Wellknowlogy: 4/7/23

Wellknowlogy is a curious, honest, and caring source of news & thoughts on innovations world of wellness; an efficient way for providers, technologists, investors, and enthusiasts to stay in sync and informed about endeavors to increase wellbeing. For more context surrounding Wellknowlogy, the motives behind it, and its purpose, check out Why Wellknowlogy. For filtered information concerning your particular venture, reach out to [email protected]

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I promised I would follow my last email with a guide to increasing resilience. I am doing that now. It's been awhile and I appreciate your patience as I am juggling a few priorities and have put this on the back burner as of late. I'll do my best to send these out as regularly as possible — hopefully things are looking up from here!

Onto increasing resilience, chutzpah, moxy, and other funny words meaning "to bounce back and rise above!"

In my breakdown, the equation for raising resilience comes down to three simple layers: occupying healthy spaces, caring for your basic needs, and training your stress response. Today's email will address how you can make spaces to support your resilience.

Occupying Healthy Spaces

There are a few aspects of our environment that can serve to nourish or undercut our resilience depending on where they fall. These are air quality, natural light exposure, environmental stress, and the quality of your sleep environment.

Air quality is shown to impact one’s on resilience with studies showing acute correlations between changes in particulate matter and HRV. Given that indoor air quality is not always up to snuff (check out the chart a bit down the page), some strategies like consistent air circulation and proficient air filtration systems can ensure that the spaces you occupy most aren’t hurting your resilience. As I'll undoubtedly repeat over time, air quality (both indoors and outdoors) is super important and related to many aspects of our health and wellbeing!

Another key tenet of a resilience-boosting environment is the quality of your sleep environment, both to support high quality sleep and an optimal wake-up sequence.

There is conclusive science showing that people receiving lower-quality sleep have lower HRV. Meaning, your sleep quality may be the difference between that extra bit of of strength pushing you to create, learn, and thrive. 

Of course, this can be modulated. The simple elements here are control of external light, temperature, and (again) air quality. Having the temperature of your home controlled (and ideally automated) to meet optimal sleep zones and access to sunlight (or a sunlight analog) upon waking can dramatically improve your sleep quality and consistency. And, of course, high quality air comes with a host of benefits, sleep just being one of them.

Lastly, an oft-overlooked aspect of a healthy space is the way it contributes to or detracts from your stress levels. Chronic stress (the kind that occurs constantly and eventually feels like the norm) majorly impacts resilience and, interestingly, ambiguity avoidance. Much like the fish that is oblivious to water, your environment’s impact on your wellbeing can be easily overlooked because it’s always there.

Of course, this doesn’t make it unimportant, but quite the opposite. Interestingly, studies have proven the impact of environment on stress with experiments involving VR indoor environments, certain types of furniture, certain interior colors, lighting, and the presence of various natural analogs in geometry and video content. Like a fish in toxic water, it turns out occupying an unhealthy environment can have negative repercussions even if it feels standard.

With that out of the way, here's some cool recent stuff:

Neat Articles

• US clinic’s treatment for ADHD? Play this video game five days a week.

• Preventive healthcare ecosystem: The inverse relationship with budget constraints

• The science behind solfeggio frequencies

Ramblings about Resilence and HRV

• Listen to my 18 minutes of imperfect, stream-of-consciousness monologue about resilience

Research for You and Yours

• The benefits of regular outdoors time

• Float therapy's impact on anxiety, depression, and pain

• Study discussing HRV's role in mediating the impact of chronic stress on ambiguity avoidance

Closing Kernel of Wisdom

You got to the end! Nice. I don't charge for this, but if you value this enough to give me money, feel free to do so — my venmo is @dsimenz. If you want more, click the button below and check out my site with everything Wellknowlogy has ever published:

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Wishing you a great week to come.

Warmly,

Dayton