From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
There's a direct link between mental health and immunity. If you go through a divorce, if you are in a car accident, or if you suffer some major trauma to your body… your cortisone rises, adrenaline goes-up. You could have enough of an immune response to get pneumonia.
We are a dark-deprived society in this modern era, and we need darkness for the release of melatonin for healthy sleep. Without melatonin, we will not sleep sufficiently.
With technology, we're creating a lot more hammers – and with more hammers, we're able to find more nails. The question is whether those hammers are being made for the right purposes, and whether they will serve the right purpose. I often worry that when we talk about health-tech – it almost seems that in certain areas the tech is taking over the health.
Chosen suffering is part and parcel of a meaningful life. If you don't have any chosen suffering in your life, you're probably not living the best life you could.
I see myself as the pioneering 'zero'—the inaugural integration of a human with technology, aiming for an autonomous growth trajectory. The introduction of zero transformed mathematics, art, physics, and more. Now, it's humanity's turn.
Our goal is to pinpoint where we can create the most value for humanity per dollar, rupee, or shilling spent. This isn't usually something that makes you wealthy, but it does a significant amount of good in three ways: it helps people survive and stay healthy rather than falling ill or dying; it alleviates poverty; and it improves the environment.
My training as an actor prepared me for caregiving. As actors, we show up ready to explore what might happen without a clear sense of the outcome. This requires you to be nimble, flexible, and curious, qualities I had to embrace daily as a caregiver.
Current statistics indicate that 1 in 3 managers grapple with exhaustion, stress, and mental health challenges. If leaders themselves are struggling, how can they effectively support their teams? It's crucial for leaders to prioritize self-care.
This crisis is rooted in the collective delusion that burnout is the necessary price we must pay for accomplishment and success. Recent scientific findings make it clear that this couldn't be less true. Our golden age of sleep science is revealing all the ways in which sleep plays a vital role in our decision making, emotional intelligence, cognitive function, and creativity. Not only is there no tradeoff between living a well-rounded life and high performance, performance is actually improved when our lives include time for renewal.
If we treat the mind and body as one unit, then wherever we put the mind, we necessarily put the body—and that opens up enormous possibilities for control.
Many organisms have a pattern of temporal change and senescence that is reproducible and predictable for the species and gender — clearly with a huge genetic component. For example, the longevity of rats is 3.8 years while their 'cousins' the mole-rats live up to 30 years. These timings are probably optimized to fit with the ecology patterns of the species — predation, litter size, environmental variation, food abundance, etc.
There are two key advantages of thinking of guns as a public health issue. First of all, it removes some of the emotion from the issue because it's no longer about banning guns, it's no longer about guns being awful things. Secondly it moves the debate to be about evidence; where we can empirically show what works, at what cost.