The Long Game 84: Heart Rate Variability, Fun, Superstition, Strength
The Long Game 84: Heart Rate Variability, Fun, Superstition, Strength🧠 Impact of Covid on Early Child Cognitive Development, Airlines, Annual Review, Egypt, and Much More!Hi there, it’s Mehdi Yacoubi, co-founder at Vital, and this is The Long Game Newsletter. To receive it in your inbox each week, subscribe here: In this episode, we explore:
Let’s dive in! 🥑 Health⌚ Heart Rate VariabilityHeart rate variability (HRV) is a measure of your autonomic nervous system that can be extremely useful for evaluating your physical fitness and determining how ready your body is to perform. Generally speaking, higher HRV is a sign of better fitness. After realizing that my HRV is lower than where I’d want to be, I did a bit of reading to see how I could improve it. As a general rule, you’d want your HRV to be as high as possible in the ranges below. Here are a few things that could impact the HRV:
I hope to get my HRV in the 100ms range over the next couple of months. Ps: when it comes to measuring your HRV, Oura, Whoop are good solutions, but the Apple Watch through Apple Health is not. You can use HRV4Training instead. HRV - APPLE WATCH
Too many issues to make it useful:
• It doesn't record a value every day
• Sometimes crazy artifacts skew the values 👇
• It's measured at a different time each day
@altini_marco's great article has the full take:
medium.com/@altini_marco/… 🌱 Wellness🧠 Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Early Child Cognitive DevelopmentI try to stay away from the covid discussion as much as possible. Still, I thought this paper was important to share, especially for parents with young kids:
While we’re talking about covid, I think it’s essential to understand that there is no going out of a covid world at this point. Variants will keep coming at us, and we need to make decisions that acknowledge this fact. We have vaccines and other medications being developed. We need to do everything to go back to living our lives and stopping the mental health and cognitive development burdens that this pandemic has caused. Bill Ackman puts it well here: “We need to give the healthcare system the resources it needs, and we need to start living again. It appears that Omicron will ‘vaccinate’ everyone who isn’t already vaccinated. Let’s protect the vulnerable and continue to live our lives. The beginning of the end of living in fear of Covid is near.” We have reached the stage in the Covid crisis where our attention needs to focus on severity and protecting those who are vulnerable rather than case counts. While unvaccinated Americans are still at risk, the vax decision is a personal one. We need to give the healthcare system https://t.co/uzRZImuLja Scott Gottlieb, MD @ScottGottliebMD In South Africa, we’re thankfully seeing a striking decoupling between new Covid cases and ICU admissions and deaths. Whether #Omicron is inherently less virulent, whether this hopeful finding is result of baseline immunity in infected, or a combination of both, is still unclear. https://t.co/xtmCSdpCNc🧠 Better Thinking🔮 In Defense of SuperstitionAlthough I try to be as rational as I can, superstition and belief in miracles can have their place and even be beneficial psychologically. This article makes a great case:
Magical thinking indeed has a lot of downsides, but it would be wrong to think it doesn’t help us in some circumstances:
⚡️ Startup Stuff🃏 The Importance of FunA couple of days ago, I heard Lex Fridman say “fun things go further.” He was talking about Dogecoin and why it might keep going up. “Fun things go further.” — @lexfridman
A fundamental principle of how we think about product at @joinvital. I think this idea is essential and often underrated. Fun can be a substantial comparative advantage, whether it’s about a product, a space, or a team. Packy McCormick describes it perfectly in the context of web3:
This is also crucial in terms of how we think about the product we are building at Vital. One of the reasons we pivoted five months ago we because we believe that health optimization needs to be extremely fun to make its way to the mainstream. You won’t get millions of people doing stuff they don’t love and enjoy doing for a sustained period. Finally, at the scale of a team, it’s also clear that selecting people who have a genuine passion for the product and a willingness to work hard will be key to creating the magic. 📚 What I Read🧬 The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social EqualityI’m still reading this book: it’s an excellent summary of everything related to genes and social inequality.
❓ I Have A Few QuestionsQuestions without any answers have become one of my favorite types of content.
🚫 The Phrase “No Evidence” Is A Red Flag For Bad Science CommunicationAn important point on science communication:
🎙 Podcast Episodes of the WeekThis week in podcasts:
🍭 Brain Food🔁 Friendships and ReciprocityI came across this recent research paper bringing some bad news! Here’s the abstract:
This article adds:
@RobertGreene @sapinker @CeliaHeyes @AnnieDuke @amychua @RobertCialdini @mattwridley Blueprint by @NAChristakis
amzn.to/2MtX8un
If you consider someone to be your friend, there is a 34 percent chance they consider you to be their friend
If you consider someone to be your enemy, there is a 5 percent chance they consider you to be their enemy 🎥 What I’m Watching🛫 How Airlines Quietly Became BanksJust like Starbucks, airlines are actually banks in disguise. 🇪🇬 Why Egypt Is Building a New Capital CityWill this gigantic project work? 🔧 The Tool of the Week🥇 The Ultimate Annual ReviewThis is the best template I found if you want to conduct an annual review for 2021 before setting up some resolutions and goals for 2022. 🪐 Quote I’m Pondering
— Jerry Colonna If you enjoyed this newsletter, make sure to subscribe if you haven’t 👇 👋 EndNoteThanks for reading! If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. Podcast reviews are also gratefully received. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the heart just below this, which helps me get visibility on Substack. Feel free to email me or find me on Twitter if you have any feedback or questions. Until next week, Mehdi Yacoubi PS: Lots of newsletters get stuck in Gmail’s Promotions tab. If you find it in there, please help train the algorithm by dragging it to Primary. It makes a big difference. If you liked this post from The Long Game by Mehdi Yacoubi, why not share it? |
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The Long Game 83: Wearable Data & Lifestyle Modifications, Emotional Intelligence, Optionality, Blood Testing
Monday, December 13, 2021
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Monday, December 6, 2021
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The Long Game 81: Gratitude, The Guilt Trap, Hard Work, Career Moats
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The Long Game 79: Burn, Uncertainty, The Reading Obsession, Positioning
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The Long Game 78: Turning Blood into Human Eggs, Crypto Cities, Choosing to Suffer, Coordination Headwinds
Monday, November 8, 2021
🏃 Escaping Competition Through Authenticity, Romwod, Japan, Shamanic Breathing Technique, and Much More!
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