Behaviors

After reflecting on childhood, put the thoughts outside yourself in writing or speech, discuss them with a trusted other, or see a therapist if needed to process their current effects.

Display photographs or other reminders of people, experiences, and times you liked in your environment. Even without deliberate daily attention, this can cue positive emotional states and bias your unconscious climate toward the positive.

Deliberately counter negativity bias by recalling good things that happened to you, what you did well, what you learned from things that did not go as planned, and the effort you made even when outcomes were imperfect.

Notice what you say to yourself in quiet moments or pauses in the day. Use this to identify repetitive negative, critical, or intrusive internal messages that may be occurring many times a day outside awareness.

Use squats to develop the legs; mentioned as a concrete training behavior and also as an analogy for disciplined self-improvement.

Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper, label one side concern and the other influence, then write down the things occupying your waking hours. Use it especially when sticky thoughts are preventing sleep. Huberman says doing it once a week has been very helpful; Stumpf says he now does it about once a month or once every six months.

Avoid bright electronic device light in a dark room right before bed.

If intrusive thoughts reflect a genuinely unsafe situation, change the situation rather than only working on the thought.

First notice and identify intrusive or repetitive thoughts, including self-talk that may occur hundreds of times a day outside awareness. Then ask what purpose the thought is serving.

Challenge yourself to drive daily total phone usage to under an hour; in their experiment they excluded phone calls. Andy reports getting his down to 30 minutes by the last week of January.

Force social media use onto a laptop instead of a phone because the platform is less sticky and less intuitive there; Andy says he would post what he wanted and then leave.

Huberman cites evidence that adding three 30-minute cardio sessions grows the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, specifically if you hate cardio.

Begin the day as early as possible with some act of discipline, such as making the bed or drinking a 16-ounce glass of water before coffee.

If you know the next day will be busy, meal prep the night before. If breakfast is not ready-to-eat or is complicated, do all the prep work beforehand so a healthy breakfast is easier the next morning.

Try to get a sweat or get as close to sweat as possible once a day; for some people this may just mean getting off the couch and walking around. If you cannot fit in other exercise, Andy suggests sitting in the sauna for 30 minutes as one option.

As he gets older, Andy sees utility in both jujitsu and workouts but not in doing both very hard on the same day because it can overdo fatigue.

When hiking in places like Glacier with grizzlies, hang your food.

Use vaccines to protect against dangerous infections; discussed specifically in the context of childhood vaccination against lethal illnesses such as mumps, measles, and rubella, and also includes adult vaccination examples such as the shingles vaccine.

Use sunscreen to protect DNA from UV radiation; mentioned as one reason to reduce mutation burden from sun exposure.

Consider banking a child's umbilical cord; framed as worthwhile if cost is manageable because stored cord blood stem cells could be useful, especially if a child were to develop childhood leukemia.

After morning light, delayed caffeine, and early exercise, move into a focused learning bout.

Eat the first meal around midday.

If you wake at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., consider that your natural bedtime may be much earlier and shift bedtime earlier.

Use loud music to increase alertness; volume is a universal factor and loud music tends to wake people up.

Use soft music when you do not want as much wakefulness; soft music does not tend to wake people up as much.

Use extreme caution with anything involving stem cells, including reinjecting one's own blood or stem cells, due to risks such as inappropriate differentiation or tumor formation.

Use a mindfulness practice such as eating one almond while focusing all attention on its taste and texture to shift from pursuit/craving into present-moment enjoyment.

Suggested before using dopamine-increasing interventions for low motivation or procrastination.

Leverage top-down expectation to positively impact performance, focus, and working memory, based on the caffeine/Adderall expectancy example.

If concerned about excessively high or low thyroid hormone levels, look up symptoms and talk to a physician.