Phew - glad that week of being thankful is finally over.

All seriousness, pretty silly in the grand scheme of things that we have a 2-3 day stretch on our 365 day calendar focused on being thankful and practicing gratitude. It’s no wonder our material focused compasses have us constantly yearning for the next thing.

I often think about what routines and actions I could put in my life to remind myself to be more thankful. I’ve tried the gratitude journal, I’ve tried the meditation, and what I think I have come to is this: take action on it.

When you think of someone you are thankful for, or an action you are thankful for, call it out. Call them, text them, visit them. Let them know.

When you are thankful for a good night of sleep. Call it out. Beautiful sun rise? Praise it.

We have too much to be thankful for, and orienting ourselves around the small and mundane helps us greater appreciate the big and life changing.

The Stoics had a simple, annoying way of describing human suffering - “It’s not things that upset us, but our judgments about things.” In other words, life doesn’t hurt nearly as much as the story we tell ourselves about life.

Modern neuroscience (2,000 years later) is basically raising its hand saying, “Yeah, they were right.”

For some, this pill is a hard one to swallow: your emotional experience isn’t a direct download of reality. It’s an interpretation. A meaning-making process. A narrative your brain assembles in a split-second based on past experiences, habits, and whatever mental lens you’ve been wearing lately.

And most of us walk around reacting to our interpretations as if they were facts.

The Neuroscience Behind Stoic Emotional Control

When something happens - your boss sends a cryptic email, someone cuts you off in traffic, your kid is melting down - the first part of your brain to light up is the amygdala, the threat-detection center. Its job is simple - assume danger first, ask questions never.

The reality often is that initial reaction is only the draft. It’s fast, crude, and emotional.

Enter the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the more rational, deliberate part of your brain. This is the region responsible for reframing, perspective-taking, and impulse control. Huberman often talks about the PFC as the “editor” of emotional responses, capable of rewriting the amygdala’s rough draft into something calmer, clearer, and more useful.

The bridge between the two (the emotional impulse and the thoughtful response) is what psychologists call cognitive appraisal. It’s the same idea the Stoics obsessed over: the meaning you assign to an event determines your emotional outcome.

Research backs it up. Studies on reappraisal show that actively reframing a stressor (layman’s example - “This isn’t a threat, it’s a challenge”) reduces amygdala activation, increases PFC activity, and shifts the body’s stress chemistry toward a more productive state. Same event, different meaning, entirely different biology.

Your internal dialogue and narrative literally rewires your nervous system.

I think about this dilemma often. Is the thing that happened to me really that bad, or is my brain just interpreting it as so?

Did that person make that comment to me with malicious intent, or is my brain just perceiving it that way? That angry customer is calling again, they’re probably still pissed off right? This thing happened to me, that must mean this. I haven’t heard from this person in a while, that must mean “x”, etc.

Our brain is a processor that never stops running, and without intentional effort and guard rails for how we interpret the information it is processing, our fear-based survival system often guides us in the wrong mental directions.

It’s a worthy exercise to audit our thoughts, and especially audit the negative ones. What is the genesis of said thought, and is that your threat-detection system going off louder that it needs to be?

Here are practical, science-backed ways to take control of your interpretations:

Myth: Sodium is harmful. Truth: sodium isn’t harmful - excessive sodium in the context of a garbage diet is.

Most research linking sodium to negative outcomes involved sedentary individuals eating 4,000–7,000 mg/day from processed foods. If your diet is whole-food based, you’re active, and most of your sodium comes from salting food or electrolytes (not Cheetos) you’re in a completely different category.

Running and endurance sports helped completely reframe my approach to sodium and the benefits it provides the body, and with the explosion of electrolyte packet consumption, it deems a worthy topic to be covered here.

A generally safe, performance-supportive range for active people: 2,500–4,000 mg/day, depending on sweat rate, activity level, and climate.

Endurance athletes? Sometimes double that the science can say, and based on if you consider yourself a heavy sweater or not.

So the question comes up: Should You Supplement? Should you be using electrolytes in your daily routine? Use This Simple Framework:

When it comes to trying to change your physique, sodium plays an active role too:

Sodium for Fat Loss: Reducing carbs drops electrolyte stores. If you don’t replace sodium, you feel drained and crave junk. Proper sodium intake stabilizes energy, reduces cravings, and improves training output - critical when calories are low.

Muscle Gain: Hydrated muscle tissue performs better. Better performance = higher training volume = hypertrophy. Also, sodium improves cell swelling, which signals anabolic pathways.

I would propose that 90% of people would do well with starting their day with some sort of electrolyte supplement (before anything else is drank). Give it a go and see how you feel.

This time of year is the perfect time to revisit this latest title from Cal Newport, “Slow Productivity”

The end of the year always tempts us into two extremes: (1) collapsing into the holiday chaos with zero structure, or (2) sprinting into 2026 planning like productivity junkies who can’t sit still for five minutes.

Leaning on the wisdom of Slow Productivity offers a third path - one that’s annoyingly simple, deeply balanced, and exactly what most of us need right now:

Do Fewer Things. But Do Them Better.

I highlighted these two passages in this section of the book, and they take continual reminding (like, daily): “To produce at your peak level, you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.” And later: “It’s far better to make meaningful progress on a small number of high-impact projects than to frantically juggle dozens of trivial ones.”

This is the antidote to end-of-year overwhelm and the perfect compass for 2026. When everything feels urgent, when your calendar looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, when every email screams for attention - your real edge is subtraction.

Not more goals. Not projects. Just fewer things done with more intention.

I have relied heavily on being an efficient communicator in my career. As a sales rep, I wore it as a badge of honor when a customer reached out and I responded immediately (or as soon as I physically could). I answered emails as they came in. And I continued to do so as my career advanced. At some point I had an epiphany though that this constant pinging back and forth of email was constantly pulling me from the task I was working on when I received said email.

I noticed the same phenomenon in my inability to say no to things - meetings, additional tasks. I wore busy like a badge of honor, and the quality of the things that really mattered suffered because of it.

When you focus on fewer priorities, you reduce what cognitive scientists call attention residue - the mental lag from switching tasks. Every time you hop from planning next year’s goals to buying gifts to reorganizing your inbox, your prefrontal cortex burns through limited neural resources.

Fewer tasks = less residue = more clarity and more output with less effort.

This is Slow Productivity at its core - designing your life so you can actually work deeply, rest deeply, and live like a human instead of a task robot.

To simplify this down to be actionable for this end of year push and transition into our “new year, new me” BS:

“Sustainable achievement requires respecting the natural rhythms of life.” Do fewer things. Do them better. And give yourself the margin to enter the new year with clarity instead of chaos.