Newsletter #139: Happy New Year and Good Riddance to 2020 🎊
Welcome to the New Year edition of the humanOS newsletter! We are definitely looking forward to better days ahead, and sharing a healthy and productive 2021 with all of you.
I hope if you have learned anything from this year, it’s that your health is more valuable than anything you possess (sounds trite, I know, but it is totally true). But learning to achieve a lifestyle that promotes health is surprisingly difficult, and maintaining it is even more so. Many aspects of the modern world and economy are working against us every single day, and we are collectively paying a terrible price. And the effects are insidious, starting earlier than you probably think - research suggests that major declines in health can start as early as age 27.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. That is why we developed humanOS: as a comprehensive training platform for all of the major categories of health. We believe that health and human performance is similar to learning a musical instrument or a foreign language - you get good at it through learning and practicing, until it becomes second nature.
However, altering fundamental aspects of your lifestyle, like eating and sleeping, takes daily work. Would you consider making an investment in the most important thing you have - your health - and join humanOS? Currently, you can get a Pro Plan for $9.99 per month (just 33 cents per day), or $95.88 for a 12 month membership. This also enables us to continue our mission, releasing new content, churning out these weekly newsletters, and everything else we do. Thanks for supporting us through these tough times, and we look forward to supporting you in turn.
This Week’s Research Highlights
🧠 Sleep loss impairs our ability to stop unwanted and unpleasant thoughts from intruding our minds.
Sixty healthy participants were trained to associate pictures of faces with photographs of either emotionally negative scenes (such as an image from a war zone) or neutral scenes (such as an image of a cityscape). After this learning session, participants either slept in the sleep laboratory for eight hours, or stayed awake the whole night. Then, subjects were shown faces and asked to try to suppress thoughts related to the scenes with which they were paired. The sleep-deprived individuals had a much harder time suppressing the memories of associated scenes. In contrast, the sleep group got better at suppressing the memories with practice, and they showed a reduced sweat response when the negative scenes were presented to them again. These findings could have obvious implications for patients with psychiatric conditions linked to unwanted thoughts, like PTSD and major depression. Senior author Scott Cairney notes, “The study also suggests that the onset of intrusive thoughts and emotional disturbances following bouts of poor sleep could create a vicious cycle, whereby upsetting intrusions and emotional distress exacerbate sleep problems, inhibiting the sleep needed to support recovery.”
😴 Restricting mobile phone use before bedtime may improve aspects of sleep and cognition.
Thirty-eight participants were randomized to either an intervention group (n = 19), where members were instructed to avoid using their mobile phone 30 minutes before bedtime, or a control group (n = 19), where the participants were given no such instructions. After four weeks, the group that restricted cell phone use showed reduced sleep latency (-12 minutes), increased sleep duration (+18 minutes), and improved sleep quality. As an added bonus, these participants also showed improved mood and performed better on tests of working memory. Importantly, the study showed that restricting mobile phone use around bedtime lowered pre-sleep arousal, which is thought to be an important factor in insomnia.
🍩 Short sleep increases sweet taste preference, appetite, and food intake.
Researchers recruited 24 young healthy participants who were not overweight and had normal sleeping patterns. Subjects were randomly assigned to either a control sleep condition (8 hours per night) or sleep curtailment condition (5 hours per night) for three consecutive nights. On the fourth day, participants came to the laboratory for testing. Then, after a three-week washout period, all participants switched to the opposite condition, so all participants ultimately experienced both control and sleep curtailment over the course of the study. After sleep curtailment, participants exhibited a stronger sweet taste preference and showed higher levels of ghrelin. As you would expect from the higher ghrelin levels, these subjects also expressed stronger appetites and ate more food when presented with an ad libitum breakfast. These findings are consistent with a prior meta-analysis of human intervention studies, which found that partial sleep deprivation increases caloric intake, on average, by 385 calories.
Question of the Week
🤔 The start of the new year is often a period of self-improvement - but what can you do to make your resolutions “stick” this time around? What is your strategy to be better at your self-care health practice in 12 months time?
Podcasts We Loved This Week
- Dick Zare and Charles Bamforth: What gives “bubbly” its bubbles? Via Science Friday.
- James Clear: How to build awesome habits. Via Rich Roll Podcast.
The humanOS Bookshelf
Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Many of us are evaluating the past patterns of our lives and resolving to start anew. (Maybe more this year than any other before!) But our efforts are usually pretty short-lived because we fail to develop an effective system to assess our current habits, reinforce good habits, and abolish bad habits.
In this book, author James Clear draws upon a wide array of evidence from psychology, biology, and cognitive neuroscience to construct a guide to doing just that. So what do we mean by habits? James defines habits as behaviors that are repeated enough times to be nearly automatic, and not demanding cognitive effort or willpower. Like brushing your teeth, or heading to the gym at 5:00 pm every day, or making a green smoothie every day for breakfast. These automatic processes, which are mostly mundane things that we take for granted, are actually foundational to all of our goals.
The problem, of course, is that we generally don’t see the immediate payoff for any of these behaviors. You don’t drop twenty pounds just switching from sugar-sweetened soda to water in a single day. You don’t become fluent in a new language by using Duolingo for fifteen minutes.
It is only after you’ve committed to these behaviors for a while - after your efforts have compounded, as James puts it - that we start to see the difference. If you want to learn more, check out our past interview with James Clear (one of my all-time favorites), and definitely give the book a shot if you would like to jump-start those New Year’s resolutions.