Pills, Powders, and Proof
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 Powerful Art of Negative Capability
A Guide to Medications and Supplements: Determining What to Take, What to Skip, and How to Know If They’re Working For You
Read Old Books
“The best revenge is not to be like that.”
The Powerful Art of Negative Capability
Sahil Bloom
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
Negative Capability is the discipline of staying with uncertainty instead of rushing to escape it. We all know the impulse: the moment something feels unclear—a career choice, a relationship question, a health worry, a shifting future—we reach for an answer, a plan, a prediction, or someone to reassure us. That search for certainty can feel productive, but it often has a hidden cost. When we reach too quickly for certainty, we can mistake the first answer for the right one, cling to familiar paths because they feel safe, become overconfident in incomplete information, or try to control what cannot yet be controlled. John Keats called the alternative “Negative Capability”: the capacity to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” without irritably reaching after fact and reason. Rainer Maria Rilke offered a similar invitation when he advised a young poet to “live the questions” rather than demand answers before he was ready to live them. In a world where AI, work, relationships, and culture are all shifting faster than we can fully understand, this skill becomes increasingly valuable. Negative Capability does not mean being passive or indecisive. It means giving yourself enough space to see more clearly before you act. It turns anxiety into openness, overconfidence into humility, and rigid control into acceptance. The person who can sit with the question a little longer often sees possibilities that the person chasing certainty too quickly never notices.
🎬Action!
When you notice yourself rushing toward certainty, pause and ask:
What discomfort am I trying to escape by forcing an answer right now? The urge to “figure it out” is often less about clarity and more about avoiding the unease of not knowing.
What might become clearer if I gave this one more day? Some answers need time to surface. Let the question breathe before locking yourself into the first explanation, plan, or conclusion that brings relief.
What would change if I stopped trying to solve this immediately? Not everything needs to be resolved right now. Some questions are meant to be lived with, watched, and understood gradually.
A Guide to Medications and Supplements: Determining What to Take, What to Skip, and How to Know If They’re Working For You
Dr. Peter Attia
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
Medications and supplements often promise better energy, better health, longer life, or faster results—but those broad goals can make it surprisingly easy to fool yourself. As Peter Attia puts it, “Poor problem definition almost guarantees some sort of false positive.” Before asking what to take, the better question is what problem you’re actually trying to solve, how you’ll measure it, what would happen if you did nothing, and what evidence would convince you that an intervention is truly working. Without that clarity, it’s easy to mistake noise for progress, marketing for science, and a compelling story for a meaningful result.
🎬Action!
Define the problem before choosing the intervention. Before taking any medication or supplement, get clear on what you are actually trying to solve.
Avoid vague goals like “more energy,” “better health,” or “longevity.”
Choose a specific metric you can track, such as a lab value, symptom, behavior, performance marker, or health outcome.
Set a target and timeline. For example: “Lower ApoB from 130 mg/dL to below 60 mg/dL within six months,” or “Reduce sleep onset from 60 minutes to under 10 minutes within two months.”
Ask what happens if you do nothing. If the problem does not meaningfully increase risk, reduce quality of life, or create downstream consequences, the bar for taking something should be higher.
Clarify what job the intervention is supposed to do. Different goals require different levels of evidence and different levels of risk tolerance.
Disease treatment: Requires strong evidence, but more risk may be acceptable because the stakes are higher.
Symptom relief: Focus on whether you actually feel and function better, while staying aware of placebo effects and possible downsides.
Risk reduction: Look for validated biomarkers or hard outcomes, not just vague claims of prevention.
Optimization: Be especially skeptical. When you are already healthy, the expected benefit is usually smaller, harder to measure, and easier to exaggerate.
Judge the evidence honestly. Do not mistake a compelling story for proof that something works.
Ask what kind of evidence supports the intervention: mechanism, animal data, validated biomarker change, symptom improvement, or hard outcomes.
Treat mechanisms and animal studies as early clues, not clinical proof.
Be especially cautious with longevity and optimization claims, which often sound scientific but may be based mostly on biological plausibility.
Focus on absolute benefit, not just relative benefit. A “30% risk reduction” means very different things depending on whether your baseline risk is 20% or 2%.
Weigh the full downside, not just side effects. An intervention can be “safe” and still not be worth it.
Biological risk of side effects and possible unintended consequences.
Financial cost if the intervention becomes an ongoing expense.
Cognitive load: remembering doses, timing pills, managing uncertainty, and maintaining a growing stack.
Monitoring burden of repeated lab tests, follow-ups, or additional medical management.
Opportunity cost: Ask what else you could do with the same time, money, and attention.
Be more skeptical with supplements. Supplements usually do not have to prove meaningful efficacy before being sold. They may also have issues with dose accuracy, purity, contamination, or labeling. If you use one, look for third-party verification, such as USP, NSF, or ConsumerLab.
Test one thing at a time. If you decide to try something, structure it like a clean experiment rather than a vague trial.
Change one variable at a time and define the dose, duration, and endpoint before you start.
Decide in advance what would count as success or failure.
Use a washout period when appropriate so lingering effects do not confuse the next experiment.
Monitor results without fooling yourself. Humans are good at noticing changes, but bad at knowing what caused them.
Track the specific outcome you defined at the start. (I.e., “Did my LDL cholesterol or ApoB reach the target I set?” and not “Do I feel different?”)
Watch for regression to the mean, where symptoms or lab values naturally improve after an unusually bad period.
Separate intended benefits from possible side effects instead of relying on one general impression.
When appropriate, stop the intervention and see whether the effect disappears; if medically reasonable, restarting later can help clarify whether the effect returns.
Reevaluate regularly. Starting something does not mean it should continue forever.
Every few months, ask: “If I were not taking this today, would I start it now?”
Reconsider whether the original problem still exists and recheck whether the evidence, benefit, cost, and downside still justify continuing.
Be willing to stop something that no longer earns its place, even if you already bought it or have taken it for years.
Let uncertainty bias you toward inaction. When the problem is vague, the evidence is weak, the benefit is hard to measure, or the downside is unclear, do not add another intervention by default. The more uncertain the case, the stronger the reason should be for taking it.
Read Old Books
Kyle Harrison
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
Old books offer something the moment rarely can: distance. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice to “never read any book that is not a year old” was less about avoiding newness entirely and more about escaping the noise of whatever everyone is currently reacting to. The news, the viral take, the rushed book about yesterday’s crisis—these things often come to us “without asking,” pushed into our attention before they’ve earned it. Older books, especially the ones that have survived beyond their original moment, have passed through a kind of natural selection. They may not be perfectly current, but they often carry a depth, ambition, and lasting truth that fresher commentary cannot yet prove. Whether it’s Will and Ariel Durant spending decades telling the sweeping story of civilization, or Andy Grove writing business principles that still apply in the age of AI, the best old books remind us that wisdom usually ages better than urgency. So read what genuinely draws you in, favor books that have earned their place over time, and give yourself the gift of learning from ideas that are no longer competing for attention, but have proven they were worth keeping.
🎬Action!
Create a “distance filter” for what you read. Before picking up a book, ask: Has this survived beyond the moment that created it? Prioritize books that are at least a year old, widely respected, or still being discussed because they contain durable ideas rather than timely reactions. This does not mean you can never read new books, but it does mean being cautious with anything tied too closely to “the current thing.” If the topic is everywhere right now, pause before investing your attention. Give the idea time to settle, let the noise fade, and then choose the books that still seem worth reading after the urgency has passed.
TOOL TIP
Learn AI Layer by Layer: An interactive guide to understanding AI from first principles.
FUN FACT
The oldest river in the world is Australia's Finke River, which formed between 300 million and 400 million years ago.
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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.
