Andrewjericho | Thoughts & Commentary

When Late-Night Twitter Recommends a Life-Changing Diet

You know that feeling when someone sends you a study that’s supposed to change everything, and you spend three days actually believing it might? That was me in January when the PREDIMED-Plus trial results in The Lancet started making the rounds. A 24% reduction in major cardiovascular events. Five years of data. The kind of numbers that make you suddenly aware of your own heart beating.

The protocol itself seemed straightforward enough on paper: an energy-reduced Mediterranean diet paired with actual physical activity. Not revolutionary. Not trendy in the way that most health things are trendy. Just olive oil, vegetables, legumes, fish, and the kind of eating that hasn’t changed much in coastal Sardinia or the Nicoya Peninsula for generations. The Blue Zones 2025 research and dietary findings showed that in these places where people actually live long lives, around 70% of daily calories still come from whole plant foods. Not as a wellness trend. Just as Tuesday.

I decided to try it for five weeks. What could go wrong?

Week One: The Optimism Phase

Week one was pure performance art. I bought the good olive oil. The expensive kind. Not the kind you use for cooking scrambled eggs, but the kind that comes in a dark bottle and costs more than coffee. I’m talking fifteen dollars for a liter. I was committed.

Monday through Wednesday, I stuck to the protocol with the kind of rigid determination usually reserved for people starting their first corporate job. Grilled fish with roasted vegetables. A proper salad with legumes. Olive oil drizzled like I was painting a Renaissance portrait. I drank more water than seemed reasonable. I felt virtuous. I felt unstoppable.

By Friday, I’d lasted through work lunches and one moderately tempting happy hour invitation. Thursday night I meal-prepped like someone who’d just discovered the concept. Everything was controlled, everything was measured. I took a photo of a particularly beautiful bowl of lentils and didn’t post it anywhere, which I think proves something about how serious I was taking this.

Weeks Two Through Four: The Entropy Begins

Here’s what nobody tells you about the Mediterranean diet when they’re citing the cardiovascular data: most Americans get only about 12% of their daily calories from vegetables and legumes combined. That’s actual USDA data from 2025. The protocol calls for around 40%. That’s a gap that doesn’t close in week two just because you’re feeling determined on a Monday morning.

Week two started strong and ended with pizza. Not even good pizza. Mediocre delivery pizza on a Thursday because I had back-to-back meetings and forgot to pack lunch. The olive oil sat at home in its dark bottle, judging me silently.

By week three, I’d settled into what I’ll call aggressive negotiation with the protocol. Breakfast was compliant. Lunch was maybe sixty percent compliant if I squinted. Dinner was where I’d either nail it or order Thai food and call it a wash. The legumes became inconsistent. Some days I’d eat chickpeas like my life depended on it. Other days I’d reach for a bagel and pretend that wasn’t technically a violation.

Week four was when I noticed something unexpected: the depression thing. There’s actual research on this now, published last year in Nutrients. A 33% lower risk of depression in people who actually stick to Mediterranean eating patterns compared to the standard American diet. I wasn’t thinking about that academically anymore. I was just noticing that on days when I’d actually eaten properly, my brain seemed slightly less inclined to convince me that all my emails were disappointing. Small sample size of one. Not scientifically valid. But noticeable.

Week Five: The Honest Reckoning

By the final week, I’d stopped pretending this was a medical intervention and started treating it like what it actually was: an attempt to eat in a way that might be slightly better for me, undertaken by someone who still lives in a country where olive oil imports spiked 28% in the first quarter of 2026 but where you can also get a cheeseburger delivered to your door in under twenty minutes.

I did the math on my actual adherence. Maybe forty percent compliance most days. Some days higher. Some days I’d eat a pizza bagel at 8 PM and genuinely wonder what I was doing with my life. But here’s what I actually noticed over five weeks: I felt less sluggish. My skin looked better, which is vain but true. That depression thing was real, maybe. The energy thing was definitely real.

I also noticed that half-assed adherence to an evidence-based diet is still adherence to something. It’s not the same as the study participants in the PREDIMED trial, who had actual supervision and support and health professionals checking in. But it’s not nothing, either. It’s somewhere in the middle, which is probably where most of us actually live most of the time.

Who This Is Actually For

If you’re someone who responds well to structure and likes the idea of eating fish and salad and olives, do this properly. Find the actual protocol materials. Commit to it. The data is real. The cardiovascular benefits are real. The depression reduction is real. You might be the person for whom this becomes a genuine lifestyle shift.

If you’re like me, and the idea of perfect adherence makes you want to order pizza just to prove a point to your own future self, the good news is that the protocol seems to have some flexibility built in. You don’t need to be at 40% plant calories overnight. You don’t need to ditch every bagel forever. You just need to shift the direction slightly and stick with it long enough to notice that you feel different.

The olive oil is still sitting in my cabinet. I still reach for it. Some days I’m 80% compliant. Some days I’m 30%. But I’m not back to 12% vegetable calories either. Somewhere in the middle seems to be where I can actually live, and that turns out to be the only diet that matters anyway. The one you’ll actually keep doing.

If you’ve been thinking about this kind of thing, I’d say try it. At least try it honestly for a few weeks and see what you actually notice. I’m curious whether your version of this experiment looks anything like mine. Drop me a message if you do. I’d genuinely like to know.

The Moment Everything Changed

Sometime between January and now, sleeping apart stopped being something people whispered about and became a headline. A couples therapist published a piece in the New York Times basically saying “hey, maybe separate beds are fine,” and suddenly everyone had feelings about it. The Google search volume for “sleep divorce” hit 1.2 million in January alone. That’s the kind of number that tells you we’re not just talking about logistics anymore. We’re talking about what it means to be close to someone, what compromise looks like in 2025, and whether we’ve finally gotten comfortable admitting that the fantasy doesn’t always match the reality.

I found myself thinking about this a lot more than I expected to. Not because I have some revelation to share, but because how mainstream the conversation had gotten caught me off guard. For years, couples sleeping separately felt like a failure. A sign that the relationship was struggling. Now it’s everywhere, and people are genuinely debating whether it might actually be better.

The Numbers That Make You Stop and Think

Here’s where it gets interesting. According to a 2025 survey from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 35 percent of partnered adults in America are now sleeping separately at least part of the week. That’s up from 25 percent just two years ago. Ten percentage points in twenty-four months. That’s not drift. That’s movement. And it’s movement happening in public, without shame, which feels like the bigger shift.

The physiological reasons aren’t mysterious either. Research published in Sleep Medicine Reviews in 2025 analyzed decades of data and found that people sleeping next to a partner experience about 13 percent more micro-arousals per night than solo sleepers. Micro-arousals are those tiny moments when your sleep gets disrupted, usually so briefly you don’t remember it. Two-thirds of the time, snoring is the culprit. Nobody’s doing it on purpose. It’s just the body doing what bodies do, and it’s wrecking sleep for the person next to them. When you frame it that way, suddenly separate sleeping arrangements don’t sound like giving up. They sound like problem-solving.

If you want to go deeper on what actual sleep health looks like, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine sleep health resources has solid information on what quality sleep should feel like and when to take it seriously.

The Technology Narrative Nobody Expected

What surprised me is how much of this conversation got shaped by mattress companies. Not because they’re evil, but because they genuinely solved something. Dual-zone temperature control mattresses have become a real category, not a gimmick. Eight Sleep released data showing that couples using customizable temperature zones on their Pod 4 mattress saw a 19 percent reduction in reported sleep conflicts. Nineteen percent. That makes complete sense once you think about it. My partner runs hot. I run cold. We’ve spent years somehow making it work under one blanket like we’re solving a physics problem.

The industry noticed. The global mattress market hit 56 billion dollars in 2025, and the fastest-growing segment is dual-chamber and customizable split mattresses, growing at 11 percent annually. That’s the market telling you something. Couples are choosing customization over compromise, buying solutions instead of accepting frustration as the price of closeness.

You can look at Eight Sleep Pod 4 sleep tracking data overview to see how this actually works in practice, if you’re curious about the mechanics of it.

What This Says About Us That I’m Still Figuring Out

What gets me about the mainstreaming of the sleep divorce conversation is that it reveals something we’ve been too polite to say for a long time. We’ve been trying to make one-size-fits-all intimacy work, and it turns out intimacy is more complicated than we wanted to admit. Some couples sleep together and thrive. Some couples need separate spaces and then appreciate each other more. Some couples use fancy mattresses and solve it that way. There’s no wrong answer anymore, and that feels like a real shift.

The other thing it says is that we’re getting a little better at separating physical proximity from emotional closeness. For decades, the cultural narrative was that sleeping in the same bed marked a good relationship. If you needed space, something was wrong with you or the relationship. But what if space and good sleep actually make the relationship better? What if someone who sleeps seven solid hours is going to be a better partner than someone who spent the night being irritated by snoring?

Where I Land, For Now

I’m not saying I have this figured out. I’m writing this because I’m still in the middle of figuring it out, and I think that’s worth acknowledging. The sleep divorce conversation going mainstream has cracked open something that a lot of couples are dealing with quietly. It’s made it safer to ask whether the way we’ve been doing things is actually working.

If you’ve been feeling weird about wanting to sleep separately, or if you’re in a relationship where one person snores and everyone’s exhausted and resentful, maybe this moment matters. Maybe the fact that 35 percent of couples are already doing this, and talking about it, means you don’t have to carry shame about wanting something different.

What do you think about all this? Are you someone for whom the conversation shifted something, or does it feel like everyone’s overthinking something that should just be natural? I’m genuinely curious how this lands for different people, especially since we’re all still in the middle of deciding what normal looks like.

The Year We Started Saying No Out Loud

Remember when it felt revolutionary to just say “I can’t afford that” without apologizing? That was the promise of loud budgeting when it took off a little over a year ago. A TikToker named Lukas Battle coined the phrase in late 2023, and by the time January 2025 rolled around, the internet had collectively decided this was how we were going to talk about money from now on. Google searches for the term peaked right around New Year’s, which tracks. Nothing says fresh start like admitting you’re broke.

The cultural moment felt genuinely different. After decades of pretending our finances were fine while quietly spiraling, we were suddenly giving ourselves permission to speak the truth. No more vague excuses about being tired. No more fake-sad “I wish I could come” texts. You could just say: that’s not in my budget. There was something almost defiant about it, like we were reclaiming our right to have limits and talk about them without shame.

What the Numbers Actually Said

Here’s where things get interesting, and by interesting I mean slightly uncomfortable. Bankrate’s annual money and relationships survey found that 42% of Gen Z respondents said they’d openly declined social plans because of cost in the past year. That’s a solid bump from 31% just two years earlier. So we’re definitely saying no more often, and we’re definitely doing it out loud.

But then you look at what’s actually happening with our money, and the picture gets murkier. NerdWallet’s consumer spending analysis showed that the average American still overspent their monthly budget by about $314 in 2024, which is exactly where we were in 2023. The trend shifted our language without shifting our behavior. We got better at declining invitations, but not at declining purchases.

And the credit card debt picture? That got worse. Young adults aged 18 to 34 collectively owed $1.14 trillion on credit cards by the end of 2024, a record high. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Loud budgeting was supposed to be the cultural reset we needed. Instead, we got a year where we talked more honestly about our financial constraints while still, somehow, not respecting them.

The Gap Between Saying and Doing

Financial therapist Amanda Clayman nailed something important in a February 2025 New York Times piece. She said loud budgeting works beautifully as a social script, a way to change the conversation and reduce shame. But it fails without actual infrastructure behind it. You can say no to happy hour with total confidence, but if you haven’t built a real budget, tracked your spending, or figured out why you keep overdrawing your account, you’re just trading one type of avoidance for another.

That distinction stuck with me because I recognize it in myself. I spent chunks of 2024 being extremely vocal about not spending money I didn’t have, right up until I wasn’t. I’d decline a concert ticket with this newfound zen about my limits, then somehow justify the third coffee subscription because this one was different. The script changed. The underlying patterns didn’t.

What loud budgeting gave us was permission to talk about the problem. What it didn’t give us was the uncomfortable work of actually solving it. Those are not the same thing, even though they feel related.

Why the Disconnect Matters

I think we did something interesting last year. We normalized financial honesty in a way that’s genuinely valuable. There’s real progress in 42% of Gen Z feeling comfortable enough to say “I can’t afford that” instead of pretending. That’s not nothing. It matters for mental health, for reducing financial shame, for letting people who aren’t wealthy exist in social circles without constant performance anxiety.

But we also got a false sense of accomplishment. We felt like we were taking control of our money by changing our language about it. We reframed budgeting as something cool and boundary-setting rather than something restrictive and limiting. Then we went right on spending at the same rate, just with better excuses for why.

The real work is messier than the trend. It requires looking at your actual numbers, which is boring. It requires saying no to things you want, which is hard. It requires sitting with the discomfort of your financial reality instead of just talking about it differently. Loud budgeting gave us the language to acknowledge the problem. It didn’t give us the discipline or support systems to fix it.

What Actually Changed, and What’s Still Waiting

I went into 2024 genuinely expecting loud budgeting to be transformative. I watched the TikToks. I appreciated the cultural shift. I even said some things out loud that I’d been keeping quiet for years. But I’m sitting here a year later with basically the same spending patterns, the same debt level, and the same tendency to rationalize exceptions.

The trend changed one important thing: our willingness to acknowledge our financial limits in public. That’s genuine progress. It reduced shame and created space for honest conversations. But it also gave us a shortcut to feeling like we’d addressed the problem when really we’d just talked about it differently.

If you spent the past year loud about budgeting and noticed your bank account looking the same, you’re not alone. We got the easy part right. We normalized saying no. But the hard part, the actual structural changes to how we spend and save and plan, that’s still waiting. I’m curious whether 2025 will be the year we move from talking about it to doing something about it.

Have you found that loud budgeting actually changed how you spend, or does it feel more like a cultural moment that made things feel different without much shifting underneath? I’d genuinely like to know if I’m the only one who got stuck in the gap between the conversation and the action.

The Setup: When a Tool and a Fantasy Collide

Last summer, Anthropic rolled out Claude Projects, and if you spend any time in the AI productivity space, you probably heard about it the way you hear about a new restaurant opening downtown: with cautious optimism and the sense that maybe this time things would be different. The feature promised something genuinely useful—persistent context, memory across conversations, the ability to feed an AI system a bunch of information and have it actually remember what you told it three weeks ago. It sounded like the scaffolding for something real.

I watched the launch unfold while simultaneously watching YouTube’s algorithm serve me content about AI side hustles. Thousands of videos. Billions of views, actually—over 1.2 billion last year according to tracking data. The passive income tutorials were the crown jewels of this content ecosystem, each one more confident than the last. Build digital products. Sell them on Etsy. Let the AI do the heavy lifting. Watch your bank account grow while you sleep.

The logic felt airtight to me, which should have been my first red flag. I had Claude Projects. I had Canva. I had an Etsy shop I’d created on a whim two years prior that had exactly zero sales. What I didn’t have was a realistic assessment of what I was walking into, but that’s never stopped anyone before.

The Project: Why It Looked Promising on Day One

I decided to create digital product templates. Specifically, social media content calendars, budget trackers, and habit-tracking dashboards—the kind of thing that looks good as a PDF and costs nothing to ship. Claude Projects let me set up a persistent workspace where I could dump design briefs, brand guidelines, and template specifications. I could ask Claude to iterate on designs, generate descriptions for Etsy listings, and brainstorm marketing angles. The AI would remember everything.

This is where I need to be honest about something: the tool actually worked. Claude’s Projects feature did exactly what it promised. I could maintain complex context across dozens of conversations. The AI generated thoughtful product descriptions. It helped me think through pricing strategies and came up with genuinely clever keywords for discoverability. The friction that usually exists between idea and execution? Reduced. That part was legitimately impressive.

So I did what the tutorials suggested. I created twelve templates over eight weeks. I designed them in Canva, paid for the premium tier to unlock the good fonts. I wrote product descriptions, set up SEO tags, and priced everything competitively. Underpriced them, actually, which in retrospect was the only thing I got exactly right. I was following the script so closely I could have been reading it aloud.

The Results: Where the Numbers Stop Being Theoretical

Three months of actual work resulted in four purchases. Three of them were from the same person who bought one template and then came back for the others. The fourth was from someone I didn’t know. Total revenue: twenty-three dollars. Total time investment: forty-seven hours. Do the math yourself if you want, but I’ll save you the effort. Forty-nine cents per hour.

There’s a meaningful question hiding in that number. When Influencer Marketing Hub’s AI side hustle report 2025 found that 71 percent of people attempting AI-assisted digital product creation earned less than a hundred dollars from their effort, they were looking at the tail end of a long distribution. I was just further out than most.

But here’s what stopped bothering me about my personal failure and started bothering me about the broader ecosystem: Etsy’s Q3 2025 earnings showed that AI-generated digital downloads had become the most-uploaded product category on the platform. They’d also become the lowest-value category—an average selling price of $3.40, down from $7.20 just two years earlier. The market had flooded. Massively. And Etsy’s Q3 2025 investor earnings release made it clear this was a trend, not a blip.

I wasn’t unlucky. I wasn’t missing some crucial insight. I was operating in a category that had become simultaneously saturated and devalued, using a tool that had lowered the barrier to entry so far that anyone with an idea and two hours could produce inventory. The AI didn’t create an advantage. It eliminated it.

The Uncomfortable Truth: Why This Matters

Let me say something that won’t be popular: Claude Projects is excellent. The tool works exactly as intended. The problem isn’t Claude. The problem is what happens when you give millions of people an excellent tool and tell them it’s their ticket to passive income. Everyone becomes a competitor overnight. Competition drives prices down. Lower prices mean the only way to make meaningful money is through volume, and volume requires marketing skills, audience-building, or luck. Preferably all three.

The AI didn’t fail me. The narrative failed me. The content ecosystem that profited from my optimism—the YouTube videos with the eye-catching thumbnails, the email newsletters about side hustles, the Twitter threads about building six figures—that ecosystem had already succeeded before I even started. They made their money from my attention and my hope. The passive income was theirs, not mine.

What gets me is that this isn’t some cynical take meant to trash the concept. Some people will build real businesses using Claude, using Etsy, using AI tools. Some people will actually hit five hundred dollars a month or way more. But they won’t do it by making one tool and hoping. They’ll do it through distribution channels that already exist, or by building an audience first, or by solving problems that people are actively looking to pay for. The shortcuts you see in the tutorials aren’t shortcuts. They’re just the middle part of the story, edited to remove everything before the success moment and everything after it.

What I Actually Learned (Beyond the Obvious)

I spent forty-seven hours and made twenty-three dollars, which is approximately forty-six hours and twenty-three dollars worse than I hoped. But I noticed something while doing this work that I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. The best part of the process wasn’t the potential for money. It was the problem-solving. Figuring out how to structure a template so it was genuinely useful. Thinking about what features a budget tracker actually needs. Imagining the person who might use these things and whether I’d built something they’d actually want to keep.

That’s worth something, even if the Etsy shop didn’t validate it. The skill is real. The AI literacy is real. The ability to move from idea to product is real. I just learned it’s not worth $500 a month. It’s worth what it’s worth, which in my case was a clearer understanding of why passive income feels so appealing and why it rarely works the way we imagine.

If you’ve tried something like this yourself, I want to know what happened. Not the success stories—I can find those on YouTube. I want to hear about the projects that didn’t land, the time you spent, the moment you decided whether to keep going or cut your losses. That’s where the actual information lives.

The Honeymoon Phase: When Data Feels Like Answers

I got the Oura Ring 4 in late March, right after it had been out for a few months. I’d been skeptical for years—I’m the kind of person who reads articles about wearable anxiety and thinks, “Yeah, that won’t be me”—but then my sleep got weird, and I wanted to know why. Not the obvious reasons. The actual data. So I dropped $349 on the titanium version and waited for answers.

The first two weeks were genuinely magical. The ring tracked my sleep stages, my heart rate variability, my body temperature dips, my resting heart rate. It gave me a daily score out of 100. Everything felt quantifiable. Knowable. I could see patterns. On nights when I took my ADHD medication later than usual, my sleep score tanked. On nights when I went to bed early, it improved. There was a logic to it, cause and effect that felt solid in a way nothing else in my neurology ever does.

What I didn’t know then was that I was looking at data specifically designed to confuse people like me.

The ADHD Variable Nobody Talks About

Around month three, I started noticing something odd. My heart rate variability, one of the key metrics the ring tracks, was all over the place. One night it would be 95 milliseconds. The next night, 47. Then 82. Then 33. I’d read that HRV is supposed to be stable, that variability is bad, that consistency is what you want. My ring seemed to think I was either doing everything right or everything catastrophically wrong, often on consecutive nights where I’d done basically the same thing.

I did what any reasonable person with ADHD would do: I spiraled into research. That’s when I found a 2025 paper in the Journal of Attention Disorders that made me feel seen and immediately more paranoid. The study showed that adults with ADHD have significantly higher night-to-night HRV variability. We’re talking 22-millisecond swings compared to 11 milliseconds in neurotypical people. The data from wearables is technically richer for us because our nervous systems are naturally more variable. But it’s also harder to interpret because the patterns that would look alarming in a neurotypical person might just be… how our brains work.

This is the part they don’t mention in the marketing materials. The Oura Ring 4 came out in October 2024 with improved blood oxygen sensors, 97.4% accuracy and a 12% improvement over the previous generation, plus new cardiovascular age scoring. It’s genuinely better technology. But better technology doesn’t automatically mean clearer answers. For me, it meant more data points to misinterpret.

When Helpful Data Becomes a Compulsion

Month four is when things shifted. I was checking my scores multiple times a day. Not once in the morning with my coffee. Multiple times. After exercise, before bed, after meals, at random moments when I was curious whether my body was cooperating with me. I started optimizing for the numbers in ways that didn’t actually feel good. I’d stay up later to hit a certain bedtime that I thought would improve my sleep score. I’d skip coffee if my resting heart rate was higher than usual, as if caffeine deprivation would somehow reset my baseline.

A 2024 Rock Health survey of 4,000 Americans found that 38% of wearable device owners reported increased health anxiety directly linked to tracking data. Researchers are calling it “metric-induced health anxiety,” which is a polite way of saying that sometimes data makes you more worried about your health, not less. I was definitely in that 38%. I had constructed an entire anxiety around my sleep score that had nothing to do with how I actually felt when I woke up.

The subscription model didn’t help. After the initial hardware cost of $349 to $499, the ring costs $5.99 per month for the full suite of features. Over two years, that’s roughly $643 total, putting it on the higher end of consumer health wearables. When you’ve spent that much money, you feel obligated to use it obsessively. To get your money’s worth. To make the data mean something.

Around month five, I realized I was checking my ring more often than I was checking in with how I actually felt. That seemed bad.

The Plot Twist: Oura’s Actually Doing Interesting Things

Here’s where I have to give credit where it’s due, and this is where my thinking has genuinely shifted. In 2024, Oura partnered with UCSF on something called TemPredict 2.0, a research study tracking over 65,000 users’ temperature variation data to predict illness onset up to 2.5 days before symptoms show up. This isn’t just about individual dashboards and daily scores. This is about using aggregated data to understand how bodies actually work. The partnership is still ongoing, and the implications are legitimately fascinating. Oura Ring 4 features and research partnerships are increasingly focused on this kind of population-level insight rather than personal optimization.

I’m not here to defend the corporate wellness industrial complex. I’m also not here to say wearables are inherently bad. But I’ve noticed that the best use case for my ring isn’t personal optimization. It’s baseline data. When I get sick, I can look back and see the temperature variations that preceded it. When my ADHD medication dosage shifted, I had actual sleep data to discuss with my doctor instead of just saying “I don’t know, I think it got worse.” The data stops being a problem when I treat it as information to contextualize rather than a score to obsess over.

What I’ve Actually Learned

Eight months in, here’s my honest take: the Oura Ring 4 is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s tracking my physiology accurately. The technology is legitimately impressive. The research they’re participating in matters. But how I relate to the data matters more than the data itself.

I’ve stopped checking my sleep score obsessively. I stopped trying to optimize for numbers that might not even mean what I thought they meant. I take the data as one input among many, which is what all health data should be. My ADHD brain’s natural nervous system variability is just that: natural. Not good or bad, just different. I wish I’d understood that before spending three months convinced my HRV was telling me something was deeply wrong.

What I’m curious about now is the bigger picture. Not my individual score, but what happens when you put this kind of detailed physiological data in the hands of someone trained to interpret it, like a sleep specialist or a cardiologist. That’s where the real value seems to live. Rock Health digital health consumer survey data shows that anxiety around wearables drops significantly when people have professional guidance on interpretation. The device itself isn’t the problem. The isolation of the data is, the pressure to make it mean something it doesn’t.

If you’re thinking about getting a wearable and you have ADHD, go in with your eyes open. The data will be interesting. It might also be confusing in ways specific to how your brain works. Think about whether you have a professional you can discuss the numbers with, and maybe set some limits around how often you’re checking them before you even strap it on. Because the most fascinating data in the world isn’t worth it if it’s making you feel worse about your body instead of better.

The Setup: Why I Downloaded Yet Another Dopamine Trend

Around early January, my feed started filling up with the dopamine menu trend. You know the one. Everyone was suddenly organizing their lives like restaurants organize menus, sorting activities into appetizers, main courses, and desserts based on how much emotional energy they required. At first, I rolled my eyes the way you do when you see the fifteenth productivity hack of the week.

But here’s the thing about me: I’m the person who keeps a spreadsheet for her houseplants. So when I started reading about how ADHD coach Jaclyn Paul popularized this framework to help people actually take care of themselves instead of doom-scrolling for three hours, something clicked. It wasn’t another optimization scheme. It was permission to plan pleasure. Which apparently I need written down to execute.

The timing made sense too. The APA 2025 Stress in America Report found that 77% of adults are stressed about not having enough meaningful downtime. Seeing that statistic made me feel weirdly validated, like my inability to just “relax” wasn’t a personal failing but a structural problem. If my brain wasn’t going to let me off easy, I was at least going to give it a framework.

What I Actually Built (And Why My Spreadsheet Looks Like It Was Made by an Anxious Accountant)

I didn’t use the cute Notion template everyone was downloading (though the Notion Template Gallery had over 400,000 downloads in February alone). Instead, I made my own spreadsheet with columns for date, activity, category, estimated mood impact, actual mood impact, and what I’ll generously call “notes but it’s really just me complaining.” My friends thought it was hilarious. I thought it was necessary.

The dopamine menu concept itself is simple enough. Appetizers are the quick hits: a five-minute walk, your favorite tea, a funny TikTok. Main courses are the stuff that takes real time and attention: calling a friend, working on a hobby, cooking something good. Desserts are the rare, special experiences: concert, weekend trip, that thing you’ve been saving for. The idea is that when your brain is fried, you know exactly what’s available without having to make decisions.

What I learned immediately was that my menu looked different on paper than it did in real life. I’d put “reading a book” under main courses, but turns out I was too scattered most weeknights. The categories kept shifting. By week two, I was color-coding based on whether activities were solo or social, because it turned out my dopamine profile was less about intensity and more about companionship variables I hadn’t considered. This is the part nobody tells you: building your menu is the easy part. Knowing yourself well enough to categorize what actually works is the real work.

The Data I Didn’t Expect to Care About

By the end of 30 days, I had enough spreadsheet rows to actually see some patterns. A 2025 study in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that people with ADHD who did structured leisure planning reduced their emotional exhaustion by 23% over eight weeks. I didn’t expect to notice anything that clinical in my own tracking, but I did.

Here’s what my spreadsheet actually revealed: on days when I did at least one main course activity intentionally, my anxiety scores dropped measurably. Not eliminated, but noticeably lower. The correlation felt too good to be true, so I kept digging. Days with zero planned activities weren’t necessarily bad, but they were scattered. I’d end them having consumed a lot of content and accomplished nothing, which somehow felt worse than a quiet day where I’d deliberately done something small and nice for myself.

The appetizer items surprised me most. I thought they’d feel trivial, but they didn’t. A 10-minute coffee ritual before checking my phone. A walk around the block with actual attention to the weather. These weren’t filling the deep wells, but they were keeping the wells from going completely dry. They were proof that I didn’t have to wait for the big experience to feel okay.

Who This Is Actually For (And Why You Might Be That Person)

The dopamine menu trend hit 180 million views on TikTok by early 2025, which tells you something about how many people are looking for this kind of framework. But I want to be specific about who actually benefits, rather than suggesting everyone should suddenly spreadsheet their joy.

This is for the person whose brain doesn’t naturally prompt them to take breaks. It’s for people whose anxiety shows up as endless productivity or whose depression shows up as complete shutdown, and they need a middle ground. It’s for the person who has good intentions about self-care but never actually executes because it feels too vague. It’s for anyone who has ever felt weird guilt about taking time for things that feel “unproductive” but are actually necessary.

It’s not really for people who naturally have a good relationship with leisure. It’s not for people who can just decide to relax and then relax. And honestly, it might feel like overkill if your life is running smoothly. But if you’re reading this and thinking “wow, that spreadsheet thing is weirdly relatable,” then I’m telling you: spend an afternoon building your menu. Make it messy. Include the specific songs that make you feel better. Note the time of day that matters. This is permission to get specific about what actually helps you.

What Actually Stuck After 30 Days

I’m still using the spreadsheet. Not in the obsessive way I started, but I glance at it when I feel off-kilter and can’t name why. It’s become less about tracking and more about having a quick reference for “what do I actually feel like doing right now” that doesn’t require me to have energy I don’t have.

The real shift wasn’t in productivity or optimization. It was in permission. Having the menu made it feel acceptable to do the small thing instead of waiting for the big thing. It made it feel okay to spend an evening drawing badly instead of feeling like I should be doing something more meaningful. It made leisure feel like a category of life that deserves actual planning instead of whatever’s left after obligations.

If you’ve been seeing this trend and wondering whether it’s worth trying, I think it depends on whether you’re the kind of person who needs structure to feel free. I definitely am. There’s something about naming what I need and putting it somewhere I can see it that actually changes what I do. Whether that’s the dopamine menu effect or just me finally giving myself permission to be intentional about my own life, I can’t entirely say. But the spreadsheet doesn’t lie, and more importantly, I feel better. That’s the data point that matters.

The Rule That’s Everywhere (And Nowhere at the Same Time)

You’ve probably seen it by now. The 8-8-8 rule is having a moment. Eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure. It’s clean. It’s balanced. It fits perfectly into an Instagram carousel with a soft-focus image of someone sleeping on expensive sheets. Since late 2025, this concept has accumulated over 400 million combined views across TikTok and Instagram Reels, which is roughly what happens when something feels simultaneously aspirational and achievable enough to share.

Here’s the thing though, and I say this with genuine warmth because I fell for it too: the person most associated with sleep science is actively walking back how people are using his research. Matthew Walker, the neuroscientist behind the bestselling book “Why We Sleep” and decades of legitimate sleep research, went on the Huberman Lab podcast in December 2025 and basically said, “That’s not… quite what I found.” Not in a dramatic way. More in the way a friend gently corrects you when you’ve been telling a story wrong for years.

What Walker Actually Said (And Why It’s More Interesting Than a Number)

Walker’s research supports a range of 7 to 9 hours of sleep for most adults, not a rigid mandate of exactly 8. More importantly, the consistency of your sleep schedule matters considerably more than hitting some magic number. Your body prefers rhythm over arithmetic.

The data backs this up. A 2025 meta-analysis published in Sleep Medicine Reviews examined sleep patterns across 1.1 million adults and found that sleeping between 7 and 8 hours was associated with the lowest all-cause mortality risk. But here’s what didn’t make it into the viral clips: individual variation was significant. Some people genuinely thrive on 7 hours. Others need the full 9. Your genetics, your age, your stress levels, your exercise routine, the ambient light in your bedroom, what you had for dinner, whether Mercury is in retrograde (okay, that last one isn’t science, but you know what I mean) all factor in.

The research from Matthew Walker’s UC Berkeley sleep research lab has been carefully measuring these individual differences for years. What’s frustrating for Walker, I imagine, is watching those details get hammered flat into a single number. It’s like someone reading a 400-page book and only remembering the chapter headings.

The Gap Between What We’re Marketing and What We’re Actually Sleeping

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. The global sleep economy has become a 78 billion dollar industry as of 2025, up from 58 billion just three years prior, according to projections from the McKinsey Health Institute. That’s a lot of money riding on the idea that sleep is fixable, that you just need the right supplement, the right app, the right temperature-regulating pillowcase, and suddenly you’ll slot neatly into the 8-8-8 framework.

But when Oura Ring sleep health insights analyzed their 2025 annual data, they found something telling. The average user’s actual tracked sleep was 6 hours and 51 minutes. Not 8 hours. Not even 7. There’s a canyon-sized gap between the ideal being marketed and the reality most of us are living in.

This matters because I think a lot of people see the 8-8-8 rule and feel instantly guilty. You’re already not hitting it, right? You’re scrolling at midnight. Your kid woke up at 4 a.m. Your job doesn’t respect boundaries. And now there’s this rule that feels like it’s mocking you from every algorithm-fed surface.

Who This Actually Affects

This whole thing matters most for people who are already stressed about sleep. If that’s you, if you’re the type to track metrics and optimize systems, here’s what I’d actually recommend: Stop aiming for 8 hours like it’s a fitness target. Notice what’s realistic in your actual life and commit to consistency within that. If you can genuinely get 7.5 hours four nights a week because that’s when you can control your schedule, that matters more than occasionally hitting 8 and then sleeping 5 hours the next night.

It also matters for people in fields like medicine, teaching, or parenting, where sleep gets sacrificed regularly and the guilt is real and constant. The research isn’t saying you’re doomed if you don’t hit 8. It’s saying that when you do get sleep, making it predictable and relatively stable is more valuable than raw quantity.

And honestly, it matters for anyone who’s bought into productivity culture so hard that they’ve convinced themselves they can optimize their way to never needing rest. The 8-8-8 rule can accidentally become another tyranny, another way to feel like you’re failing at something as basic as sleeping.

What to Actually Do About All This

The unsexy answer is that Walker’s actual findings are less about finding the perfect number and more about building a sustainable rhythm. Go to bed at roughly the same time. Wake up at roughly the same time. Aim for somewhere in the 7 to 9 hour range, but don’t spiral if you land at 6.5 some weeks or 9 others. Your body can handle some flexibility.

If you’re someone who likes data, great. Tracking can be genuinely helpful for noticing patterns and understanding what actually affects your sleep quality. But use it to learn about yourself, not to confirm that you’re failing at an arbitrary standard.

The goal isn’t to achieve 8-8-8. The goal is sleep that feels sustainable within your actual life, pursued with enough consistency that your nervous system can trust it. That looks different for everyone, and that’s not a bug in the system. That’s the whole point of what Walker and other sleep researchers have been finding.

What does your actual sleep rhythm look like right now? Not what you think it should be, but what it actually is? I’m curious whether it matches what you think you’re getting.

The Morning Ritual That Wasn’t

I used to set my alarm for 5:30 AM every single day, convinced that waking up early would transform me into the kind of person who has their life together. You know the type — they drink green smoothies, respond to emails promptly, and probably have a meditation corner in their bedroom that actually gets used.

For six months, I dragged myself out of bed in the dark, made elaborate breakfast bowls that I photographed for Instagram, and sat with my journal writing morning pages that mostly consisted of complaints about being tired. The whole routine took ninety minutes, and by 7 AM I was already exhausted from performing productivity. I finally stopped when I realized I was spending more energy maintaining the morning ritual than I was getting from it.

Now I wake up when my body wants to wake up, usually around 7:15. I eat toast standing at the kitchen counter while checking the weather. It’s not Instagram-worthy, but it’s honest, and I’ve never once felt guilty about it.

Saying Yes to Every Coffee Meeting

There was a period where I said yes to every networking coffee, informational interview, and “let’s pick your brain” invitation that landed in my inbox. I thought this was what ambitious people did — they collected connections like business cards at a conference. My calendar looked impressively full, dotted with forty-five minute blocks at various coffee shops around the city.

Most of these conversations followed the same script. We’d order our drinks, make small talk about the weather or the neighborhood, and then they’d ask me about my work while simultaneously scrolling through their mental Rolodex to figure out how I could be useful to them later. I’d leave feeling drained and slightly hollow, like I’d just performed my own resume for an audience of one.

The turning point came when I realized I was having more meaningful conversations with the barista at my regular coffee shop than with these strategic networking contacts. Now I’m ruthlessly selective about who I meet with. If someone wants to connect, they need to tell me specifically why and what they’re hoping to discuss. It’s amazing how this simple filter weeds out the people who just want to “grab coffee” because they think that’s what professionals do.

The Project Hoarding Problem

I’m naturally curious, which sounds like a virtue until you see what it looks like in practice. My computer desktop used to be a graveyard of half-finished projects: a podcast I recorded three episodes of, a newsletter I sent twice, a photography series I shot for two weeks before getting distracted by something else. Each folder represented a burst of enthusiasm that fizzled out when the initial excitement wore off.

The problem wasn’t lack of follow-through — it was that I was starting too many things at once. I’d get an idea, immediately create a folder for it, and start researching tools and platforms before I’d even figured out if I actually wanted to commit to the work involved. My “ideas” document had forty-seven entries, most of them variations on themes I’d already tried and abandoned.

Now I have a rule: no new projects until I finish or consciously abandon an existing one. It sounds obvious, but it was revolutionary for me. Instead of juggling seven mediocre efforts, I can put real energy into two or three things that actually matter to me. The ideas document still exists, but I’ve learned to let most ideas stay ideas.

Optimizing Everything

I went through a phase where I tried to hack and optimize every aspect of my life. I tracked my sleep with three different apps, used the Pomodoro technique for everything from writing emails to folding laundry, and maintained elaborate spreadsheets for groceries, exercise, and mood patterns. I had systems for systems.

The irony was that managing all these optimization tools became a part-time job. I spent twenty minutes each morning updating trackers and reviewing data, then another fifteen minutes at night logging the day’s activities. I was so busy measuring my life that I forgot to actually live it. Plus, most of the insights were either obvious (I sleep better when I don’t drink coffee after 2 PM) or useless (apparently I was 8% more productive on Tuesdays, but what was I supposed to do with that information?).

I still track a few things that genuinely help me — mostly money and deadlines — but I’ve stopped trying to quantify my way to self-improvement. Some things are better felt than measured. The quality of a conversation, the satisfaction of completing a project, the pleasure of a perfectly ripe peach — these don’t need metrics.

What Stays

Giving up these habits felt like failure at first, but it was actually the opposite. Each thing I stopped doing created space for something better. Less morning ritual, more actual morning time. Fewer coffee meetings, deeper friendships. Fewer projects, better work. Less optimization, more presence.

The thread connecting all these abandoned practices is that they were performative rather than purposeful. I was doing them because they seemed like things a successful, intentional person would do, not because they actually worked for my life. They were borrowed solutions to problems I didn’t really have.

I’m curious about what you’ve stopped doing lately, and whether it felt like progress or retreat. Sometimes the most important decisions aren’t about what to add to our lives, but what to subtract from them.