger can be stressful, but if you are a willing student, it will teach you to widen that threshold. My final sentiment on the topic is that digestion is also stressful. As one of the most energy intensive and therefore distracting bodily duties, I believe that digestion pairs poorly with most tasks, and would recommend you strategically plan for it around your periods of stress volatility (your “regular” stress). Multitasking is the enemy of productivity.
Physical fitness can more accurately be termed physical stress endurance. If your tummy rumbling is the body’s way of saying, “STOP FASTING,” then the burn we feel in our muscles is it saying, “STOP MOVING”. The extent to which you can keep going anyway is a measure of endurance. Anyone who wants to expand their productive capacity must start with exercise. This is not about health, confidence, or energy, (although all three will thrive). It is about the wisdom that will come from understanding the concept of progressive overload. Give it a Google. Progressive overload is a cornerstone of level two because it embodies the key teaching that you must start where you are and move forward. The root word progress is all we’re after here. It’s very simple; pick up a weight, and if you can only do five reps, great. Come back tomorrow and do six. If you can only run for five minutes, great. Tomorrow let’s go for five and a half. Five seconds? Great, you know what to do. This same concept can be applied to any discipline you want to improve, and exercise is the surest one to observe its merits through results. There is no end to the research you could do in this field, but I suggest you start as small as possible. Many of us have some experience with working our whether it’s from playing sports or messing around with mom’s dumbbells. I assure you that there are infinite resources on the internet that you can dive into at your own pace, but if you’ve never been to the gym before, then just start walking. Use your smart phone to find out how many steps you’ve been taking on average and tell yourself you’re going to beat it. Then beat that the next day, and again the next day, and the next day. I strongly encourage you to focus on daily cardio above all else, but the point is just to do something every day. This is not a lifelong prison sentence and remember; it’s a slider. If you’ve been walking ten thousand steps per day, but tomorrow you only do five, that’s still something to be proud of. Five thousand steps! Get back out there tomorrow and beat it. Maybe one day when you’ve got a lot of time you want to go for fifteen. Or maybe you’re sick of walking and today you want to try running sprints. Surprise the body, it will thank you for the variability.
Here’s one you can’t google. Assisted introspection is a term I’m coining for any practice of mindfulness with the help of some preferable intervention. Hear me out. We’re all sick of millennial bloggers shoving meditation down our throats. While I believe it’s a useful tool, it’s extremely difficult to pick up and even harder to make a habit of. Also, most people just don’t want to do it, and I get that. I don’t want to advise everyone reading this to take a break and do nothing for an hour every day. It would be a beneficial prescription, but for many it isn’t practical and trying to fit that into your day can end up creating more stress where we’re trying to remove it. I recommend going down the meditation rabbit hole if you’re interested, but the mindfulness practice I suggest here will be much easier to start and stick to. Assisted introspection is taking something you already enjoy and doing it on your own. The intervention can be chemical, physical, or informational. A few examples of what chemical intervention might look like would be fixing yourself a drink, having a coffee, or taking an edible, and then just sitting there. Now, I know I just finished telling you to drop caffeine and now I’m contradicting myself saying you can have a coffee, but the whole point of this post is really that you can do whatever you want. If you enjoy having a coffee, don’t swear off it for life because some guy with a blog said that’s the way. There are no silver bullets here. Quitting caffeine won’t make you happy no matter how dedicated you are, I just think breaking the addiction makes it easier to be happy. The point of assisted introspection is just to get you to hang out with yourself, and if formalizing your private time with a cocktail helps get your ass in the seat, that’s worth something. I’m by no means encouraging you to get blasted by yourself. I am against all forms of substance dependence, but I don’t believe in always or never for anything. What I really want for my readers is to get you all thinking about yourselves. This, you will find, is stressful. Doing nothing is truly one of the hardest tasks there is because those who are unskilled in self-reflection have learned to immediately seek a distraction when there’s nothing left to do but think. If you can’t sit by yourself for ten minutes because that roommate in your head won’t shut up, try answering them for once. I would argue that drowning out that voice in your head makes you more susceptible to stress, while listening to it over time will decrease your stress volatility. I implore you to find a healthy way to enjoy your own company. Physical intervention might look like taking a walk or riding your bike, but always cap your session with some alone time while sitting still. The duration is up to you, just remember progressive overload. You don’t have to time yourself, but I like to look at the clock before and after sitting down just to get an idea of how long I went. If you have roommates, do this somewhere where it won’t be interrupted. An informational intervention might be a chapter of a book you like, a podcast, or listening to your favorite song. The possibilities are endless, so find out what puts you in a meditative mood in a short amount of time. It won’t take long to find something that works for you. When you’re ready to start your practice, allow yourself to think about as much or as little as your mind wants to, and don’t judge yourself for any thoughts that come across. Every time you do so, you’re adding that time to your stock of knowledge about yourself. That is an indescribable advantage.
Level three is where I urge you to dig deep. Some of my ideas may start to sound crazy here, but if you’ve made it this far, I ask that you continue through with an open mind. Level two was all about empowering yourself to endure stress by subjecting yourself to healthy forms of it. Level three is where we can test whether it’s working or not. There’s something special about surprising yourself when you’re trying stuff like this, and this level sets you up to do just that. Think of it as a dress rehearsal. The methods I suggest below will not provide a direct measurement of your ability to handle the stress that you commonly experience. What I mean is that I don’t have a way to directly test your composure when stuck in traffic or being scolded by your boss. However, the following methods do provide a litmus test for your general stress threshold and baseline. I hope you find them to be a useful blueprint and allow your creativity to tailor them to fit your needs.
The human organism is a system, the body of which is comprised of subsystems that harmonize in the creation of a thrilling experience we call consciousness. And we spend a great deal of this experience marveling at other systems that outperform us. We study the whales, tortoises, and other sea creatures that commonly outlive us. We obsess over automobiles for their speed, and computers for their throughput. The aforementioned systems are all remarkable, but I think what sets humans apart in many categories is our near perfect energy efficiency. As a diurnal mammal, we’re capable of sustaining energy throughout the day and well into the night if needed, and we can exert or conserve it based on reason. We require a great deal of input to make all this happen, but we’re able to process extremely efficient fuel sources with the stomach. It isn’t a showstopper on its own, but the development of cooking eases the digestive process and greatly increases the stomach’s efficiency. This is one of many examples of humans channeling their intellect to enhance the performance of some system they utilize or operate. These are the two methods of energy management that allow humans to excel: throttling up or down to control the strain on a given system and channeling the intellect to distribute the strain more evenly. Analysis of each system in the body will reveal some implementation of one or both methods, whether voluntary or involuntary. Each night, we rest our visual, vascular, and cognitive systems while we sleep. The same goes for more than just the eyes, muscles, and brain. Throttling down most of our bodily components at the end of the day is the most common implementation, but we see it in plenty of other abbreviated manners as well. We throttle up our legs and heart if we must walk to the store, our renal system when ingesting potentially dangerous toxins, and our reproductive system when we stand a chance to mate. The ability to choose when these subsystems should be employed or lie dormant contributes to their preservation and the overall longevity of the parent system. The extent to which we can rest each component also sheds light on how effective the rest can be. Back to sleep for a second, during which the muscles can power down fully, but the heart still must idle to some extent. This helps us make some sense of how much more common heart failure is than muscular deterioration. Diet is a perfect instance of energy management for the digestive system. Being strategic about when, what, and how we eat enables us to control the amount of crucial rest the stomach, intestines, and other components are rewarded. The most common fast that humans indulge in is the eight hours we spend sleeping each night, so it’s no surprise that the rejuvenating effects of that fast can be enhanced by practices like eating the last meal of the day well before bedtime and avoiding midnight snacking. The patterns just described speak to the prevalence of digestive issues among humans as well. Most people give their stomachs a reasonable break overnight but aside from that they’re pretty much always chowing down. We’re very good at throttling the background process of digestion up and down, but generally aren’t concerned about the amount and quality of rest that subsystem gets. Our culture makes it evident that it’s a good idea to take extended breaks for certain systems. For instance, frequent gym goers will take a week off from all forms of exercise, athletes have an off season, and CEOs will even take sabbaticals. But most people don’t have a natural proclivity to rest. It’s common to hear about success stories of entrepreneurs or athletes who were overworking themselves at one point and were then able to perform better by resting more. It seems though that digestion is still slipping through the cracks for many. I think I’ve driven the anatomic metaphor far enough home, but the point is that your stomach is a powerful asset, and the more attention you pay it the harder it will work for you. If you’ve never gone a day without eating, give it a try. It will be uncomfortable at first, but the distinction between pain and discomfort is an important one to get a grip on in your quest to properly manage stress.
Steven Kotler describes grit as performing at your best no matter how bad it feels. I guarantee you that challenging yourself to embrace cold water will exemplify what grit means to you. Experiencing the numbing discomfort of a cold shower will reveal how strong your body is and how weak your mind can be. Once you’re completely dry after a session of cold exposure, you’ll find yourself unscathed, and likely better than beforehand. If you want hard facts about epinephrine, dopamine, and other chemical reactions the cold can trigger behind our skin, I implore you to stroll leisurely through the various rabbit holes of ice baths, cold showers, and polar plunges (apologies for all the homework). Although I’ve been down them myself, I don’t lay any claim to the physiology, and I sustain a practice of cold exposure only for the primitive reasoning that IT FEEL GOOD. The grit will first appear in your teeth, but if you’re consistent with your onboarding you’ll soon find it to have moved into the mind as its permanent dwelling. And while the grit in your teeth is replaced with a relaxed and confident jaw, the grit in your mind will thereafter serve as a straightforward reason to get back in that shower tomorrow, the next day, and so on. If you want to truly understand the dichotomy of the physical and the mental, you must unravel them individually. I think cold exposure will give you a window into your physical toughness and open your mind to the possibilities of what you might be able to endure mentally. Doesn’t it sound logical that after starting your day in a freezing cold shower, getting a stain on your shirt won’t even phase you? This is just another way that physical stress does a world of good for the management of mental stress that we can’t predict.
The first time I heard of fermentation, an art teacher described it to me as weighing down vegetables inside of a crock and letting them rot for weeks. At sixteen years old, I did not take well to this overview. It wasn’t traumatic for me to hear that, but it was enough to get me to steer clear of any fermented foods for about six years. Then when I was out of college and onto some sort of gut health renaissance, the magic of letting those veggies rot was revealed to me. Fast forward to today and there’s a two-liter mason jar full of salty cabbage right over on my counter that’s been sitting out for weeks. Good stuff. The point is I already knew what fermentation was, but the way I was told of it made all the difference. Meditation is the same for most of us. I cringe at the sound of the M-word. The idea that anyone would sit criss crossed waiting for Jesus to take the wheel sounds like boring hogwash. Not to mention the stigma. Whether you’re literally picturing Mike Meyers in The Love Guru, or just some dick millennial from your yoga class, no one wants to be the one who won’t shut up about meditation. It gets a bad rap and I’m here to rectify that so, if I didn’t lose you with that sauerkraut anecdote, I hope you’re still with me. We already talked about introspection in level two, and all I want you to do now with the unassisted version is see how much of yourself you can bare. If you give it an honest try and feel weird after sitting by yourself for three minutes, then that’s where you’re at. Three minutes is a fine progress report. And what is it that’s really removing you from that chair? That’s right, stress. If all that madness weren’t swirling around in your head, you could sit there for as long as you wanted. That’s all you needed to know; there’s still work to be done. The problem with meditation culture is people take it so seriously. The space is flooded with startup founders and breath counters and fart sniffers that never seem like they’re having any fun. Well, all I’m telling you in this article is to use progressive overload to make yourself feel like a badass. Don’t embark on an introspective journey expecting to become Steve Jobs, Jerry Seinfeld, or Naval. Just start doing it little by little so that you can be even more yourself. Once you’re comfortable with who you are, you’re unstoppable. To sum things up, sit somewhere private without any incentives to do so and just see how long you can stand your own company for. Then, when you want to stop, just walk away and take note of how you did. The only thing left to do is tell yourself next time will be better.
I find the human body fascinating and it wasn’t until very recently that I discovered the impact our choices can have on it. I’m lucky to have grown up healthy, with an active lifestyle, and always at a normal weight. I didn’t notice the level of comfort I had with my health until three years ago when sheer boredom, (I let my postgrad lifestyle become far less stimulating than it had been in college), lead me to begin some general research. I was interested enough to start trying the ideas I was reading out on myself, and that’s all I can say for the methodology. I haven’t done any controlled, double blind, official kinds of studies. I just absorb information, change my own habits, and observe the results. Such a journey cannot be abbreviated and I’m not even sure it can be completed either, but I’ve been able to make two broad conclusions since embarking:
Even though the squeaky wheel gets the oil, you can always give the other three chrome spinners… Ok, I had to put that in, but crass axioms aside, none of the knowledge I’ve shared here offer the flashy aesthetic function of chrome spinners. To abuse the metaphor even further, I was not a squeaky wheel whatsoever three years ago, and if I had changed nothing about myself back then, I’d be fine right now. However, I cannot discount the results that a few years of conscious tinkering have shown me.
2. Channeling agency towards a desirable outcome is psychologically impactful.
You have undoubtedly experienced this in some capacity whether it’s watering a plant, studying for a test, or asking for a date. Experiencing the yield of a calculated decision you made is the essence of inspiration, and every person is an instrument with which they can capture that. In you lies the free will that serves as proof of your power when successfully implemented.
I know we went in every possible direction to get here, but those were the only two things I wanted to get across. Everything I’ve offered in this article has been revolutionary to my wellbeing, stress levels, and happiness. But don’t take my word for it. Try it out, keep what you like, and leave everything else behind. I once heard professional bodybuilder Stan Efferding say that every diet works, sticking to it is all that matters. So, if you want to eat carbs, drink coffee, or hit the sauna instead of an ice bath, do it! Because it’s not about how strictly you diet, how long you meditate, or how psycho you are in your routine. It’s the chase. Build the habits that make you perform best, and never be satisfied having done them well enough. That’s how I stay happy.
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