Behaviors

Avoid working in environments with loud, ongoing air conditioner, heater, fan, or ventilation noise because it impairs cognition, increases fatigue/stress, and may damage the auditory system long-term.

Do not position your computer facing the door; face the wall instead to reduce interruption-driven distraction.

For any habit you want to adopt or re-adopt, mentally rehearse the exact sequence of steps required from start to finish; do it once or maybe twice, eyes closed if desired but not required. Also include the 10–15 minutes before the habit and the immediate events or feelings after it.

Put the habits that require the most activation energy and have the highest limbic friction into the first 0–8 hours after waking.

Once a habit becomes easy and reflexive, vary its time of day somewhat randomly to test and strengthen context independence.

After the initial 21 days, stop deliberate acquisition and assess which habits now occur automatically; do not add new habits until the current set has become reflexive and sustainable.

Immediately after catching yourself doing a bad habit, perform a different adaptive behavior right away to weaken the old habit loop through temporal mismatch. Make the replacement something positive and fairly easy to execute.

Choose play involving dynamic, multidirectional movement rather than strictly linear movement; examples include jumping, angled movement, ducking, leaping, and sports like soccer, provided you do not take them too seriously.

Choose activities that let you adopt different roles within the activity rather than rigidly linear ones, to leverage play for neuroplasticity; chess is given as one example.

Wash hands to reduce spread of germs, especially after higher-risk public exposures such as the grocery store, subway, or public playgrounds where there may be germs, pesticides, or herbicides.

If considering probiotics for a medical issue, consult a physician because the evidence can be difficult for non-scientists to evaluate.

Know whether you have normal blood pressure, pre-hypertension, or hypertension, and use blood pressure as a key metric to guide salt intake, cardiovascular exercise, and other lifestyle changes, especially while adjusting sodium intake for anxiety, dizziness, sports performance, or cognition.

Do not ingest excessive water rapidly; too much water in a short period can be dangerous or fatal.

Develop awareness of your baseline autonomic state when with someone and when they leave, and build the ability to self-soothe and regulate yourself in a partner's temporary or permanent absence rather than relying entirely on their presence for calm.

Before adding or subtracting anything from a supplementation or health regimen, check with your doctor or healthcare provider.

Repeat or recite the information or perform the skill over and over; more repetitions strengthen the relevant neural circuit and improve retention.

If you are not suffering from depression, modulate indoor and outdoor time across the year to allow normal seasonal changes in melatonin duration: generally more outdoor time in spring and summer and more indoor time in winter.

Avoid UVB light from artificial sources between about 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. because even small amounts can disrupt sleep, energy, mood, melatonin, and dopamine-related pathways. If you have depression or low mood, be especially cautious even in the late evening, roughly 8 p.m. to 4 a.m.

Get regular UVB exposure from sunlight to the skin, eyes, and face throughout the year, as safely possible, to support endocrine, mood, energy, immune, pain-relief, wound-healing, and tissue-renewal pathways. Most people should likely get more UVB exposure overall, especially in winter, while avoiding sunburn and eye damage.

Never look directly at sunlight or artificial light that is so bright it is painful to look at.

Do not rely on sunlight exposure through windows or a car windshield because most glass filters out UVB.

If you have retinitis pigmentosa, macular degeneration, glaucoma, or are especially prone to skin cancers, consult your ophthalmologist and dermatologist before increasing UVB exposure from any source.

Instead of testing a true 1RM, do as many reps as possible with a challenging but safe load and use a conversion chart to estimate 1RM.

In addition to glabrous skin cooling, putting cold water on the top of the head and perhaps the neck may also help someone who is overheating.

Practice long-exhale breathing while consciously thinking about slowing your heart rate on the exhale and increasing it on the inhale to train respiratory sinus arrhythmia, strengthen vagal pathways, and build vagal tone. Do this for 1–3 minutes or 1–5 minutes, either occasionally or daily.

Raise core body temperature a bit before stretching to reduce injury risk. If already warm from running, weight training, or other activity, do the stretching session at the end of that workout. Otherwise, do 5–10 minutes of easy cardiovascular exercise or safe calisthenic movements first.

Define end range of motion as the place where you can feel the stretch in the relevant muscle groups, rather than forcing a fixed distance or position. Feel the target muscles as you stretch them, and do not get attached to hitting the same stretch depth every session because range of motion varies day to day. Hold the static stretch at the point where you cannot go much further; later sets may increase range of motion further.

If already taking an SSRI for OCD, add cognitive behavioral therapy to further improve symptoms.

After a focus bout, take at least 10 minutes and ideally up to 30 minutes for deliberate defocus. Let your mental state idle, do automatic or reflexive tasks rather than cognitively demanding ones, avoid focused reading, avoid tight visual focus such as your phone, and use ordinary transitions like walking down the hall or going to the restroom without checking your phone. Daily daydreaming also fits this decompression practice.

If using lithium treatment, monitor blood levels extremely carefully because of toxicity risk, especially during the first three months of treatment.