Happy rainy Monday, friend.

This week I’ll detail a breathing practice I do daily, share progress on cutting down my exposure to microplastics, and tell you about an infusion experiment that’s become a staple in my daily routine.

I’m still figuring out the format of this newsletter, and I would appreciate your thoughts on it: what do you like or don’t like? What’s too long or too brief? What’s unclear, boring or uninteresting? If you’re reading this on Substack, let me know in the comments, or send me a message via the button at the bottom of this post.

Breathing for air hunger

1. Lowering my resting heart rate before sleep improves my sleep quality, and in the morning I wake up with an alert calmness that cascades throughout my day.

2. If you wake up with a pressure cooker going off in your mind, a panic to get things done, this is especially for you. You’ll see that things get done anyway, with less effort, and without a mid-afternoon mental crash.

3. If you’re short on time, do it for just 5 minutes to fall asleep. There’s no substitute for good sleep. None.

4. Method:

   1. Sit on a chair or lay on your back in bed, bending your knees if it takes tension off your lower back.

   2. Breathe normally. There’s no need to fully fill or empty your lungs. Pay attention to your inhales: how fast are you breathing? How much are you filling your lungs?

   3. Start the practice by inhaling less air than you were during your normal breaths. If you can lower the volume of your inhales to 75%, great!

   4. At the top of your inhale, relax your entire body and let the air out at whatever speed it comes out. Your exhales should be passive. Let them happen. Don’t force out any air.

   5. At the bottom of your exhale, relax even more. Don’t rush into the next inhale, but rather glide gently into it. Ideally, there should be a pause at the end of your exhales as well as at the end of your inhales.

   6. Continue this way for 15 minutes. During your practice, keep on reducing the size of your inhales without tensing up. Aim for a slight air hunger: a feeling that you want to inhale more.

No more acidic foods in plastic

• Stop buying acidic foods in plastic containers.

• The more acidic the food, the more it decomposes the plastic it’s in and ends up in your body.

• Ketchup, pineapple, tomato soup, gazpacho, fruit juice, and salad dressings all tend to be acidic. You’ll probably still buy ketchup, but it’s quick and easy to make.

• Making this change is nearly effortless and will pay off in the long run. Microplastics are everywhere; there’s no avoiding them. But they wreck your metabolism, damage the nervous system, and can cause some cancers (ref). Because this happens over time, you don’t notice how you’re slowwwly being poisoned. You just get used to feeling a tiny bit worse every day. Let’s avoid that.

• There are many other ways to reduce microplastic exposure. I’ll cover them in a dedicated post.

Overnight spice infusions

• Drinking warm liquids in the morning raises core body temperature (which drops at night). This helps wake me up.

• I used to drink warm water (sometimes with lemon juice) when I woke up and after my cold showers. I found it super hydrating. But ever since I bought an almost entirely stainless-steel insulated bottle, I’ve been making overnight infusions with spices to benefit from their many nutritious compounds.

• Every night, I put whole spices in my 1 liter bottle, fill it with boiling water, and seal it. In the morning, the infusion is potent and ready to drink.

• So far, I’ve used two crushed cardamom pods, or a stick of cinnamon broken up in my mortar and pestle, or two cloves. If you have other ideas, send them my way!

Pause and look at the ice cream again.

Think of all the happiness it’s ever brought you. Isn’t it harsh to call something you enjoy “bad”?

How many years do you have left on this planet? How many more times will you beat yourself up for eating ice cream? Or pizza? How about chips?

Maybe deep inside you there’s a wish for the guilty voice to stop ruining the show and disappear someday. Or for your abs to reveal themselves one day, and for the voice to say “Well done, you’d been making the right choices all along.”

That all sounds like a lot of work. Wishes, fears, hopes, regrets—these mental gymnastics we accept as ordinary ways to spend our energy. But there’s a better map.

I do things another way. I’ve decided that there’s no such thing as unhealthy food. Ice cream isn’t actually food. It’s fun.

Lentils are food. Ginger, broccoli, berries, green apples and sardines are food.

Bread is fun. Ice cream too. Pasta, alcohol, and watermelon are fun. Deep fried things are also fun, like deep fried broccoli. To me anyway.

My ground for these categories is objective. I let modern science and ancient medicine help me draw lines, but I move the lines when I learn more. The trick isn’t banning foods, it’s knowing why you reach for them. Nothing is bad so long as I’m aware of whether I’m eating food or having fun.

I mostly eat food. Occasionally, I have fun. It works well.

This is a simplistic view of nutrition, but a hard one to lie to yourself about. Decide on what you consider is healthy, and sort that in your mind as food. Everything else is fun.

Experiment with these categories, educate yourself, and observe the results. Pay close attention to your body, your sleep, your energy levels. Pay attention to the quality of your thoughts. And adjust the categories as you go on.

Appreciate food and learn to make it taste good. Be intentional about the fun you have. Enjoy what you eat. This is the most important point.

It’s an image of Antonia shutting her door in my face. Of me in the hallway, standing between my room and hers, stunned mid-sentence. The scene loops back in my mind, tinged with frustration and dripping with disappointment.

Within seconds, the stillness has given way to a barrage of thoughts. 

I have nothing to figure out about the situation, nothing to plan or process. The friction of our interaction won’t get resolved by my thinking about it. I know this, and I yield to the thoughts anyway, pulling me into the labyrinth of my mind, chasing one seductive idea after another—”I’m important!” each one says—and building up avatars of my righteous self and her unjust attitude, reinforcing my bitter point of view, justifying the apology I feel I’m owed.

A labyrinth has an end. There is no end to thinking. The possibilities of the narrative I could weave are exhaustingly endless.

By the time the microwave is done, I find myself in a state so different that the pull of my thinking feels violent in retrospect.

Whether I notice it or not, stillness pervades my days—when I first open my eyes in bed, after every exhale, or in the seconds after I stand up from my desk. I disconnect from many of these moments either by zoning out or thinking, almost on autopilot. But in some contexts, like in music, I find stillness much easier to be with.

Sometimes, a tune comes to a halt and then resumes, or changes direction. Sometimes, it halts to come back even stronger. Other times, the stillness feels like silence, even though there are sounds present—through a change of rhythm, or an instrumental solo dissolving.

Nicolas Jaar makes frequent use of stillness in his compositions. His song Aquí comes to rest several times, for fractions of a second, and I find myself suspended in a sonic fog each time, with no urge to fill the pause with thoughts. I carry on being without anticipating what comes next—a textured rumble, a distorted screech, or his voice gently singing, “qué significa ser de verdad aquí?”

“What does it mean to be truly here?”1

Stillness is a choice musicians make, and I find it easy to trust. Something will come next. Something always comes next.

Embracing stillness in day to day life is also a choice. Thinking does have its utility: how else would I plan my day or solve a Wordle? But I often act as if thinking is the only choice. As if I need to fix every silence with my thoughts.

The choice seems justified when strong emotions fuel and shape my thoughts, but looking at my thoughts and the situations they project, my emotional fuel feels more like an excuse. My thinking, my ruminations and projections, rarely solve anything. They’re just background noise taking center stage.

There’s a lot of background noise that robs me, you, us of the experience of life, of being here, even when ‘here’ is as unglamorous as two minutes spent standing by a microwave. We spend too much time preoccupying ourselves with abstractions and assumptions, with creating mental images of people, things and events elapsed or ahead. 

I’m learning instead, as one of my teachers says, to trust the immediacy of my embodied existence. I’m learning that this moment is ok as it is. That it’s unnecessary to fill stillness with restless thoughts. There is no need to fix silence. It isn’t broken.