I showed up to an important client meeting without my laptop last winter. I’d forgotten to charge it the night before and left it on my desk during my morning rush. Sitting there, red-faced and caught off guard, I knew this wasn’t just bad luck. My system sucked, plain and simple. That night, I started… Read More »The “Dailyish” Practice: The habit formation method that works
Every night, my phone sat on my nightstand, buzzing with notifications, tempting me with “just one quick check” that turned into thirty minutes of scrolling. It served as my alarm clock every morning, pulling me directly from dreams into a world of news alerts and messages. The cruel irony? I used a sleep-tracking app on… Read More »Sleep Better by Keeping Your Phone Out of Your Bedroom
Scientists have long understood that smarter people tend to live longer. The question has always been: which parts of intelligence matter most? Is it quick thinking, strong memory, vast knowledge, or something else entirely? Researchers studying 516 older adults—all now deceased—found something unexpected. Among nine different mental abilities, only verbal fluency predicted survival. People who… Read More »Words add years to your life
While you’ve been focusing on when you sleep and where you sleep, scientists at the University of Tsukuba have uncovered something far more fundamental: what you eat determines how you sleep. Their research on nearly 5,000 people proves what grandmothers have suspected all along: Certain foods make you sleep better. But it’s not warm milk… Read More »Protein and fiber are your secret ingedients for better sleep
When I was a kid, my mother used to tuck me in with a kiss and say: “Count sheep if you can’t sleep.” Instead of counting, I wondered: Why sheep? Why not count ducks or balloons or tacos? And why does counting anything help us sleep at all? I now know the truth about these… Read More »Mental shuffling for faster sleep
The phone rang. Sarah’s hand trembled as she reached for it, guided more by muscle memory than conscious thought. “Hello?” Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. “Hi, Mom. It’s me.” Sarah pressed the phone tighter to her ear as if clarity might come from closer contact. “Who is this?” she asked, a surge… Read More »The Cardinal’s Song
One morning, I had to present a project but woke up twenty minutes behind schedule. I grabbed my notes and sprinted across campus, mentally reviewing my key points between gasps for air. When I burst through the classroom door, the professor immediately called me up to present. Still breathing hard, heart pounding, I launched into… Read More »The cardio speech hack
While watching a movie I’d waited months to see, I caught myself doing something strange. I was scrolling Instagram, responding to texts, and still felt weirdly empty. My brain was consuming three content streams simultaneously, yet somehow still bored. That’s when I realized what had happened. My mind no longer knew how to focus on… Read More »How to Do a Dopamine Detox
Today, I watched my daughter fight a dragon. She sat cross-legged on our porch swing, book propped open, completely still except for her eyes and the occasional flick of a page. Yet everything in her body language, the tension in her shoulders, the slight lean forward, the barely audible gasp, told me she was somewhere… Read More »Read fiction to improve your social skills
Traditional to-do lists lie flat on the page, but your work doesn’t. I spent years staring at traditional, linear task lists, wondering why I felt constantly overwhelmed. My tasks looked like separate islands with no prioritizations and connections between them. How could I choose between tasks when I couldn’t see how they related to each… Read More »The visual 1-3-Nexts to-do list method
