All the world is full of suffering.
It is also full of overcoming.
– Helen Keller
Latest Newsletter:
May 2024
Oppenheimer
• There aren’t many emails that make me want to immediately open and read; or save for later so I can give it full attention. The “Six at 6” emails from this young writer BIlly Oppenheimer (nothing to do with the movie or the physicist) are just so good.
• This April 28 post looks at the importance of intrinsically loving the work you do, so that if/when you finally get the achievement or award, and that experience passes, you still look back with no regrets on all the time you spent. Matt Damon won his first Academy Award at age 27 for Best Screenplay [Good Will Hunting]).
“He went home, sat down on his sofa, and looked at the award. As he looked at it, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a heartbreaking thought: ‘I remember very clearly looking at that award and thinking, ‘Imagine chasing that, not getting it, and then getting it finally in your 80s or your 90s with all of life behind you and realizing what an unbelievable waste of your life.’”
Relationships
• Interesting article from NPR about how sibling relationships evolve over time. Apparently age 23 is about when sibling rivalry tends to warm up a bit. Strong ties between siblings unsurprisingly impact mental health over time. Thanks for the article, Uncle!
How to Change
• I start wellness presentations with the Derek Sivers quote “If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” We have a decent idea of what behaviors lead to good health, but the hardest part is changing our habits.
• Check out this brief post from Michael Easter on ideas coming from the book Master of Change by Brad Stulberg. Here are my highlights from the article, I use Instapaper to read online articles and save notes because otherwise I will forget them.
“1. Order, Disorder, Reorder. Fighting to get things “back to normal” is a waste of energy. More importantly, it leaves progress on the table. A better and more accurate way to view change is seeing it as a continuous cycle of order, disorder, reorder. It’s up to you to do the reordering.”
2. Develop Rugged Flexibility. They’re not so rugged that they never change. They’re also not so flexible that they passively surrender to the whims of life.
3. Diversify Your Sense of Identity. Much like you want to diversify an investment portfolio to be more robust in the face of change and chaos in financial markets, you want to do the same with your identity.
4. Respond, Don’t React: Reactions tend to go like this: Something happens. You panic. Then you proceed. Responses tend to go like this: Something happens. You pause. You process. You plan. Then you proceed.”
Outdoors
• We all know that exposure to nature improves wellbeing. Dr. Pawel Lorkiewicz at the UofL Envirome Institute is studying the phenomenon down to the molecular level. The lab measures levels of Limonene, a molecule that plants send out into the air. Limonene might explain some of the mechanism of nature’s health benefits.
• Spread the word on this cool research, we can all do a better job of congratulating each other on the impressive work being done on campus. Thanks Robin for the link.
Bears
• Highly recommend this New Yorker piece, hopefully not blocked by paywall. Jill Lepore reviews the book Eight Bears: Mythic Past and Imperiled Future (Gloria Dickie) but also adds in her own reporting. Here are some fun facts:
“There are eight living species of bears, on four continents: polar, panda, brown, black, sun, moon, sloth, and spectacled.
People have been living with bears since people began. People are smarter, but bears are older: they got here first. Both bears and people belong to a mammalian order called boreoeutheria. Before Darwin made the case that humans had a common ancestor with apes, humans all over the world—across tens of thousands of years and hundreds of thousands of miles—assumed that our closest relatives were bears.
There is an uncanniness to bears, as if they were wild men, or people dressed in bear suits. They can walk standing up. They are very clever. They use their paws like hands. Their footprints look like ours. Like us, they’re omnivores.
When Yellowstone finally began seriously implementing its bear-management program, closing the park’s dumps, teaching visitors not to feed the bears, and ticketing violators, bear-related injuries fell, from sixty-one in 1967 to three in 1975.
Bearsitters. Since 2002, they’ve tried to make sure any bears that wander inside the city limits get out again, without hurting anyone or getting hurt; the main tactic is to drive them out by hazing them—clanging pots or making other loud, irritating noises. “The hope is that the bear will return to the mountains and remember how horrible we humans are, never wanting to return to town,” the Bearsitters’ Web site, bearsandpeople.com, explains.
Every year more people are injured by toilets than they are injured by bears.
Bear spray, studies prove, is better protection to have during a bear attack than a gun.”
Dogs
…are the best. Careful how much darkness you take in during the day.
Quotes
People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.
– Thich Nhat Hahn, Vietnamese monk
You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest? … The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.
– David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity
Daily Supplement
• Check out this page on practiceofwellness.com with thoughts on a daily supplement. Taking material for many places, I narrowed the list down to the most important nutrients that are often deficient in even a well-balanced diet, while also being very low risk for toxicity.
• I practice Lifestyle Medicine at Integrative Health Specialists (IHS). We worked with a company to create personalized supplements, and we now have a Practice of Wellness supplement: PW Daily.
• The PW Daily supplement is now split into a Core Formula and an Enhanced Healthspan. Check out the ingredients!
* JWellness is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research and review articles in all areas of medical, physical and psychological wellness. No profits / fees for authors or readers.
This is the first journal of its kind. Check us out on Twitter @JofWellness