Scott Anderson, Ph.D.

Behavior change is hard. Whether you're trying to be more active, adjust your default workout intensities, or eat more kale, ingrained patterns resist our good intentions. This is among the many reasons meditation is an integral part of my fitness regimen. Without working directly with the mind, behavior change tends to be an arduous and often futile task. Thankfully, the mind is malleable, and meditation is one of the most reliable ways to put that malleability to work. Neuroplasticity is the term for how your brain constantly restructures itself in response to experience. Neuroscientists often summarize Donald Hebb's famous principle this way: neurons that fire together, wire together. Most of the time, this rewiring happens without our noticing. Live under chronic stress, and the brain's stress circuitry grows stronger. Spend years navigating the maze of London's streets, as the city's cab drivers do, and the brain regions associated with spatial memory actually ...

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...