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Why Doing Less Helps More
Welcome to Effective Habits, a weekly newsletter where I share evidence-based strategies and tools to help you live a happy, healthy, and productive life.
Today at a Glance:
The Wandering Mind: A Gift We Squander
Endurance Training Interferes with Muscle Strength Gains, But Not Hypertrophy
Life Happens at 1x Speed
“The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”
The Wandering Mind: A Gift We Squander
Darius Foroux
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
Most people treat a wandering mind like a flaw—something to suppress the moment attention drifts from a screen or to-do list—but psychology suggests the opposite. In Focus, Daniel Goleman argues that mind-wandering is often the source of creative ideas, and the real problem is not that our minds wander, but that they wander away from what matters. Neuroscience helps explain why: the brain shifts between the TPN (Task-Positive Network), our focused mode for solving problems and executing tasks, and the DMN (Default Mode Network), our reflective mode that activates during rest, daydreaming, and open-ended thought. The DMN is where ideas connect, life gets processed, and future plans quietly take shape. Time away from deliberate focus is not wasted time, it is integration. Without it, many people stay busy all day yet never experience clarity. Research has found that an anxious wandering mind can reduce happiness, but wandering fueled by curiosity can generate insight. That distinction matters: one loops through stress, the other explores possibility. In a culture that glorifies constant busyness, many have lost the ability to truly switch off, mistaking stimulation for recovery. But attention, like any muscle, fatigues when overused. The solution is rhythm: periods of deep engagement through the TPN, followed by genuine mental space that lets the DMN do its work. Nature, walks, quiet moments, and boredom often restore focus better than endless scrolling ever will. Wandering is not the enemy of productivity—it is one of its foundations. Your brain does not run on nonstop intensity. It runs on cycles of effort, recovery, and space.
🎬Action!
Reclaim one “dead zone” each day. Choose one routine moment, like walking to your car, waiting for coffee, washing dishes, or standing in line, and do it with zero input. No phone, no music, no podcast. Let your mind drift instead of automatically filling the space.
Take a “Blank Walk” three times a week. Go for a 20-minute walk with no audio or distractions. The first few minutes may feel uncomfortable, as that’s often just the habit of constant stimulation fading. Stay with it and let your thoughts settle naturally.
Set an evening input cutoff. Choose a time each night (for example, 8:00 PM) when you stop consuming new information. No news, podcasts, videos, or endless learning. Give your brain space to process what you’ve already taken in during the day.
Keep a wandering log. Carry a small notebook or keep one note on your phone. When a useful idea appears during quiet time, capture it quickly, then return to the moment. This helps you preserve insights without breaking the flow of wandering.
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
Can cardio and strength training coexist, or does one sabotage the other? A new study suggests the answer is more nuanced than the old “cardio kills gains” mantra. When previously untrained men combined resistance training with four weekly HIIT sessions, they still built virtually the same amount of muscle as those who only lifted—type II muscle fibers grew about 18–19% in both groups. What did suffer was maximal strength: the lifting-only group improved leg press strength far more than the concurrent group. In other words, endurance work didn’t appear to shut down muscle growth, protein synthesis, or the cellular machinery behind hypertrophy. Instead, it likely reduced strength gains through fatigue, recovery strain, and neuromuscular factors like coordination, motor unit recruitment, and freshness. That matters because strength and size are related, but not identical. If your goal is to be as strong as possible, too much hard cardio may blunt progress. But if your goal is to build muscle while also improving fitness and conditioning, the feared “interference effect” looks far smaller than many assume. The real conflict may be less about biology and more about how much time, energy, and recovery you can realistically allocate to both.
🎬Action!
Train for your primary goal, then support the rest. If maximal strength is your top priority, schedule cardio so it doesn’t compromise your lifting by separating sessions by several hours or placing endurance work on different days, and keeping hard intervals limited. If muscle gain and overall fitness matter more, confidently combine both by prioritizing progressive strength training, adding 2–4 cardio sessions per week, and protecting recovery with sleep, food, and rest days. The key takeaway: cardio doesn’t automatically kill gains—poor recovery and poor programming do.
Life Happens at 1x Speed
Matheus Lima
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
At some point, speeding through podcasts, audiobooks, and videos at 2x became a symbol of modern efficiency—the same kind of humblebrag as waking up at 5 a.m. But beneath it is usually something less admirable: anxiety, FOMO, and the feeling that there is always more to catch up on. The queue never ends, the algorithm never sleeps, and consuming faster becomes a treadmill disguised as progress. Yet life itself happens at 1x speed. Every meaningful conversation, every meal, every walk, every moment worth remembering unfolds in real time. When we speed up content, we may capture the words, but we often lose the pauses, rhythm, nuance, and texture that make ideas stick. We optimize for volume when we should be optimizing for understanding. Worse, constant input leaves no room for boredom—the empty space where reflection, creativity, and original thought are born. A simple rule changes everything: if something is not worth consuming at 1x, it is not worth consuming at all. Suddenly mediocre podcasts, filler videos, and forgettable hot takes no longer make the cut. You become selective instead of “efficient.” And the reward is surprising: you enjoy what you do consume more, retain more of it, and rediscover the silence between inputs. Sometimes the thing we need most is not more content, but less noise.
🎬Action!
Put all audio and video content back to 1x speed for one week, and use a simple filter before you press play: If this is not worth my full attention at normal speed, I will skip it. This forces you to consume more selectively, creates space to actually process what you hear, and helps replace fake productivity with better attention and retention. At the end of the week, notice what you enjoyed more, what you actually remembered, and how much “must-consume” content was never worth consuming in the first place.
TOOL TIP
GasBuddy: GasBuddy (available for iOS and Android) is a popular, crowd-sourced app for reporting gas prices. The app has over 10 million downloads on the Play Store alone, and a massive community of users who update fuel prices on a near real-time basis.
Alternatively, Google Maps has a built-in gas price tool as well, but it's not community supported and it doesn't update as often as you might like (many listings show prices that are over 24 hours old). Still, it's convenient because it's built right into an app you probably already use.
FUN FACT
Training OpenAI's GPT-4 used an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours of energy — enough to power San Francisco for three days.
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Disclaimer: The information provided in this newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult a medical professional for advice, diagnosis, or treatment. We are not liable for any risks or issues that may arise from using this information.
