meatbag maintenance

Getting sweaty 3x 20 minutes a week can reduce your overall mortality rate significantly. The transition of your body from an untrained state into a trained one (“noob gains”) is a wonderful thing to experience. This is probably the #1 thing on the list, as regular exercise will increase your overall energy level and allow for a higher quality sleep.

I cannot stress this enough, regular exercise boosts your energy, mood, and overall health. You will be more content if you exercise.

Healthy gums = tight gums = less room for sugars and foods to get stuck between your teeth. You can get healthy gums by flossing regularly. Brush your teeth and floss to remove bits that would stick around and rot your teeth.

Every time you drink {soda,coffee,tea,<anything acidic>}, you lower the PH level of your mouth, leaving your teeth in a weakened state until things normalize. My current mental model is to imagine a “time-to-normal PH” timer that resets everytime I take a sip of coffee. Thus, it’s in my best interest to intake my coffee in a short time window, as opposed to sipping it all day.

Keeping a regular sleep schedule schedule is the key here. Habit is everything, and your body will help you both fall asleep and wake up if you get this down.

• Keep your sleep area as dark as possible
  • remove any blue light source from within your room
  • blackout curtains
• Get a box fan for white noise if you need to mask surrounding sounds
• Don’t use your bed for anything other than sleep or sex
  • If you lounge in bed, your brain will associate it with “lounge time” and you will want to be awake

Other: When you are sleep deprived, your ability to gauge your sleep deprivation is degraded. Also, you cannot “pay back” sleep evenly – you will simply be off (that is, you cannot make up an all-nighter all at once, you feel it’s effects for awhile).

Fasting (or intermittent fasting) can be a powerful tool.

I’m an off and on keto dieter. There’s plenty of resources around for how that changes your body’s relationship to insulin and fat. I will emphasize here that for weight loss purposes, the main advantage is the loss of appetite that people experience on keto, allowing them to have an easier time maintaining a caloric deficit.

• Use sunscreen when you will be outside for extended periods of time (>30 min)
• Moisturize chronic or seasonally dry areas
• WASH YO FACE

Your lungs are only meant to process air. Don’t make a habit of putting not-air into them.

Philosophy can be kind of weirdly helpful because changing your view can make “everything” seem totally different even though nothing has changed. I find the concepts in the school of stoicism motivating and helpful for becoming content (ie not happy).

This section is less “tried and true” maintenance – that is, sleep + exercise will do much more for you than anything in this section.

Some supplements may be thought of as insurance – the idea is you are somehow more deficient than you “normally” would be, so you should compensate your bodily need externally to cheat the natural route. I will tag those supplement headings with an insurance tag.