Exercise is good for boosting memory and thinking skills, new guidelines say

My general suggestion is that you should naturally wake up before the alarm rings. I set it to 9 hours and naturally wake up between 8 and 8:30 hours.

From what I've experienced, I think the time of day you go to bed matters as well, meaning even with a full fresh perfect feeling 8 hours, your body doesn't enter REM the same or produce the same amount of growth hormone or clean out the brain properly if you go to sleep everyday at say 6am vs sometime shortly after sun down. I guess it has to do with the light levels you experience.

I've found them to be good indicators to whether i need to catch up on my sleep.

I realized instead of working on my productivity directly, I need to work on stabilizing my energy level, because everything else ultimately depends on that.

Regular sleep, meals and exercise, practiced consistently, get your body into a pattern, where at each time of day it knows whether it should be releasing energy or resting, so it gets easier over time as the metabolism begins to work with your plans rather than against them.

You are absolutely what you eat. And for people wondering, I follow simple principles with food

1. avoid processed sugar like you avoid cigarettes (avoid both if you don't)

2. mix your diet with fruits and vegetables (make sure there is some rather than sparse or none)

3. be high on protein and good fats, low on carbs (protein + fat ~ 80% calories, carbs 20%)

4. eat right amount of calories (resting metabolism + daily activity level)

You also don't notice your own day-to-day cognitive decline due to environmental pollution and aging.

I don't even know how you'd be aware of, say, memory improvements unless you're quite scientific about it.

This phenomenon is well known among runners. Apparently it's natural and nothing to be concerned about.

Thank you.

It's definitely a factor. Even if you filter out the utter bullshit (which is a task in itself), there's a huge amount of stuff out there around the theme of "exercising wrong", most of which doesn't agree about anything outside a handful of basics (e.g. sit-ups aren't very good at engaging abs) and much of which warns of injury if you fail to heed the advice. Are crunches a good exercise, or will they wreck my spine? How deep should I squat? What are the tradeoffs between high weight/low reps versus low weight/high reps? Are resistance bands or dumbbells worthwhile, or is barbell training so superior that anything else is a waste of time? The answers all seem to depend on which "school" of exercise you subscribe to.

> Everyone knows what a pushup is.

I know what a pushup is, but I can't actually do one, and it's not obvious how to progress it in a practical way ("wall pushups" aren't challenging, but going down to chair level is too much). There are a lot of practical issues like this that are glossed over by mainstream exercise advice (most of which seems to be written for relatively young, fit people with no chronic health issues that might interfere).

> But exercise sucks.

There's a huge amount of disagreement on this as well. Statements like "your body wants to move" are a common refrain from fitness gurus, for example. The chemical and neurological responses to exercise seem to vary quite a bit throughout the population, all the way from exercise triggering euphoria to exercise triggering depression (but it's only socially accepted to advertise the former). It's also pretty common in exercise studies for a given outcome measure to get no better or even get worse in ~10% of subjects, even when the average response is a statistically significant improvement. Conversely, there's often a ~10% with a markedly above-average improvement; this has been spun by the popular press as some people being "superexercisers" and others being "non-responders", but it seems to be much more complicated than that (i.e. one can be a "superexerciser" on one axis but a "non-responder" on another).

He said it was the only exercise he got most days, but he did it every morning.