Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

What matches

178 practices

Narrow these down

Alcohol does not add anger. It takes off the brake. Stimulants do the opposite job and press harder on the accelerator, and having both in you at once is the worst arrangement of the two.

What drink takes first is the part that holds you back, which is why nothing feels different from the inside. You are not angrier, there is simply…

Five minutesAnger, alcohol and the bodyMedical and treatmentQur’an 4:43One line of research

The strongest pull is not the anger by itself. It is anger plus being right, the lift in the body and the certainty of the moral high ground arriving together.

That pairing is genuinely hard to put down, because giving it up means giving up more than a mood. It means not being the wronged one for a while.…

Five minutesAnger, alcohol and the bodyMedical and treatmentQur’an 12:53One line of research

Before a task you have been circling for days, give five minutes to moving your body. A brisk walk or a couple of flights of stairs is often enough to make starting feel less like pushing at a door that will not open.

Treat the movement as part of the task rather than something virtuous you do separately. The lift is short lived, so it helps most sitting right…

Five minutesSystems for daily lifeMedical and treatmentQur’an 20:114One line of research

Light movement while you work is not stolen from the work. Rocking a foot, standing up, a slow circuit of the room on a call: for many people the concentration goes up rather than down.

Worth testing instead of assuming. Take one task you always do sitting still and do it moving gently: read on your feet, take the meeting walking,…

Five minutesSystems for daily life

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

Medical and treatment

Qur’an 22:78

One line of research

Do not leave it to eleven at night to decide whether to close the tab. Set the block in the afternoon, while you are still the version of yourself who wants it set.

A browser extension that shuts certain sites between certain hours, a router on a timer, mobile data off after a set time. Pick one, set it once, and…

Five minutesSystems for daily lifeMedical and treatmentQur’an 34:11One line of research

Most claims about food and behaviour rest on weak studies. The ones worth taking seriously give each person both the real thing and a dummy at different times, with nobody knowing which is which, so that hope and expectation cannot do the work.

The food colouring trials are the standard example. Around 150 children each received drinks containing a preservative plus one of two dye mixes, or…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 25:67One line of research

The same brand of sweets is often made with plant based colours in one country and artificial ones in another. If a company can make it without the dyes elsewhere, the dyes are not essential to the food.

Nine artificial colours are approved in the US, and the volume approved for use rose roughly fivefold between 1950 and 2012. One of them, Red No. 3,…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:67One line of research

A real food allergy shows itself on the body: a rash, a swollen or inflamed throat, something you can see. Behaviour on its own does not identify one, although behaviour often improves once a genuine allergy is dealt with.

One child's attention and mood went back to her usual level once berries came out of her diet, and what made that findable was the rash and the sore…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 55:11One line of research

The studies linking pesticide levels to ADHD are tangled up with income, since families least able to buy organic differ in plenty of other ways too. If organic food is affordable for you, fine. If it is not, you are not failing your child.

In one study of 1,140 children, 94% had detectable pesticide in their urine, and ADHD was about twice as common among those with higher…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 36:35One line of research

Most eating advice quietly assumes a budget. Fresh food is expensive and does not keep, so a household relying on food assistance ends up buying what lasts, and what lasts comes in tins and packets.

If money is the constraint, say it out loud rather than nodding along and then failing quietly at home. The advice can be rebuilt around what is…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:184One line of research

A second study, this time of 44 products, found only about half were authentic. Roughly six in ten were mislabelled, three in ten contained a substituted ingredient, and one in five held contaminants or fillers.

One study of this kind is a story about some bad batches. Two independent studies finding the same thing is a description of how the market works.…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 6:99One line of research

Several herbal products change how fast the liver processes medication, which can leave a prescribed drug either weaker or stronger without a single change to the dose.

This is often why a supplement looks like it caused a relapse or a sudden run of side effects. Nothing about the prescription changed, so the pattern…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:60One line of research

Two to be careful with in particular. Yohimbe reliably ramps anxiety up, so much so that it has been used in research to bring panic on, and kava is a sedative that stacks with alcohol and with sedating medication and has damaged livers at higher doses.

Kava has been restricted or banned in several countries over liver harm, which tells you how seriously that risk is taken. Yohimbe is a poor choice…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 20:81One line of research

You cannot patent a plant, so there is little commercial reason to fund expensive trials of one. When you read that a herb has no evidence, that often means nobody paid to look rather than that somebody looked and found nothing.

Both halves of that need saying. No evidence is not proof of no effect, and it is also not permission to assume one. It leaves you with an open…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 16:67One line of research

Herbal products are rarely covered by insurance and they add up quickly. That cost belongs in the decision, particularly when you cannot be sure the capsule holds what it says.

Money spent here is money not spent elsewhere, and often the alternative is a treatment that is covered and has been tested. Nobody is telling you…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 6:141One line of research

What you feel does not stay in your head. Emotional states register in the body's immune signalling too, which is one reason a long stretch of unspoken distress can leave you physically run down.

This is not a claim that you can think yourself well or ill. It is closer to saying the body keeps a tally. If you have been carrying something heavy…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:172One line of research

A physical symptom is not a free floating fact. Read it next to what your life has actually held, the early parts included, and it often makes more sense than it does on its own.

This works in both directions. It stops you treating a body complaint as something random that landed on you, and it stops you treating it as a…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 15:22One line of research

Saying a difficulty is in the past is not the same as saying it was never real. Sometimes a picture changes because something that was making it worse got taken away, and the honest words for that are neither cured nor imagining it.

People who have been disbelieved by doctors are very sensitive to this, and with reason. The choice usually gets offered as either it was all in your…

Five minutesFood, caffeine and fuelMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:184One line of research

Feeling close to your own people does not automatically make you kinder to everybody else. Sometimes it does the opposite and sharpens the line between us and them.

This is worth watching in yourself, particularly if you are the sort who gets angry on behalf of a group. The same warmth that makes you loyal can…

Five minutesGrowing empathyMedical and treatmentQur’an 49:13One line of research

The advice to touch, to eat together, to move your body, to say the true thing out loud stands up perfectly well without the hormone story attached.

Explanations that hang on a single chemical are memorable and usually too tidy, and the studies behind the popular version are often small. None of…

Five minutesGrowing empathyMedical and treatmentQur’an 2:177One line of research