Darren McConaghy @ReconHub

The research behind this is wild. Your brain can’t flip from full alert to sleep like a light switch. It needs a runway. And reading builds it faster than almost anything else. A University of Sussex study found that just 6 minutes of reading cut stress by 68%, more than music (61%), tea (54%), walking (42%), or video games (21%). The effect is surprisingly physical. When you read, your nervous system shifts from fight-or-flight into rest-and-digest mode. Heart rate slows, breathing deepens, muscles release tension. The neuropsychologist who ran the study, Dr. David Lewis, described it as entering “an altered state of consciousness,” where focused imagination activates the part of your brain that tells your stress response to stand down. A 2021 randomized trial tested this directly. Researchers split nearly 1,000 people into two groups: read a book in bed for seven nights, or don’t. After one week, 42% of readers reported better sleep versus 28% of non-readers. Nothing else changed. Now compare that with what 86% of Americans actually do before bed: scroll their phones for an average of 38 minutes a night. A 2025 Norwegian study of 45,000 university students found that every additional hour of screen time in bed raised insomnia risk by 59% and cut sleep by 24 minutes. A separate American Cancer Society study of 122,000 adults found daily screen use before bed was tied to 50 fewer minutes of sleep per week. Screens hit you with two sleep-blockers at once. Blue light suppresses melatonin, the hormone that tells your body it’s time to sleep, by about 50% according to a Harvard study. But the bigger problem is the content itself. News, social media, work emails, all of it fires up your brain’s threat-detection mode and spikes your stress hormones right when they’re supposed to be at their lowest point of the day. A physical book sidesteps both problems entirely. The long game matters too. A Yale study tracked 3,635 adults over 12 years and found that people who read 3.5+ hours per week were 23% less likely to die during the study. That worked out to living roughly 2 years longer, regardless of gender, wealth, or education. Books beat newspapers and magazines. The researchers pointed to deep, sustained reading creating a kind of workout for the brain that protects it as it ages. So the 5-10 minutes he’s describing? The science says 6 minutes is the threshold where your body starts winding down. His brain is switching off its stress response and easing into a state where sleep becomes almost automatic.

Mayne @Tradermayne

4 months ago

Reading before bed has improved my sleep hygiene more than anything else. 5-10 mins of a book in bed and I’m out like a light no matter what I’ve done before.

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I’ve been an orthopedic surgeon for nearly 30 years, and a few patterns have become impossible to ignore. One is that many musculoskeletal problems in adults aren’t sudden injuries. They’re the moment when declining capacity and awful metabolic health finally reveals itself. Over the decades your strength fades, muscle mass declines, as your aerobic capacity tanks. Tendons and connective tissues lose substance, stiffness, and resilience. For years the body compensated... quietly. Then one day a knee hurts during a run to get the train, or shoulder aches reaching overhead, or a back tightens lifting something simple. At that point the story usually becomes more about structural damage. An MRI gets ordered. Welcome to high-tech, low-medicine. And the MRI almost always finds something. A meniscus tear. A rotator cuff tear. A disc bulge. Why? Because by midlife these findings are extremely common — even in people with no pain at all. If you have a tear in one shoulder, image the other shoulder... you probably have the same tear there. But I digress. Once the scan appears, the narrative changes. The image becomes the diagnosis. Now the patient believes something is broken, and the focus often shifts to fixing what the MRI shows. What often gets lost in this is the reason the symptoms appeared in the first place. Many so-called “atraumatic” orthopedic complaints are not purely mechanical failures. They are the moment when reduced strength, declining tissue capacity, and sometimes broader metabolic health issues finally reach a tipping point. Our tissues change over the decades... get over it. In other words, the MRI didn’t create the problem. Well... it sort of did in this scenario. But all the MRI showed was something that was already there.... because of your age, lifestyle, health and so on. The real driver of symptoms is often loss of physiologic reserve. Less muscle. Less tendon or aerobic resilience. Less tolerance for load, etc. Once the MRI enters the picture, the risk becomes overtreatment. This is probably the number one reason people have surgery. When in many cases the most powerful intervention was never the scan or the procedure. It was rebuilding capacity. Strong muscles stabilize joints. Aerobic fitness improves metabolic health and tissue perfusion. Gradual loading restores tolerance. But people often don't take PT seriously prior to surgery. They often take PT very seriously afterwards. Therefore, PT is probably the reason you feel better, despite the surgery. The irony is that the treatment many people ultimately need is the same thing that might have prevented the problem in the first place. Staying strong. Staying active. Maintaining the reserve that protects our joints/tendons/muscles/abilities as we age.

It’s out!! The long-awaited report by the Make America Healthy Again Commission to analyze the causes of the chronic disease epidemic in children is finally here. What a watershed moment for American health. It is a huge first step in not just understanding the root causes of chronic disease, but in starting to change policy and practice to set our children up for a life of health and wellbeing. Well done to the key teams behind this: @SecKennedy @DrMakaryFDA @DrJBhattacharya @DrOz and the rest of the Commission! static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/d…

@BasedHypnotist Those X-ray machines ain’t cheap. Someone has to pay for them:)

This is a move in the right direction. Why has @HealthCanada decided not to take the same action?

U.S. FDA Human Foods Program @FDAfood

2 years ago

Today, the FDA is issuing an order to revoke the authorization for the use of FD&C Red No. 3 in food and ingested drugs in response to a 2022 color additive petition that requested the agency to review whether the Delaney Clause applied. fda.gov/food/hfp-const…

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CAD and USA healthcare systems prioritize pharmaceutical profits and symptom management over addressing illness root causes. The main difference is funding: CAD healthcare is tax-funded, while the US relies on insurance. Both systems have flaws and require reform.This must change

6/ Pain isn’t always just about “growing pains.” Sometimes, it’s about how an athlete moves. Maybe it’s time to shift our focus from just naming conditions to actually fixing the underlying issues. #AthleteDevelopment #InjuryPrevention #MovementMatters

5/ We’ve become too focused on leaving the doctor’s office with a diagnosis rather than a solution. Instead of just managing symptoms, we should be addressing movement quality & biomechanics.

@Lisa71781607 Agreed. Changing school start times can’t fix poor parenting. Healthy habits start at home, and one thing I recommend to parents is not allowing screens in bedrooms during sleep hours.

Exhausted kids at school contribute to poor athletic performance and a higher incidence of injuries. Sleep specialist backing RFK Jr.'s MAHA movement pushes to change school start times in America foxnews.com/health/sleep-s…

RFK JR gives his first remarks from the Oval Office. "For 20 years, I've gotten up every morning and prayed that God would put me in a position where I could end the childhood chronic disease epidemic." Time to MAHA🔥

@mboyle1959 @hubermanlab Many struggle with maintaining proper spine and pelvic alignment during asymmetrical walking farmer carries, let alone jogging a mile while doing so. While I’m all for pushing the body to its limits, rucking seems like a safer alternative to achieve similar results with less risk

Pavel is one of the best in the business. Great to hear him on Huberman. Worth the listen.

Andrew D. Huberman, Ph.D. @hubermanlab

a year ago

Full episode here: hubermanlab.com/episode/pavel-…

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6/ The takeaway: listen to your body. Ensure you incorporate adequate rest into your training routine to maintain a strong immune system. #Fitness #Health #recovery

5/ Fatigue from overtraining further hampers antibody production. Together, these effects can result in more frequent illnesses and slower recovery times.

1/ In the post-COVID era, anxiety about viruses persists. Staying healthy is a top priority, and one key factor is how we train.