Reminder that awareness solves a lot if you actually follow up on what you notice.

“I literally thought having a stuffy nose was just part of having a nose,” as long-term allergy sufferers nod in agreement.

“For the longest time, daytime drowsiness just felt like adulthood,” until I found out I had sleep apnea.

I assumed everyone’s shoulders were just permanently halfway shrugged.

Headaches seemed like part of existing.

Being exhausted after eating felt like that was just what lunch does.

Waking up feeling bad seemed like how mornings worked.

Grinding my teeth registered as a personality trait.

Needing total silence to function just made me think I was dramatic.

My jaw clicking felt like one of my little sounds.

Never breathing through my nose seemed normal.

Standing up and seeing stars felt like something bodies just do.

My back always hurting a little seemed like the default setting.

Being bloated after everything felt like normal digestion.

Constantly having to consciously unclench seemed universal.

Only being able to relax when alone felt like introversion.

My feet hurting after basic walking seemed like adulthood.

Acid reflux felt like part of having a throat.

Getting dizzy in hot showers seemed normal.

My brain sounding like fifteen tabs open felt standard.

Forgetting everything unless I could see it just made me think I was lazy.

Sleeping 8 hours and still feeling destroyed felt like modern life.

Only being able to focus once panic kicked in felt like just how I work.

Ears ringing in quiet rooms seemed like what quiet sounds like.

Period pain that folds you in half seemed like just the deal.

Being itchy all the time felt like part of having skin.

Waking up with a dry mouth seemed like normal sleeping.

Coughing after laughing felt like part of laughing.

Having one nostril that didn’t work seemed universal.

Feeling weirdly bad all winter felt like just winter.

Getting shaky if I didn’t eat at exactly the right time seemed normal enough.

Not being able to hear people in noisy places made me think they were mumbling.

Constant low-grade anxiety felt like being responsible.

Needing recovery time after small social things felt like adulthood.

My hands going numb sometimes seemed like a circulation quirk.

Feeling mildly sick after bad sleep felt normal.

Snoring seemed funny, not medically relevant.

Having no energy for anything I actually care about looked like laziness.

Not being able to inhale fully felt like stress.

My eyes burning by afternoon seemed like part of looking at stuff.

A bad stomach felt like the default.

Brain fog felt like what thinking was.

Peeing all the time seemed like being hydrated.

Being bad at coping with heat felt like a personal flaw.

Everyone’s neck feeling like a stack of gravel seemed plausible.

Random heart pounding felt like caffeine doing its thing.

Being miserable in bright stores made me think I was just weird.

Waking up 5 times a night still somehow counted as sleeping.

Needing sugar to feel functional seemed normal.

“Always a little tense” felt close enough to “fine.”

I think I figured out the dynamic at play that is resulting in a lot of the worlds problems right now.

Its basically that context switching is costly and since the internet has our attention/context switching spread thin between things like admin/messaging/learning/etc constantly we make our bandwidth really small so usually by the middle of the day our brains are fried if we changed contexts a lot even if we didn't do much, and what's worse is that to compensate for feeling like we didn't do much we may just doomscrolling more to feel like we gained something so it just spirals and gets worse unless we do something about it.

What I suggest we do is recalibrate to having our baseline be as dead simple in terms of relaxing as sitting still staring at the wall or something, doing almost nothing, and then if we want to do something it should be something that we can steadily do for a couple hours at a time, anytime we have something to do later such as socials on a phone or something to google later we should note it down somewhere and eventually we create a todo list of those sorts of things that will last a couple hours so that we can do that without much context switching, and if we still need to recalibrate we can always stop and be still for some time.

At first this seems less fast but it is actually more fast because you gain more higher quality time in which we are working more efficiently at whatever we may be doing at any moment.

We aren't getting dumber by using the internet, we are just getting very biased towards information overload.

This can even lead people to developing weird reward cycles that look like autism as well as people doing a lot of things at once so people call this adhd. We can use meds to increase bandwidth, that's basically what ADHD meds are doing, closing the reward loops so that bandwidth is freed up, what very few do is learn to close the reward loops themselves and chunk similar things together so people functioning normally look like they have superpowers as a result.

As a result of doing these things I see my hrv increase due to stress relief because I'm not taxing my brain extra hard all the time and my sleep quality increase because there is not anything being carried over into sleep to be processed which also means dreams get an all around boost as well as clearer thinking throughout the day because I'm not taxed constantly. Doing this even slightly seems to show a lot of positive things just even a day later.

It is crazy how much eating bad affects me.

Basically we have big thanksgivings and so we have been eating thanksgiving leftover food for days for basically every meal and my energy during the day is all over the place and I can't sleep well and I just feel like I'm unwinding back into depression brain.

This is in stark contrast to the weeks prior to thanksgiving where I was focusing very hard on getting all my health routines in as ideally as possible.

Its crazy how fast it flipped too, it was within a week, its not even anything to do with weight or body fat changes because my numbers have not changed at all, its purely the fact that I'm eating the wrong things.

I haven't lost any gains from the training i was doing for running and I did even get a better than expected time so I wasn't starting in a worse position, it just really was a matter of eating the wrong things.

What's confusing is in this case cronometer wasnt so helpful. I can see that before thanksgiving I was meeting like 80% on everything if I did all the right things, I could be better but that's soooo much better than what I sued to be which was like 30s.

And when I eat the Thanksgiving food I'm actually hitting a lot of it, in the 60s but that means nothing apparently because I actually am functioning worse all around, so despite being somewhat rounded and somewhat filling, its putting me near when I was in the 30s.

I guess this means that the timing of food is probably equally as important as hitting macros/micros.

My sleep was getting up into a score of 80s even if I didnt do a proper wind down routine before and now after I'm in the 60s and still doing a nosedive of both quality and duration.

Its interesting how stuff like this is all still basic stuff but it turns out its still complex and probably explains why people can never agree on ways to do health because its too variable to be able to just say do this and that and also too complex to just tell people the variables, they have to figure out how to improve for themselves.

Hey I'm not sure if anyone knows this, but often trades schools/post secondaries will have an option to have what you need done by students for cheaper. They are watched over by the instructors as they do it, so less of a chance for messing up irreversibly. They do tend to take longer, but is usually much cheaper. Examples in my city:

• Hair cuts
• skin care
• dental care
• car repair
• message therapy
• probably more that I don't know about...

Even if you don't brush your teeth and floss that well or regularly you may still keep your teeth from at least getting really bad by simply brushing your tongue with your teeth and brushing your teeth with your tongue, this will at the very least keep the tartar and stuff off your teeth.

I went from not brushing my teeth or flossing almost ever to doing both plus mouth wash at least once before bed and often once in the morning but not always. It was a long uphill battle but eventually I realized that I didnt like how my teeth felt when I don't brush and I like the way it feels when it is clean so at some point it shifted from a habit I must force myself to do to doing it without thinking very much. My teeth went from being yellow to now pearly white and some of my teeth are shaped ever so slightly better I think due to flossing.

I'm using an electric Philips toothbrush I have seen some people say oral b electric ones are slightly better due to rotating but I haven't tried them.

I floss before toothbrush and toothpaste with floss picks, I wish there was a better way but floss picks seem to be the best way to go by a landslide even considering some natural stick things and various kinds of floss string holders. Apparently the stuff in the toothpaste works better if left on your teeth for 10 minutes or longer with no water swishing or mouth wash so I have been waiting some time before I do mouthwash after that.

The toothpaste i am using is toms of maine whole care and i use a pretty small amount each time i brush because you can definitely overdo the brushing, as an example the same substances in toothpaste such as sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) is used to polish metals so we are using metal polishers on our teeth essentially. The mouth wash I am using is therabreath invigorating icy mint an important note here is this is the only flavor as far as I know from therabreath that has xylitol in it which is important. A key ingredient to look out for is xylitol, it is found in gum sometimes too, apparently xylitol makes your mouth water and saliva has everything your teeth need to remineralize and protect themselves.

In this study the app called sleep routine was compared against 11 other devices ranging from what they are categorizing as wearable, nearable, and airable, the devices are all a little old now but the data for the app is still relevant, it matches the accuracy of my pixel watch 3 based on the testing I have been doing on and off for awhile.

As far as I can tell it does something with spectrum analysis from the microphone and gets more accurate as time goes on I'm not sure on the specifics but the app seems like its decent on the privacy respecting side of things and comes from a country that has decent laws on that stuff so its probably fine.

Some recommendations for the app, keep it close to your head for cleaner audio signals, cross check the app with any sleep tracking devices you may have just as a comparison test, focus on how they compare over time and not so much night to night because unless you have a really solid routine for sleeping each night is going to be a little different and hard to tell what is a result that changed because of the app.

Highly recommend giving the app a shot since it is inexpensive and super worth it if you spend a little time improving your sleep,technically you should only need the app for a month or two before you get a solid idea about your sleep quality so that you may change your habits and not necessarily need to keep tracking your sleep.

Android link to app

iOS link to app

I have looked into this stuff and there is some pretty compelling evidence for shoes making people run faster, like your typical highly cushioned shoes. The reason barefoot shoes are good is because it is the equivalent of a manual transmission car, we are forced to learn how to actually make our feet do the right things for proper kinematics. The automatic transmissions still heavily beat any manual paired with a good driver in most races. So barefoot shoes aren't actually that great in certain contexts despite being very helpful for making our bodies do well. Once our body gets good at using barefoot shoes though we can use regular shoes and intuitively know that we are using it correctly which is also an advantage.

My balance of these things at the moment a pair of some shoes from wildling that are water resistant but not super breathable and a pair of boots from lems that have proper outdoor siping (not their other boots that have terrible siping) these boots are about as barefoot minded as you can get boots to be while still being functional boots. And that's it, just the 2 sets of shoes.

The biggest thing is realizing that our legs have a built in spring system for all this wear and tear that we put on it. Basically our ankles are springs and the travel those springs have is the amount of distance you can move your ankle to not stomp your heel on the ground except for when needing to make quick turns or standing still for balance, momentum is what gives us balance while moving forward just like a bike rolling.

People sometimes take that and think they need to dinosaur walk all the time lol, this is just saying that walking pains come from heel stomping too hard, its ok to touch it on the ground often.

figured I’d put something here to explain what I actually do day-to-day so folks know the kind of practical stuff we’ll be talking about.

My Current Routine

• Breakfast: Big shake that’s a mix between overnight steel-cut oats and Bryan Johnson’s nutty pudding, plus my NOVOS stack and a few extras.
• Supplements: I take a couple more NOVOS things after checking my phone.
• Strength: A few lifts with 25-lb weights (different variations) to strengthen my back — I learned my weak back muscles were causing more sweat → acne.
• Shower + skincare: PanOxyl on my back.
• Throughout the day: Sunscreen, staying fairly active.
• Night: Adapalene on my face and back.

I’m tall, a bit underweight, and fairly active, so the real challenge is eating enough food consistently — not exercise.

My Approach

I basically find the weakest link and improve it in a sustainable way. Most things I figure out by watching how my body and mind respond.
If I need precision, I’ll use a watch, scale, or blood tests.

What’s Next

• Add daily walks (short and consistent).
• Possibly use dog-walking apps — that way I get full-body movement and get paid.

Why This Matters

I’d been slowly sliding into a fog since middle school through college.
Taking my health seriously has felt like getting my superpowers back — clearer mind, more energy, better mood.
I wish more people felt this way. You’re your own greatest weapon in this world; better keep it sharp.

3 Tiny Things That Helped Me Stay Consistent

1. Make big calorie dense meals with variety you can prep the night before (so you don’t skip) and keep eating calorie dense foods and drinks throughout the day, I check what I'm doing occasionally with the app called cronometer.
2. Short, regular strength moves (5–10 minutes, same time every day) to build base muscle — consistency > intensity.
3. Pair a habit with a trigger: “put on shoes → 10-min walk” or “shake in blender → take morning supplements.”
   Small chains beat willpower.

Not to mention sleep, I thought I slept well until I started to really analyze what my sleep scores and habits were like and how I felt before during after sleeping.