January 2024

A Monthly Review

Lots of people do year end reviews. I've done them prior to this blog. I think they serve two key functions: entertainment/self-congratulations and course-correcting/reorientation. I don't think there's anything wrong with a year-end review that helps reinvigorate somebody and make them feel good about what they've achieved (the self-congratulations function). However, I think the course-correcting utility of year end reviews could be substantially improved by doing lower stakes reviews more often throughout the year. I often get to the end of the year and have to revisit what my resolutions even were before I can reflect on whether or how I met them.

This year, I did not set "resolutions". I have general things I want to achieve, but I don't think I'm any more enlightened at the turn of the year than I am at the end of January, and so I don't think whatever goals I found compelling on January 1 should have the vaunted title of "New Years Resolutions" that I have to judge myself against, whereas goals that surface at other times exist without a title. With all that said, this post is the first of hopefully many constituting a monthly review. It outlines the biggest wins over the past month and the biggest things to build upon going into next month. Hopefully this frequent reflection will keep things moving in the right direction. If I find focus straying too much from month to month, hopefully that will become clear much more quickly than if I waited until the end of the year to take stock of everything.

Reflecting on January

With the preamble out of the way, January 2024 was a fantastic month. I started the year with almost debilitating insomnia (which had spilled over from pre-vacation December 2023). I had heartburn, indigestion, and was waking up at 3 am every night and immediately panicking and trying to fall back asleep. If you're awake, the harder you try to fall asleep, the worse it gets; a terrible quicksand situation. I was a few more days away from resigning myself to lifelong insomnia. But fortunately, I made a couple key lifestyle changes that turned everything around:

Diet. This was the key one. My diet today consists of:

• Breakfast - Greek yogurt, banana, blueberries, dates, one spoonful of peanut butter, and agave sweetener / organic maple syrup. One cup of coffee; only one is a new frontier.
• Lunch - Salad, optionally with two boiled eggs and avocado.
• Dinner - Salmon + vegetables OR Ground beef / venison and eggs OR steak. Cooking steak is a new culinary feat (cooked in my newly bought cast iron pan).
• Snacks - slice of cheese (aged over raw milk), brazil nuts, macadamia nuts.
• Night - Apple cider vinegar and raw local honey.
• No alcohol.

Lifestyle:

• I moved my desk from my bedroom and into my living room. This has turned my workspace and my bedroom into much more focused spaces.
• I have shifted my bedtime / wakeup earlier. Today (Sunday) I woke up at 5:45 am, which I've been steadily trending towards throughout the month. This is huge from a stress management perspective - I get to spend a higher proportion of my day working with a clear head, before feeling the weight of the day. Working 8 hours and starting your day 2 hours earlier than everyone else vs working the same amount of time and starting 2 hours later than everyone else makes a world of difference. In the first case, more of your day is spent on your priorities as opposed to reacting. I realize different people have different chronotypes, but the results of starting earlier have been tremendous  for me.
• I have added yoga (1-2x per week, time permitting) and acupuncture (2x in January) as restorative activities. Acupuncture, in particular, led to my highest recovery day, as measured by heart rate variability, since May 2023.
  

These two changes have enabled me to kick off my triathlon training (level 0 Olympic plan as prescribed here: https://www.amazon.com/80-Triathlon-Breakthrough-Elite-Training-Performance/dp/0738234680), which I'm now two weeks into. This volume of training, which isn't high by triathlon training standards but is high for an average person, would simply not have been possible at the beginning of the year. I needed to get diet, stress, and sleep under control first, and that's provided the structure and steady energy required to manage six workouts per week, along with occasional stretching, mobility, and strength exercises, alongside work.

Beyond that, I am off to a good start with operationalizing the concentration and willpower rituals from "The Power of Unwavering Focus", which I wrote about in my last post. My concentration ritual was to be as engaged as possible while brushing my teeth in the morning and evening. It's not perfect, I still find my focus straying occasionally, but I'm much more engaged than I otherwise would be. I've also leveraged this engagement to incorporate flossing as part of the daily dental care routine. My willpower ritual is to make my bed every morning to complete the act of sleeping. I've kept to that every day. It doesn't sound impressive, but it's a small simple step. Many of those will add up.

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Looking Ahead

Looking ahead to February, there are many exciting things on the horizon.

For one, the diet I outlined above still has some room for improvement. I'll go into a little more detail on how in the next section, and in much more detail in some followup posts.

Secondly, I plan to add another concentration and willpower practice, in addition to what I did during January. For concentration, I have a daily team meeting at 10 am for 15 minutes that I often tune out of. This month, I will strive to bring the power of my full concentration to that meeting. That doesn't mean I need to interrupt people every five seconds or get clarification on every item that doesn't make perfect sense to me, but it does mean that I am following the discussion and keeping my awareness on the content of that meeting and not on Youtube or the price of Bitcoin. On the willpower side, I plan to do mobility exercises before every working, and static stretching afterwards to "complete" the act of exercising. This is an often neglected part of my workout and fitness routine but it's critical for recovery, longevity, and healthy movement patterns. My muscles and joints will thank me, even if I find it a bit tedious in the moment. A perfect candidate for exercising willpower.

The other big focus for me over the next few months is enabling ways to work without stress. Even during my newfound sacred morning hours, I find myself walking a tight rope between malaise and anxiety. Throughout the day, as other people come online and put new problems on my plate, I find myself tipping towards anxiety. I want to increase the width of this metaphorical tight rope and be more able get through entire work days in a state of focused calm. There are two components to this pursuit.

The first component is learning and practicing proper breathing. I've been working my way through an excellent video course about breath holding techniques, but it's really about breathing much more broadly. Healthy breathing is a key but underappreciated tenet of wellbeing. In my view, it's the second level on the pyramid of wellbeing, right above quality sleep.  The stock advice for how to breathe better - "take a deep breath" - is at best, unhelpful, and at worst, harmful. Unhealthy breathing also uniquely affects office workers. I mentioned Email Apnea in my post about corporate wellness, the phenomenon whereby people hold their breath while checking their email. Many people are also subconsciously habituated to overbreathing, which signals to your nervous system that you are in danger and triggers the stress response, which results in increased heart rate, lower digestion, tense muscles, and other physiological responses that are totally at cross-purposes with how a high functioning knowledge worker ought to behave during the day. I'll have more to say on the mechanics of breathing in a future post, but for now, the goal for February is to continue making progress in this course, and to practice what I have learned to instill healthier breathing patterns.

The second component of working without stress is a course I plan to take offered by the Flow Research Collective called Zero to Dangerous. The website is quite heavy on marketing, but I saw this recommendation on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanevansvp_i-achieved-success-as-an-amazon-vp-despite-activity-7154891764212875264-VXtG that deeply resonated with me. I spend a lot of time staying on top of things, but very little time getting to the bottom of things. The frequent time and task switching is what leads to distraction, stress, and ultimately burnout. It's also a mirage for actual accomplishment. It feels busy and effortful, but large amounts of staying on top of things, over the long haul, do not produce nearly as impressive results as large amounts of focused work. This course, which is not cheap, is aimed at educating people about flow, that state of being focused and in the zone, and hopefully will provide many tactics to get in a flow state and stay there, even amidst the busy demands of a corporate manager role.

Animal-Based Diet

The diet was the highest leverage change I made during January, so I wanted to do a slightly deeper dive on the context behind that and where things are headed. I discovered the merits of an animal-based diet from a former physician, and now health influencer, named Paul Saladino. Saladino claims that the ideal starting point for a human diet consists of the following food groups: meat, organs, fruit, honey, and raw dairy.  If you want to get there by eliminating things, the things to eliminate (in order) are: seed oils, high fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, and vegetables. Vegetables are leaves, stems, roots and seeds (which themselves consist of nuts, grains, or beans).

I'm sure the claim that this is an optimal human diet is highly controversial. Red meat? No vegetables? I'm going to explore this topic in much more depth over many posts, but for now, let's start from a few basic, intuitive starting points, and I'll layer on the nutritional and metabolic science in future posts as I learn more. It stands to reason that the ideal diet consists of "everything you need and nothing you don't." You want to get all or as many nutrients that benefit you while minimizing toxins, harmful compounds, or unnecessary surplus. The question then becomes: how do we realize this ideal diet? The claim here is that evolution provides our best guide - we should mimic the diet that premodern humans have had because premodern humans were compelled them to seek out only the most nourishing food sources in order to thrive.

I think nutrition and food quality is one of the areas where we have moved backwards as time has progressed. The more we scientize foods, the worse for us they get. Processed food, lab grown meat, artificial sweeteners and other man-made interventions in our food supply have moved us backwards in terms of nutrient density and quality. We've created cheap sources of cheap calories which have left most people in the perverse situation of not getting of what they need and an excess what they don't. We have the results to show for it: a whopping 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy, and over 40% (and rising) of American adults are obese.

Food is a business, and the goal of this business is not to make you healthy. Peter Attia, in his book Outlive, talks about the real aims of the Standard American Diet (SAD):

"(1) how to produce enough food to feed almost everyone; (2) how to do so inexpensively; (3) how to preserve that food so it can be stored and transported safely; and (4) how to make it highly palatable...not so much a diet as a business model for how to feed the world efficiently. Two cheers for modern industrial food systems. But notice that a fifth criterion is missing: how to make it harmless."

Put yourself in the shoes, or the rugged bare feet, of a premodern human. If you were seeking food, where would you go? First, you'd hunt, because wildlife are the most nutrient dense food source. Not only would you eat the muscle meat, but you'd eat as much of the animal as you could, including its organs. Second, you'd eat fruit and honey, which are sweet and dense sources of carbohydrates and sugar. People balk at not eating vegetables, but I don't think you'd reach for vegetables, literally the leaves, stems, and roots of a plant, if you had other sources of food available. And if you had sources of raw dairy or eggs, which are filling animal-based products, you'd absolutely consume those as well.

This is meant to just be a high-level explanation of the intuitive appeal of an animal-based diet. An ideal diet is nutrient dense. Our ancestors were forced to optimize for nutrient density. What would our ancestors eat? An animal-based diet. I plan to explore this topic from many angles, and from a more scientific first principles approach, in the future.