Aloha! Welcome to this week's digest. This week is a very special "Interrogation" edition, as we carefully inspect a few controversial subjects. This week's topics include cannabidiol (CBD), exercise recovery, and meritocratic values. Enjoy!


Source: Giphy

• TOPIC OF INTEREST - CANNABIDIOL (CBD) - CBD is a nonpsychoactive derivative of cannabis that is safe, legal, and clinically proven to be effective for treating epilepsy, with initial research suggesting efficacy for anxiety, insomnia, and pain, too.
   
• BOOK - Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery by Christie Aschwanden (My full Kindle notes) - "Insofar as there exists any magical secret for recovery, sleep is it. The benefits of sleep cannot be overstated. It’s hands-down the most powerful recovery tool known to science."
   
• ARTICLE - The New York Times: The Moral Peril of Meritocracy by David Brooks - In our life's journey, we each have the opportunity to transcend the self and our pursuit of success to instead focus on building loving connections and doing meaningful work.

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• Sensible Living: Reflecting on the Fine Essentials of a Beautiful Life
   
• TSD Ventures Consulting: We give Proactive Health companies strategic and financial clarity.
   
• TSD Ventures Coaching: We help our clients build healthy, fulfilling habits. Our clients aspire to cultivate proactive, healthy habits in areas like sleep, nutrition, exercise, mental health, and relationships.

• I discovered that it’s not enough to ask “Does this thing work?” First, you have to start with more fundamental questions: How would we know if it’s working? What are the benefits this gizmo or ritual is supposed to deliver, and how would we measure them? If the proof is coming from something measured in a lab, do those numbers translate into meaningful differences in real life?
   
• ...claims about sports drinks rely on small studies with comparison groups that rig the studies in favor of the products being studied, a lack of rigorous blinding so that participants were likely nudged to perform better while taking in the sports drinks, and measurements of effectiveness that might not be meaningful in real life. Add to that statistical sleights of hand that inflate the benefits of the drinks (for instance, one study increased the benefit of carbohydrate drinks from 3 percent to 33 percent by excluding a segment of the test from the analysis), and sports drinks don’t come out looking so impressive.
   
• We’re programmed to maintain homeostasis—a physiological state of equilibrium—even when conditions are less than optimal. Which means that it’s important to get the big picture right, but fixating on the smallest details won’t necessarily yield much payoff.
   
• Insofar as there exists any magical secret for recovery, sleep is it. The benefits of sleep cannot be overstated. It’s hands-down the most powerful recovery tool known to science... If you’re forced to pick between some extra shut-eye or an extra workout, it’s wiser to pick the sleep, Singh says. Sacrificing an hour of sleep to make a morning workout is totally self-defeating.
   
• The problem with technology is that it can lure us into mistaking the numbers we can collect with answers to the questions that matter. They may look the same, but they rarely are... What makes tracking and data analysis so appealing is also what makes it dangerous—it conveys a sense of certainty that the science cannot yet deliver.
   
• Turns out, we’re much happier doing something—anything—than we are waiting. Stretching or icing or foam rolling provides a sense of agency and engagement, which studies point to as active ingredients in placebos... So often what athletes are really seeking when they turn to these expectation-inducing tools isn’t physical, but psychological. They want to feel proactive and empowered. More than anything else, they’re seeking confidence. They want to feel like they’ve done everything they can to take care of themselves and facilitate recovery.

• But in the lives of the people I’m talking about — the ones I really admire — something happened that interrupted the linear existence they had imagined for themselves. Something happened that exposed the problem with living according to individualistic, meritocratic values.
   
• In the wilderness the desire for esteem is stripped away and bigger desires are made visible: the desires of the heart (to live in loving connection with others) and the desires of the soul (the yearning to serve some transcendent ideal and to be sanctified by that service).
   
• If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second is about shedding the ego and dissolving the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution.
   
• On the first mountain, personal freedom is celebrated — keeping your options open, absence of restraint. But the perfectly free life is the unattached and unremembered life. Freedom is not an ocean you want to swim in; it is a river you want to cross so that you can plant yourself on the other side. So the person on the second mountain is making commitments. People who have made a commitment to a town, a person, an institution or a cause have cast their lot and burned the bridges behind them. They have made a promise without expecting a return. They are all in.
   
• Joy involves the transcendence of self. When you’re on the second mountain, you realize we aim too low. We compete to get near a little sunlamp, but if we lived differently, we could feel the glow of real sunshine.