I felt pretty run down this last Saturday morning, but I had to see clients and had an afternoon meeting to get through before I could fully relax. By the time I was in the meeting I had significant drainage down the back of my throat and knew it was time to get serious. When I got home my whole body was achy and my throat was now sore to where it hurt to speak or swallow. I wasn’t worried though. These symptoms were just a wake up call for me. I initiated my “I can’t afford to be sick” protocol…

I have been told to cover up, wear sunscreen and wear sunglasses my whole life. Not just by my mother, but the media and health journals as well. How could that be? How could something humans have always coexisted with be our enemy? Well, rumors turned out to be false. Plenty of studies show that appropriate sun exposure is essentially a powerful multivitamin. I won’t get into the entire litany of the sun’s benefits in this post. I’ll simply stick to how sunlight exposure to our eyes contributes to our health.

Coffee is a water based solution made up of thousands of different compounds. It helps grownups “adult” and keeps grad students alive. Perhaps the most notable compound in coffee is caffeine. Caffeine has long been used as an energy booster and cognitive enhancer, but studies show it can actively prevent cognitive decline by blocking inflammation in the brain, which may even lower your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.

Now here’s the bad news. Much of, if not all, the benefit of caffeine can be mitigated by coffee beans containing mold toxins, most notably Ochratoxin A…

Almost half of your standard coconut oil is made up of a 12 carbon medium chain fatty acid called lauric acid. Up until recently, it has been my least favorite medium chain triglyceride (that’s right...I keep an ongoing ranking of fatty acids in their various categories). It’s previous low ranking is mostly due to the fact that it lacks the powerful ketogenic properties of the other MCTs. However, it may deserve much more credit than I’ve given it, due to its ability to kill “unkillable” viruses.

When you consume coconut oil, the lauric acid metabolizes into monolaurin. Monolaurin is one of the few antivirals that has been shown to kill the coronavirus. The other compounds that have shown effectiveness against the coronavirus, in animal studies at least, are still a ways out from being approved for use because further evaluation is needed regarding their potential toxicity.

This post begins a series of quick health tips that can make a big difference in how you feel and perform. The goal with these tips is that they shouldn’t have a high cost to your time or finances, but they should have a high impact on your life. The first tip I’d like to share is to take a quality vitamin B complex.

B vitamins are naturally occurring in foods like fish, meat, eggs, beans, and leafy greens, but according to the Harvard school of Public Health, only a fraction of U.S. adults get the recommended daily intake of all B vitamins from their diets alone. And due to the increasingly more stressful lifestyles we live, we also deplete the B vitamins we do consume faster than ever.

Have you ever felt like you’ve been stuck in front of the same obstacle for a long period of your life? Sometimes the obstacle is your actual path to begin or the push to continue walking forward finally. It’s there for you to be challenged and to not only go through it, but also grow through it. I like to think about the difficulties in my life as if they were the obstacles soldiers deal with while in basic training. We’ve all seen the movies. The two most iconic obstacles are the barbed wire crawl and the climbing wall. The can be portrayed as torture in certain movies, but they are there to prepare the soldiers for the true battles to come. They are there to strengthen the soldiers, not tear them down. 

Like most people in America I grew up thinking brown rice was healthier for you than white rice. Brown rice has significantly more fiber, minerals and vitamins, right? While the vitamin difference is actually negligible, brown rice does have much more fiber and minerals. So why don’t I prefer brown rice? Let’s talk about nutrients vs. anti-nutrients. Nutrients are the things you’ve heard of like vitamins, minerals, fat, protein and the like. Anti- nutrients are naturally occurring compounds in foods that do more harm than good. And brown rice has plenty, including phytates and lectins. 

The author illustrates a story about a man and his kid who come across a lion for the first time. He doesn’t know what it is so he gets too close and the lion eats his kid. Horrible story to start a blog post with, but the point is that the next time he spots a lion far away he immediately hides himself and his kids. Humans aren’t often hunted down by wild predators these days, but there are new ways of becoming prey that make this idea worth writing about today. This story sets up the two types of thinking described by Kahneman, which he calls System 1 and System 2. Personally, I prefer names that mean something so I can remember which one is which more easily, but since it’s only two systems, I’ll let it slide. 

A mentor of mine once said to me that, “The easiest thing in the world to be is yourself.” This statement is reasonable enough for me from a practical sense. Being yourself should require no extra energy. Trying to be someone else or trying to be what you think others want you to be takes extra energy. In this logic, if you are exhausted, you may be trying to be someone else.  However, in my personal experience, it seems easy to be exhausted.

Our word “health” derives from the Old English word “hal” meaning “to make whole.” It was also used for the word integrity, which essentially means undivided, and to integrate something means to combine different things into a whole. Interestingly enough, “hal” is also the etymological word for “holy.” This makes sense to me. Someone who is deemed holy has likely integrated the different facets of their being (body, mind, heart and spirit) in their whole nature. That also sounds like a description for someone who is healthy to me. Someone who is more aligned with themselves would express more vitally and experience more inner peace. 

In my experience, having a healthier mind often trickles down into a healthier body, healthier relationships, healthier finances, better sleep and better choices. Dr. Dan Siegler has a great breakdown, called the Healthy Mind Platter, to help organize your time to create a more balanced mind.  He lists 7 categories of intentional time to try to fit in to each day to stay balanced. Personally, I need to create more playtime in my life.

Intellectual autonomy is a valuable asset. You don’t want to be dependent on others for your thoughts. The loudest voices in our society are usually trying to sell you something. And the biggest platforms, like the news, have agendas. We are becoming mentally sedentary. And I believe media outlets support this. They don’t make money by informing the public. They make money by driving consumers to their customer’s products and services. I’m not saying don’t watch the news. I don’t personally watch it, but I get why people do it. I am saying that you should watch it with a critical ear. Cross check every idea, even ideas you support. Challenge each opinion in your mind with a contrary view point. See if the ideas they’re selling hold up. You are made beautifully and significantly unique. The world needs you to be fully you. Conforming to the median is no longer an option. 

Nootropics (/noʊ.əˈtrɒpɪks/ noh-ə-TROP-iks) (colloquial: smart drugs and cognitive enhancers) are drugs, supplements, and other substances that may improve cognitive function, particularly executive functions, memory, creativity, or motivation, in healthy individuals. I’ve played around with a few of these so called “smart drugs” over the last several years. I thought I would list some of them out as well as share my experience with them. Also, please consult with a health professional before using any of these if you currently have any health concerns. 

Is listening becoming a lost art in our society? Do we patiently sit quietly and wait our turn to speak again while someone else is talking, or do we listen? I can muster up some good listening when I’m being paid to, but when I leave the office I sometimes feel like those muscles have been exhausted or perhaps the motivation to listen is gone. I want to be a generous listener. Listening generously involves curiosity and vulnerability, a willingness to be surprised, and the ability to suspend judgement and see the beautiful humanity in someone.

Lieutenant commander Jocko Willink, an author and a speaker I follow,  says that, “discipline equals freedom.” Or at least it is the path to it, anyway. Discipline drives daily execution and removes excuses. You can’t easily control motivation. It falters with your emotions. In a certain way you are actually subject to it. But discipline is under your control. Freedom to me is being able to choose your own life. Motivation falters, but discipline is a choice.