Scott Anderson, Ph.D.

For most of my adult life, I could drink coffee after lunch and sleep just fine. These days a 1pm cup means I'm staring at the ceiling at 1:30am. As we age, our bodies take progressively longer to clear caffeine out of our system . The tolerance you built in your twenties doesn't carry forward. It quietly erodes, and most of us fail to connect the dots between our afternoon espresso and the sleep we can't figure out how to fix. I'm fond of espresso. I cut my caffeine consumption by about 60% a couple months ago. The 1:30am wakeups stopped almost immediately, and I'm sleeping the way I did in my 30s. My wife Collette went further and eliminated caffeine entirely, coffee, tea, chocolate, all of it, and the change in her sleep has been remarkable enough that I suspect I'll eventually follow her there. Sleep isn't a wellness accessory. It's foundational to both mental and physical health, which is part of why sleep is one of the first things I check in on ea...

The best movement to practice is the movement that you practice. The human body is built to move, though modernity has made it increasingly easy to be sedentary. As a result, all manner of mental and physical dis-ease have become the new normal. While I advocate titrating the dose of cardio in order to maximize well-being, I remain an enthusiastic exponent of moving your body at every opportunity. Whether taking the stairs in lieu of the escalator, or grinding your coffee with a hand-grinder in lieu of using a machine, the opportunities to move your body are baked into your daily life. Some days I commute by eBike, and other days I ride my "analog" bike. It depends on the weather, how much I have to carry and the trail conditions. For example, we generally need to get from Point A to Point B. For most of us, the default conveyance is the car. While I like cars as much (or more!) than the next person, every chance we drive the car is opportunity-cost for movement. Particularly...

It probably goes without saying: as you age, your body changes. Some of those changes show up in the mirror. Many more are happening under the hood. Staying physically active matters more as the body changes, but it also has to match your current physiology. It is tempting to train the way you “used to.” In my experience, that often leads to a familiar loop: injury, inactivity, recovery, and re-injury. Others swing too far the other direction and train so gently that they barely get a return on all the time they put in. The goal is a workable middle: enough stress to drive adaptation, not so much that you pay for it for days. That is one of many reasons that I monitor my heart rate when I train. Heart rate zone training gives you a window into what is going on under the hood , which can help you choose the right duration and intensity for the day. As I have gotten older, my training focus has shifted from performance to keeping the autonomic nervous system working well. With aging, man...

Working with wellbeing, particularly with regards to fitness, is often supported by setting goals. Goals, however, can be tricky to put into practice. At this time last year, I assembled the fitness goals that supported my recent 500+ mile bicycle pilgrimage. I'm now a few weeks away from sharing my 2026 BDG (big, dumb goal), though I am already drafting my Fall and Winter training plans. In setting goals, it’s important that the goals be clearly stated, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-limited. Without these factors, goals often fall by the wayside like so many unmet New Year’s Resolutions. An easy way to remember these factors is with the mnemonic of SMART. S MART - helpful goals should be succinct. Meandering goals tend to be too complicated to put into action, whereas succinctly stated goals are easier to keep in mind. S M ART - optimally, goals should be measurable. For example, getting fitter is a nebulous goal. What does “fitter” mean? To make this measurable, y...

Regularly doing cardio is one of the best investments that you can make in your health. Benefitting both mental and physical health, the benefits of regularly doing cardio are legion. Besides rowing, one of my favorite forms of cardio is biking. The just-right challenge is the key to optimizing the time that you spend doing cardio. I often see people working on the two extremes; "Too easy." Many people spend hours per day being physically active, though they’re not optimizing the time that they’re investing. If you're not breathing hard and heating up, you can likely extract a lot more benefit from the time that you are investing. Even increasing your workload a little bit can make a significant difference in wellbeing. "Too hard." For some people, they spend too much time in the “red” zone. Too much high-intensity cardio can lead to depletion, injury and increased levels of stress hormones and inflammation. High-intensity cardio is important for developing cap...

Both cardio and meditation are strongly associated with improving mental and physical wellbeing. Whether measuring the incidence and severity of diseases, indices of psychosocial wellbeing or inflammatory biomarkers, both cardio and meditation are disproportionately effective in cultivating wellbeing. During my recent pilgrimage, I spent many hours meditating while riding my bike. Since many of us are short on time, I strongly encourage you to practice meditation while doing cardio. The scientific evidence is increasingly indicating that active meditation confers the same benefits as formal meditation, and combining cardio and meditation has the potential to allow double-dipping in the time that you allocate to physical fitness. If you haven’t already tried my MDFL CARDIO classes, I encourage you to check them out via my studio's on-demand library . Interestingly, it appears as though cardio and meditation interact with different anti-inflammatory pathways. University of Wisconsi...