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Research

Twenty minutes with a pen

What the science actually says about writing your way through trauma

There is a real, replicated, forty-year research literature behind the claim that fifteen to twenty minutes of honest writing can help people process difficult experiences. There is also a wellness-internet version of that claim that has drifted some distance from what the studies actually show. This essay walks the original Pennebaker protocol, the Lieberman affect-labeling neuroscience, the meta-analytic effect sizes from Smyth through Frattaroli, and the boundary conditions — including where writing demonstrably does not reduce core PTSD symptoms — and arrives at a defensible version of the claim that neither oversells nor undersells the evidence.

#expressive-writing #trauma #neuroscience #mental-health #psychology

By Mick

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Research

Becoming a stranger

What dépaysement is actually doing to the brain, and why "travel rewires you" overshoots the evidence

The French word dépaysement names something real — the strange clarity that comes from being somewhere unfamiliar. There is a wellness-internet version of this idea that has drifted some distance from what the research actually shows, and a smaller, more interesting version supported by predictive-processing accounts of perception, by Ritter and colleagues' work on schema violations, and by Maddux and Galinsky's finding that living abroad — but not travelling abroad — predicts creativity when people psychologically adapt to the new culture. This essay walks the gap between the two versions and arrives at the more defensible claim: temporary unfamiliarity interrupts the brain's habitual predictions, which sometimes lets people recover parts of experience that routine has quietly edited out.

#depaysement #neuroscience #novelty #creativity #cognitive-flexibility #travel

By Mick

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Field Notes

On changing your mind about food

A short history of dietary certainty, and what the pattern of reversal teaches

The past four decades have produced a series of public reversals on dietary fundamentals. Saturated fat, dietary cholesterol, eggs, salt, red meat, low-carb diets, seed oils. Each was confidently declared dangerous, then re-evaluated, sometimes reversed. The pattern of reversal is itself the lesson.

#nutrition #contested #evidence #seed-oils #ageing

By Mick

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Field Notes

The lectin question, examined

Steven Gundry, The Plant Paradox, and what to make of a popular thesis the field has rejected

Gundry argues that lectins — a class of plant proteins — are responsible for chronic inflammation, autoimmune disease, and obesity. The book has sold millions; the mainstream nutrition community has dismissed it. A closer look at where the argument is right, where it falls apart, and why elimination diets keep producing apparent results.

#nutrition #contested #evidence #seed-oils #supplements

By Mick

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Mind & Method

The morning protocol industrial complex

What the evidence actually supports, and why the format keeps spreading

A genre has emerged in which a successful person describes their twelve-step morning routine and the audience is invited to copy it. The interesting question is not whether the protocols work — some do, some don't — but why the format itself has become the thing.

#habits #circadian #caffeine #light #mental-models #contested #stress

By Mick

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Longevity Practice

Compression of morbidity

James Fries's 1980 paper and the longevity goal worth wanting

The goal of medicine, Fries argued, should not be to extend life but to compress the period of late-life disease into as short a window as possible. Forty-five years on, the framework remains the right way to think about the longevity project — and a useful corrective to the language of "anti-ageing".

#ageing #healthspan #mortality #biomarkers

By Mick

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Longevity Practice

What knowledge workers get wrong about training

The cardio-versus-strength false dichotomy and the minimum effective dose

For people whose job involves sitting and thinking, exercise tends to be approached as an aesthetic project or a discharge of accumulated stress. Neither lens captures what the evidence suggests should actually be on the calendar.

#exercise #zone-2 #deep-work #vo2-max #hormesis

By Mick

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Longevity Practice

A framework for evaluating supplement claims

Three tiers, one worked example, and a way to keep one's wallet shut

The supplement industry generates tens of billions of dollars in revenue from claims that range from well-evidenced to fabricated. A three-tier framework helps separate what is worth taking, what is worth experimenting with, and what is worth ignoring entirely.

#supplements #evidence #mental-models #biomarkers #habits

By Mick

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Longevity Practice

VO2 max and the all-cause mortality curve

One of the strongest signals in longevity science, and what to do about it

Across multiple large cohorts, cardiorespiratory fitness emerges as one of the most powerful predictors of all-cause mortality — comparable in effect size to smoking. The data is unusually clean. The training implications are unusually concrete.

#vo2-max #mortality #zone-2 #exercise #biomarkers #healthspan

By Mick

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Energy & Recovery

Stress isn't the enemy — chronicity is

The hormesis curve and why acute and chronic stress look identical at the cellular level

A hard workout, a cold plunge, and a difficult problem trigger almost the same physiological response as chronic financial worry. What separates beneficial from damaging is not the magnitude of the stressor but its duration and the recovery that follows it.

#stress #hormesis #recovery #hrv #neuroscience #sleep

By Mick

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Energy & Recovery

Sleep is upstream of almost everything

What the evidence supports, what it doesn't, and where the popular discourse has run ahead of the science

The case for treating sleep as a foundational lever is one of the strongest signals in physiology. The case for tracking your REM percentages on a wrist device is considerably weaker. The distinction matters.

#sleep #recovery #circadian #flow #neuroscience #hrv #caffeine #light

By Mick

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Flow & Focus

Flow isn't what you think it is

The state the literature describes, and the one the marketing sells

Csikszentmihalyi's original research describes a psychological state with reasonable scientific support. The popular literature has converted that descriptive finding into a prescriptive performance hack. The distance between the two matters.

#flow #deep-work #neuroscience #evidence

By Mick

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