Behaviors

If you are not accustomed to caffeine or are very sensitive to it, do not use it for the first time on the day of an important mental or physical challenge.

Brief bouts of intense exercise ranging from about 10 to 50 minutes after learning can improve memory for information learned beforehand.

He is not a fan of drinking coffee or espresso right before a nap; prefers restricting caffeine to early day and using naps or NSDR without pre-nap caffeine.

Consume caffeine every other day to maximize many positive effects while reducing tolerance and avoiding the misery of longer abstinence periods.

Leverage caffeine's reinforcing effects to increase preference for desired foods or beverages, and avoid pairing caffeine with things you want to stop craving. If trying to reduce sugar cravings, avoid co-ingesting sugar with caffeine, such as chocolate with caffeine or coffee with pastry, because caffeine further enhances sugar reinforcement.

Use some portion of your income for prosocial spending; giving money to others or causes is associated with significantly greater happiness than personal spending.

Regularly seeing faces, especially in the morning and late afternoon, is described as positively impacting emotional wellbeing.

Brief unstructured interactions with a dog, even an unfamiliar dog, can reduce stress and increase positive affect. If you cannot own a dog, walk foster dogs or neighbors' dogs to gain the wellbeing benefits of interacting with dogs.

Engage in consensual, context-appropriate nonsexual tactile grooming behaviors to promote bonding and wellbeing. Examples include brushing or combing someone's hair, using a lint roller on them, haircuts or hair styling, manicure, pedicure, skincare, or massage. Human-to-animal allogrooming also applies: petting or brushing dogs and cats can increase oxytocin and bonding-related neurochemistry.

Use idle time to reset attentional resources after cognitively demanding effort.

Allow positive mind wandering as a way to reset the brain's ability to focus after demanding cognitive effort.

If a child has obesity, puberty is described as a particularly effective time to reset lifestyle and habits and improve body composition.

Avoid deliberate overeating to gain both muscle and fat; recommended indefinitely across the lifespan, especially during growth and puberty because excess body fat can accelerate puberty and limit height.

For overweight youth, changing body composition should be done under physician supervision; framed as recomposition or renormalization of the growth curve rather than aggressive dieting.

Avoid pure carnivore or very pure vegan diets in teens and early 20s; both were described as likely to significantly decrease free androgens. In the late 20s, these approaches were described as potentially more reasonable.

Recommended for everyone; supports getting outside, sunlight exposure, some natural heat and cold exposure, and moving more regularly.

Suggested as a way for men to better understand symptoms related to men's health and hormones.

Daily or more than once per day masturbation to ejaculation was described as hormonally detrimental due to prolactin increase and suppression of LH/FSH.

A sustainable pattern was described as vigorous exercise around 3 to 4 times per week, plus 3 to 4 additional sessions of less vigorous exercise such as Zone 2 cardio where you can hold a conversation. Vigorous examples included weight training and HIIT.

Use lower-intensity weight training from time to time so it can be done more often and still support collagen hypertrophy in tendons and ligaments, while also training very heavy periodically for lean body mass growth.

Regular vigorous exercise sessions longer than 60 minutes were described as not hormonally helpful.

Very low carbohydrate intake was mentioned as part of the pattern associated with very low free testosterone in overtrained, calorie-deficient individuals doing a lot of vigorous exercise.

Stop the workout before complete exhaustion to preserve energy and vigor for the rest of the day.

Suggested as potentially helping growth hormone release because most growth hormone is released during sleep.

Very tight clothing was mentioned as a lifestyle factor to change in fertility consultations.

Long periods seated on a bike seat, especially with pressure on the perineum, were described as concerning for pelvic floor, continence, and impotence.

Use proper lifting form during heavy leg work and Valsalva-based lifting. If there is weakness or pathology, pelvic floor physical therapy may be needed. Kegels were mentioned as one of many exercises that can help, but not sufficient alone and excessive contraction can be problematic. Casual exercise like walking and stretching can help return blood flow to the area.

Alcohol significantly increases aromatase; recommendation was not more than 3 to 4 standard drinks every two weeks.

General recommendation to eliminate trans fats, except for naturally occurring trans omega-3 fats from grass-fed or finished ruminants.

PSA monitoring was discussed as important, with age-dependent reference ranges and special caution if using finasteride or dutasteride because they can halve PSA.