Pillars of Wellness with Jacob Laub

Today we're going to talk about wellness hacks. Muses. Hacktical. Hacktical. Practical hacks. Things we've discovered over the past eight years of running a wellness company that we actually use in our lives. Sleep. Put the screen in the inferior feel. Put it lower. Put it low. TV on the floor. Relationships and community. I'm looking to cut down on my number of relationships.

Well, that could be a hack. I don't know. Text-based communication, people will read it in their worst interior voice. Let people hear your voice. Just call. exercise simplest way to get around all the crazy information on the internet walk a lot lift heavy things to integrate movement throughout your day take the stairs this is like one of the aspects of the blue zones people might not know

So today we're going to talk about wellness hacks. In particular, I would say either things that are resolutions for us. in the new year or things we've discovered over the past eight years of running a wellness company that we actually use in our lives and find useful on a day-to-day basis. I'd say the Commune podcast often is about like

big sweeping lifestyle changes. And hopefully that is not this episode. It is more of an extended lightning round, so to speak. This is hacktical. Hacktical. There we go. Hacktical hacks. all right well we're going to cover sleep nutrition movement and exercise stress regulation and mental health relationships and community creativity

and spirituality and purpose. And I will say that we will also be covering those in a more extended version over the next three months on the podcast. But now, hecticall. Yeah, those are the seven deadly.

Sins. Right there. Sleep. Let's get right into it. You can't exercise or eat your way out of bad sleep. As we know, your body will not be in a place of receptivity for whatever. nutrition or other things that you want to bring in. So sleep hacks, sleep resolutions. I know this is one you sometimes struggle with. I find that doom scrolling is a great device.

when I can't fall asleep. I actually have a beef with Skylar on this because I believe that illicit shags are a great... precursor for sleep but she maintains that that keeps her up so it puts me right to sleep so i don't know so if i had my choice But, you know, this is a consensual matter. So aside from that, which requires a willing partner, I mean, some of them are like the typical, you know, sleep architecture hacks. Right. So like really.

Getting out of like bright light, obviously overhead blue light is the big one. Oh, here's the one that is slightly off kilter and people might not know. relates to the science, which I'm not going to go too deeply into because we have that other places. If you are going to watch Curb Your Enthusiasm,

at night or anything else on Netflix. I'm watching this one about the two women that have a podcast. Nobody wants this. Very clever. If you're going to do that, put the screen in the inferior field. Right? Like lower, below if you're like gaze line, straight ahead, put it lower, like TV on the floor. Yeah, as if it were an raging amber fire.

because this is how we evolved, right? And we developed these mechanisms in relationship to how we evolved. So put it below you because you don't have those sensory neurons in the... superior part of your retina. Yeah, the blue light is sensed with neurons on the lower part of your eye, thus seeing toward the ceiling or the sky. Yeah. TV campfire. Right. TV campfire on night shift. So Larry David has a nice little kind of amber glow to him. He looks like he went to a tanning bed, tanning salon.

That's the way if you, you know, if you're trying to just navigate honestly the real world, which is probably watching a little Netflix every once in a while, that's one hack. All right, well, I'm going to go back toward your... the beginning of your hack, which was you and Skylar. Yeah, I would actually, the interesting hack that's come into my life is that Julie and I do not sleep in the same room.

Currently. So wait, I thought you were trying to have another kid. Doesn't have to happen at night when you're asleep, in fact. Oh, right. You're a morning guy. This is actually a good reason to be a morning guy because you have more testosterone in the morning and you have more. Blood flow. Do you know what I mean? I do know what you mean. I grew up, my parents still sleep in a queen bed. Oh, that's right. And I grew up thinking.

that if your relationship is going well and you love each other, then you sleep next to your partner. Yeah. Your dad's a big fucking dude too. Yeah. They sleep queen bed. He's jacked. Your dad is jacked. He is. Yeah. He is. I got to know Julia and her parents sleep in separate rooms, and they have a wonderful, loving relationship. They just have very different sleep habits and patterns. Really? Do they go to bed at separate times? They do quite a bit of-

like Netflix at night. And then, but my father-in-law- Different shows. Not different shows. Actually, it's one of their points of bonding. My father-in-law tends to wake up much earlier, have like a little middle of the night. Sorry. Screenwriting session. I just kind of realized that that's not a prerequisite and Julia... honestly would always complain about me waking her up. And so now she sleeps separately and I sleep with Maeva, our four-year-old daughter, and that works out.

Great. We have a moment of connection. We always try and have a moment of connection before bed, a little neck massage, whatever. I see you looking skeptically there. Yeah. And so you don't wake Maeve up though. No, she wakes me up. No, she's a much better sleeper than Julia. But this whole sleeping like a baby is kind of a misnomer.

People say that, oh, you slept like a baby. Oh, you woke up every hour? Well, they wake you up and then go immediately back to sleep. Right. You were fucked. Exactly. But that goes to my hack number two, which is if you have kids, go to sleep with your kid because nothing good is going to happen. Like there's nothing that makes you sleepier than reading The Runaway Bunny for like the hundred.

Totally. And we often try and crawl out of bed and rev up to do something, but nothing good is going to happen. That's when you get into the doomscrolling. Do you ever find that you keep reading? but you actually don't know what you're saying. You're quasi-liminally unconscious, but you're still able to read. It's quite amazing. Yeah, you've gone to sleep in your brain. Your brain is like, you go to sleep before the-

book puts them to sleep. So just give in, go to sleep with them. And then like last night, I woke up and was up in kind of a thought loop for 90 minutes, went back to sleep, Maeve woke up. promptly 30 minutes later to need to go to the bathroom. But because I'd gone to bed at 7.30, I still woke up at 5 a.m. Functional. 7.30. I know. Good Lord.

So what do you think about listening to Audible in the middle of the night if your phone is on airplane mode? There's a bunch of research about how we sleep in kind of two chunks in the night. And that's why I wake up hot in the middle of the night after four hours. It's pretty regular. It's like three and a half to four and a half hours. I wake up, my brain starts going. If I don't feel, I'm going to fall right back to sleep.

I will read my Kindle which doesn't have a light in it. Or Audible I think would be a great choice. Meditate. I mean something because you are naturally… up at that moment and give yourself the 30 minutes for your body to kind of drop back down. Sometimes it backfires if your book is too good. That's my problem right now. I'm listening to this book. called heart the lover which is very unlikely for me i usually usually listen to kind of like philosophy books or like clinical books sapiens

is a great way to go back to sleep. Great way to go back to sleep. It is both interesting, but it's also the nature of the reader. I find that British male readers, especially if you don't put them even on full speed.

like half speed british mail readers there's your sleep pack all right let's move on to the next one so nutrition similar to sleep you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet nutrition is information for your body What's your food hack or resolution? And it can't be no duck because you already did that last year. Yeah. Well, it's going to be no duck again because that's the resolution I can keep. If I'm going to make two resolutions.

I want to be successful 50% of the time. Yeah. No duck confit last year, 2025. I made it. You made it all the way. No duck again this year. Take your last bite of food three hours before you go to sleep. Yeah, it's a classic. I will also say fiber and protein in the morning. I mean, this is not revolutionary. But Cheerios, I grew up on Cheerios. That was not fiber and protein in the morning. Eggs and sauerkraut. That's a classic in our household.

And we have chicken, so we have eggs. Maybe a little fat with that too, a little avocado, a little good olive oil. Yeah, it kind of depends what I'm trying to do. Protein, definitely for muscle protein synthesis and hypertrophy. depending like if I'm focusing on calorie restriction or not, because if you're going to have fat, it's very caloric. So for example, I actually got into high quality, nonfat, plain yogurt.

boring as shit, right? But high protein, like protein bolus, really low calorie because you're not getting any of the fat. Now, I know a lot of people like the healthy fats in there. And then you have like all the probiotic. if it's, you know, properly fermented. So if you're like, want to keep muscle mass, but maintain or lose weight, like a high quality nonfat plain yogurt.

All right, well, I think I can tie that into my hack, my second hack. First, the boring one, buying the bulk section as much as possible. It's cheaper, it's healthier, it's better for the environment. Nowadays, they like slip like the chocolate covered almonds are also in the bulk section. That doesn't count really as like bulk food that's buying candy. They entice you. Yes. That way. Support your local food co-op.

package free grocery stores, certainly if you have them, they're rare, hard to find, but Whole Foods kind of the sub hack here. Whole Foods will let you bring your own container. They will sometimes shame you. Sometimes employees don't know this, even at Whole Foods. I'm at the olive bar, fill in my jar. Someone comes over and says, you know, you can't do that. You have to use the plastic.

clamshells that go with it. First of all, fat and plastic, not great. Second of all, fresh plastic, not great. And I just said, no, what are they going to do? Arrest me at the olive bar? They might. They might, yeah. But when you go up to the counter.

Either you've pre weighed your jar and you've put like a piece of tape with the number of grams or the pounds on it, and they can sometimes they have to call the manager and ask. It's a good training tool for them, but they can plug in the weight and then subtract the weight of your jar. Or you bring an extra jar of all, you know, you bring all the same size jars, you just bring an extra one, they kind of tear the weight and then weigh your stuff or you bring, you know.

bags that weigh nothing to fill up with your bulk quinoa quinoa ah yes your book quinoa it's just rice with a meditation habit um

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Put a jar in your car for the olive bar. Jar in your car for the olive bar. There you go. Thanks, Jeff. I knew you'd come into this episode sharp. It's all the Minesweeper. I've been addicted to Minesweeper. I've been traveling so much. And I've been doing this like... long, long flights over the ocean where you don't get internet, so there's nothing else to do. And so it'll be like eight hours of Minesweeper. And my brain is so sharp from that.

All right. We've got to save that for the creativity section. All right. Hack number two to your jar of yogurt in the fridge. Chef chat. Bringing AI back into it is a really good one. People don't know. that you can ask it, okay, I want to make, in fact, my daughter calls it the muffin man, because I'm often asking chat for muffin recipes. And the brilliant thing is that you can take, like, I have half a cup of leftover yogurt I want to use up.

I went shopping and I have half a cup of buckwheat flour and I graded this random zucchini from our garden and it's one and a quarter cups. Make me a muffin recipe. And it gives you an... with exactly what you have and it'll fill in with some other things and you don't have it, you say, I don't have that and it replaces it with something else. It just takes a lot of the nitty gritty math, I guess you could say, out of-

muffin making. And yeah, it's been hugely enjoyable in my household to make chat muffins. Okay. And that ain't muffin to sneeze at. Because I don't get to see Maeve much. So you can say, let's ask Jeff Boyardee. That'll keep me in her life. She's too young to even know those advertisements. Yeah. We'll work on it. We'll work on it. All right. What else we got? Yeah, I had one more there, which is like...

putting your extra protein smoothie into popsicle molds for lunch dessert, because everyone wants a lunch dessert or even a breakfast dessert, if we're really honest. So like when you're making that chocolate peanut butter protein smoothie, double batch it. Throw it in some popsicle molds, minor mermaid popsicle molds. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Smurfs. Then you can have like a guilt-free lunch dessert. I've been getting bloated lately from protein powders.

Yeah, whey protein, not everyone tolerates it well. Julia too. Maybe you have to go plant protein. Yeah, I might. All right, exercise. Hit me. Exercise. Yeah, I call this Jehovah's Fitness, right?

because i already know where you're going i'm not gonna do it but uh yeah 40 days in the desert right a lot of fasting you know fish on friday by saturday you're completely dead Sunday, come back to life again. So for me, this one is the most obvious one to answer through the lens of how did I evolve? I walk seven to 10 miles a day. That's 14,000 to 20,000 steps. I lifted heavy things.

We call that resistance training now, whatever. We build structures and carry firewood every once in a while against our... well generally we were forced into a sprint by being chased by a tiger right now we call that high intensity interval training and the last thing is we just moved all the time you know now we call that non-exercise activity thermogenesis neat

Cleaning the house. Cleaning the house. Yeah. So just, that's it. That's the simplest way to get around all the crazy information on the internet. Walk a lot, lift heavy things. Every once in a while, get your heart rate up to 90%. It's on five. And just the biggest thing is just to integrate movement throughout your day. Don't productize it and put it in 45 minutes of chronic cardio at the end of your day to expiate your sins.

Yeah, I have not been able to get into the walking pad, but Julia swears by it. She's a nurse practitioner. She sees 15 to 20 clients a day via telemedicine now. We share a double office. We share one wall. And I made sure the wall was really soundproof, but nonetheless, the walking pad, it's like there's an...

little Eastern European disco next door when she's on the walking path. It's like the baseline coming through the wall. And that's also when she's in her bedroom, there's also that too, right? Yeah, exactly. But not at night. There's a separate wall. Bed's over there. A little disco. You're like, what's going on over there? Mine is related to yours, which is a classic. Take the stairs. My grandpa Bob passed away last January. He was.

adamant about taking the stairs. If he saw you walking toward the elevator in the hotel, he would beeline for the stairs to try and beat you up to your floor because he knew you'd push the button, you'd wait. Tortoise in the hair. Tortoise and the Hare, yeah. Yeah. But what if you were like on the 15th floor? There's no way he's going to be you. No, but he would still try.

Okay. Unless there's a classic family story that involved a Shabbat elevator where it stopped at, you know, the Shabbat elevator stops at every floor in Israel. Right. Because he can't press the button. Yeah. So he won that one handily. would love this house, would have loved my house here. Yes, he would have. Lots of stairs. 93 stairs every time you come home. Well, of course, this is like one of the aspects of the Blue Zones that a lot of people talk about, which is.

climbing hills. These places are all hilly in general. So it's like climbing grades. Defying gravity, basically. Small addendum to my exercise one, which is do yoga in airports. Don't worry. about other people judging you because they will be. The idea of sitting around to then sit around is totally insane. You sit in a car to then sit at the airport to then get on a plane and sit.

Skylar started a yoga class in the waiting area of our last flight. She started doing it and then I was like, okay, I'll join in. And then we had like three other young women join in too. It's a great way to meet.

People. Well, stress regulation and mental health. What do we do? Yours. Minesweeper. I hate to lie. We're here for complete honesty, Jeff. Some people do this with Sudoku and there's other... I've not generally been sucked into that vortex. But I will say that... Minesweeper does really engage my brain in a particular way where I'm not distracted. I'm not thinking about anything else at sort of a single point of attention. And it does require some fair...

fairly deep kind of analysis as you start to like break it apart. You have to think through a lot of different permutations. And I don't know. There's a fair amount of research. I can't quote it to you, but about. growing older and crossword puzzles and that kind of brain exercise. So sure, I can see it. Yeah.

I mean, and then, of course, some of the other things. I will say I have really become very dedicated to doing breath work. I mean, you could call it sort of a basic Vipassana practice when I do wake up.

in the middle of the night where if you just put us your single point of focus on your breath and you could do like a box breath but even the box breath is it actually sometimes requires too much effort But you just really put all of your attention on the quality of your breath in a very regular rhythm.

And it can be actually just very pleasant. I do the same thing. And then you try and convince yourself that it's not what you should do and you should continue thinking about whatever you're thinking about. And then you do it and it's so simple and so sweet. And then as you start to get into that rhythm, you just fall asleep. I agree. If you do it, it almost takes effort to commit to the lack of effort. Well, you have to stay with it too. And your mind will wander.

And then you just, again, bring it back to the breath, right? And then all of a sudden, you find yourself out. Yeah, totally. Well, that leads well into mine, which is a breath. work practice, just very simple, sitting in, out, in, out, but breath retention, particularly for mental health. I'm going to focus on the mental health side of this, which is ironically the thing that makes people panic the most. I was just talking with Skylar about this course she's developing for Commune about

breath retention and how particularly breath holds on the exhale are very, very challenging for people these days. I see you smiling with something to add. Yeah. Well, it's fascinating. I think this was in Nestor's book. I'm getting there. 7% carbon dioxide. Yes. So let me just explain it real quick. There's one science bit I'm going to get into today. When you don't breathe.

you have more carbon dioxide in your blood, your blood becomes more acidic. When your blood becomes more acidic, it triggers a suffocation alarm in the amygdala, the fear center, and basically CO2 reliably. provokes anxiety in humans. So, typical air is 0.2%. zero, 4% CO2. It's like 400 parts. It's very, very low, less than one 10th of 1% CO2. But if you give people seven to seven and a half percent.

CO2. So it's not like entirely CO2, but you put a mask on them, like an oxygen mask, and you give them a mix that is 7%. CO2, it acutely raises anxiety. And if you give people a single breath of 35% CO2, this is from the book, literally one breath, you go one inhale, it's one third carbon dioxide, triggers a panic attack. No matter who you are.

Immediate panic attack. I don't know if you remember this, but there was a woman, a very, very famous woman in scientific circles, who had no amygdala. She didn't feel fear. And so she could not feel fear. And they would do... everything under their power to try to scare her. And she, unfortunately, actually went through some horrific events in her life. She was put in at knife point. And she was never scared. No.

And it had no lasting impact on her either. That's right. There was no kind of residual trauma to metabolize. The only way that they could actually induce fear... was through CO2. Yep. And it freaked her out. It totally freaked her out. And I think the theory was is that the chemoreceptors, which is the, I guess, the tissue that senses carbon dioxide accumulation, sits prior to the amygdala or...

That's probably not the best way to describe it, but it basically has its own sort of fear center. Yeah, because it's so... because when you're not breathing your co2 and your blood goes up and that was such a primary evolutionary metric for your body to keep track of that it had its own pathway

for measuring that and freaking out basically. So you've been doing a lot of stoic work lately to paraphrase Epictetus, practice in little things and then proceed to greater practicing breath holds, raising your CO2 slightly, it's called hypercapnia is the fancy term, but essentially practicing, you really can. like exercise, exercise that aspect and habituate your chemoreceptors to deal with carbon dioxide better because people with anxiety disorder

will hyperventilate to try and blow off carbon dioxide to avoid that. And that causes a whole negative feedback loop of other issues of over-breathing. We won't get into that here. When you train yourself to be flexible as your carbon dioxide fluctuates in your blood, it is like Jedi mind training. And it is also physiological training for your body to breathe better.

over the course of the day, which then in turn makes you less anxious. Little geek detour is that... Hey, it's Jeff. And do you know the human foot contains 26 bones, over 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments, and... thousands of nerves. It's a biomechanical masterpiece millions of years in the making. Left to its own devices, you can walk, run, jump, dance. It's designed to feel.

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So if you want to experience it for yourself, Vivo Barefoot has an amazing offer for Commune listeners. Try them risk-free with a 100-day return guarantee and get 15% off your order at vivobarefoot.com forward slash Commune. Free your feet and the rest will follow. That's vivobarefoot.com forward slash commune. So your chemoreceptors are kind of here in your neck next to your carotid arteries. So they'll sense that.

that hypercapnia, that buildup of carbon dioxide. And in response to that, your body will actually generate a protein called EPO, erythropoietin, basically that activates the production of new red blood cells. And those red blood cells, of course, have the hemoglobin in them that are the ushers for oxygen to get energy to your cells.

it is quite amazing that when the body is deprived of oxygen and has more carbon dioxide concentration your body has a natural built-in response to that stress to actually make more red blood cells to optimize your ability to make energy at the mitochondrial level. And of course, this is why athletes train at high altitudes. Train at high altitudes and some of the most effective training is on...

breath retention is basically in some form of increasing carbon dioxide in the blood. So do some retentions. There you go. Yeah. I mean, the practice is very simple. Long, slow exhale. sit at the bottom of the pool is how I like to think of it. If you ever did that as a kid, you'd blow out all your air and kind of sit at the bottom of the pool for as long as you can. You will not

You will not die. You may feel like you're gonna die and maybe don't even go quite that far and then breathe in, take some recovery breaths, do it again, do five to 10 rounds. It can take 10 minutes to 20 minutes, depending on. how long you exhale and how long you sit at the bottom of the pool. And you feel amazing afterwards. High as a kite. I want to teach teenagers a class someday. Let's get high on your own supply. Another whim-ism.

All right, let's move on. Relationships and community. I'm looking to cut down on my number of relationships. Well, that could be a hack. I don't know. Stronger, more. I mean, yeah. Well, that's actually interesting. Yeah, you're out of here. Never liked you. This is obviously a hack that gets short shrift, particularly in today's world, because we really are convinced.

that we can just door dash our our entire life and we kind of can but of course we weren't you can get ozempic delivered to your door damn yeah there you go yeah solve all your problems For me, there are these hacks that sometimes I call social fitness because we're so used. to kind of this individualistic lifestyle where we live in single-family homes and vertical CAFOs that we actually have to practice being extroverted and social.

And some of those are just really simple. Like when my family calls me, I pick up the phone. Instead of like, I can't talk right now and being in an endless text thread. It's like if I'm available. Well, vice versa too. If I start ending up in a text thread and I see there are three dots and I'm waiting around, just call. Yeah.

Or pick up, because I think we're so used to this digital communication. Just let people hear your voice. Text-based communication, people will read it in their worst interior voice. Always. Period. Goes with family, co-workers, etc. I mean, I'm on some threads. Also, people express themselves in ways that they would never express themselves quote-unquote face-to-face or even on a car.

It's like the shitty things that get said on text or on Instagram or whatever. It's just, don't do it. In the vein of, if you're thinking about them, call them. Mine is, if you have a compliment. give it right away. I feel like we often think about a compliment and go, oh, I'll put that in a better form and send that off to them later. There's a particular commune co-worker I've worked with a very long time. Her love language is probably not the right word for a co-worker.

is appreciation and recognition. And one of the things that really has helped in that relationship for me is when I think something nice about her, I just write it down and send it off right away. It doesn't have to be complicated. It's like... Oh, I thought you did a really good job organizing that document. Yeah. What if you think something really shitty? Well, so that goes to Thomas Jefferson had a great...

10-second rule for anger is basically as soon as you recognize the emotion of anger, nothing for 10 seconds. You can't freeze. Stop. Red stop sign for 10 seconds. To me, this is the opposite, which is before you get distracted from that thought of gratitude, acknowledge it quickly, and then you can move on. And I think it's also really interesting in a coworker context.

Also in a partner, romantic partner, but as a father, it's been very helpful because I think we over congratulate our children as just a cultural thing. It doesn't feel good inside. It's not healthy. So I really try. when she does something that I appreciate, immediately telling her so that I don't have to make up things because then I feel like I'm providing enough appreciation. Their little antennae are so fine-tuned. They can tell. Their bullshit detectors are...

So sensitive. What about the other side? Not just giving compliments, but the ability to receive compliments with grace. This is a really difficult one for me. And I just got back from Australia. After I would do a lecture or do my speaking session, I would go out and do book signings. And there would be just heaps of people.

And one after another after another would be like, Jeff, I got to tell you, you and Commune got me through COVID. I would not have made it through COVID without you and Commune. over and over and over again, just like incredibly effusive gratitude. it was really uncomfortable for me at the beginning and i'm like oh well you know it's just kind of like we're just sort of doing our thing and you know it's great for us and we really love our work and i mean i would just hem and haw and not just

receive the compliment and say, thank you. But I got better at it because almost out of necessity, this quote from Khalil Gibran. the poem, and it's just an amazing line that says, and to the open-handed, the search for one who shall receive is joy greater than giving. It's just basically like the giver requires the receiver.

Just as important as giving is being willing to receive that fully. Like the lover and the beloved. You need a buyer and a seller to make a deal. You need a giver and a receiver. In the Jewish tradition, this is an actual resolution for me, and it's kind of an ongoing resolution. I feel I've made gradual improvement. In the Jewish tradition, there's a concept called Lashon Hara, which is evil speech, and it's saying something negative about someone.

even if it's true, when there's no real need to share it. And I feel like we often bond with people by sharing things that we find negative about other people in our lives when there's not really a... reason and this is separate from like making something up negative about someone that's false it's gossip gossip yeah so you're trying to gossip less gossip less yes

Spirituality and purpose, my resolution is to stay closer to the commune audience. We've said this before on the podcast, when we worked at Wanderlust, it was so easy to see the impact we had at the festivals. We'd go there and people would be having life-changing experiences in front of our eyes.

That was very gratifying for the eight months in the Brooklyn winter office planning these things. And here now, you and I are sitting alone doing this podcast in a dark room in Laurel Canyon, and we'll go off and... leave and there won't be anyone here, no cheering crowds, but hopefully people are really impacted and I want to get closer to that. I think it really motivates the team and it really helps me understand that what I do.

mostly sitting in a computer every day has purpose. I don't know exactly how that relates to the audience, but... Certainly that they should email jeffk at onecommune.com. I love the way you offer up. You'll pass along. You voluntarily offer up my email. You just pass them along, the good ones. Keep all the complaints to yourself. I have a filter for you. I'm a good filter. The impact that we have on the world isn't always palpable.

And I think that's true for a lot of people, honestly. I mean, people work hard. I think a lot of people that listen to this podcast, they're into health and they're into wellness they might be into giving back in their local community but it's it's sometimes hard to really gauge your impact and it's not always that one needs recognition necessarily to be impactful, you know, and to feel a sense of purpose. Like for example, you know, Thanksgiving.

i always take my girls down to this thing called gobble gobble give where we just package up kind of toothpaste and napkins and little random canned foods and secondhand clothes and stuff like that and put them in little packages and then we go out and distribute them. you know, to homeless folks here in Los Angeles. And there's no like recognition involved. I mean, there's other people there. It reminds me of the second episode of the Commune podcast, which was on charity and how...

Choosing charities or choosing actions where you can be close to the result, even if you don't think it's the world's biggest problem that you're solving brings a lot more purpose than donating. to a climate fund charity, doing something where you are in relationship or you get, you try and bring yourself more into relationship with the receiver. Another little kind of twist on purpose, which is in Helen Watson. sort of being less connected to purpose in the sense that purpose often

appears to be something out there in the future, for one. Like, I'm gonna do all of this work, you know, for this future goal. And that... perpetual focus on some better future condition really divorces us from the present moment. And there is a purposelessness in being. actually fully present for people or like you know when i you know i write about this when i when i write about my daughter's

dance, you know, when I watch them dance, you know, their purpose is not to get from one place on the floor to the other place on the floor, right? The purpose is like just to dance, you know, and I see that in music too. So I think there is... purpose in purposelessness to do something just for the sake of doing it and for no other reason. Well, I think you just gave me my last resolution for this year, which is

Just dance. Just dance. All right. Well, we did it. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks. Happy New Year. Thank you for listening to today's episode. For more of my weekly musings along with ad-free episodes and live stream conversations, head over to my Substack at jeffkrasnow.substack.com. i also want to let you know about our course platform over on commune which contains over 3 000 lessons and practices from the world's leading integrative medicine doctors health experts

and yoga, fitness, and mindfulness teachers. It's a living library for holistic well-being and you can try it for free for 14 days at onecommune.com forward slash trycommune. As a reminder, the audio version of my new book, Good Stress, is available on Audible, and you can listen to it for free as part of your premium Spotify membership. And if you prefer the old school analog option, well, you can pick up a dusty old scroll at goodstress.com and get over $900 worth of bonus courses.

from some of my biggest influences, including Dr. Mark Hyman, Dr. Zach Bush, and Dr. Gabor Mate. As always, feel free to reach out to me with comments, questions, or... criticism of the constructive variety at jeffk at onecommune.com. Okay, that's all from the Commune for today. My name is Jeff Krasnow, and I am here for you.

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