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1. Keep your smart phone as far away from you as possible if you want your brain to work right
A while back I made a video titled Willpower is for Losers where I explain how simply purchasing a timed lock box that allows me to lock away temptations (like a video game controller) allowed me to be much more productive. You’d think I could simply resist the urge to play video games, but I argue that having to use mental resources to maintain that resistance drains mental resources. I think something similar is happening with the following study.
April 2017 study: Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity
Results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity.
In a 2017 article, Ward et al describe the results of two experiments.
The first one found that the easier it is to access your smart phone, the worse your cognitive performance. Having the smart phone on the desk lead to the worst scores of working memory capacity and fluid intelligence, smartphone in the bag was slightly better and having the smartphone in another room elicited the best scores.
In the second experiment they wanted to see if the results would be different in people who were more or less dependent on their smart phones. They asked the participants whether they agreed with various statements like “I would have trouble getting through a normal day without my cellphone” or “Using my cellphone makes me feel happy” and came up with a dependence score. They found that the higher the dependence score, the more people’s cognitive performance was negatively affected by having the smartphone on the desk.
Interestingly enough, the people dependent on their smartphone with their smartphone on the desk had by far the worst cognitive capacity, but had the highest cognitive capacity when their phone was in the other room…
2. Statins: Giving you diabetes to reduce your risk of heart disease except diabetes jacks up your risk for heart disease
March 2023 paper: Effects of statin therapy on glycemic control and insulin resistance: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Statins, slightly but significantly raise indexes of diabetes in individuals with adequate or altered glycemic control. The diabetogenic effect does not seem to be influenced by the type or dosage of statin prescribed.
Cholesterol-lowering statins are supposed to be the wonder drug that will protect us from heart disease. Indeed, if you take a statin, your cholesterol will go down. However, there are two little known things about statins:
(1) Statins increase insulin resistance.
(2) Insulin resistance worsens your risk for heart disease more than high cholesterol.*
*There’s debate on whether cholesterol is actually important when it comes to heart disease, but let’s set that aside for now.
A 2015 study explains that: “being insulin resistant carried a significantly higher risk of ischemic heart disease than having an LDL-c, LDL-c/HDL-c, total cholesterol/HDL-c, or non-HDL-c cholesterol higher than the median values of 142 mg/dL, 2.69, 4.30, and 173 mg/dL, respectively.” Simply put: being insulin resistant is worse for your risk for heart disease than high total or high “bad” LDL cholesterol is.
Further, Dr. Kevin Forey explains in this article of his that:
Insulin Resistance measured by the Lipoprotein Insulin Resistance Score (LPIR) is a stronger predictor of premature cardiovascular disease, and cardiovascular disease at any age, than elevated levels LDL-C, ApoB, systolic blood pressure, and body mass index.
If you want to reduce your risk for heart disease and just be healthy in general, your first step should be avoiding insulin resistance.
3. Drinking? Have some lemon juice.
April 2017 study: Protective Effects of Lemon Juice on Alcohol-Induced Liver Injury in Mice
The results showed that lemon juice significantly inhibited alcohol-induced increase of alanine transaminase (ALT), aspartate transaminase (AST), hepatic TG, and lipid peroxidation levels in a dose-dependent manner.
A study on mice found that lemon juice has protective effects on alcohol-induced liver injury. They surmise that the protective effects have something to do with the antioxidant capacity of lemon juice “because lemon juice showed in vitro antioxidant capacity.” Further, the more lemon juice, the more protection they observed. Though, surely this has to plateau at some point… you can’t just drink two liters of straight lemon juice and grow a new liver.
Shout out to my friend living in Kyoto who only drinks lemon sours.
4. Want to slim? Then eat fat! (1958)
Fun video from British Pathe:
5. Not enough time to go for a walk? Do air squats
April 2024 randomized controlled trial: Enhanced muscle activity during interrupted sitting improves glycemic control in overweight and obese men
Collectively, short, frequent walking or squatting breaks effectively enhance glycemic control in overweight and obese men compared to a single bout of walking within prolonged sitting.
A 2024 paper on 18 overweight and obese men found that just 10 body weight air squats every 45 minutes 10 times helps regulate blood sugar more than one 30-minute walk.
As someone who doesn't really use the "smart" portion of the smartphone I found the Appendix to be more interesting.
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Accordingly, we excluded data from participants who reported not owning a smartphone (n = 3 in Experiment 1; n = 11 in Experiment 2).
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14 people (2.5%?), around 21 years old, found to not own a smartphone in Chicago??
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“How much money would it take for you to give up watching television for a full day?”—an item assessing the subjective value of a digital device that is not one’s smartphone—revealed no interaction between Phone Location and Television Value, F(2, 247) = 0.15, p = .86.
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Do the youth of Chicago not follow the general trend of not caring for television?
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Note that we also collected self-reported number of tweets sent per day as a potential measure of use frequency. However, we found that this was not a viable indicator of smartphone use; 88.6% of participants reported sending 0 tweets per day, 6.6% reported sending between .1 and 1 tweets per day (inclusive), and only 4.8% reported sending more than 1 tweet per day.
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Why tweets sent? They could have asked about "messages sent on social media", "tweets viewed", or "cat videos" or something else that would have given a real measure.
Such an odd measure to pick.
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A one-way ANOVA on participants’ responses to the question “While completing today’s tasks, how often were you thinking about your cellphone?” (1 = not at all to 7 = constantly/the whole time) revealed no effect of Phone Location on phone-related thoughts (F(2, 514) = .84, p = .43). Notably, the modal self-reported frequency of thinking about one’s phone in each condition was “not at all.” Combined with the significant effect of Phone Location on available cognitive capacity, these results support our proposition that the mere presence of one’s smartphone may impair cognitive functioning even when it does not occupy the contents of consciousness.
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It's also interesting that conscious thought had no bearing on the result.
Perhaps the subconscious is constantly on the active lookout for audiovisual signals that they have received a new notification?
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For example, we find that the effect of smartphone salience on cognitive capacity is robust to both the visibility of the phone’s screen (face down in experiment 1, face up in experiment 2) and the phone’s power (silent vs. powered off in experiment 2), suggesting that intuitive “fixes” such as placing one’s phone face down or turning it off are likely futile. However, our data suggest at least one simple solution: separation. Although this approach may seem at odds with prior research indicating that being separated from one’s phone undermines performance by increasing anxiety (Cheever et al. 2014; Clayton et al. 2015), we note that participants in those studies were unexpectedly separated from their phones (Cheever et al. 2014) and forced to hear them ring while being unable to answer (Clayton et al. 2015). In contrast, participants in our experiments expected to be separated from their phones (this was the norm in the lab) and were not confronted with unanswerable notifications or calls while separated. We therefore suggest that defined and protected periods of separation, such as these, may allow consumers to perform better not just by reducing interruptions but also by increasing available cognitive capacity.
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They did argue that turning off the phone would mean that the participants certainly can't be expecting a notification. But then, wouldn't the autonomous systems simply be trained on the presence of the phone rather than its actual state? Given that most of the time the phone would be turned on so the autonomous systems wouldn't have had the chance to learn differentiating such a thing.
Like the difference between the subconscious handling cycling a bike, and doing a wheelie.
Perchance, the autonomous systems are unable to discern, due to inadequate training, that the phone cannot generate notifications in such a state and is therefore still preoccupied, on alert, solely due to the presence of the phone?
Would be interesting to see if simply the image of their phone being within their visual range would have the same result.
Would also be interesting to see the actual demographic breakdown of the results and, given proven effects on compulsive behaviour, especially socially related behaviour, and the tendencies of university students in this regard, the hormonal levels of participants.
Thanks so much Joseph! <3
Indeed I like to banish my phone whenever possible . . . love the simplicity of 10 squats every 45 minutes . . . and I LOVE lemon in my water . . . Btw Many medications raise blood sugar just as statins do. Not sure why that is, but it's a built-in morbidity maker. The list includes corticosteroids, antipsychotics, and many common blood pressure medications (as with statins, the side effect of diabetes risk is a more relevant factor in CVD than what the pill is treating). The film was hilarious: Thanks because laughter is medicine :)) They were following their British countryman Mr. William Banting who popularized low carb eating a century before.