Five Things
Lower the floor first. 👇
By the end of 2018, exhaustion finally caught up with me.
I looked healthy from the outside. A decade of endurance training, mostly clean eating, good sleep habits, and great community around me.
Early in 2019, I accepted an invitation to join a new friend’s yoga studio program built around breathwork, hot yoga, clean eating, guided meditation, and immersive experiences like chakra clearing and chanting.
I said yes because why not?! What I found wasn’t a practice or a protocol.
It was the foundation of a framework. I knew these essential needs. You know these essential needs. But the months of being plugged in were a clear reminder of how meaningful life can be when you cut out the noise. Five things that are simple and easy to understand. Movement. Sleep. Nourishment. Connection. Reflection.
Here’s what I’ve discovered around why it’s so hard to stay consistent with all of these day-to-day… It’s the volume of distraction. Distractions and interruptions accumulate everywhere and come at you from every direction. Sleep suffers and nourishment slips. Connection fades and reflection becomes a lift. For me, movement becomes the last thing standing, and eventually even that gets squeaky.
Again, the framework isn’t complicated. What’s complicated is staying with it in a world that is actively, aggressively pulling you away from it.
And it’s not an accident.
Last week I wrote about how the wellness industry isn’t selling you health; it’s selling you the idea that you can’t do this on your own.
The filter I use for every tool, product, and protocol being sold to me: does this build my competence, or does it replace it?
The pillars are where that competence lives.
And the reason we keep drifting from them, the reason the wellness industry can keep selling us more interesting alternatives, is neurology.
Dr. Anna Lembke, Stanford psychiatrist and author of Dopamine Nation, describes the modern world as a dopamine buffet. She says we live in an environment engineered to spike your reward system constantly, cheaply, and at scale. Every scroll, every notification, every next wellness thing to buy is a micro-hit. Small. Fast. Effortless.
Your brain adapts. What neuroscientists call downregulation. Your receptors become less sensitive over time. The baseline shifts. The ordinary things like a walk outside, a quiet meal, or a real conversation stop registering as rewarding because they can’t compete with the volume our smart devices provide.
Andrew Huberman is direct about this: when we front-load dopamine into the beginning of our days, like phones in bed or social media before breakfast, the activities requiring patience and presence feel flat by comparison. Not because they are. Because we’ve raised the floor.
The noise isn’t just distracting you from paying attention to the pillars. It’s making them feel boring.
And then (as touched on last week) you are sold something more interesting to replace them.
So the actual work (before any optimization) is to lower the floor back down. Not a detox. A recalibration. And this is where the pillars stop being a checklist and start being a system.
And the better news: these pillars overlap. They reinforce each other in ways that aren’t rocket science once you see them but are also easy to miss when you’re chasing the next thing.
A morning walk alone is movement and reflection. Some of my clearest thinking happens on foot as the sun rises and the suburbs offer the sounds of nature before they can be drowned out by cars.
A meal cooked and shared with Lauren and the boys. No phones, no rush. This is nourishment and connection.
This isn’t about engineering the perfect routine. It’s about noticing that the pillars don’t need to be siloed and turned into a managed habit. They bleed into each other naturally when the noise isn’t crowding them out.
The intentional version looks like asking a simple question when you have the moment to slow down: What needs my attention right now? Or what need is missing right now?
Sometimes it’s to get up and move. Sometimes it’s a slow meal. Sometimes it’s five minutes of genuine stillness before the house wakes up. None of this is complicated. We don’t need it to be more sophisticated. We need it to be more protected.
Here’s what my simplified version looks like across the five in my life, imperfectly and always evolving:
Sleep is where I struggle most often. With kids and work and everything that doesn’t get done until after 9pm, a pristine schedule is a fantasy. So I’ve stopped chasing. I aim for a consistent wake time and a 30-minute window of bedtime between 10:00 and 10:30. Last night was 11. 🫠I also do my best to have low stimulation in the hour before bed. Lembke’s research shows that even a 30-minute low-dopamine buffer meaningfully improves restorative cycles.
Movement I’ve mostly solved in that I move a lot throughout the day. Everyday features some sort of outdoor movement. Every week has 2-3 resistance workouts. The rest is icing on the cake. I built my identity around activity long before anyone told me to track it. So in my world it doesn’t require much lift.
Nourishment gets hard for me because convenience is engineered to be more dopaminergic than real food. Ultra-processed food is designed by teams of scientists to be more rewarding than anything you’d find in nature. The friction reduction that works best from my experience is what food is in the house. What requires zero decision-making. You can’t F up too much in a kitchen stocked for your health.
Connection is the one most under attack over the last couple of decades. Not followers. Not online networking. A real conversation in the flesh. Phone off the table. Eyes up. Buettner’s Blue Zone research (save for its flaws) and Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s work on social isolation land in the same place: genuine human connection isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a foundation for health. I’m deliberate with this in my family life as well as my professional life.
Reflection is the hardest sell IMHO in a high-dopamine world because it produces no immediate reward. Sitting with yourself is really hard (if you are starting from zero). With no music and no app, just the uncomfortable real thing feels like nothing is happening. That’s exactly why it works. You’re building tolerance for presence. Lowering the floor. My comes with a walk without a device, a sauna session to sit and reflect, or upon waking I’ll perch right up in bed for 10-15 minutes.
My friend’s studio in 2019 didn’t give me anything new. It stripped away enough noise that I could finally observe the essentials. These five pillars. Overlapping, reinforcing, compounding.
Not a biohack. Not a subscription. Not a retreat you have to fly to.
Just the simple version protected, practiced, and returned to again and again. Everything else is either supporting them or competing with them.
You already know which is which.
