All protocols

Include some form of jumping in weekly exercise to load the skeleton and likely stimulate osteocalcin-related brain benefits, especially jumping where you control the eccentric or landing portion. Examples include jump rope, high-knees jump rope, double unders, box jumps, and jumping on or off boxes. Progress slowly and safely because eccentric work increases soreness and injury risk. This work can be added at the end of a run, zone 2 day, or HIIT day.

Suggested surface for explosive jumping with eccentric landing.

Use a box for jumping up and down with controlled eccentric landing; start with low boxes and progress slowly.

After about 10 days of no cardiovascular or resistance training, brain oxygenation and other markers begin to decline.

If you have not been exercising, start with a ramp-up or warming phase rather than jumping in aggressively.

If illness, injury, family event, or stress requires a week off, do not obsess; recover and then ramp back up after a couple of days.

At least once per week, do a psychologically and physically safe form of exercise you strongly dislike in order to engage the anterior mid-cingulate cortex and support resilience and super-aging-related brain benefits. Examples given include deliberate cold exposure and rope flow.

Used for rope flow; a thick rope from a hardware store, like a dog-leash-type rope, can work.

Place a hand on your heart during grounding or self-soothing exercises to come back into your body; pair it with compassionate self-talk if helpful.

Use simple sensory orientation such as naming visible objects to reset boundaries and return to the present.

Use this when someone else's upset dysregulates you, to remind your body that activation is not danger.

If your pulse rises above your threshold, stop texting or responding until you calm down; unless there is a true emergency, your response can usually wait.

Create periods of separation from devices to reset your relationship to speed and stimulation.

Use a dedicated physical container, such as a wooden box, to place phones out of reach; creating a separate container acts as a physical barrier and changes your relationship to the phone.

When a task feels impossible, pause, breathe, and come back later if needed rather than abandoning it entirely.

If a task feels impossible, reduce the first step until it feels doable; keep shrinking it until you can start. Examples include reducing writing from article to page to paragraph to sentence to word, saying a difficult word out loud repeatedly as a micro-step, writing down what you want to say before a hard conversation, and practicing the conversation with another person first.

Use hand-on-heart contact as a simple self-regulation practice and pair it with compassionate self-talk such as 'parenting is really hard,' 'I'm doing enough,' and 'I'm not messing up my kid forever.'

A basic telescope is sufficient for beginner stargazing; a $50-$75 telescope can let you see moon craters, Jupiter's moons, and Saturn's rings.

Use/access designated dark sky communities for better stargazing; examples given include Julian, California and Borrego Springs in Anza-Borrego Desert.

Use inexpensive optical filters to block narrow-band outdoor lighting, such as sodium vapor lighting, to improve viewing conditions.

Use a biofeedback game to learn to increase and decrease arousal and eventually control pupil size, which influences arousal and temporal segmentation. A 'poor man version' is to look in the mirror, deliberately ramp up autonomic arousal and watch pupils dilate, then relax and make them smaller.

Practice very intense visualization as part of learning to create stronger physiological and learning states.

Develop triggers that shift your psychology and physiology so intellectual study carries stronger somatic intensity.

Never do cyclic hyperventilation or long exhale-emphasized breathing while in or near water, or while driving, because blowing off CO2 suppresses the gasp reflex and can lead to blackout, drowning, or accidents.

Cultivate awareness of where you are on your performance/creative spectrum and train the art of ramping up and releasing. The ability to turn performance on is directly connected to the ability to turn it off; build this oscillation into both mental work and physical training.

Use the MIQ process to identify and train around the most important question in your work: focus on it at the end of the day, return to it first thing in the morning before any external input, and take brief MIQ breaks throughout the day by breathing and avoiding your phone before resuming the question. Track MIQs over days or weeks and compare early versus later questions to use MIQ gap analysis for deliberate practice.

Take some time to lie completely still, keep the body still, and allow the mind to be as active or calm as it wants; described as mimicking REM sleep in wakefulness.

If you wake from a dream and want to continue it, keep your body completely still.

Avoid checking messages first thing in the morning because it shuts down awareness of what has been happening beneath the surface overnight.

End creative work with something unfinished, such as a half-written sentence, so you retain direction. Then let the work go completely and return to it first thing in the morning, when the unfinished sentence or question may have expanded in your mind overnight.