It's all your fault 😢

95% of New Years resolutions are related to health and fitness, and 91% of them fail. Below are some frameworks, ideas and hard truths that have helped me set and achieve health goals in the past.

Born perfect

If you are one of millions of Americans afflicted by the following:

• Poor sleep/insomnia: 25% of Americans

• Anxiety: 31% of Americans

• Overweight/obese: 69% of Americans

• Gut issues (IBS etc): 20% of American women

I have great news! You were very likely to be born in perfect health and have allowed your lifestyle to take it away from you.

These are “diseases of modernity” that are largely not observed in simpler/poorer societies, or mentioned historically.

Realizing that it’s entirely your fault, and your responsibility (not the Dr’s) to fix it is hard to swallow, but the first step towards sanity.

The fall

With each step you take away from nature, you surrender your rights to perfect health.

The two shortest paths to your self-inflicted hell in this regard are:

• Circadian disruption

• Poor diet

…as they have been most drastically disrupted in the past 200 years. Electric lighting, social media and ultraprocessed food are neck-breaking shifts to the human experience.

People differ in sensitivity, but these are the first places I recommend searching for answers.

Black box theory

Think of your body as a perfect “black box”, a gift from nature that was intended to turn real food, natural lighting and social interaction into positive emotions and mental energy:

When your box starts outputting bad stuff (disease), modern medicine will take the view that something is wrong with the internal mechanism of the box, and will try to remedy it with sleeping pills, SSRI’s and Ozempic. Since M.D’s dont actually understand the box at all, this often ends in ruin.

The serotonin theory of depression: a systematic umbrella review of the evidence (Published in Nature last year, Drs still have no idea what causes depression)

Instead, focus on shifting the inputs and stimuli the box is receiving. Changes will be slower than you hope, but stay the course.

Putting more sunlight, exercise, and great food into the box, and removing some of the Tiktok would be a good place to begin any health journey.

Positive feedback loops

Recognizing when you are trapped in a positive feedback loop is the key to resolving many health issues.

An example might be:

Feel anxious => Can’t sleep => Sleep deprivation spikes cortisol and anxiety => Feel more anxious => Sleep even less => And around it goes

(Pharmaceuticals are sometimes helpful in breaking these loops temporarily)

Identifying and breaking these cycles is often the key to getting a hold of yourself and beginning to rebuild from the baseline.

Gardening

If you plant a garden and nothing blooms, it likely wasn’t due to any one mistake, or a single day missed watering. It’s due to a failure in your processes, and poor conditions in the garden.

Let’s use insomnia as an example:

On any given night, when you lay down to sleep, your fate was already determined by your actions that day, and your stress level that week etc... The garden is rotten and hostile.

This is great news, you can relax every time you lay down, because you’re basically powerless. You either did the work or you didnt.

Things like overeating seem like pure willpower in each moment, but they are actually the same. If you lower your stress levels and fix your gut, resisting overeating will be effortless.

Good sleep is natural, it’s not about some hack or mental judo or supplement, it’s about getting your circadian rhythm on track, and no one is irredeemable. Many health issues are the same, as it is all one body.

Conclusions

I’ll write a dedicated newsletter about sleep, as I think I have some unique insights to offer there.

Best of luck achieving your goals this year, I hope SOS can help bring some of your guts into alignment.

A few books that might be helpful if you want something actionable from this newsletter:

• Brain Energy (Published last year by Harvard researcher Dr Chris Palmer, a well researched theory that ALL mental health disease is metabolic and mitochondrial dysfunction)

• A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life (Gives numerous strategies for surviving hypermodernity)

• Say Goodnight to Insomnia (Insomnia CBT that works)

• When Panic Attacks (Anxiety CBT)