Matt’s Mix Tape, Vol. 134

Matt Tillotson

Mar 11, 2022

Hi, I’m Matt Tillotson, and this is Matt’s Mix Tape: essays + links on living a healthy and creative middle life.

This week’s Mix:

Notice-taking over note taking
Sleep patterns + Alzheimer’s Disease
You can’t just cardio your way to being lean
This week’s Florida photo

Notice-taking over note-taking

In the Write of Passage course, where I’m working as Lead Mentor, note-taking creates serious angst.

Choosing a note-taking platform. Defining a system. Creating the muscle memory to take notes regularly.

People stress over this stuff.

I’ve struggled with note-taking. But I learned, by teaching a session on note-taking this week, that I do something slightly different: notice-taking.

Notice-taking starts with why

First, get clear on why you want a note-taking system. I have two main whys:

Exercise my faith and gratitude muscles
Create compelling and useful content around fitness and creativity

I’m not highlighting things to save them in a system. I use notes to drive action-oriented goals.

Three components to my notice-taking system

Journaling

I write 500 free-form words every morning: a recap of the prior day, prayers, something about a TV show I watched, or anything else.

No rules. Just clear my head.

More randomly, I jot down one-liners in an ongoing “Gratitude and Growth log,” noticing things to be grateful for, and moments where I’m growing as a person.

The G+G log is a new experiment this year. I’m excited to review it in December.

Inbox

When I come across an article I want to read, I don’t typically read it in the moment. Instead I use this iOS Shortcut to grab both the URL and the content of the article and whisk it away to a folder called “Inbox” in my Apple Notes.

Later, I read in batches, looking for ideas, inspiration, and items to share with you in this newsletter.

Debris

This is a delicious sandwich:

It’s from Mother’s Restaurant in New Orleans. It’s called the “Debris Sandwich” because its made up of leftover roast beef that fell into the aus jus gravy.

It’s fantastic.

(And thanks to its caloric density, you won’t require sustenance for two days afterwards.)

There is value in the Debris. The same goes for notice-taking.

The debris in my notes are items that don’t fit elsewhere:

Client meeting notes
Random observations
Notes from teaching sessions and Write of Passage meetings

Ultimately, my notice-taking system isn’t about preserving things for tomorrow. It’s about noticing things today, ideas and feelings that serve my goals, fortify my faith, and strengthen my gratitude.

And yes, I do it all in Apple Notes.

Consistent sleep may help fight Alzheimer’s

Another reason we need sleep:

The brain’s ability to clear a protein closely linked to Alzheimer’s disease is tied to our circadian cycle, according to research published recently in PLOS Genetics.

The key seems to be not just quality of sleep but also consistency:

Alzheimer’s disease is known to be associated with disruptions in circadian rhythms, the 24-hour cycle that controls many aspects of human behavior and physiology. For example, sleep disruptions begin years before symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease appear and are linked to more severe symptoms and a higher risk of developing the disease.

It’s like our brains have windshield wipers to clear the proteins away. But they only show up by appointment. If we get off-schedule, the wipers skip the appointment.

You can’t just cardio your way to being lean

It’s a core tenant of most fitness philosophies: use cardio to burn more calories and get leaner.

But is it wrong?

Maybe not wrong, but overly simplistic, according to Herman Pontzer, Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Global Health at Duke University:

We’re told — through fitness magazines, diet fads, online calorie counters — that the energy we burn each day is under our control: if we exercise more, we’ll burn more calories and burn off fat. It’s not that simple! Your body is a clever, dynamic product of evolution, shifting and adapting to changes in our lifestyle.

In Pozner’s new book, Burn, he studied members of the Hadza tribe in Tanzania.

Despite the hunter-gatherer activities that carried members to 16,000 steps per day, he found they didn’t burn more calories than Netflix-surfing Westerners.

But don’t relax just yet. Cardio-based exercise is still important:

When we burn more calories on exercise, our bodies spend less energy on inflammation, stress reactivity (like cortisol), and other things that make us sick.

Still, we can’t just cardio our way out of bad diets and excess weight. What we eat—and drink—matters a lot, no matter how many steps we get in each day.