Everything I know about being a man I learned from a woman. — Doctors on Tuesday declared my mom “cured” from cancer. I wrote the following story about her for Men’s Health magazine about five years ago, as she was going through chemotherapy and radiation. I recently posted about her on my Instagram feed, and many people wanted to read the story. …

A 200-year-old newspaper helped me figure out why modern news is stoking irrational fear and anxiety — Last week I was hunting in Utah with people who work in media, entertainment, and business. Half the fun of hunting is camp, where people come together in the afternoon and at night to sit around and shoot the shit. Cell phones don’t have service. There’s no TV or computers…

A friend interrogated me about my job. I’m re-sharing what I told her here. — I write for a living. People find this more fascinating than it is. As I’ve written about in the past, writing is hard. It’s also a lonely endeavor. …

It goes against everything you’ve heard about asking questions — My career as a journalist who writes about complicated topics like health, psychology, physiology, anthropology, etc. means that I’m constantly talking to very smart people. The kind of people with all sorts of letters behind their name, whose studies appear on the cover of Nature and Science, and who talk…

Carrying weight for distance is the best form of exercise — but let’s not overthink it — I recently wrote about rucking and how the human body was built to carry weight over distance. Humans are unique among animals because we can carry stuff from point A to B. As we evolved, we’d use this skill to hunt and gather, which allowed us to expand as a…

Think of your demise—often—as the ultimate immersive experience — HBO’s The White Lotus wrapped up last Sunday. It’s a great show I recommend. Think: Succession but at a luxury Hawaiian vacation resort. In the final episode Jennifer Coolidge’s character (who is perfect in the role) says something that got me thinking about my own work. …

More screen time is only going to break your brain. Try this stuff instead. — The average American today spends nearly 12 hours a day on digital media. That figure includes all the time we spend focused on our phones, tvs, computers, tablets, and the audible information we beam into our ears. Let’s face it, most of our digital time is wasted. We typically don’t…

How to win back your time and productivity — I was emailing with Ross McCammon, my editor here at Medium. I told him that “I’ve been absolutely slammed with travel, book promotion, and teaching a summer course” at UNLV, where I’m a professor. He suggested I write a post about five ways to unslam. It was his way of…

A neuroscientist is discovering that time in nature is one of the best ways to reduce stress and increase happiness and productivity. Here are the specific doses that work the magic. — In my new book The Comfort Crisis, which looks at the benefits of engaging with forms of mind-and-body-enhancing discomfort our ancestors faced every day, I spend a section unpacking all the benefits of the outdoors … of which, I found, there are a metric shit-ton.