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Dick Fosbury was born in Portland, Oregon on March 6, 1947. Fosbury was never the most gifted athlete, and this became clear to him during high school while on the track and field team. As a lanky, 6-foot 3-inch fellow, he was encouraged to try high jumping but found himself frustrated with the traditional straddle-roll style. As a result, Fosbury began experimenting with a new method where he approached on a curve, turned his back, and went over headfirst and backward—flopping over the bar. Although it worked for Fosbury, the unorthodox method was consistently met with resistance as the straddle-roll was used by practically every jumper at the time. In fact, between 1961 and 1963, Soviet high jumper Valeriy Brumel broke the world record six times using this method.

When Fosbury arrived at Oregon State University and joined the track and field team, he was forced to use the straddle-roll. But when it once again proved unsuccessful, he reverted to his unorthodox method—much to the dismay of his coaches and confusion of spectators.

Nevertheless, Fosbury flopped his way to winning the NCAA championships, qualifying for the 1968 Olympic team. With some suspecting his success was a fluke, Fosbury met more criticism when he arrived at the Mexico City Olympics. Spectators reportedly became quiet watching this guy throw himself backward over the bar. Then he cleared 2.24 meters, set an Olympic record, and won gold.

If Fosbury had settled for what everyone else was doing, he would have been a normal high jumper. But the Olympian understood something important: what is normal isn’t necessarily optimal. Four years after Fosbury’s Olympic win, 28 of the 40 Olympic high jumpers were using his technique. Eventually, virtually everyone was.

Being normal isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But at the same time, each of us is aware that authenticity, or “being true to ourselves,” is important.

Yet, it appears that the forces pushing us toward normalcy are stronger than ever. A study from Michigan State University researchers found a dramatic decline in people's desire to stand out from other people over the past 20 years, with the most notable drop in people being “hesitant to defend their beliefs publicly” and “becoming more concerned with what people think about them.”1

Furthermore, there’s evidence showing that convergence is a risk not only to our desires but also to our ideas—especially when it comes to using AI. A 2025 meta-analysis found that “humans collaborating with GenAI significantly outperform those working without assistance. However, GenAI has a significant negative effect on the diversity of ideas for such collaborations between humans and GenAI.”

This concept, which researchers call mechanized convergence, is yet another example where we extend the limits of human capability while sacrificing part of our humanity in the process. We have never had more tools for individual expression, yet those same tools may be castrating our collective creativity. Aristotle is famously credited with saying, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” but this relies on those parts being unique and complementary to one another.

Naturally, humans have a strong drive to fit in, as the consequences of being ostracized were historically dangerous, if not fatal. But today, the same could be said about being “normal.” Here’s what writer George Mack, has to say about it:

“Every time I catch myself hiding my weirdness to be normal, I read this list I wrote:

• Normal consumes 17 teaspoons of sugar per day.

• Normal has $104,755 in debt.

• Normal is 30 lbs overweight.

• Normal averages less than 4,000 steps each day.

• Normal spends 90,000 hours of their life at work disengaged.

• Normal stays indoors for 22.3 hours per day.

• Normal spends more time on the toilet than exercising.

• Normal hasn’t finished a book in the last 12 months.

• Normal experiences under 10 minutes per day in silence.

• Normal gets 55% of their diet from ultra processed foods.

• Normal will spend 20 years of their life watching TV or scrolling social media.”

At this point, this may seem like hustle-culture hype speech to go out and do something exceptional. It’s not. Rather, the point is that the pull towards being normal is as strong, and consequential, as ever. Resisting this pull takes effort.

In his final letter to Amazon’s shareholders in 2020, Jeff Bezos wrote about a passage from Richard Dawkins’s book The Blind Watchmaker. The passage goes like this:

“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work. For instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content of their cells, work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world. If they fail they die. More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

Bezos goes on to argue that, while the passage is not intended as a metaphor, it’s a relevant one for Amazon, individuals, and institutions. He asks, “In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness? To keep alive the thing or things that make you special?”

Like Fosbury, Bezos knows that what is normal isn’t necessarily optimal. He goes on to say, “We are all taught to ‘be yourself.’ What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen.”

Naturally, things will regress to being normal. My hope is that reading this makes you resist this pressure. Producing average things, thinking average thoughts, and living an average life have never been so accessible yet so unfortunate. Maintaining what makes you distinctive requires energy. The world will continue to pull at you in a thousand ways, as it did Fosbury. Going against this takes courage. And if we can learn anything from him, it would be to not let it happen.

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Attribution errors

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In the fall of 1969, the Cincinnati Bengals had a problem.

Greg Cook, that year’s fifth overall draft pick who had led the NFL expansion team to a 3-0 start, was forced out with a then-undiagnosed rotator cuff tear. At 6 feet 4 inches and about 220 pounds, Cook had earned the nickname of “blond-haired football god.”1 A New York Times article noted the following about Cook, “he could make all the necessary throws, especially the deep ball, with timing, anticipation, and accuracy, from inside or outside the pocket.”

These were big shoes to fill—literally, and they were Virgil Carter’s to step into. Carter, the 142nd pick in the 1967 draft, stood at 6 feet 1 inch and 192 pounds. Rather than “blond-haired football god,” Carter was described as having a strong mind and weak arm. Better than neither, I guess.

In his first year as an assistant coach of the Bengals, Bill Walsh recognized the implication of a constrained quarterback on his receivers. It didn’t matter if they could outrun or outmaneuver their defenders if the quarterback couldn’t get the ball to them.

This constraint is what led to the development of the West Coast offense, a philosophy that Walsh created during his time in Cincinnati and which he eventually took to San Francisco, where he won three Super Bowls with some of the most efficient offenses in history. Perhaps more impressively, head coaches descending from Bill Walsh have won 18 Super Bowls.

It seems that a philosophy of turning less into more served these teams quite well.

In his recent book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better,” author David Epstein makes a paradoxical and somewhat countercultural claim: that less freedom can lead to a better life. Anecdote after anecdote, Epstein reinforces that narrowing the scope of our options helps us come up with more creative solutions, make better decisions, and get more out of our finite lives.

But of course, constraints are neither necessary nor sufficient for a good life. Poverty and prejudice are not the kinds of constraints that lead to more creativity and productivity. However, our modern problem is not scarcity, it’s abundance. In the world of venture capital, there’s a common saying that “more companies die of indigestion than starvation.” Something similar can be said for individuals.

In a world where abundance appears to be the ultimate aim, constraints may offer the timely antidote.

Rather than giving a tactical and practical list of ways that constraints can be used to improve health while working a demanding job, I’ll share just one example of what Epstein refers to as maximizing by satisficing.

To satisfice means to consider a limited menu of options and choose one that is good enough. It’s a term coined by Nobel laureate Herbert Simon combining the words "satisfy" and "suffice,” operating under the observation that humans have limited time, information, and mental capacity to evaluate every possible choice.

It’s a decision-making heuristic that encapsulates our finitude. But it’s seen as a bad thing.

The tendency to constantly optimize has evolved into a cultural ethos of maximizing. But as Epstein points out, satisficing is actually the most direct path to maximizing for a better life.

We aggrandize flexibility, even though it doesn’t always make our lives better. We agonize over options, even though the more similar our options, the less choosing between them actually matters. And we preserve optionality, hoping that eventually we’ll be able to cash in.

That is, until we adopt the philosophy that constraints can make us better.

Bill Walsh’s constraints-led approach to coaching has left a meaningful mark on the NFL and sports at large since he developed the West Coast offense in the 1970s, and this is perhaps most true for his second-generation coaching disciple Andy Reid, the head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Reid famously brings a single 3x5-inch index card to every team meeting and enforces a strict rule: if the information cannot fit on that card, it is not shared with the team.

Reid isn’t lazy. He has 307 total career wins, ranking him fourth all-time in NFL history and first among active head coaches. Perhaps he knows something that most of us might be missing, and maybe it’s that constraints make us better.

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Creativity

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Workers are often sold a narrative that they cannot be happy, healthy, and high performing. This is because work is commonly viewed as something that is a necessary evil meant to service the other “good” parts of life. While work certainly comes with trials and tribulations, there’s a case to be made for the benefit that work can bring to our lives. In short, work can be good.

I recently interviewed Dr. Kat Page about what it means to have Good Work and how to transform work from the inside out. Here’s our conversation:

Let’s start at the beginning. When did you first realize that work wasn’t good for you?

Interestingly, it took me a long time to get there. I started researching work and mental health back in 2005, while I was still a psychology student, and for years work felt great. I was in academia, studying happiness and wellbeing, and for about a decade it was genuinely a happy period in my life. Research gave me a lot of autonomy and purpose. I had a good team, a good leader, and at that stage I didn’t have the financial pressures or family responsibilities that make work feel very different.

The first time I really experienced not so good work was when I left academia and joined Deloitte in 2014. It wasn’t Deloitte itself that was the problem. It was one of my first client projects, which was horrendous. I was thrown in at the deep end with a very difficult client and very little experience in change management. I was under a lot of pressure, and I didn’t really have anyone walking alongside me. That was the moment I thought, “Oh my God, [clients] can treat you really badly.”

I had a director on the project who I spoke to often about my struggles, but she wasn’t actually in the trenches with me. So while I had emotional support, from her and from peers, I didn’t have enough practical support. That’s the difference. The system can look supportive on paper, but if the person is isolated in the work itself, the support doesn’t really reach the point of need.

Something you often talk about is the difference between fixing the worker and fixing the work. What does this mean to you?

“Fixing the worker” is what organizations usually default to. It means identifying someone who is struggling and giving them support, training, resilience tools, emotional backing, or skills development so they can cope better with a difficult situation. The assumption is that the problem sits in the person’s confidence, capability, or experience.

That is not useless. Of course people need support and skills. But it treats the symptom rather than the cause.

“Fixing the work” starts from a different assumption: if someone is distressed, the cause may sit in the work itself. That might mean poor design, excessive load, low control, unclear expectations, toxic relationships, or a lack of recovery. The point is not to make people tougher so they can withstand bad work forever. The point is to prevent the harm from happening in the first place.

A lot of people can cope for a long time, especially highly resilient people. But coping is not the same as thriving. Just because someone can carry the load doesn’t mean they should have to.

That seems especially relevant in high-pressure environments. What tends to happen over time?

Burnout is often the result. I have a friend who is a paramedic, and the performance impact may not be obvious day to day, because he keeps going and keeps delivering. But over time you can see an erosion in how he feels and how he relates to the world. People become more cynical, more detached, less empathetic. They lose some of the compassion that brought them to the work in the first place.

That is the quiet cost of chronic exposure to bad work. People don’t always fall apart dramatically. Often they just become less like themselves.

It can be easy to frame this in a negative light, but in the book you are really interested in what good work looks like. Why did you choose to frame it that way?

I wanted to create hope. The world feels bleak in a lot of ways right now—politically, economically, socially. Mental health is worsening, particularly for young people. Loneliness, stress, financial insecurity, cognitive overload—all of it is rising. In that context, I didn’t want to write a book that simply described harm.

Hope matters because it gives people the energy to keep going. Good work is important because work can be harmful, yes—but it can also be a source of purpose, identity, and joy. And that is not just about changing how individuals think about their jobs. It is about how we lead and design work.

So what is good work?

Good work is more than the absence of bad work, it is work that promotes wellbeing and performance together, sustainably.

I developed a simple framework, mostly to help me remember the main features. I call them the six C’s.

The first is clarity. People need to know what success looks like, what they are responsible for, and how they are being judged. That sounds basic, but clarity is missing in a lot of workplaces.

The second is control. This is one of the most important factors, because control affects both mental health and even physical health. If people have autonomy— genuine choice in how they do their work—they are more likely to cope and to perform well.

The third is competence. Work should involve challenge, but not the kind that overwhelms. People need opportunities to learn, improve, and see progress.

The fourth is connection. People need more than proximity to others. They need to feel seen by others, and to know that they matter.

The fifth is contribution. People want to know that their work has a point, that it means something, and that it matters to someone—ideally to themselves, to others, or to the world.

And the sixth is care. We need to treat people as humans, not as machines. Human beings have limits. Good work respects that and gives people a workload they can actually sustain, along with time to recover.

You use the phrase “sustainable performance” a lot, which makes me think about sports. What can we learn from elite athletes about good work?

A lot, actually. Elite athletes understand something many workplaces do not: recovery is part of performance. They do not train relentlessly and assume more is always better. They build in recovery deliberately, and they track it. They know their bodies need time to repair and rebuild.

The same is true psychologically—we are not limitless. Cognitive and emotional recovery need to be treated as part of the job, not as something that happens only after work if there is time left over.

That is one of the biggest mistakes in modern working life. We still operate with an industrial-era model of work, even though most of our work is now highly cognitive. People need time to recover mentally, not just physically. Ideally that means building recovery into the day, the week, and the rhythm of work itself.

Recovery connects to your idea about positive spillover. What does that mean and why does it matter?

I think good work and good life should reinforce one another. There should be a virtuous cycle, where leaving work gives you energy to enjoy home, and home gives you energy to engage with work.

The modern challenge is that boundaries have become more permeable. Technology makes it easier for work to follow us everywhere, which has benefits in terms of autonomy but also real costs. A 9-to-5 structure can actually be healthier in some respects because it creates a hard stop. We are not naturally very good at switching off, so the system has to help us.

Speaking of blurring boundaries, AI is one of the biggest forces reshaping work right now. What does good work look like in the age of AI?

The promise of AI is productivity, but I am not sure that is automatically what is happening. In many cases, people simply reinvest the time they save into doing more work. The psychological tendency is to fill the space. That means we need to be much more intentional about how we use the gains.

My highest hope for AI is that it removes the drudgery of work. But my concern is that we use the capacity it creates to extract more from people instead of making work better for them. We should be asking not just, “How do we use AI to solve human problems?” but “How do we use AI to improve human flourishing?”

One line that I’ll take away is, “leadership begins with the thought that things can be just a little bit better, and the courage to take a step in that direction.” What do you wish for leaders to take away from your book?

Leadership starts with hope plus action, not necessarily a grand vision. Just the belief that tomorrow can be better than today, and the willingness to do something about it.

Hope creates motivation. It gives people the energy to persist, to try harder, and to keep moving forward even when things are difficult. Without that belief, people give up. And when people give up, the outcomes they fear are more likely to happen.

That is why I wanted the book to be constructive rather than simply critical. It is easy to describe what is broken. It is harder, and more useful, to show people what better can look like.

Good Work: Transform Your Work from the Inside Out

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Constraints

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In 236 B.C., Archimedes operated the first elevator by hoisting ropes around a drum rotated by manpower. In 1857, E. V. Haughwout and Company department store in New York City installed the first passenger elevator made possible by Elisha Graves Otis’s pioneering safety brake that prevented elevators from falling if a cable snapped. In 2015, construction was completed on the Shanghai Tower, including an elevator that travels over 45 miles per hour and transports passengers 118 stories in less than a minute.

While teleportation remains a science fiction pipe dream, modern inter-building transportation would be inconceivable for those in Ancient Greece. What’s even more striking, though, is what that change has meant for the average person.

Prior to the mass adoption of elevators, buildings typically maxed out at six stories tall given the reasonable human limit, and desire, to climb more than six flights of stairs. Today, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai stands at 163 stories tall. You would think that such dramatic increases in building height would be accompanied by at least modest increases in stair climbing. Unfortunately, you would be sadly mistaken.

Nearly one in five U.S. adults (18.2%) report difficulty walking or climbing stairs.1 This is especially unfortunate when considering findings of a UK Biobank study of 280,000+ adults which showed that people who climbed more than five flights of stairs per day had about a 10% lower risk of premature death than those who climbed none, after statistical adjustment.2

However, this is not a blog about elevators, stairs, or the general physical dysfunction of American adults. It’s about our brains on AI.

I vividly remember the first time I used AI. OpenAI had just released ChatGPT and the new model was generating buzz beyond the typical coding and computer science circles. What had been relevant to a small group suddenly became useful to nearly everyone. In fact, I remember preparing for a difficult book discussion where, instead of re-reading chapters or going to office hours, I simply plugged my questions into the AI tool and voilà! My questions were answered and the assignment was complete. What once would have taken hours of time and non-trivial amounts of cognitive effort was simply offloaded through the push of a button.

These new tools are amazing. They analyze, synthesize, and create faster than any human ever could. And as a result, humans have gone from being able to cognitively climb a six-floor walkup to ascending the Burj Khalifa.

This warrants discussion about the limitless potential of AI tools. Steve Jobs famously said that “computers are a bicycle for the mind,” to which Naval Ravikant remixed for today’s time saying that “AI is a motorcycle for the mind.”

These new tools can take us farther than we have ever gone before, and they can get us there faster than we ever thought. Much like the difference between today's elevators and Archimedes' in 236 B.C.

And that is exactly why I am concerned.

We have the potential to go where no human has ever gone before, but we share the risk of losing our humanity in the process.

This is what I call The Elevator Effect.

I won't be so dramatic as to say that the first time I used AI was euphoric, but it was helpful. What was once drudgery and drain became almost delightful. And this is how it stayed for a while. It wasn’t until recently that I began to notice what this trade had been costing me.

In February of 2026, researchers from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania published their findings from an experiment involving more than 1,300 participants about “how AI is reshaping human reasoning and the rise of cognitive surrender.”3

What’s surprising from this research is not the finding that humans have the tendency to be cognitively “lazy,” as this is a well-known feature, not a bug, of evolution. Our decision-making heuristics are a key part of what makes us human.

Instead, what’s surprising is what the authors call System 3 thinking (an extension of Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 and 2 thinking from his book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”). Their observation is that rather than taking cognitive shortcuts to preserve energy, people can now defer critical thinking entirely. The researchers call the resulting phenomenon cognitive surrender, which is “the uncritical acceptance of AI’s answers in place of one's own reasoning.”

It's like walking through an airport and facing the choice between the elevator and the stairs. The question is no longer, "How do I get my suitcase upstairs?" it's "Should I take the stairs at all?"

I am concerned, not because I think that stair climbing is the ultimate panacea for human flourishing and certainly not because I subscribe to science fiction doomsday scenarios of artificial intelligence. I am concerned because our ability to think critically is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition.

The atrophy is not instantaneous, yet the gratification of offloaded thinking is. Because of this, we must choose to see thinking as an investment to be made, not a cost to be incurred.

Just as taking the stairs is an investment in future physical fitness, exercising your judgment is an investment in future cognitive fitness. So, take the cognitive stairs, not because you need to but because it’s what makes you human.

While AI may be a motorcycle for the mind, Naval goes further by saying, “you still need someone to ride it, to drive it, to direct it, to hit the accelerator, and to hit the brake.” Humans can perhaps go farther than ever before, but the most important question remains: Can we retain our humanity while doing so?

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Good Work

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I’ve always had a natural curiosity about life’s big questions.

It’s perhaps related to my ineptitude in small talk—water cooler conversations about the weather or latest sporting event have never been a skill of mine. This is something that became evident, if not reinforced, to my girlfriend on a recent run through Quebec City.

She, who notably does not often ponder the existential questions of life for minutes at a time without speaking, but is accustomed to me doing so, asked me to talk during our run. Assuming this was intended to distract from the feeling of heavy legs and burning lungs, I naturally attempt small talk—picking the most casual prompt I can find.

“What’s the meaning of life?”

Expecting to have bought myself a minute or two for her contemplation, I quickly began planning the smoothest synthesis of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, Arthur Brooks’ The Meaning of Your Life, and Jim Collins’ What to Make of a Life, all of which I’ve spent the last few months reading in search of the answer to this question—when my thought process was interrupted by her response.

“To enjoy it,” she says.

I turn my head with one eyebrow lifted, “I’ll need to think about that for a few minutes.”

Fraught finding meaning

Meaninglessness among people in the United States has reached unprecedented levels. As Arthur Brooks argues in his most recent book on the matter, this psychogenic epidemic of meaninglessness is related to falling rates of happiness across the country and related to a lack of purpose, coherence, and significance within people’s lives.

In fact, Google Search Trends show that “the meaning of life” searches peaked earlier this year. Yet, despite their best efforts, people cannot seem to find what they are searching for.

Figure 1: Google Trends. (n.d.). Meaning of life. Google. Retrieved June 30, 2026, from google.com

The mental masturbation of meaning

After my girlfriend disrupted my thoughtful curation of perfect meaning frameworks, I realized I was actually avoiding my own question altogether. I had fallen prey to what author Mark Manson considers the intelligent person’s favorite form of procrastination: learning.

And I believe this tendency—to endlessly think about the meaning of life rather than actively live it—is one of the primary contributors to meaninglessness today. We engage in excessive, self-indulgent overthinking and intellectual conversation that gives a temporary feeling of accomplishment but produces no real-world results. We busy ourselves figuring out the meaning of life instead of actually living it.

This does not mean we should stop seeking answers to life’s big questions. Quite the opposite. It means that we should not treat the answer to an obviously existential question as a prerequisite for living. All of these books, podcasts, frameworks, and finger-waving influencers have one thing in common—they can potentially help us orient our lives toward meaning. But none of them can do the living for us. No framework, mantra, or role model will provide the sufficient supplement for living a life of meaning.

While I appreciate the frameworks, try to apply them in my own life, and will continue to read self-help books until the day I die, the meaning of life cannot be borrowed, intellectualized, or dreamed the same way that a painting cannot exist anywhere but the canvas. You can internalize the ideals of the Renaissance, study the works and lives of the greats, or even explain in excruciating detail the intricacies of Cy Twombly’s scribbles. But at the end of the day, something must go on the canvas. The artist must do the painting.

In a world where offloading hard things is easier than ever, we must choose to do the living ourselves. This is because much of what makes us human is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition—which is what we’ll turn to next.

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Your brain on AI

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Prior to college, I didn’t care a lot about academics. I cared almost exclusively about football, sparing only enough time and energy to make sure that school didn’t impede my athletic aspirations.

And it worked. With a little skill and a lot of luck, I went on to play college football. However, the better stroke of luck was that I went to a university where academic apathy was no longer an option. I had to care—otherwise I would jeopardize the whole reason I was there in the first place.

Caring for something beyond football catalyzed a voracious appetite for learning that has persisted ever since, but it doesn’t mean that caring all of a sudden became cool. I still have distinct memories of curbing my caring under the perception that others may find it uncool or cringe to care too much about school, relationships, or even a career.

We’re made to believe that caring isn’t cool.

In writing his book The Way of Excellence, Brad Stulberg spoke with hundreds of top athletes, creatives, musicians, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, physicians, coaches, and educators to understand what it takes to pursue excellence. What Stulberg found was not the nonchalance we’re often sold when the media lionizes professionals who “make it look easy” or those who stumble upon success. He found that the common differentiator was “a willingness to hold nothing back, to truly give the people and pursuits you care about your best shot.”

As Stulberg puts it, “doing big things, let alone living a big life, requires trying hard, risking failure, and caring deeply.”

We want there to be a world where we can have it all without the work, but such a world does not exist.

But at the same time, you're reading a blog about improving health while working a demanding job. You care. In fact, if you're anything like me, you may care too much.

In a world that is as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous as ever, it can be easy to feel pressure to care about everything all the time. Demographic and ecological collapse. Geopolitical conflict. Artificial intelligence. The offhand comment a coworker made. Or even what you’re having for dinner tonight. From existential to ephemeral, the opportunity to care is infinite.

This leads us to an important question: In a world where caring is a necessary prerequisite to living a meaningful life, how do we manage our economy of care? In other words, how do we intentionally allocate energy and attention toward the passions, pursuits, and people that matter most?

Managing Your Economy of Care

Maximizing what I call “Economy of Care” depends on the convergence of three things:

1. Uncover why you care

2. Decide what deserves your care

3. Protect who you care about

Uncover why you care

Some people care because they feel like they should. Others care because they feel like they have to. For some, caring is driven by curiosity. For others, it comes from insecurity, obligation, ambition, fear, love, or a desire to prove something.

The source of our caring matters because it determines how we feel during and after a given activity. The same pursuit can feel energizing when it aligns with our values and exhausting when it exists solely to satisfy someone else's expectations.

Consider two people who both work late every night. One does so because they genuinely enjoy the challenge and believe in the mission. The other does so because they’re terrified of disappointing others. The behavior looks identical, but the motivation is not.

The lesson is not that there is a single correct reason to care. Human motivation is messy. The lesson is that the reason for caring should belong to you. Too often, we inherit our priorities from other people. We pursue careers because they are prestigious. We adopt opinions because they’re popular. We end up carrying concerns that originated somewhere else entirely.

Before deciding where to invest your attention, it’s worth asking a simple question: If nobody else knew I was doing this, would I still care? If the answer is yes, you’ve probably found something deserving of your care.

Decide what deserves your care

The modern world presents us with an endless menu of things to worry about. News cycles operate twenty-four hours a day. Social media ensures that every controversy, tragedy, breakthrough, and opinion arrives directly in our pocket. The opportunity to care is effectively infinite.

Our capacity to care is not.

This creates a fundamental problem: caring is a finite resource being spent in an infinite marketplace.

Every hour spent obsessing over a stranger’s opinion is an hour not spent investing in a relationship. Every ounce of attention spent monitoring problems you cannot influence is attention unavailable for the people and pursuits you actually can.

While the world may create the illusion that caring is about quantity, it’s almost certainly the quality of care that is more important. The goal is not maximizing the number of things we care about; it’s maximizing the attention we can devote to what, and who, matters most.

Protect who you care about

Many of us spend an astonishing amount of time worrying about the opinions of people we neither know nor particularly respect. Meanwhile, the opinions of our closest friends, family members, mentors, and partners are often drowned out by the noise.

This seems backward.

If caring is an investment, then the people closest to us have the potential to generate the greatest return. They shape our lives, influence our behavior, celebrate our victories, and support us through failures.

The opinions of strangers rarely offer any of those things.

This doesn’t mean becoming indifferent or closed-minded. It simply means being selective. Not every opinion deserves equal weight. Not every criticism deserves equal consideration. Not every voice deserves equal access to your attention.

The people who deserve your care should have disproportionate influence over how you spend it. When we fail to make this distinction, we often end up optimizing our lives for audiences that don’t actually matter while neglecting the people who do.

I won’t go as far as saying that caring deeply has never been more important. The truth is, it’s always been important. The problem is that the balance between what is possible to care about, what is manageable to care about, and what we do care about has never been more disconnected. By uncovering why we care in the first place, actively deciding what deserves our care, and protecting who we care about, we can slowly but surely navigate toward a life of meaning and significance, and that’s what we’ll cover next.

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Finding your philosophy

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During my senior year of college (2023, to date myself), I distinctly remember one professor predicting that within decades leisure time would be abundant, income would be basic and universal, and energy would be cheap and widely accessible. A bold but justifiable prediction following OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT. Interestingly, these predictions have only accelerated. In a 2025 interview, AI expert Dr. Roman Yampolskiy predicted that 99% of work will be replaced by AI and humanoid robots in the next five years. He also predicted that humans would have 60 to 80 hours freed up per week, thanks to not having to work.

But just because work can be automated by agents and robots doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone will work less. Actually, the contrary may be true.

Annual working hours per worker have decreased dramatically over the past 150 years, yet the prevalence of “overworking,” an occupational condition characterized by working excessively, often at the expense of the worker's physical and mental health, may be on the rise. A 2021 ILO review found that “from 2000 to 2016, the numbers of deaths by heart disease from working long hours increased by 42%, and those from stroke by 1%.” This group of “overworkers” represented about 10% of the global employed population as of 2021.

New technology may present the opportunity to work less, but history tells us this opportunity is more elusive than imminent. It’s likely that many people will work more, not less, whether or not tasks are automated, leisure is abundant, or energy is widely accessible. But why is this?

Why we overwork

As someone who, by the official definition, tends to overwork, I can offer a theory for why this is the case. The thing about a theory is that it isn’t a rule or a law. You may not overwork, and to that I say keep reading because you probably care about someone who does. Additionally, the theory I present might not be why you overwork, and to that I say keep reading because there’s only one way to find out.

I believe people overwork for two reasons:

1. The “too muchness” of modern work

2. The “not enoughness” of modern identities

The too muchness of modern work

“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved ‘work-life balance,’ whatever that might be” — Oliver Burkeman

Modern work is fundamentally different from the work of previous generations. A farmer could see the end of a harvested field. A factory worker could hear the whistle signaling the end of a shift. Modern knowledge workers enjoy no such luxury.

Our tasks are indefinitely expansive, our communication channels are boundaryless, and our technologies are infinitely generative. There is always another email to send, another document to update, another article to read, another opportunity to pursue.

The result is that work no longer has a natural stopping point. No matter how much gets done today, there will always be more tomorrow.

But infinite work opportunities alone cannot explain overwork. Most people are exposed to the same overflowing inboxes and endless obligations. Only some become consumed by them.

The not enoughness of modern identities

“I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.” — Anne Lamott

A recent paper published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes suggests that excessive workers often organize their identities around being "doers." The researchers found that “doing” frequently serves as a defense against deeper feelings of not being enough.

For some, work provides a source of worth. Achievement offers proof that they are valuable and productive. Not working creates guilt because it feels like evidence that they are falling short. One participant described feeling guilty whenever they weren’t working, as though their worth was tied to their output.

For others, work creates a sense of safety. Constant activity, preparation, and achievement provide protection from uncertainty and vulnerability. Doing becomes a way to stay in control. Another participant described excessive achievement as a way to escape an unstable environment and create security for themselves.

Still for others, work provides a source of recognition. Accomplishment offers validation, approval, and belonging, but only temporarily. The next achievement quickly replaces the last. One participant described chasing recognition despite knowing it never produced lasting satisfaction.

Overworking can be a learned behavior to cope with a deep-seated insecurity that you may not be enough. If you just work a little bit more, then maybe you can feel worthy, safe, and recognized. Sound familiar?

The work never ends and you are already enough

When you die, you’ll keep getting emails. Someone might even reach out and ask for the latest status update, not knowing they are being indefinitely “ghosted” without the decency of an out-of-office auto response.

As morbid as that may sound, it is equally liberating. As Oliver Burkeman points out in his many writings on the futility of modern productivity hacks, we’ll never get on top of our ever-expanding to-do lists. It is an impossible task. If the task were improbable, we strivers could, dare I say, overwork to make it happen. But this one is impossible. The work will never end.

Yet coming to terms with this fact is still not enough to make you feel, well, enough.

Work can provide a tremendous source of purpose, and fully committing to One Big Thing is a commendable, if not necessary, part of living a good life. This is a lesson that many overworkers take to heart early in their careers. I know because I’m experiencing it firsthand. And what many people find is that work provides a productive feedback mechanism for filling psychological gaps of self-worth, security, and admiration of others. The problem is that work can never be enough.

I often ruthlessly scan the internet for studies, Stoic philosophy, or even scripture to find evidence for all the claims I’m making, but this one can stand alone.

You are enough.

Whether you work 80 hours a week, 20 hours a week, or not at all. You are enough. Whether you measure your life by what you create, who you care about, or which cause you fight for, you are enough.

We should work hard, not because we’ll finally get on top of our to-do lists and not because we have something to prove, but because we care. And that’s what we’ll turn to next.

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Caring

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I grew up going to a Catholic school where we routinely talked about Adam and Eve’s “fall” in the Garden of Eden—consequences of which included an inclination toward sin and separation from God. However, the part of this story that stuck with me the most was the idea that Adam was sentenced to “a life of toil by the sweat of his brow.” Basically, he was told that “work sucks” and that he and all of his Sisyphean descendants would be stuck pushing a proverbial boulder up a hill until they were relieved of their duty—either by death or social security… or something like that.

But this isn’t just a Bible story, fable, or figment of my imagination. Most people today think work sucks, and that’s because for many people, it does. Only half of workers in the U.S. are satisfied or very satisfied with their jobs.1 One in five workers globally report symptoms of burnout.2 And to add fatal insult to injury, recent research from the International Labour Organization (ILO) shows that workplace psychosocial factors account for approximately 840,000 deaths per year.3

In fact, work sucks enough to have a Reddit thread titled, “Work simply sucks” in the r/jobs subreddit. I asked ChatGPT to summarize it and this is what I got:

Work sucks because you don’t control your time, it often feels meaningless, and it never actually ends.

Well, it turns out there may be some merit to this statement (particularly for knowledge workers). Not because work is inherently miserable or because we’re uniquely bad at it—but because of how work is designed.

A model for understanding work experience

The Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model provides a useful lens for understanding work experience by identifying two simultaneous forces that shape our day-to-day: job demands and job resources.4 Demands are the physical, cognitive, and emotional requirements of the job—things like workload, time pressure, role ambiguity, and toxic behavior. Job resources are the factors that enable performance and buffer stress—autonomy, support from coworkers, adaptability, and access to health resources at work, to name a few.5

Importantly, the model describes two simultaneous processes. First, the stress process, where excessive or chronic demands lead to strain, disengagement, and burnout. Second, the motivational process, where resources help us achieve goals, buffer demands, and/or develop new skills and abilities. In other words, different aspects of work are associated with different outcomes—the things that drive burnout are different than the things that drive health.

In support of this, McKinsey Health Institute (MHI) research shows that job resources are 14x more predictive of holistic health than demands while job demands are 7x more predictive of burnout than job resources.6

Work sucks when we are resource-light, demand-heavy, or both at the same time. In fact, the same MHI research shows that over half of the population finds themselves in some combination of these circumstances. Said another way, over 60% of the world’s population over the age of 15 is employed, and yet approximately half of these people experience work as a health-degrading, not health-promoting activity.

Whether work is your higher calling or simply a paycheck to keep the lights on, it ought to be a life-giving experience. Thankfully, knowing why work sucks in the first place gives us the knowledge to help make this the case.

Work is a system, not a circumstance

Many of the most taxing demands sit at the job and team levels: toxic behavior from managers, lack of clarity on what our role is, and physical demands like long hours or manual labor. At the same time, the resources that would buffer these demands—autonomy, flexibility, supportive teams, meaningful work, and skills such as adaptability—are often constrained, under-developed, and/or inconsistently applied.

The result is a predictable collision of high demands, insufficient resources, and chronic strain, which makes the Reddit summary feel less like cynicism and more like the predetermined outcome. Work sucks because you don’t control your time, the work feels meaningless, and it never ends.

The notion that work sucks is one that is often sold as an obvious fact rather than a malleable outcome. But this need not be the case. As Edwards Deming is often credited with saying, “every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does,” and this is exactly the case for our jobs. The extent to which your work sucks at any given moment is a product of the balance between the resources and demands you are experiencing.

So perhaps when we talk about balance in the context of work, we ought to reframe balance from a symmetrical outcome of hours worked to a reasonable equilibrium of resources and demands.

Stepwise Strategies

While some of these aspects, like toxic behavior, physical demands, and access to health resources may be uncontrollable and subject to the behavior of a manager, nature of a role, or culture of your company, there are steps we can take to make work better. More to come on this in an upcoming newsletter, but for now, here’s a list to get started:

1. Set clear boundaries at work

2. Be a good boss

3. Develop resilience and adaptability

4. Seek out new things to learn

5. Make friends at work

For more information on the factors that drive health and burnout, see: “Reframing employee health: Moving beyond burnout to holistic health”

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Why we work so much

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In a previous edition of Stepwise Health, I called for a revolution in the way we consume information. As the world has regressed toward a content consumption pattern built on ultra-processed, substance-devoid, and highly desirable information, we must reclaim our attention by rebelling against this Standard Information Diet.

This revolution requires rebuilding our information diets with a balance and abundance of three “macronutrients:” Trustworthiness, Completeness, and Resonance.

We need accurate, credible, and logically sound stories that provide comprehensive details while, at the same time, maintaining a level of enjoyment and applicability capable of shaping future action for the better. We need to stop with the BS.

But when 10 companies, many of which are incentivized to monetize our attention, make up forty percent of the S&P 500, one could say that we’re fighting an uphill battle.

However, this doesn’t mean that reclaiming your attention, and subsequently salvaging your cognitive and mental health, is impossible—you just need to try a bit harder.

So how do you do this?

A Modern Information Diet

Managing weight comes down to simple biochemistry—energy cannot be created or destroyed. Calories in must balance with calories out.

While there’s no caloric equivalent in content consumption, it’s clear that our Modern Information Problem is one of abundance, not scarcity. Algorithmic curation and infinite scrolling have turned already-problematic social media platforms into metaphorical slot machines.

But not all hope is lost. We can manage our consumption diets, and we can learn a thing or two from weight loss to do so.

Path 1: Platform restriction

We consume too much information. Whether under the pretense of learning, staying up to date, or relaxing—the net outcome is the same—we consume too much information. This is partly due to the fact that consumption has become the default state to avoid doing hard things. This is made easier by the availability and desirability of all media platforms: social media, news, substack, television, etc.

Getting off these platforms is the surest way to break your bad content consumption habits. It’s akin to not buying sweets while you’re on a diet. If it’s not there, you can’t eat it.

Here are a few ideas:

1. Delete all social media (and/or other apps that push content to you) from your phone. You can re-download these apps on the weekend, but chances are you won’t want to

2. Use Clearspace, or a similar tool, that restricts certain apps from immediately opening on your phone

3. Put all of your apps/content platforms on an old phone that only connects to WiFi

Path 2: Time restriction

Intermittent fasting as a dieting method has become quite popular in recent times. In fact, in 2023 alone, roughly 38 million US adults tried intermittent fasting.1 This approach entails restricting one’s eating window to a specific period of the day and is touted by many for its positive impact on health and weight management.

While many potential reasons have been proposed for why this is an effective dieting strategy, the primary explanation is that it simply restricts the amount of available time to consume food, therefore limiting calories. The most popular intermittent fasting diet is the 16:8 method where people fast for 16 hours a day and consume for 8 hours (e.g., 11am - 7pm).

A similar approach can be used to moderate our content consumption.

There’s also some evidence supporting extended fasts and the related benefits of the cellular repair process—known as autophagy—that ensues. While the mechanism behind an extended digital detox may not be autophagy, the outcome is similar. For example, backpackers scored 50 percent better on a creativity test following four days in nature disconnected from electronic devices, according to a study from the University of Utah and University of Kansas.2 Extended time away from devices clears the chaos of our minds.

Path 3: Topic restriction

Perhaps your problem isn’t being chronically online. Maybe instead, your problem is being pissed off whenever you are online.

This makes sense. The world thrives on bad news.

This doesn’t just mean actual news. It means bad news in the form of rage-bait, divisive online forums, unrealistic social comparison, and whatever other catastrophic and supposedly existential things that are happening at the moment.

Relatedly, I love cinnamon rolls. In fact, I love cinnamon rolls so much that I buy one almost every time I go anywhere that sells them. However, I hate how I feel when I eat cinnamon rolls. Without fail, I regret eating them after the fact.

This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up cinnamon rolls for good. Why prolong the life that’s not worth living? However, I don’t often frequent places that sell them. I won’t fool myself into thinking that my willpower is an infinite resource. It’s better to stay away from the cause of my demise (cinnamon rolls) altogether. The same goes for the topics that send you raging.

This isn’t a recommendation to become a reclusive, disengaged citizen. However, my guess is that you’re a better citizen when you’re not pissed off.

This was a lot about what you shouldn’t do, but what about the content that you should consume?

I’m not going to say that you should read books (that’s a different newsletter), shun TikTok, or treat podcasts as an afternoon snack.

In fact, unlike food, the inherent value of the information we consume is in the eye of the beholder. However, what we can all strive to do is consume information that is high in nutrient density.

Just as a meal that has high nutrient density (balance of carbohydrates, fat, and protein) will leave us more satiated and metabolically healthy than the alternative, content that is trustworthy, complete, and resonant will leave us more fulfilled and focused than its substance-devoid alternative.

Try thinking about it like this: the typical croissant is roughly 300 calories, whereas an apple is about 150 calories. Croissants taste good and apples taste good. But when I eat a croissant, I want another croissant. When I eat two apples, I don’t want another two apples.

So, the next time you have 30 minutes and feel the compulsion to turn to whatever content is right there at your fingertips, ask yourself: is this a croissant or an apple?

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Why work sucks (and why it doesn’t have to)

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In early 2026, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its new dietary guidelines.

“To Make America Healthy Again, we must return to the basics. American households must prioritize diets built on whole, nutrient-dense foods—protein, dairy, vegetables, fruits, healthy fats, and whole grains. Paired with a dramatic reduction in highly processed foods laden with refined carbohydrates, added sugars, excess sodium, unhealthy fats, and chemical additives, this approach can change the health trajectory for so many Americans.

The United States is amid a health emergency. Nearly 90% of health care spending goes to treating people who have chronic diseases. Many of these illnesses are not genetic destiny; they are the predictable result of the Standard American Diet—a diet which, over time, has become reliant on highly processed foods and coupled with a sedentary lifestyle…

For decades, federal incentives have promoted low-quality, highly processed foods and pharmaceutical intervention instead of prevention. This crisis is the result of poor policy choices; inadequate nutrition research; and a lack of coordination across federal, state, local, and private partners.”

The refreshed guidelines represent a broader cultural shift toward health awareness and cross-sector action to combat preventable chronic disease. We are in the midst of a metabolic revolution.

But as one crisis fades, another is emerging: the Standard Information Diet—a consumption pattern reliant on ultra-processed, substance-devoid, and highly desirable information.

As the outlook on treating and preventing metabolic dysfunction improves, we are simultaneously facing a cognitive crisis with consequences far graver than those of obesity.

Therefore, food is not the only consumption pattern we must change. We need to revolutionize our information diet.

Here’s the manifesto.

Rebuilding our information diet requires a balance and abundance of three information macronutrients: Trustworthiness, Completeness, and Resonance.

Like nutrition, this is not about perfect ratios within every input. It is about ensuring that, over time, these macronutrients are present and balanced across what we consume.

Here’s a way to think about each of them:

Trustworthiness (i.e., can I believe this?)

The degree to which information is accurate, credible, and logically sound. This is information that is well-sourced, internally consistent, and free from distortion or error. Think of this as the protein of information—the critical building block that is non-negotiable.

Completeness (i.e., is this the full picture?)

The degree to which information is comprehensive and sufficiently detailed. This is information that includes necessary details, avoids cherry-picking, and presents enough scope and perspective to form a sound judgment.

Resonance (i.e., will this have an impact on me?)

The degree to which information is enjoyable, internalized, and capable of shaping future thinking or action. This is information that is clear, personally relevant, and impactful enough to influence behavior—not just be consumed. Think of this as the carbohydrate of information. Consuming resonant information is a critical source of energy for our intellectual development, but it cannot be all we consume. Moreover, like carbohydrates, this is the most manipulated aspect of information to capture and retain attention.

A population-level metabolic shift requires systemic change—but individuals are not powerless. The same is true here.

Just as “we are what we eat,” our minds are shaped by what we consume.

The contours of our lives are drawn from the contents of our thoughts, and the contents of our thoughts are shaped by the information we take in.

It is within every individual to fight back against the cognitive dysfunction that is upon us. In essence, your life depends on getting this right.

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Going on an information diet

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What if we achieved six days’ worth of work in the typical five-day workweek, while improving job satisfaction and sense of meaning?

It may seem like I’m proposing some mind trick played by big-industry to get more out of workers. However, it’s quite the contrary. It’s time that workers get more out of their work. So, why do we need this and how can we do it?

We seem to be at an inflection point.

New technologies are promising unprecedented improvements in productivity that will revolutionize the way people live and work. Just imagine: tasks that once took an entire day now take ten minutes. Books that took weeks to read can now be summarized with the click of a button. And the deadbeat vendor who takes forever can now be replaced by AI agents that coordinate and complete the task without you even knowing. More time. More money. More capability.

Simultaneously, people are demanding more meaning from work—and increasingly finding that their jobs fall short. The very tools and technologies that promise exponential productivity improvements and utopian visions of the future are the same ones extracting the meaning from work to begin with.

But this didn’t just start with artificial intelligence. The knowledge economy at large has persistently grappled with the problem of measuring and managing workforce productivity, settling on what Cal Newport calls “pseudo-productivity.” Newport argues that in the absence of obvious measures, such as widgets per working hour, busyness has become the proxy for productivity. In essence, we’re busy chasing productivity instead of actually producing.

But what does any of this have to do with a six-day workweek?

As knowledge workers demand more flexibility in their jobs, and as global burnout and disengagement continue to climb, many companies have adopted the four-day workweek. In fact, a broader research effort across more than 200 companies worldwide revealed better mental and physical health, life satisfaction, and positive affect, as well as less stress, burnout, and fatigue among employees with a four-day workweek.1

But perhaps the most staggering finding from the research is that in many cases, there is no negative impact on productivity.2

In essence, five days of work can be accomplished in four days. The issue isn’t hours worked, it’s the expansion of unnecessary work due to sprawling pseudo-productivity.

However, a four-day workweek requires structural changes and sweeping organizational adjustments on behalf of CEOs.

Therefore, what I’m proposing is a six-day workweek, but one that is completed in five days total. Four days of traditional work, plus an additional day for individual pursuits that don’t otherwise get the attention they deserve.

• The major project that constantly gets deprioritized for smaller, more time-sensitive projects

• The book that you’ve been wanting to write

• The life admin that causes late nights or weekend work

• The skill development required to make the next leap in your career

Rather than requiring CEO sign-off, this change is one that can happen at the team or individual level.

Here’s how to do it:

• Establish “deep day” working norms: Cancel all meetings and mandate communication norms such as no emails, Teams messages, and Slack. The ‘free day’ should be the same across the team, otherwise the four-day workweek is likely to suffer

• Decide on quarterly “important” projects: These are the sorts of things that fall into the important but not urgent quadrant of work tasks. Decide what these are and devote the “deep day” to working on them

• Pilot the “deep day” once a month: Some managers may feel hesitant to let their direct reports go unsupervised for an entire day. Start with one day per month and have the team report back on what they were able to accomplish

• Decide what counts as an exception: It’s unreasonable to think that urgent matters won’t come up. Decide what is truly urgent and align as a team on how to respond

We live in a world where the limitation is no longer the technology at our disposal but rather the human capacity to do excellent, meaningful work. However, we’re devoid of the time and space needed to do it.

This isn’t a call for the masochistic 9-9-6 (9am-9pm, 6 days a week) and neither is it a way for the workforce to rest on their laurels and disappear for a day per week.

It’s a way to reclaim the time and space to pursue excellence and find meaning in our work while still striving to make a change in the small corner of the world we occupy.

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Fixing your information diet

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For most of history, work was physically demanding but biologically aligned with human health. We moved, spent time outside, and stopped when the sun went down.

Modern work flipped that equation.

Today, 40% of workers say their job harms their mental health and approximately one in five workers globally report symptoms of burnout.12 In fact, more than 120,000 deaths per year and approximately 5%–8% of annual healthcare costs are associated with and may be attributable to how U.S. companies manage their workforces.3

This doesn’t mean humans today are worse off than humans of the past. In fact, it’s quite the contrary. Humans have more money, work fewer hours, and live longer than previous generations.4 However, people’s relationship with work, in many cases, is not health promoting—it’s health degrading.

This begs an important question: How can work become healthy?

Biohacking has earned an infamous place in ‘bro science’ circles recently and is defined as “making small, strategic changes to habits and behaviors to improve things like cognitive function and weight management.”5 This ranges from micro-dosing psilocybin to drinking electrolytes.

Workhacking, on the other hand, is what I define as “making intentional changes to work environments and daily behaviors to maximize productivity and health.” Workhacking is both behavioral and environmental—what you do and where you are (mentally and physically). Like biohacking, it relies on small, strategic changes to habits that are grounded in biology and psychology.

Modern work may not be designed for health, but it can be redesigned for it. Here’s how.

Do brain burpees. Reading is seen as an increasingly obsolete skill given large language models’ ability to process and synthesize text faster than is humanly possible. However, the modern brain evolved for reading—just like the modern body evolved for moving. Just because I cannot lift two-thousand pounds and a forklift can doesn’t mean I should stop exercising. As Derek Thompson wrote in a recent post, “if I just let Claude summarize every book for me, I suppose I might be able to cite ten-times more books in my writing. But if I stop reading books, then not only am I decimating my capacity to pay attention to ideas for a long period of time, but also I’m replacing my own taste and judgement.” Think of reading as burpees for your brain, and make sure you get your daily dose of exercise.

Sleep for at least 7 hours. As a previous and sometimes relapsing member of the “I can survive on not that much sleep” camp, I cannot emphasize this enough. If you do not sleep, you are actively handicapping your ability to function. Don’t treat your sleep deprivation as a badge of honor and don’t commend those who do.

Say no to AI “workslop.” In recent months, complaints have grown about a new productivity inhibitor in the workplace: AI-generated “workslop.” Misleading and unnecessary information is already a defining characteristic of the knowledge economy, and it may worsen with the vicious cycle of AI-created outputs that are known as “workslop.” To meet growing work demands, employees are leaning on AI tools to generate outputs faster. This creates an unintended quality control problem where people are being confronted with “workslop,” which increases cognitive load, which pushes them toward speed over quality in their own work. Move away from the vicious cycle and choose quality over speed. If you automate a skill, make sure you’re willing to lose it.

Build walking into your routine. Morning walks, lunch walks, evening walks, dog walks, romantic walks—it doesn’t really matter. There are too many benefits of walking to list here, but it’s one of the best recovery tools for the mind and body. Two ways to build walking into your routine are: 1) park farther away from work, and 2) take phone calls while walking.

Optimize caffeine and food intake. What you eat and drink has a meaningful impact on your ability to function. Caffeine is typically best consumed ~2 hours after waking up and at least ~10 hours before going to sleep, leaving a relatively small window if you’re awake for 16 hours total. While the impacts of certain foods are more subjective, I personally try to limit heavy meals and high carbohydrate intake early in the day.

Find a standing desk and use it. Standing desks have become a staple of the modern office space but are often underused. This is a shame, given a 2015 study found that people burned 10% more calories per hour than those who were sitting while another 2021 study showed perceived improvements in neck and shoulder pain as well as performance for those who used standing desks.67

Do some form of morning activity. Morning activity has two main benefits at work based on my experience: 1) it positively impacts sleep quality, vigor, and focus—which in turn, benefit performance and health, and 2) exercise done in the morning doesn’t require compromises during the workday and/or evening.8 The best routine is the one that you can stick to, and mornings are the least subject to disruption for many.

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Bold ideas to make work healthier

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After 25 years of life and 50 blogs on improving health while working a demanding job, a few things are clear to me. The first of which is that 25 years of life and 50 blogs are by no means enough to figure life out. So, I appreciate everyone for bearing with me while I piece together reality.

Here’s where I’m at right now:

1. Better health means better performance at work. Research shows that, at the company level, strong health predicts strong performance. This is something that we all intuitively understand at the individual level. When we’re well-rested, active, and socially engaged, we perform better at work. However, it is easy to fall victim to the idea that happiness and health will come after work is taken care of. There will be moments where we will need to choose one over the other—extra sleep instead of an extra task. Time at the gym instead of a networking happy hour. The list goes on. Taking care of your health makes you better at taking care of your work, and the same certainly cannot be said for the other way around.

2. Get the everyday things right. Nearly half of our daily behaviors are habitual1. This, combined with the fact that we spend at least two-thirds of our day in highly structured and routinized activities (work and sleep), means that we tend to do the same few things over and over again. This makes getting the little things right all the more important. Find a healthy breakfast that you love but doesn’t weigh you down. Resolve to go to bed at a consistent time. Build walking into your daily commute. Then, when life happens, and you find yourself eating Panda Express in the airport at 11pm, it’s not adding insult to injury. This builds room for the “fun” things in moderation. However, things done in moderation consistently aren’t actually being done in moderation. Half a cookie, while not enough to cause a major setback, eaten after every dinner is a deceptive way to impede progress.

3. Optimizing usually helps, but not always. Most people, especially early on in a journey, could do with a healthy dose of optimization. For example, dialing in your morning routine with a plethora of Huberman Lab protocols is likely to make you feel better and get more done. However, optimizing can do as much bad as good. “A focus on improving the self usually first requires finding problems with the self,” says Tim Ferriss in a recent blog post. “In a society that rewards problem-solving, you can end up hallucinating or exaggerating unease in order to fix it. This leaves you always in the red, always one step behind.” Living a healthier life is a worthwhile investment, but not at the expense of everything else. More on that next.

4. Improving health should be a sacrifice, not a travesty. An idea often attributed to moral philosopher Brian Witte is the fundamental difference between a sacrifice and a travesty. Sacrifices are when we trade lower-order values for higher-order values, and travesties are the opposite. For example, it’s a sacrifice for many when they give up money to spend more time with family, but it’s a travesty if they give up extensive time with family for money. We’re often made to believe that prioritizing health is a travesty. You can sleep when you’re dead. Just one more drink. Live a little! There are bigger things at stake here, we’re told. That may be true. However, investing in health is fundamental to living the life we want. Make that investment a sacrifice, not a travesty.

5. Sleep should be high-status. Don’t let others lure you into the “badge of honor” sleep deprivation camp. Humans are extremely adaptable to sleep deprivation, but just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. We should celebrate sleep as a culture and stop normalizing its blatant disregard. Just look to any self-reported survey data and you’ll find that people, especially those who are hard-driving and ambitious, are very slow to report cognitive impairment. When that same person brags about their ability to “run on just a few hours of sleep,” simply call out that two weeks of six hours of sleep per night is nearly equivalent to one night of total sleep deprivation.

   

6. Create environments that are conducive to starting again. One guarantee is that you’ll need to restart. In training, writing, working, relationships. There will always be restarts, both between and within activities. Create situations where beginning again is the default behavior. Invest in friendships where the response is “what now?” not “what a shame.” Give yourself credit for showing up every day, but don’t give yourself another option. Ask your partner for the chance to begin again when it’s obvious you weren’t showing up at your best. Avoid negotiating with yourself. But when you inevitably do, stack the cards in your favor.

7. Embrace uncomfortable things. As one Substack writer so perceptively put it, “every time you avoid something uncomfortable, your brain reinforces the idea that avoidance works. It literally strengthens the pathways that make hesitation, procrastination, or excuses automatic. And every time you do the hard thing — even imperfectly — your brain is building a new pathway: this is something I can do.” Doing hard things isn’t idolizing masochism or celebrating a life-sized marshmallow test for delaying gratification. We’re supposed to do hard things. If you’re in the camp that believes suffering is inevitable (which I am), then you have two choices: (1) hope for less suffering, or (2) get better at dealing with it. Go with the latter.

8. It’s not really about what you do in the gym on any given day. Exercise is obviously an important part of living better for longer, but at the end of the day, it comes down to how you orient yourself toward the problem. Do you think health is a problem for later? Do you think you could be doing a better job but things are fine? Do you let the problem remain vague and therefore too daunting to solve? Or, do you decide to see the problem for what it is: the constant, boring, and unsexy decision to prioritize your health as a means for living the life you want, acknowledging that this will only happen one step at a time.

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I often get asked which books I would recommend for learning more about health. In fact, I get this question almost as often as I offer unsolicited book recommendations.

There’s an almost unconsumable amount of information in the world providing strategies and tactics for improving health—and some of it is useful. While I would never position myself as the foremost authority on the credibility or quality of books, I can say which ones I found most helpful. But before I offer that list, I’d be remiss not to share my thoughts on the value that I find in reading itself as a tactic for improving health.

Reading helps me sleep. A study by the American Society of Sleep Medicine found that nearly 90% of Americans sleep with their phones in the bedroom1. This is concerning given the well-documented negative impacts of phone use and blue light on sleep. For example, a large study by the American Cancer Society found that, compared with no screen use, screen use prior to bed was associated with a 33% higher prevalence of poor sleep quality and fewer minutes of sleep on workdays2. Reading each night before bed replaces the phone-before-bed habit, helping me fall asleep faster and sleep better.

Reading improves my mental health. There’s a simple heuristic I use when evaluating how I spend my time: Do I feel better, worse, or indifferent after an activity? Following most leisure activities like social media use, television, or scrolling through news articles, I find myself feeling worse or indifferent—especially after social media use. Anger, animosity, and apprehension drive clicks. Timeless wisdom, insight, and moving stories sell books.

Reading makes me a better employee. As Sahil Bloom notes in his book Five Types of Wealth, our activities at work can be divided into cultivation, ideation, creation, management. Often at work, I am starved of time for cultivation (learning new things) and ideation (coming up with new solutions). I find that both are positively impacted by reading—no matter the topic of the book.

Reading—not what you read—is what matters. When I began reading more often, I was set on finding the “right books” so I could learn everything I needed to know. I quickly realized the futility of that task. If you continue to read, no matter the book, you’ll read the right lesson when you need it. Hopefully these books give you a place to start, but they are by no means the “right books” for a better life.

What these books have in common is that each has changed the way I think about performing well at work while improving my health.

Built to Move

For healthy daily habits

A practical guide to maintaining mobility and physical function over time.

Meditations for Mortals

My favorite book of 2025

A reflection on time, limitation, and modern productivity culture. The book encourages imperfectionism rather than constant optimization.

When Breath Becomes Air

For finding life in the process of death

A posthumously published memoir by neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi, chronicling his journey from a promising doctor to a patient with terminal lung cancer.

The 5 Types of Wealth

For shaping a career

A framework for understanding wealth beyond money, including time, health, relationships, and purpose.

The Comfort Crisis

My favorite book of 2023

An examination of modern comfort and its unintended consequences.

The Happiness Files

For a short morning read

An exploration of happiness using research, philosophy, and personal stories from Arthur Brooks’ column “How to Build a Life” in the Atlantic.

Stolen Focus

For attention and what’s impacting it

An investigation into structural and environmental causes of distraction in the modern world.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants

For approachable anatomy and physiology

A comprehensive tour of human anatomy, physiology, and medicine for a general audience, blending science, history, and storytelling to answer many of the “why does my body do…?” questions that we face every day.

The Psychology of Money

For finance and human behavior

An examination of how emotions and behavior shape our everyday decisions about money, with consistent parallels to health.

The Daily Stoic

To start or end the day with

A daily meditation book based on Stoic philosophy with practical everyday implications.

Four Thousand Weeks

For confronting time and our limitations as humans

A perspective-altering read, for anyone, at any point in their life, that encourages reflection on time, productivity, and human limitation as a way to embrace finitude and reframe how people relate to their cosmically insignificant lives.

Good Energy

For mitochondria and metabolic health

A discussion of metabolic health and its relationship to chronic disease with tactical ways to measure and manage our energy at the cellular level.

Blind Spots

For the healthcare system

An examination of common medical errors and institutional overconfidence.

Stillness Is the Key

For slowing down in a world of chaos

A philosophical look at calm, restraint, and reflection across history, drawing on Stoicism, Buddhism, and modern psychology.

Why We Sleep

For sleep

A seminal text on sleep and its effects on health and cognition. If you think sleep is something you’ll do when you’re dead, this is a good one for you.

What Is Health?

For scientifically understanding health

An approachable scientific and theoretical explanation of health as adaptive regulation rather than constant balance.

Outlive

For tools to improve quality of life

A medical and lifestyle approach to extending healthspan. The book emphasizes prevention, risk reduction, and long-term planning as improving quality of life.

Note: The author was recently included in the “Epstein files” and is facing severe scrutiny. While the ideas in this book are immensely valuable for living a longer and healthier life, the actions of its author are indefensible.

Deep Work

For daily working habits

An argument for sustained, distraction-free concentration in an increasingly fragmented world.

From Strength to Strength

For understanding happiness and how to be happier

An examination of how success and fulfillment evolve across life stages—based on the transition from fluid to crystallized intelligence, where author Arthur Brooks coins the three “macronutrients” of happiness.

The Antidote

For a unique path to happiness

A perfectly curmudgeonly exploration of happiness through the lens of negativity and uncertainty by Oliver Burkeman.

Die with Zero

For finding fulfillment

A perspective on using money as a tool to maximize fulfillment by using health, wealth, and time across life stages to get the most out of life.

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In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy proclaimed the latest malady plaguing people across the country—the loneliness epidemic. In recent years, nearly half of U.S. adults reported experiencing loneliness, and there is evidence to support that other countries are experiencing the issue as well1. It doesn’t take much reflection on Americans’ time use to come up with the reasons why people are lonelier now than they have ever been. In 2024, the average American spent approximately two-and-a-half hours per day watching TV compared to approximately half an hour of socializing2. The good news is that there’s a relatively simple solution to reducing loneliness: eating meals together. The bad news is that we are doing this less than we ever have before.

As of 2023, approximately 1 in 4 Americans reported eating all of their meals alone the previous day—an increase of 53% since 20033. According to Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, an author of the World Happiness Report, which includes a chapter titled, “Sharing meals with others: How sharing meals supports happiness and social connections,” smartphones and social media are exacerbating the problem, but there isn’t a single cause4. The ubiquity of solo dining options (e.g., meal delivery, fast casual dining) and the rising share of people living alone (nearly 30% compared to ~8% in 1940) are additional factors isolating individuals at mealtime5. This is problematic not because eating alone clearly causes health problems. Rather, eating meals alone is leaving improved well-being on the table (no pun intended).

The 2025 World Happiness Report highlights the following links between shared meals and well-being

1. Meal sharing is a strong predictor of subjective well-being. Across 142 countries, individuals who share more meals report significantly higher life evaluations, higher positive affect, and lower negative affect.

2. The positive relationship is nearly dose-dependent. Life evaluations rise steadily with each additional shared meal per week. Individuals who shared zero meals reported the lowest average life evaluations with the score steadily rising for each meal shared until nearly every meal in a given week was eaten with others.

   

   Figure 1: Life evaluations by number of meals shared per week, 2025 World Happiness Report

3. Shared meals outperform income and unemployment as indicators of well-being. Regression analyses show that the number of meals shared explains more variation in life evaluations and positive affect than income quintile or unemployment status.

4. The benefits of shared meals are strongest for young people. While shared meals are associated with higher well-being at all ages, the relationship is strongest for ages 16–24.

5. Food enjoyment increases measurably with shared meals.
   Respondents who shared more meals reported higher enjoyment of both cooking and eating, suggesting shared meals enhance not just life evaluation, but everyday experience.

Eating together—what anthropologists call commensality—has long been understood as a foundational human practice. Research on hunter-gatherer societies shows that food sharing and communal meals were central to survival, cooperation, and social cohesion6. Anthropologist Claude Fischler argues that commensality functions as a “social glue,” signaling trust, belonging, and mutual obligation across cultures, while eating alone often marks social marginality7 . There’s also evidence to support the claim, “families that eat together stay together,” as families that eat together report stronger emotional bonds8 . Beyond scientific research, linguistic evidence provides further reinforcement: the English word companion, the French copain, and the Italian compagno all derive from the Latin cum panis—“with bread”—underscoring how deeply shared eating is embedded in the very language we use to describe closeness.

As the world drifts farther apart, perhaps it’s time to come together at the table—one meal at a time.

Stepwise strategies

Here are five simple ways to eat together more often

• With family: Time spent with family after the age of 20 declines drastically. Even if it’s a video call and takeout dinner once a week, find time to share meals with your family—it’s later than you think.

  

• With coworkers: As De Neve has also found in his workplace well-being research, workers quit not because of leadership alone, but because they lack a sense of belonging with their teams9. In other words, friendships at work are critical to longevity and performance. Find time away from the desk to build meaningful connections with coworkers—it will pay dividends later on.

• With friends: Eating with friends is the perfect excuse to bring people together and strengthen relationships10. This sounds pretty wishy-washy, I’ll admit. However, as work and life place greater demands on our time and socializing is a less structured part of our days, it’s important to not let the muscle of socializing with friends atrophy.

• With partners: In couples, more shared meals were associated with higher similarity and relationship satisfaction11. Aim to protect shared meals with your partner when possible.

• Without technology: Eating while distracted (e.g., using screens or devices) is associated with lower food enjoyment and reduced awareness of the meal experience12. Try eating with your phone in a separate room or out of reach.

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Note: This newsletter reflects my views—not the views of the McKinsey Health Institute

I started writing Stepwise Health because I was disheartened to see people, including myself, trade their health for performance under the assumption that only one was possible. But that wasn’t the sole reason. I had also spent a large share of my career doing work that was exciting and challenging but not deeply meaningful to me. So, I began writing about what I did find meaningful: helping people live healthier lives.

With a healthy dose of persistence, those two paths eventually converged. Recently, I had the opportunity to contribute to McKinsey Health Institute’s new report From potential to practical: Fueling performance with proven workplace health interventions. The publication and interactive tool analyze more than 100 workplace health interventions (any intentional workplace action designed to influence employee health, well-being, or related outcomes) and break down what actually makes them work. The research gives employers the evidence and a practical path for getting started. But what about you? What does this mean for the striving individual who wants to be happy, healthy, and good at their job? In short, it gives you practical ways to blend health with how you work.

There are thousands of ways to improve health. The abundance of options paired with the scarcity of time creates a precarious situation, especially when most advice recommends adding more—more workouts, more sleep, more supplements, more time with friends and so on. All of this and a demanding job begins to feel totally unreasonable.

It is unreasonable.

Part of why the narrative that one cannot be healthy and high-performing at work persists is that these two aspects of life are seen as entirely mutually exclusive. Prioritizing health is viewed as something that is done outside of work. However, this does not necessarily need to be the case. Work itself can be medicine. There are things that we can do, for ourselves and for others, to make work a place that is conducive, not detrimental, to living a healthier life.

In assessing more than 100 workplace interventions, it became evident that a few commonalities exist between the “no-regret” moves. As the authors write, “The strongest approaches fit naturally into daily work, are easy to adopt, and drive measurable outcomes across multiple health dimensions.” This mirrors the four laws of behavior change popularized by James Clear: make it obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.

1. Fit naturally into daily work (make it obvious): Most attempts to make work healthier share a common pitfall: they do not fit naturally into daily work. Sure, a yoga class or a mindfulness and meditation app may be helpful, but these are appendages and further separate time spent working from time spent living a healthier life. A more effective approach is to change the default way work happens. These don’t have to be major changes. Raise your standing desk every time you get up—and leave it up as long as you can. Make certain meetings walking meetings by default. Decide what you’ll eat for lunch ahead of time and put it on your calendar. These are small changes, but they reframe health as part of how you work, not something you squeeze in around it.

2. Are easy to adopt (make it easy): I enjoy cold plunging. Well, I enjoy how I feel after cold plunging. I feel awake, alert, and energized. Who wouldn’t want this for their workforce? There’s just one issue: my corporate office is not going to install a cold plunge for me, and yours probably won’t either. The same goes for specialist-led programs. They may be effective, but we can’t rely on constant access to health specialists at work. The most durable interventions are low-friction: healthy food options in the kitchen, flexible schedules that protect time for deep work, and cultures that value thinking and recovery over constant busyness. If something requires heroic effort or perfect conditions, it probably won’t last.

3. Drive measurable outcomes (make it attractive): It’s reasonable to wonder why an employer should care about their employees’ health beyond the obvious humanitarian reasons. However, McKinsey Health Institute research shows that improving employee health can unlock up to $11.7 trillion in economic opportunity globally, largely driven by reductions in presenteeism (i.e., being at work when you shouldn’t be) and productivity. This is over $3,000 per employee. Just as employers need this justification to devote their energy and resources to the health of employees, individuals need the same. This is where simple forms of measurement and gamification help—tracking steps, sleep, focused work blocks, or meeting-free days. This helps link desired behaviors to outcomes people can actually feel and see.

4. Target multiple health dimensions (make it satisfying): Deciding how to spend the already limited time we have on our health creates sometimes painful tradeoffs. Go to the gym or hang out with friends? Eat a healthy dinner or get something quick and finish your work earlier? Luckily, this analysis finds that the most effective interventions target multiple dimensions simultaneously. This makes “two-fers,” “three-fers,” and similar combinations especially valuable. Going on a walk? Bring a co-worker (physical and social health). Going on a walk with a co-worker? Do it outside (physical, social, and mental health). Just because work and health are presented as mutually exclusive doesn’t mean our approach should reflect that.

The average person spends a third of their life at work; yet for many, work does not promote good health.1 It’s time for an intervention. Living better for longer is not about how healthy we can be outside of work—it’s about blending health with how we work.

Stepwise Strategies

Some of my favorite interventions from the database include:

• Group-based active rest breaks: Short, ten-minute group exercise sessions, three to four times per week for ten weeks; designed to improve coworker relationships and boost physical activity

• Outdoor booster breaks: Ten-minute daily outdoor break in nature to reduce employee stress and boost well-being

• Office lighting for well-being: Colored temperature office lighting for employees to enhance well-being, alertness, concentration, and overall work performance

• Daily journaling for stress reduction: Short journaling sessions that give employees a chance to express their emotions in writing, helping reduce distress and improve job satisfaction

• Doing work for others: Opportunity for employees to engage in tasks that benefit others rather than just themselves, increasing the meaningfulness of work and improving well-being

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Last year, I wrote about Rethinking Resolutions in light of two facts: most people want to be healthy, and most people don’t make it past the month of January on the health goals they set. Based on these facts, I wrote about the importance of setting identity-based resolutions as opposed to goal-based resolutions. This year, I’m revisiting resolutions to further refine how to live a healthier life in the new year.

While researching this newsletter, I came across an article with 60 ideas for New Year’s resolutions. Some of my favorites were:

• Wear sunscreen

• Get a real haircut

• Go to bed happy each night

I think these are the three insights I’ve been searching for. If I can manage to do these three things in the new year, I’ll finally have this pesky thing called “life” figured out.

Bad jokes aside, resolutions like these capture what’s wrong with how many people approach their “New Year, new me” aspirations. The intent is positive, but the execution is often poor. Resolutions tend to be vague, poorly incentivized, and layered onto an already complex life.

If you want to live better for longer this year, it may be worth revisiting how you think about resolutions altogether. Specifically, it helps to rethink timeframes, incentives, and simplicity.

Make your timeframe useful. One year is an ineffective timeframe for behavior change. A common reason that resolutions fail is that “life gets in the way.” While this is inevitable, it’s much easier to plan for and control the extent to which life gets in the way when your goals align with the rest of your schedule. This year, instead of setting a one-year resolution, set a 90-day resolution. This is enough time to make meaningful progress but short enough to instill urgency. To ensure that this doesn’t just result in a 90-day sprint to a better life, pre-schedule time to reflect on your progress and set your next 90-day goal.

Set legitimate incentives. Most goal-setting advice will prescribe the SMART framework. I think this is generally helpful, especially if your problem is setting goals which are too vague or ambitious to achieve, but I think what most people realistically need is to set a goal that is a must-have rather than a nice-to-have. In other words, we’re often not incentivized to achieve our resolutions. Progress requires consequences. That doesn’t mean punishment for punishment’s sake, but it does mean making failure meaningfully uncomfortable. For example, if your budget for eating out in a month is $500, then your resolution should not just be to stay under this limit. One solution could be: If you exceed the limit, you are then restricted to $100 the next month. Not achieving your goal should hurt.

Simplify your life. It only takes a few episodes of The Huberman Lab to quickly find yourself swimming in the sea of potential protocols to optimize your health. While many are effective, they rarely aim to simplify our lives, especially when implemented together. Complexity arises from too many moving parts. Exercising becomes more complex when you’re traveling: Where will you work out? What equipment is available? When will you fit it in? Each variable increases friction. What if your goal this year is to get in shape? Well, that goal is quite complex—lots of moving parts. For example, your gym membership which is based on where you live, where you work, and what you’re willing to pay. “Go to the gym every weekday” is simpler—but still not quite there. Anxiety lives in the vague, not the specific. The closer you get to forming an identity as opposed to a goal, the simpler decisions become. What if I am the type of person who goes to the gym? That just simplified my life. Get home from work late and want to stay up watching a new TV show? Simple decision. Don’t want to get out of the warm bed on a cold winter morning? Simple decision. Your resolution should simplify your life by solving many small problems at once.

People want to live healthier lives, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy task. This year, consider revisiting your resolutions by making your timeframe useful, your incentives strong, and your life simpler.

Stepwise Strategies

And if you’re still not sold on identity-based resolutions and want tactical ideas, here are some “habits that have a high rate of return on life” courtesy of James Clear. That said, these are the types of decisions that someone who wants to be happy, healthy, and high-performing would make.

• sleeping 8+ hours each day

• lifting weights 3x week

• going for a walk each day

• saving at least 10 percent of your income

• reading every day

• drinking more water and less of everything else

• leaving your phone in another room while you work

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Living better for longer is a lofty yet resonant ambition—and it isn’t just about unclogging your arteries or building strength and cardiovascular fitness. Some would actually argue that these are the minor aspects of a life well lived. Rather, in this argument, meaning and purpose overshadow any biomarker when it comes to predicting the quality of one’s life.

This is why a modern understanding of health is important—one that incorporates physical, mental, social, and spiritual health. The former three are commonly talked about and only moderately divisive. However, spiritual health is often relegated to a point of small-group discussion at best. This makes sense. To my knowledge, no wars have been fought over the optimal diet—no matter how dogmatic internet threads get. The same cannot be said for spirituality.

So here’s my attempt at distilling the spiritual side of health into something that hopefully resonates and that ideally avoids any conflicts. And if it doesn’t, well, at least you’re thinking about it more than you were before.

The McKinsey Health Institute (MHI) defines spiritual health as having meaning in one’s life, connection to something larger than oneself, and a sense of purpose. Spiritual health takes different meanings and forms across cultures and is often, but not always, associated with someone’s religious practice. For example, Pew research found that almost a third of US respondents say they are atheist, agnostic, or list “nothing in particular”. Almost half of these respondents said their reasons relate to disliking religious organizations, and a third gave a reason related to negative experiences with those who described themselves as religious. Yet within this group, almost half said spirituality is important or that they considered themselves spiritual.1

The variation in spiritual experiences is an inevitable product of its nature. It isn’t the type of thing that science can provide all the answers to. But this doesn’t mean the search should be or will be called off. Humans are meaning-making machines. More than any other species, humans have the innate urge to question why we are here beyond the sole purpose of survival and reproduction.

The trouble is, the answers to looming questions of meaning and purpose are highly variable and most likely unanswerable in a way that’s meaningful to everyone. In other words, spirituality is an individual experience that requires an active search for answers but an acknowledgement that a satisfactory conclusion may never be reached.

This creates what I would call the “explanatory gap.” We want to know why things are the way they are, why we were put onto this earth, and what we’re here to do, yet most people inherently don’t have the answer to those questions.

This “gap” is a function of the difference between the internal explanations and external explanations of the world around us. This means that the explanatory gap will vary greatly both between individuals and within a given individual over time. As meaning-making machines, we’re constantly looking to close this gap. Because if we could, then we’d finally understand the looming questions.

There are a few ways people try to close this gap. One way is by compiling fully internal explanations of the world around us. An internal locus of control, as it’s called in psychological circles, is the belief that outcomes in your life are primarily shaped by your own actions, choices, and effort rather than by external forces like luck, fate, or other people.2 However, an extreme internal locus of control entails internalizing the explanation for everything that happens to you. It’s the feeling that you have full and complete control of the sliver of the world in which you operate.

Another way to close the gap is by entirely externalizing explanations for the events in our lives. Learned helplessness, as identified by Martin Seligman in the 1960s, is a psychological state in which repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative events leads a person to believe their actions no longer matter.3 Today, this manifests in what’s commonly called the “victim mentality.” By fully externalizing explanations, people lose any sense of control and languish in defeat.

These approaches push internal and external explanations of the world around us to the extreme.

There is, of course, another way this can be approached. This entails being at peace with never conclusively closing the explanatory gap but rather making room for it to be filled with something larger than ourselves. Put another way, there isn’t a stable equilibrium to be found between the stories that we tell ourselves for why things happen and the broader macro-level explanations for those things. Instead, there’s a third, ever-flexible variable to fill the space: spirituality.

In society, it’s common to see someone turn to religion or some other form of spirituality in the wake of tragedy. In these moments, the event can feel so extreme that no internal or external explanation for “why things are the way they are” is sufficient. You can blame yourself for what has happened and take all the responsibility or you can say that you have the worst luck, but neither sufficiently explains the uncertainty and lack of control that are inherent to the lives we live. It’s only upon releasing the need to close the gap that you can open up to spirituality in a meaningful way.

Opening yourself up to something “bigger than yourself” does not require adopting a specific faith, religion, or spiritual practice. Rainn Wilson, the actor who many know from his time as Dwight Schrute on The Office, argues that spirituality is not a belief but rather something we do. It’s an active practice of connection, presence, and service—regardless of your chosen religion or lack thereof.

In that spirit, there are a few things we can do to improve our spiritual health. However, much like any other area in life, spiritual health is a pursuit, not a destination. Therefore, we should be wary of feeling like we’ve ever arrived at a state of pure spirituality.

1. Use things, love people, worship the divine. In his book From Strength to Strength, Arthur Brooks argues that happiness comes from properly ordering these priorities in our lives. For example: loving things, worshiping people, and using (or neglecting) the divine is a recipe for disaster. Notice this isn’t necessarily about a God. To worship the divine is instead a practice of transcendence, recognizing that something larger than yourself is out there.

2. Release your grip on life. In The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts writes about his appreciation for the law of reverse effort—and idea often attributed to Aldous Huxley’s quote,

   "The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing.”

   The harder we try to sink, the more we float, and the harder we try to float, the more we sink. The same goes for getting a grip on life—for closing the explanatory gap. The harder we try to control the various aspects of life, the sooner and more acutely we feel this paradox arise. It’s only once we admit that we are not the director of this whole production, but an actor who can influence our decisions, reactions, and the way we move through life, that releasing control can feel the most liberating.

3. Treat prayer (meditation, reflection, journaling, worship, etc.) as a practice. I think one of the troublesome things about spirituality is that some people feel they are “not the spiritual type” of person. Well, the good news is that very few people we admire are that “type” of person either. They practiced to become that way. One does not wake up spiritual the same way one does not wake up a basketball player. These sorts of things take practice. As someone who is still practicing this, and who continuously needs to restart, I can say that the way you practice doesn’t necessarily matter, but there are ways to set yourself up for success. Just as you’re better off practicing basketball on a basketball court, you’re probably going to have the best luck being introspective in a quiet place with very little distraction.

   ---

Trying to close the explanatory gap of life through internal and external extremes leaves no room for mystery. But keeping it open gives you the flexibility to navigate life with humility, presence, and meaning—even when the answers are incomplete.

That openness may take shape through religion, meditation, nature, art, community, stillness, silence, etc. Spiritual health isn’t a particular form or something you “achieve.” It’s something you make room for. And often, the moment you stop trying to close the gap is the moment something larger steps in.

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Previously, I’ve written about the social science of health—the psychology and economics that explain how people behave and why that matters if we want to live better for longer. But behavior and biology alone do not tell the full story. Beneath every choice lies a set of structural constraints that govern how systems interact and shape our health outcomes. These principles often relate to how energy and matter behave and the patterns and relationships that emerge from them. Together, they begin to reveal a hidden architecture of health—how energy transfers, how systems interact, and how change actually happens.

A helpful, yet imperfect, analogy is driving a car. The car, with its frame and interdependent parts and processes, represents our anatomy and physiology—the foundational components that we cannot live without. The driver represents the social science of health. Understanding and predicting how people act in certain situations is critical to navigating the road safely and effectively. The principles mentioned above are the laws that shape what actually happens based on the car and the driver. For example, inheriting a high-performing car and understanding the lane you’re supposed to drive in is a great starting place. However, turning a corner at 100 mph totally neglects the laws that govern the system, and you’ll likely pay the price for this. Knowledge and awareness of all these pieces are going to make for a safer, smoother and more enjoyable ride.

The first law of thermodynamics explains that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. Every process in the body runs on energy being transferred from one form to another. Health, at the most basic level, is an ongoing energy ledger: what we take in, what we use, and what we store. When the ledger doesn’t balance, the leftover energy doesn’t disappear—it sticks with us.

Entropy is the idea that everything drifts toward disorder unless energy is put in to maintain order. We tend to treat it more like a metaphor than a law, but it has real consequences for our health. As one paper on entropy and human aging puts it: “health means that the body is in a highly ordered low-entropy state, whereas disease implies that the structures and functions of an organism fall into disordered or high-entropy states.”1 In other words, the difference between a healthy cell and a diseased one is often just the difference between order and disorder.

The implication is surprisingly practical: without investment, chaos ensues—especially in today’s environment. The way we “pay” is through ongoing repair by moving, sleeping, eating a nutritious diet, and spending time with others. These actions create the order the body needs to push back against the natural tendency toward breakdown.

Allostasis explains why the body isn’t designed to stay the same. Peter Sterling argues that homeostasis, the idea of fixed set points we often hear in school, is the wrong model for understanding health2. Living systems don’t hold variables constant—they predict and adjust physiology in advance based on what they expect will happen next. Some examples of this include heart rate rising before you move, hormones shifting before you wake up, and appetite changing based on time and place. According to this model, a healthy system is one that can shift smoothly and efficiently across changing demands.

Sterling’s deeper point is that these predictive systems work only when core human needs are supported—autonomy, connection, purpose, rest, and the chance to move and explore. When those needs are chronically frustrated, the body is forced into constant high-cost prediction. That physiological frustration builds into what he refers to as allostatic load: the strain that develops when the system keeps adjusting without enough margin to recover. By this view, health is about maintaining enough capacity, through meeting core human needs, to continue adapting to the challenges we face.

Second-order effects are perhaps the most important effects to consider when choosing how to spend our time, but they’re often overlooked given the proximity to the here and now. In any system, inputs create ripples of consequence beyond the immediate result. For example, turning on the air conditioning in your car immediately impacts temperature but secondarily reduces fuel efficiency. As it pertains to our health, the actions we take every day have second-order effects on our health and the lives of others. For example, going to the gym has the obvious benefit of improving your physical fitness and mood that day. But we often overlook how that improvement in mood makes us better employees, friends, and partners. And what about the second-order effects of that? It’s easy to imagine how rapidly single actions can lead to very meaningful change.

Put simply: energy has to go somewhere, order requires upkeep, systems survive by adapting, and single actions spread beyond immediate outcomes. These aren’t exactly intended to be motivational phrases. They’re the principles that govern our daily lives whether we like it or not. When we understand these principles, we start to uncover why things happen, making the path toward a healthier life much clearer.

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Every year around the middle of November, I’m struck by the thought that the next 6 weeks will have a negative impact on my health, and that if I haven’t already exceeded my health-related goals for the year, then they’re as good as missed. Because from now until a burst of motivational energy on January 1st, my days will be filled with holiday parties, seasonal desserts and broken routines that all culminate in the yearning for a fresh start when the new year rolls around.

I love the festivities, food and fun-filled time with family that accompanies the holiday season. But I’ve been wondering whether sacrificing our health is necessarily required to enjoy the holiday season. I think it’s possible we can be both happy and healthy during the holidays - we just need to be deliberate in our approach.

To understand how to have a healthier holiday season, it’s worth investigating the biggest challenges presented during this time. These boil down to ransacked routines, irregular environments, and the relegation of health-related goals until a later time.

• Ransacked routines: Holidays bring with them all sorts of out-of-the-ordinary activities that make it the most wonderful time of the year. Late night parties with coworkers and friends, early morning gift-giving and traditions and often extended travel to see loved ones across the world. While this creates perfect conditions for celebrating with those closest to us, it disrupts the daily structure that underlies many of our healthy habits, making it challenging to maintain routines and necessary to acknowledge disruptions as they are and prioritize our health anyway.

• Irregular environment: It’s unlikely that any of us is waking up each day to our favorite pastries, dishes and desserts, but this is often the status quo during the holidays. And unless you’re still in college or acting as such, you’re rarely met with the daily social opportunity to drink alcohol in your free time. Our regular environments are generally quite boring. But during the holiday season, it’s as if we’re a 9-year-old whose only special treat has ever been veggie straws and we just wandered into the M&M store - tasting and trying everything we can get our hands on until we’re relegated to the couch with a stomach ache.

• Relegation of health-related goals: There’s a notion from sports of “throwing in the towel” when it’s clear that the game in question cannot be won. While no reasonable coach would support this tactic, it’s a natural tendency to accept losses and refocus our energy on the next task that could benefit us in the future. The trouble is that “throwing in the towel” on our health at the end of the year guarantees that we lose this game and start a few scores behind in the next one. I don’t mean to say that a masochistic approach to the holidays is in order, but it’s worth pointing out that relegating our health to be next year’s problem makes it a more difficult problem to solve.

So, how do we lead healthier lives this holiday season? Here are 5 ways to not only “hit the ground running” in the new year but to already be off to the races.

1. Determine your routine non-negotiables. You are going to be disrupted and there will be days where your routine probably should break. Ask yourself, what are the healthy parts of everyday life that need to be maintained no matter what? For me, these non-negotiables are exercise, writing, and walking outside.

2. Build activity into the time with family and friends. The Wall Street Journal recently posted an article titled, “This Year’s Thanksgiving Surprise. Half of the Guests Are Stoned.” The piece highlights how the “cousin walk” is a tactic many use to indulge in their favorite cannabis-based products. However, such built-in activities don’t need to be limited to pot smoking with family members—post-meal walks, backyard games, and group exercise are great ways to spend time together while improving health.

3. Choose the mealtime must-haves and the can-live-withouts. There’s a practical use case for Pareto’s 80/20 principle when it comes to holiday foods. It’s likely that at least 80% of our satisfaction (if such a metric is possible to quantify) comes from 20% of what we eat and drink. Choose your must-haves and go crazy, but stay away from the can-live-withouts when possible.

4. Commit to a New Year’s resolution early. There’s no formal rule that your goals and progress against your goals need to wait for the arbitrary launch date on January 1st. Setting your goals early can be one way to directly address the relegation of your health until the new year.

5. Find someone willing to take on the challenge with you. Having someone to hold you accountable and for whom you can do the same makes all the difference in sustainably overcoming the challenges to our health that are presented during the holidays.

Living healthier this holiday season isn’t about perfect behavior or cutting out all the things that bring us joy. You should have your favorite meals and desserts, you will miss workouts and your step goals sometimes, and you may have days where it feels like it’s time to throw in the towel and try again next year. But we’re not trying to be perfectly healthy, and I’m not sure such a thing even exists. We’re trying to be healthier. So this holiday season, just focus on doing the next right thing to prioritize your health. Because in reality, the only way to live healthier this holiday season is to do so one step at a time.

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