🧠 The Happiness Button
Trigger your brain's natural antidepressants.
If you’re feeling scattered and heavy with mental clutter, I can empathize - I was there a few weeks ago, and on my quest to fix this, I went down a rabbit hole that I never expected to go down - one with 40 hours of scientific journals. Yeah...
The Quick Version: Our brain’s wired to work with a natural light/dark cycle that developed over 70,000 years and hundreds of generations ago - this dictates how easy life can be, depending on if we follow it or not.
I found that this cycle is almost entirely light, temperature, exercise, and diet coming together to give you quality sleep.
And if you nail the sleep, you’re rewarded with fantastic mental clarity and productivity throughout the day - you’re not scattered anymore.
I thought my sleep was fine, and then I dug deeper and found out about the little habits that came in the way, and the actions I could take to make my beauty sleep just that little bit more beautiful.
Examples:
Artificial light disrupts melatonin production, meaning if your lights are on at 10 pm, screens, or otherwise, it will affect your brain’s natural schedule.
Natural light puts your body in sync. If you can get enough of it throughout the day, the correct hormones are easier produced throughout the whole cycle.
If your room is too hot, you’ll struggle to sleep. The best temperature is 18°C to 19°C or 65°F.
If you drink coffee 6 hours before bed, it’s going to block neurotransmitters - you’ll lose sleep quality and about 1 hour of actual sleep.
Exercise reduces cortisol production, aka — the stress hormone. Decreased cortisol means increased melatonin.
The Long Version for you ladies and gents that want all the hacks, diagrams, pictures, references, and other goods. [8 Min Read]
But this wasn’t everything - I found out so much that I couldn’t write about it all, so I left out the most exciting part: Our brain’s natural antidepressants and euphoriants, how to induce them, and how to up our mental bandwidth.
So here’s how you trigger happiness with action. Aka. The happiness button.
Neurobiological Effects of Aerobic Exercise
Running, walking, cycling, swimming; these are aerobic exercises.
Besides cycling, we’ve done these aerobic exercises for thousands of years, and doing them has a massive list of benefits, yes, besides looking great.
You get increased control in directing your attention.
You can better cope with stress.
You get better impulse control — you can stop yourself from reaching for a cookie or clicking on a video.
You can effectively keep multiple concepts in your head at once — the closest thing to multitasking.
Your temporary or working memory capacity increases significantly — say hello to holding more information in there.
This type of activity promotes natural antidepressant and euphoriant effects — this is the same as runners high.
“The amount of internal chatter dissipates to zero, you have no anxiety, I didn’t realize I had any anxiety.” — Joe Rogan on Runners High
Joe’s a high profile individual, so we hear a lot of what he says, but runners high isn’t specific to him; one Google search and you’ll get countless accounts of people doing heavy cardio and achieving this state.
You can also achieve this through cycling or running quite easily (30+ minutes); it’s like a flow state in its own right - this is the happiness button.
But even if you do the following - your natural cycle will handle the rest.
Integrate cardio into your day or week.
Your stress levels will decrease, also decreasing cortisol in your system.
You’ll sleep better as a result.
Cardio is the most significant mental clarity and happiness bang for your physical effort buck. So especially the lifters reading this, get on the bike a couple of times a week and thank me later. 😉
🔗 Link Dump
✍ I clocked my 200th article last week and wrote down the 22 lessons I’ve learned from the experience.
🎲 Here’s a story about how I found a coin and how that led to a fantastic decision-making process that I use over half a decade later.
🧵 Two twitter threads I came across recently that helped with getting better with twitter and mindset/productivity.
🎌 Here’s a cool video on why Google Translate messes with Japanese - for anyone learning the language or curious about how some languages work.
Thanks for reading this week’s email, and I hope you got some value out of it.
I love writing these for you, and I do see the replies - I’ve been quite busy, so sorry if I haven’t responded!
I’ve got something big brewing that a lot of you will enjoy - it’s very much productivity-focused, but it’s a little too premature to promise a date, but until then, hang on. 🔥
Hope you have a great week ahead,
Chat next week,
— Sah
P.S. Don’t forget to share this with a friend who might find it useful :)