Spirituality, for me, is an attentive wonder toward the unknown.

Not belief in the supernatural. Not doctrine. Not certainty. A posture. A refusal to foreclose on what we can’t yet explain. An eagerness to notice and explore when something exceeds the models we have for it.

To ancient peoples, the aurora looked like spirits. Lightning looked like the wrath of gods. Illness looked like divine punishment. Much of what we now call physics, chemistry, and biology was once indistinguishable from the supernatural. Much of reality still lives in that zone of incomplete understanding.

Even now, many aspects of the universe remain detectable before they are fully explainable. Aspects of consciousness and inner experience still resist the tools we bring to them. That doesn’t make them mystical. It makes them unfinished. The history of science is full of things that looked like magic until they didn’t, and there’s no reason to think that process is over.

Some of what I mean is close to home. I notice that sometimes I respond to other people before I’ve consciously read them. Something registers in the room before I can say what it is. I notice the same with animals, and sometimes with places. I don’t think this is mystical. I think much of it is information we exchange through ordinary channels operating below conscious awareness: posture, breath, smell, rhythm, micro-expressions, movement, memory, context. Some of those channels are well-studied. Others are still poorly understood.

Biology is full of subtle coordination too: trees exchanging signals and resources through fungal networks, heart rhythms and skin conductance shifting between people in cooperation, babies co-regulating their nervous systems with their mothers’.

I notice patterned coincidences too: the person I was thinking about calls, a subject starts occupying my mind and suddenly appears everywhere. I don’t think these moments are divine messages. Often they are the brain’s pattern-recognition machinery at work, remembering the hits and ignoring the misses. I think of people all the time when they do not call. But I also don’t want to flatten the experience entirely. I find coincidences stunningly beautiful, maybe even more so because I don’t believe they were guided into place by a divine hand. The meaning isn’t placed there by the universe. It’s made by the noticing.

There’s a lot of signal in the world, and plenty of it is still beyond the reach of our instruments and understanding. What I call spirituality is partly attention to that signal, a refusal to ignore what’s already reaching us.

Rituals, intentions, and ceremony belong here too. People have used them for thousands of years to mark transitions, reach altered states, heal, and gather community. They have real effects on the people who do them. I think rejecting them as woo-woo is a mistake. Some of these practices have empirical grounding we’re still uncovering, and some may work through mechanisms we describe only partially. Meditation can alter brain structure. Breathwork changes blood chemistry. Placebo works even when people know it’s a placebo. I participate in a few of these practices and ceremonies, and I don’t think they’re magic: I think they’re powerful technologies older than our understanding of them.

Some people use God-language for this space of the unknown. I don’t. That doesn’t make the space unreal. It just means I don’t want to fill it in too quickly.

There’s an old line: there are thousands of gods people have believed in. The believer rejects almost all of them. The atheist just goes one god further. What the line gets right is that both believers and atheists are trying to distinguish what is real from what is projected, what is out there from what is imagined. We draw that line in different places. But if we’re honest, both paths end in mystery.

So, no god. No doctrine. A stance.

I am staying open to the parts of reality that still feel enchanted before the explanation arrives, and maybe even after.

More recently, I’ve found an even better version of the same process: saying it out loud to an AI. Not because the AI is wise, but because talking flows more easily than writing, and because what comes back is a structured reflection instead of silence.

Late last year, I was stuck on a decision that felt too open-ended to make: where to live next.

I’d been living nomadically for about a year, moving between cities, building projects, staying light. But I’d started to feel a pull toward settling somewhere, and when everywhere was theoretically an option, the decision became paralyzing.

So I opened a conversation, hit the microphone icon, and started talking. Not a clean question. Just a verbal dump: the cities I was considering, the tradeoffs I kept running through, the way I’d get excited about one place and then immediately start poking holes in it. I wasn’t asking for a recommendation. I just needed to think out loud.

It didn’t give advice. It pointed something out: “You keep describing what each city offers, but you haven’t said much about what you’re actually looking for. Every time you get close to naming what you want, you pivot to logistics.”

That landed. I was so busy evaluating options that I’d skipped the harder step of understanding what I was optimizing for. The decision wasn’t hard because I lacked information. It was hard because choosing a place meant choosing a version of my life.

That, to me, is the real value of this kind of AI use. Not answers. Reflection.

There’s a concept in coding called rubber duck debugging. When you’re stuck on a bug, you explain the problem out loud to a rubber duck on your desk. No feedback required. The act of articulation often gets you unstuck.

The same principle applies here, but with an upgrade. AI makes the duck better.

It doesn’t just sit there while you externalize the problem. It reflects back patterns, contradictions, and implicit criteria you may not have named. In my case, it noticed that I kept talking about cities as bundles of features while avoiding the more revealing question of what kind of life I actually wanted. That is more than journaling. That is a reflection loop.

Most of the time, I’m not even typing. I’m talking out loud, stream of consciousness, half-formed sentences and all. That’s hard to do with another person. Even with close friends, there’s a social contract: be somewhat coherent, don’t ramble too long, don’t repeat yourself too much. With AI, you can be as messy and circular as you need to be, and somewhere in that messiness is often where the clarity lies.

The trick is not to ask for advice too quickly. Start with reflection.

Here’s what I’m thinking. What do you hear?

What feels inconsistent in this?

What am I optimizing for without quite saying it?

Those kinds of questions keep the center of gravity inside your own thinking. The AI is not deciding for you. It is helping you hear the decision already forming underneath the noise.

That distinction matters, because there’s an obvious counterpoint here: doesn’t this risk outsourcing thinking?

It can, if you use it lazily. If you ask the AI what to do before you’ve really said what’s going on, you can end up borrowing a conclusion instead of discovering one. But that’s not the use I’m describing. The value here is not in handing over agency. It’s in creating enough structure that you can see your own thoughts more clearly. Used well, it feels less like outsourcing cognition and more like building scaffolding for self-honesty.

That is also why the limitations of AI matter less here than people sometimes assume.

The AI isn’t actually understanding you. It’s pattern-matching on language. It has no inner experience of your dilemma, no felt sense of what you’re going through.

And yet the reflection can still be useful.

I think this points to something slightly uncomfortable: what we get from being understood may have less to do with the other party’s inner comprehension than we’d like to believe. Sometimes what helps is not empathy but structure. Empathy is valuable when you need comfort, witness, or emotional safety. Structured reflection is valuable when you need to expose contradictions, name implicit assumptions, or move a thought forward.

Those are not the same thing.

A good friend may be better at the first. An AI can be good at the second.

I noticed a related contrast from a Vipassana meditation course I did last year.

Vipassana asks you to observe experience without narrating it. You sit, notice sensation arise and pass, and resist the urge to interpret. The point is to encounter reality before concept, before story.

AI reflection does nearly the opposite. It takes raw experience and wraps it in language.

For example, in meditation I might notice a tightness in my chest and simply observe it, its texture, its temperature, the way it shifts. No story. In an AI conversation about that same feeling, I might say: “I think I’m anxious about committing to a place because stability has always felt like a trap to me.” One approach dissolves the narrative. The other examines it.

I’ve come to think they’re complementary. Vipassana helps you see what is happening in your body beneath your stories. AI reflection helps you examine the stories themselves.

The meditation practice also gives me a kind of quality control. When an AI reflection lands, I can feel it in my body: a settling, a recognition. When it is clever but wrong, I can feel that too. The point is not to trust the machine. The point is to get better at recognizing what rings true.

What this becomes, over time, is a practice of self-excavation. Instead of looking outward for answers, you use conversation to surface what you already believe, clarify your priorities, and notice the patterns in your own thinking.

The value isn’t that the AI knows you. It’s that it helps you hear yourself better.

I expected the feeling to disappear by morning.

That night in Shanghai felt singular, intense, and strange enough that I assumed it would dissolve the way many peak experiences do, memorable but largely sealed off from the workings of day-to-day life. Instead, I woke up the next day with the same curiosity, the same way of seeing, the same drive, still switched on.

The night itself unfolded in 2013 at Storm, an outdoor electronic music festival along the the Huangpu river that cuts Shanghai in half. I ended up deep in the crowd as Benny Benassi took the stage. The sky was unusually clear. A full moon hung over the river bathing upturned faces with soft light.

At some point, I found myself standing still amid the gyrating bodies, left hand over my heart, right hand lifted toward the moon. I was intoxicated, and my perception shifted in a way that is difficult to describe precisely. There was an out-of-body quality to it, a sense of distance from myself, followed by a return. I don’t remember all of what happened in between. What I remember clearly is what came next.

When I landed back in my body, I didn’t feel euphoric so much as newly attuned. I started looking around and noticing things. Practical things. Structural things.

The concession stands were badly placed and what they had on offer didn’t make much sense for a crowd that had been dancing nonstop for hours. I started thinking about what people actually needed in that environment, and how small changes could dramatically improve their experience.

That awareness widened. I began thinking about energy flows. About how much power the festival must be consuming, and whether temporary solar installations could shoulder some of that load. About modular battery systems. About whether a festival like this could collect enough energy over time (a week? a month?) prior to the event to meaningfully offset its footprint.

This was not abstract speculation. It felt constructive, almost corrective. I wasn’t imagining a distant future. I was mentally reorganizing the present.

At some point I left the festival grounds, walked to a nearby convenience store and bought a notebook and a pen. I sat down and started writing as quickly as I could, trying to capture the ideas while they were still fresh. I assumed, even then, that the clarity was temporary.

But the next day, the curiosity didn’t fade.

What lingered was not the emotional intensity, but the orientation. I kept seeing environments as systems. I kept asking how things could work better, not in theory, but in practice. I found myself wanting tools, not just language. Agency, not just imagination.

Until that point, I had been trying, without much structure or success, to become a science fiction writer. I loved imagining futures, describing them, inhabiting them in my mind and on the page. What shifted that night was a realization that imagination did not have to stop at description. The future wasn’t something I only had to write about. It was something I could participate in shaping.

What surprised me most was how sober and crystal clear the days that followed felt. I talked to people at NYU Shanghai. I sought out professors, consultants, entrepreneurs, organizers. I attended events. I asked questions I hadn’t known how to ask before. That thread eventually led me toward computer science, toward startups, toward learning how to build things that actually exist.

I am careful about how I talk about that night, because it would be easy to misunderstand it. This was not about substances producing ideas. It was about an altered state revealing a way of seeing that, once noticed, didn’t go away. The experience didn’t replace effort or discipline. It redirected them.

I also know that writing openly about this carries certain risks. I don’t do so lightly. My hope, though, is that one day certain substances and plant medicines can be recognized for what rigorous research increasingly suggests they can be: powerful therapeutic tools, capable of healing trauma, opening empathy, and, in some cases, unlocking constructive insight. Not as escapism. Not as rebellion. As medicine.

That night on the Huangpu did not make me an entrepreneur or an engineer. But it showed me, very clearly, that I wanted to be a builder. The work that followed was sober and focused.

And it started there.

You can read more about my time in China here.

Here’s how I’m feeling most delighted with development right now.

Ideation & Planning

For each project I have chats organized within their own folder in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. I pay for Claude Max and ChatGPT Plus and use Gemini for free.

When I have a new product or feature idea, I bounce it off all three services using their chat interface and workshop it among them, debating and haggling until we’ve created a technical spec I’m happy with.

I talk to all three services using VoiceInk and only type when my environment demands it. Voice allows me to express myself more fully and more quickly, and it feels like I’m chatting with a set of advisors, which is more enjoyable.

Implementation

I use Rails as a monolith with RSpec for testing. It’s just so productive for me and I love the semantics of Ruby. Shoutout to the amazing Rails and Ruby communities.

To make implementation smoother, I have tight testing guidelines and style guides (code and UI/UX) covered in a CLAUDE.md file in each project’s repository.

Both Claude Code (CC) and OpenAI Codex are running via CLI on the project repo.

I put the final spec file in my project’s /docs/specs/active directory, double-check it, and have CC review it in Plan mode and answer any questions it has. Then I feed that review back into CC if needed and repeat until I’m satisfied.. Then it’s time to execute on the plan.

While CC is fiddle-faddling or flibbertigibbeting, I get a snack, do a quick chore, or get another agent to work.

Then I check CC’s work. Make adjustments and follow-ups as needed using the CLI, do some manual smoke tests. I then have Codex do a code review of the changes and feed that back to CC if necessary.

When CC struggles, I’ll see if Codex handles it better.

If there are front end issues or changes I want that I can’t accurately explain in a sentence, I take a screenshot, annotate it with Affinity, and feed it back to CC by pasting the image into the CLI. If I can explain the issue in a sentence I’ll still include a screenshot for context.

If any manual code adjustments are needed I make those in Cursor.

Feedback & Iteration

I’ve been conducting UI/UX tests using agents (both GPT-5.2 and Sonnet-4.6) with vision capabilities (but not DOM access). From my app’s admin, I spin them up and have them log in using different personas, from tech-inept to technical cofounder, across different devices. They navigate the app according to that persona’s goal and then give UI/UX feedback with screenshots and markup. They’ve already helped me identify and update a number of things to make the UI/UX easier and more intuitive.

Deployment

I use Git and GitHub for version control. Version control, testing, and LLM coding go together like puzzle pieces. Don’t skip them.

Pull Requests on Github generate a preview environment for testing with its own ephemeral database on Render.

I commit with a Rubocop autoformat hook via overcommit, push to GitHub where CI runs, and then Render pulls, containerizes, and deploys to production. Sentry provides monitoring and logging. Resend provides a nice email API and Firebase runs SMS auth. Rails handles the rest.

If I’m on the go and want to do something fairly straightforward, I’ll use the CC coding agent on my phone connected to the project’s GitHub repo. I recently created and deployed a feature while eating pizza at a restaurant. Lest you fear I was ignoring my company: I was dining alone.

The Catch

The joy is real, but you still have to steer. Left alone, the AI, much like an over-eager junior dev, will happily over-engineer, abstract too early, or invent solutions to problems I don’t have. I’ve had to talk it down many times. It can be fun to let it run wild, but the process is best when I’m guiding it. That’s when it becomes a collaborative instrument.

–

This workflow will evolve and change. And yes, there’s plenty more to automate, but I actually like being involved in these flows. I’m having fun building. What’s working for you?

I had a great job and was living in New York City. My lack of luxury (a closet-sized room at 107th street and non-profit salary that barely let me break even) was well worth the opportunity to live in one of the world’s greatest cities. But I was unsatisfied — I felt as though I wasn’t tapping into my true potential. I wanted change.

An opportunity to make that change came when I was offered a position as a Global Academic Fellow at NYU Shanghai. I had no desire to return to China — I had dropped out of a year long scholarship there in 2012 and returned home jobless because I couldn’t stand the pollution — but I knew the NYU Shanghai fellowship would be a ticket to not only gain work experience at a start-up university, but also to interact with a diverse and driven group of people from many different fields.

I accepted the offer and told friends and family that I would be leaving New York and “Going to China to get out of China”. This sounded counterintuitive to me the first time, too, but I soon convinced myself that yes, although my existing expertise lay in China (years of language/area experience), I wanted to diversify my skill set beyond the language and culture of a country I didn’t want to live in (at least as long as breathing there was hazardous to one’s health). The fellowship promised to give me time and space to figure that out. I was hungry to explore.

Once settled in Shanghai, I started networking and learning — we had access to courses, professors, students and guest lecturers. My boss organized special ‘career talk’ events for fellows with professionals in Shanghai. I, like many other fellows in the program, was still figuring myself out, determining what to do with my passions and skills. I was heading in the direction of becoming a writer — mostly of fiction, but also some non-fiction feature articles on China and the environment for magazines as well. I needed a creative outlet, and I wanted that to be part of my job, so writing was a good fit. But I was open to anything.

At some point, on a particularly pollution-free evening in Shanghai, I had a revelation. A bright, full moon shone down on me as I stood, jammed in a crowd of bouncing bodies at an outdoor electronic dance music festival on the banks of the Huangpu River that cuts Shanghai in half. I wasn’t paying too much attention to the frantic music or lights; instead, I was formulating a story about characters in futuristic Shanghai that I could turn into a short story or novel. Then it struck me. Why, instead of just imagining what people could do in the future, didn’t I try to turn those ideas into reality? I started seeing those fantasies that I so desperately wanted to write about in a different light — could they be brought to life? This excited me, but I had no idea what to do about it. NYU Shanghai would be a good start.

Over the course of the NYUSH fellowship, I had met several professionals through career talks or guest lectures: a founder of BCG in China, a well-known investor in early-stage startups, a very successful lawyer, professor and businessman, and a TED Talk Organizer and professor who worked closely with the Startup China business accelerator, among others. I reached out to several of them to schedule meetings to discuss my ambitions and ideas. Some of the most important points I took away from my conversations with them were:

• To be an entrepreneur, I would have to learn a thing or two about business

• There are many ways to learn about business — consulting is one, working at a startup is another, and starting a business is another

• To be on the exciting, cutting edge of entrepreneurship, I should learn a bit about the tech scene

• To be successful in tech, I would be wise to arm myself with some practical technical knowledge

• My Chinese reading/writing skills will come in handy

I started attending small eco- and tech- fairs and talking to small business owners around Shanghai. I then went on vacation to San Francisco with my girlfriend, Charishma, as part of my winter break. We saw several friends who were working at Bay-Area tech startups or starting their own businesses.

I started to see the Bay Area as a playground for entrepreneurs — so many innovative ideas floating around and so much money waiting to be thrown at those innovative ideas — a newer, cheaper, more convenient, more efficient solution for this or that being launched every other day it seemed. To be sure, this was a highly romantic reading of Silicon Valley, but it still held a real appeal to me.

Back in Shanghai, I requested a position as advisor to the Startup Shanghai student club at NYUSH, and I spoke with one of the NYUSH computer science professors about my desire to acquire some technical expertise. He let me audit his CS101 course.

The officers of Startup Shanghai turned out to be a bunch of ambitious, brilliant students who were tech-savvy but still building organizational and leadership skills. I looked forward to all my meetings with them. My proudest moment was hearing from other students how much fun they’d had at Startup Shanghai’s school-wide end-of-year hackathon, HackSH. The club had managed to organize and run a successful hackathon within a few weeks all while preparing for final exams.

Through one of the professors I had met the previous term, I attended a mini startup consulting session at Tongji University’s Sino-Finnish Institute with his students and several Chinaccelerator startups. There, in their modern-concept office with an open kitchen, sitting pods, and a tree house of sorts, I heard founder pitches and participated in consultations for potential startup products. Through this class, I attended several other Chinaccelerator startup events. These experiences excited me — I could see myself hustling on a startup team and loving it.

I enjoyed CS101 a lot — programming was an intellectual challenge, a creative tool, and fun. For some reason, either because I had matured or realized that no matter what job I held, I would have to sit in front of a computer, I took to and understood computer science a whole lot better than I had during an intro course to it in high school.

What most excited me about coding was the ability for someone, equipped with enough knowledge, to create something functional, impactful, beautiful and engaging from almost nothing all. Programming seemed to open the doors to creation — one could turn an idea and into reality by harnessing the staggering power of a PC connected to the internet.

As far as technical skills went, I realized that computer science and coding would be one of the most powerful creative tools I could acquire. It would have to be in the Bay Area, I decided, the heart of it all. I needed immersion, and New York offered too many distractions.

I had been talking to a friend from Hong Kong about an NYC-based coding boot camp he had attended and enjoyed. After the boot camp, he had landed a position at a growing startup in the NYC area. After more research, I marked down the top rated boot camps in SF. I wanted to be prepared though, to ensure I got into the boot camp of my choosing. Some seemed pretty easy to get into, and others a little more challenging. I decided to shoot for the top, and worked hard, during my free time away from fellowship responsibilities, on CS101 problems and online courses.

The coding boot camps were generally three months long and had a hefty price tag ($12,000 — $17,000), and I wanted to make sure I would attend the best I could and get the most out of it. I was afraid I wouldn’t get into the top ones. So I looked for some courses around the Bay Area to continue my self-study, and eventually found CS61A, an undergraduate CS-major core requirement at UC Berkeley. The course advertised:

“There is no formal programming-related prerequisites for admission to 61A. However, most 61A students have had significant prior programming experience. There is no need for you to be familiar with any particular programming language. If you have taken the CS Advanced Placement AB course in C++ or Java, you are certainly ready for 61A.”

I decided to enroll.

My fellowship finished at the end of May, and I returned home with a good chunk of savings. Combined with previous money I had put away, I would have enough to be jobless (while attending class and paying rent) for around eight months before my situation got dire.

I began CS61A at Berkeley’s beautiful campus a couple days after landing in San Francisco. Over the course of the next two months, I got my ass kicked. In a great way. I spent almost all my time — on my 1-hour BART commute to Berkeley, in the library, and at home — working on problem sets, reviewing concepts, and doing mental summersaults trying to figure out things like tree recursion, abstract data types, functional programming, declarative programming and mutation. I made a couple good friends along the way and learned a ton.

I will start boot camp classes (6 days a week, 12 hours a day, for 13 weeks) at Hack Reactor on October 27th, and am currently doing about 20-hours-a-week worth of pre-course work before then.

I have been exploring the Bay Area start-up ecosystem through a bunch of free events: startup demo-days, Venture Capitalist fireside chats, and tech festivals. At SF’s NewCo Festival, I attended talks, panels, and discussions at the offices of: Imagine H2O, Nextdoor, HotelTonight, The VAULT, Lit Motors, Twitter, Adobe, Lemnos Labs, twofifteenmccann, Life of Two, Code for America, and Hampton Creek.

I have also been exploring the Bay Area by bike, foot and rail. San Francisco offers exactly what I want in a city — great access to the outdoors, urban hiking, laid-back attitudes, weather that is not too hot, beaches, lots of dogs, friendly people, and good food.

I’m excited to soon be equipped with the tools I need to bring my ideas to life. And don’t worry, I still want to write — there will be time for that later. But first, let me build a few things to make this world a better place. And as for China, I’m sure we’ll meet again very, very soon. ☺

This piece was originally published by me here on Medium on Oct 8, 2014. I have taken the liberty of updating the title from “Going to China to Get Out of China” to “How a Stint in China Taught Me to Build”, at title that feels more true to me now. Also please note how I was a an em-dash enthusiast before LLMs made them uncool :)

Over 10 days of Vipassana meditation - practicing 10+ hours daily - I managed to rewire neural pathways that kept me operating on autopilot around video games, pornography, substance use, and ruminating over unavailable romantic interests. These weren’t addictions - but they had become my default responses to boredom, stress, loneliness, or discomfort. I wanted to choose these activities more intentionally rather than reflexively reaching for them whenever I felt restless.

With Vipassana, my relationship with these behaviors experienced a tectonic shift at an automatic response level. I could feel myself changing not only my thoughts about my behaviors, but also the automatic reactions themselves - the physical sensations that triggered the patterns and my capacity to observe them without being controlled by them.

This transformation is why I got interested in the neuroscience of Vipassana, and why I call Vipassana a technology. Not a spiritual practice requiring faith. Not a philosophical system requiring belief. A technology: a systematic, repeatable method that produces measurable changes in the physical structure of your brain.

The Body Scan That Rewires Your Brain

Here’s how the technology works.

Vipassana - Pali for “seeing things as they really are” - trains you to systematically observe physical sensations throughout your body. You start at the crown of your head and move methodically down: scalp, face, neck, shoulders, arms, torso, legs. You’re not looking for anything in particular. You’re just noticing what’s there. Tingling. Pressure. Heat. Cold. Pain. Numbness. Vibration.

When we first began the practice, my awareness was so blunt that entire regions of my body felt like blank zones. And here’s what fascinated me: with hours of sustained attention, I started perceiving sensations I’d never noticed before. Subtle pulsing in my forearms. Faint warmth across my chest. Tiny vibrations on my skin that had always been there but that my brain had filtered out as irrelevant noise.

This isn’t meditation as relaxation. It’s perceptual training. Like developing your ear for music or your eye for visual detail, you’re developing your interoceptive acuity -your ability to detect the internal landscape of your body.

And this is where the neural rewiring begins.

Every time you direct sustained attention to bodily sensations, you’re strengthening a specific brain region: the insula, particularly the right anterior insula. Neuroimaging studies have shown that long-term meditators have measurably thicker cortical tissue in this area - they’ve grown more brain matter in the regions that process internal sensations.[1,2] While these changes aren’t unique to meditation (similar structural changes occur with other intensive training like learning to juggle or play music), the specific pattern of insula enhancement is particularly pronounced in contemplative practices.

Think of it as upgrading your body’s sensor array. The insula is where raw signals from your organs, muscles, and skin get integrated into conscious experience. A more developed insula means richer, more nuanced access to your internal state - better signal resolution for what’s actually happening in your body moment to moment.

But the changes go deeper. Research shows that Vipassana practitioners develop increased gray matter in the right orbitofrontal cortex (crucial for emotional regulation and decision-making) and the right hippocampus (essential for memory and, critically, for breaking out of established behavioral patterns).[3,4] These changes can occur after as little as 8 weeks of daily practice (in the study, 27 min/day = ~25 total hours),[5] though the effect sizes are modest - typically small to moderate[6] - and are dose-dependent, with more pronounced effects in long-term practitioners.

While the physical changes in the brain may be subtle, the functional changes can be substantial. They’re real enhancements to your brain’s control architecture, the systems that let you regulate emotional responses, make deliberate choices, and escape automatic habits.

From Automatic Reactions to Conscious Response

Understanding the neuroscience of Vipassana helped me make sense of what I was experiencing, but the real transformation happened at the level of sensation and reaction.

Here’s what I discovered about my own patterns: before thought, before emotion, before the conscious decision to open a video game or take a drag on a vape or spiral into obsessive thinking about someone who didn’t want me - before all of that, a physical sensation would arise. A flutter of discomfort in my chest. A tightness in my throat. A restless energy in my limbs. An aching emptiness in my stomach.

These sensations arose so quickly and stealthily, and my reactions followed so automatically, that I’d never been able to discern or separate them. The sensations and the behaviors felt like one continuous thing.

Neuroscience shows this process isn’t linear.

According to predictive-coding models, the brain constantly guesses what’s happening in the body and updates those guesses based on incoming signals and emotions arise from the interplay between these top-down predictions and bottom-up sensations.[7,8]

In practice, Vipassana let me notice those bodily signals sooner - whether they technically come “first” or not. That early awareness gave me a new point of choice, a way to pause before an automatic behavior unfolded.

When intense physical discomfort arises during meditation (and it does, trust me) you don’t move to escape it. You observe it. You notice its qualities. Sharp or dull? Constant or pulsing? Spreading or localized? And you watch it change. Because it always changes. The unbearable itch transforms into tingling, then fades to nothing. The searing pain in your knee becomes pressure, then numbness, then dissolves entirely.

You’re training yourself to break the automatic link between uncomfortable sensation and reactive behavior. In Vipassana, this steady, balanced awareness is called equanimity - the capacity to observe any sensation, pleasant or unpleasant, without clinging or aversion. But here’s a crucial insight from the research: you’re not “installing new neural pathways” or creating “better automatisms that replace the old ones.” That language, while intuitive, actually misrepresents the mechanism.

What meditation does is called de-automatization - the process of making automatic processes less automatic.[9,10] Neuroscience describes this as strengthening the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s control center, over the limbic and habit systems that drive impulses.[11] Meditation gives you a few extra milliseconds of choice before you act. That moment of awareness is everything. It’s where freedom begins.

This distinction matters. Habits, by definition, are automatic, unconscious, and stimulus-driven.[12] Meditation doesn’t necessarily create better automatic response- it cultivates the capacity to remain consciously present and make deliberate choices even when powerful automatic urges arise.

Findings in neuroscience supports this. Research shows experienced meditators have decreased automated frontal cognitive processing of distracting stimuli, with reduced P3a amplitude (a brain measure of automatic attention to novel events) during meditation.[13] However, this finding comes from limited studies with small sample sizes and lacks robust replication, so we should hold it tentatively. What’s more consistently documented is that meditation enhances metacognitive monitoring - the ability to observe your own mental processes - and strengthens frontostriatal connectivity, enabling better top-down control.[14,15]

This is what happened to me during those ten days. I wasn’t wrestling with impulses through cognitive strategies or moral willpower. I was watching the physical sensations that preceded impulses, observing them without reacting, and developing the capacity to stay present rather than falling into automatic patterns.

Why I Say This Gives Me More Agency (“Free Will”?)

Here’s what Vipassana showed me: If, during much of my waking hours, I’m simply following my learned and innate reactions to stimuli - if I’m on automatic mode - for example getting angry or annoyed at things I have no control over and and reacting negatively towards them, do I really have my own agency, or “free will”? Or am I just a sophisticated response machine?

When I can observe the sensations that trigger my behaviors, when I can watch them arise and pass without immediately reacting, that feels like something different. That feels like agency. Not because I’ve transcended my physical nature, but because I’ve learned to work with it at a more fundamental level.

The impulses still arise. The uncomfortable sensations still happen. But now there’s a space - not a literal gap that neuroimaging could measure, but an experiential opening - between sensation and action. In that space, I can choose. Not always. Not perfectly. But more often than before.

This is what I mean by “practical technology.” Vipassana doesn’t require me to believe anything supernatural. It just asks me to systematically observe my internal experience, leveraging neuroplasticity to enhance my brain’s regulatory capacity and reduce automatic reactivity.

The changes likely require ongoing practice to maintain - meditation appears to be a skill that strengthens with use rather than a permanent reprogramming. Research suggests that even long-term meditators with 10,000+ hours of practice continue to benefit from regular practice,[16] similar to how expert musicians maintain their abilities through continued playing. But with consistent practice, the capacity for conscious awareness and behavioral flexibility becomes increasingly available.

From Personal Change to Social Transformation

A technology that only improved individual well-being would be valuable enough. But the implications extend far beyond the personal.

The logic is straightforward: when you’ve spent hundreds of hours observing your own anger, fear, and craving arise and pass away, you develop visceral understanding that others experience these same forces. You recognize the physical sensations that precede your own harmful reactions, and you can recognize similar patterns in others before they manifest as destructive behavior.

This isn’t abstract empathy. It’s embodied recognition. You know what suffering feels like from the inside, in granular physical detail. This knowledge naturally extends outward.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence comes from Vipassana programs in prisons. Multiple institutions have introduced this training to incarcerated populations with results including decreased hostility, improved impulse control, and better emotional regulation.[17] Participants aren’t being morally reformed or threatened into compliance - they’re being given technology for working with their own minds differently.

The insight is profound: the reactive automatisms that fuel violence, addiction, and impulsive crime aren’t fundamentally different from the patterns everyone experiences. They’re manifestations of the same mechanism - uncomfortable sensations arise, and we react to escape them, often in ways that create more suffering.

If destructive patterns can be transformed through systematic self-observation, then perhaps the distinction between “criminal minds” and “normal minds” is less categorical than we imagine. We’re all running on automatic most of the time. The question is whether we have access to tools for reducing that automaticity and developing conscious awareness.

And in a world facing collective challenges - environmental crisis, political polarization, systemic inequality -we need more than better policies. We need better collective capacity for non-reactive response. We need people who can sit with discomfort without immediately lashing out. We need people who can recognize their own triggers and biases. We need people capable of genuine dialogue across differences.

Vipassana offers one such path toward developing these capacities at scale.

A Universal Technology - With Important Caveats

When you strip away the cultural trappings - the Buddha statues, the incense, the Pali terms, the spiritual/moral frameworks - what remains is elegantly simple: a systematic method for enhancing interoception, leveraging neuroplasticity to restructure brain networks involved in perception, regulation, and reactivity.

You don’t need faith. You don’t need to adopt any cosmology. You need only the willingness to observe your own experience with systematic rigor.

The mechanism is testable. The results are measurable. The technique is replicable.

After my first ten day course, I’m convinced this is one of the most powerful tools we have for human transformation. Not because it’s mystical or transcendent, but because it’s practical. It works at the level of neural circuitry and physical sensation, the substrate of all our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.

But intellectual honesty requires acknowledging limitations. The meditation research field suffers from significant methodological weaknesses: small sample sizes, lack of adequate control groups, self-selection bias, and severe publication bias (87% of published studies report positive results, about 1.6 times more than expected statistically).[18] Effect sizes from rigorous research are modest, typically comparable to other evidence-based wellness interventions rather than dramatically superior.[19] And while meditation is generally safe, adverse effects can occur in 37-58% of practitioners, though these are rarely monitored or reported systematically.[20,21]

The mechanisms aren’t unique to meditation - they reflect well-established learning principles including extinction learning, habituation, and enhanced interoceptive awareness.[22,23] What’s distinctive is how these principles are integrated: the comprehensive, non-selective approach training awareness across all experiences; the systematic cultivation of equanimity toward pleasant and unpleasant sensations; and the combination of attention training, body awareness, and non-reactivity in a single practice.

None of this diminishes the transformative potential. My experience was real. The neural changes are measurable. The behavioral improvements are significant. But they emerged through established neurobiological processes arranged in a distinctive way, not through some entirely novel mechanism.

Individual transformation, multiplied across communities and societies, can become a catalyst for collective change. When people develop the capacity to observe their reactions without being controlled by them, they become capable of different kinds of relationships, different kinds of dialogue, different kinds of collective action.

This isn’t utopian thinking. It’s engineering. If you want different outputs from a system, you need to change the system’s operating parameters.

Vipassana is a technology for enhancing the regulatory capacity of human consciousness itself, not by creating new automatic programs, but by strengthening the capacity for conscious awareness and deliberate choice.

The technology exists. The evidence, while imperfect, is mounting. The question is whether we’re willing to sit still long enough, and practice consistently enough, to develop these capacities in ourselves.

My Worst Night

“What the fuck? What the FUCK!”

The words erupted from my lips before I could stop them, shattering the silence. I sat upright in the pitch darkness, hoping I hadn’t woken my neighbors. I wanted to sleep so desperately, but I felt like I’d been dosed with LSD. For three hours, my mind had been a runaway train, furiously drafting a science fiction novel, blueprinting a climate tech startup, scripting an erotic screenplay, designing a meditation app, and planning a new Burning Man camp. My awareness of every sensation had been amplified to an extreme intensity: my heart’s every contraction thumping against my ribcage and the mattress below, the blood pulsing warm and electric through my face and extremities, individual fibers of the rough blanket tickling my torso, strands of hair laying against my forehead, patches of inexplicable tingling across my scalp, the heat and sweat where my thighs met, and the September air flowing cool over my exposed skin, the hairs picking up the movement like tiny antennae.

My alarm clock lay face down on the bedside table, but I knew it was nearly 1 AM. The morning bells would slice through my earplugs at 4:00 AM and 4:20 AM, summoning us to begin another full day of meditation. I was stripped of all my usual coping mechanisms for sleep: no New York Times crossword app to distract my racing mind, no book to escape into, no journal to dump my mental chaos onto paper, not even the primal release of masturbation. Every distraction and technology surrendered at the beginning of the course. When I’d asked about sleep troubles earlier that day, one of the teachers had said, laughing, “Don’t worry about sleep. My first course? I didn’t sleep for ten days straight!”

Terror started to creep in. Had I irreversibly rewired my brain? Was this some elaborate cult I had gotten mixed up in? I had a terrible thought: I wanted to be dull again, reverted to my previous state of ignorance - I wanted to close this Pandora’s box of acute awareness that I’d opened. Eventually, desperation drove me to the shower where the hot water soothed me and forced my core body temp to drop, allowing me to collapse back into bed and into a fitful sleep full of surreal dreams.

Arriving at Dhamma Dhara

I had wanted to do Vipassana for years, having heard about it from some friends in San Francisco in 2018. My two attempts to join a course before had been thwarted, once by a family emergency and once by the arrival of COVID. Now I finally had my chance. I was completely unattached - I was taking a break from work, had no committed romantic partner, no apartment or house of my own, no pets and no children, and I was still digesting my father’s death. I was looking for a reset to launch me into my next phase of life.

My formal meditation practice was non-existent - good luck getting me to sit for more than 10 minutes. But I knew the power of meditation and had been exposed to mindfulness practices when I was fresh out of college, volunteering at a Buddhist center for addiction recovery outside of Chiang Rai in northern Thailand. There, I participated in yoga and meditation workshops daily for a couple months. I have a very visceral memory of taking a local bus ride towards the end of my stay: sitting on a terribly uncomfortable hard wooden bench, surrounded by people holding squawking chickens, unbearable heat and choking diesel exhaust pouring in through the open windows, I was able to find refuge in my breath and have a calm ride, accepting reality for what it was. Meditation, prescribed by a very good and very expensive psychiatrist, had also saved me from mild depression my first time living in Manhattan and helped me take control of my life, decrease my anxiety, and change my circumstances.

I arrived at Dhamma Dhara Vipassana center in northern Massachusetts on a beautiful September afternoon. I had no idea what to expect, other than the beautiful aerial photos of the campus on Google Maps. The entire 10-day course, room and board included, is completely free and run by volunteers, so I was surprised when Daniel, a cheerful man in his 50s, greeted me and helped carry my tote and duffel into the registration rotunda like a bellhop.

“Packed light, eh?” he quipped.

I mentally inventoried my austere wardrobe: ten pairs of underwear, five pairs of merino wool socks, five merino shirts, and one synthetic jacket. I would be fine.

I was early, so after registration and surrendering of my phone and wallet, I wanted to explore the campus. Mary, another volunteer, pointed me toward a gravel path blocked by a chain.

“You can follow the fire road to find trails and the meditation pagoda,” she said.

“Past that chain?” I asked, confused.

“Yes,” she smiled. “That’s not to keep people out. It’s to keep you in.”

We both laughed, but the joke carried weight. Vipassana isn’t a drop-in meditation class. When you sign up for the 10 day course, you’re committing to the full journey, though several people in my cohort would ultimately break that commitment and retreat back to the default world. They disappeared quietly, their empty meditation pads and dining chairs the only indication they’d left.

The ones that made it though were an interesting assortment of men: a recent divorcee who had his entire life in the back of his Corolla heading west to start anew, a gay house husband fresh off of a drug-filled bender, a Sikh battery technology startup founder California, an immigrant living in New Jersey with a family dealing with alcoholism, a father of two from Kentucky, a man working in sales at a marketing startup, a guy who wore t-shirts with JESUS emblazoned collegiate-style on the front, a recent college grad becoming a psychedelic therapist, a professional musician from Brooklyn, a man whose Indian wife had wanted him to take the course, a man whose estranged daughter had done a course and wanted him to take one as well as part of a healing process, and a Vietnamese man whose brother, father and mother were also there taking the course.

There were about 60 men and 40 women total at the course. Despite our diverse backgrounds—from deeply religious to secular, from struggling with addiction to seeking performance enhancement, from twenty-somethings to retirees—we were all there for the same fundamental reason: to understand our minds better.

The Course Begins

The structure was simple and brutal. Wake at 4 AM. Meditate for two hours. Breakfast at 6:30. More meditation. Lunch at 11 AM (the last meal for “old students”; new students like me got fruit and tea at 5 PM). More meditation. Evening discourse. More meditation. Sleep at 9:30 PM. Repeat.

I maintained noble silence with my fellow students until the 10th day: no talking, no eye contact, no gestures, or any type of communication. Just me, my mind and body, and approximately one hundred hours to become intimately acquainted with both. Men and women were separated, existing in parallel universes on the same property. We were instructed to work as if alone, though surrounded by others engaged in the same internal excavation.

The meditation hall became my little universe. Square cushions, and assorted pillows, small sitting/kneeling benches, and blankets marked our designated spots and our attempts to get comfortable. I cannot sit cross-legged for the life of me - I’ve never been able to, even as a child. I remember being so intensely uncomfortable trying to sit on the floor of the gymnasium during meetings and events, while my peers sat easily crosslegged or kneeling. When I have meditated in the past, I have sat in the seiza, or kneeling, posture. But I realized that even that position turned into excruciating knee pain after about 20 minutes, even with additional padding and a small wooden bench for my butt (there was a whole closet full of cushions and benches we could raid). I liked how my back felt in seiza, so I would do that for as long as possible and then transition to a sitting position with a back support and pillows under my knees, like a budget zero gravity chair. In that position, I could get more intimate with “subtle” sensations and less with “gross” sensations of pain. During the latter half of the course, “strong determination sittings” meant no movement for a full hour - no adjusting, no stretching, just pure presence with whatever arose. The simple act of sitting became its own form of trial for the strength of my focus and my ability to greet both subtle and gross sensations with equanimity, acknowledging them as impermanent phenomena - neither pain nor pleasure last forever.

For the first three days, we practiced the Anapana meditation technique - narrowing our attention to the breath, specifically the subtle sensations around the nostrils. This alone seemed like medicine for my ADHD. My mind fought for its freedom to be wild and untamed, dragging up every memory, fantasy, and random thought it could muster. I could observe and be unattached to all the replays of the past (I can do nothing about them, ever) and scheming about plans for the future (I can do nothing about them at this moment), instead bringing myself and my awareness to the present moment, to the metronome of my breath. Anapana is the foundation for Vipassana, preparing the mind for the next level of awareness and concentration.

We Learn Vipassana

Day 4 arrived: Vipassana Day. This was when we learned the technique that would supposedly liberate us from suffering. S.N. Goenka, our teacher via 90-minute evening video discourses recorded before his death in 2013, explained how he’d rediscovered this technique in Burma (now Myanmar) in its pure form, 2,500 years after Buddha originally discovered and taught it. The technique had spread from India across Asia but had been modified and diluted over millennia until its essence was lost. Goenka brought its pure form back to India in 1969 and spent his life spreading it globally through hundreds of centers, all operating on donation basis, all maintaining the exact same schedule and instruction.

Vipassana means “to see things as they really are.” The technique involves systematically scanning your body, observing sensations without judgment, developing equanimity toward both pleasant and unpleasant experiences. The theory: everything is impermanent (in Pali, what the Buddha spoke, anicca), and suffering arises from our cravings and aversions to these temporary sensations. Master equanimity toward sensation, and you master your reactions to life itself.

It sounds philosophical, abstract. But the practice is viscerally physical. Even by the evening of Day 4, I could feel distinct sensations in places I’d never noticed—the space between my fingers, the backs of my eyelids, my earlobes. Sometimes pleasant tingles, sometimes stabbing pains, sometimes nothing at all. The instruction remained constant: observe with equanimity. Don’t create a craving for the pleasant. Don’t create an aversion to the unpleasant. Just observe.

I was blown away that the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, had discovered the inner workings of his mind and the connection between mind and body, and how to control these, 2500 years ago and without modern technology or neuroscience. He had just taken the time, and had the curiosity, to sit with himself to figure out how to stop human suffering and then taught the technique tirelessly for 45 years until his last breath.

During the assistant teacher’s daily office hours, I peppered him with questions about technique, about Goenka’s discourses, and about my inability to sleep. Of course there were many things in the discourses I had to take with a grain of salt - the notion of the cycle of death and rebirth, the claim that there was no scripture while we had to follow certain moral tenets called Sīla (like no lying or exaggerating). To his credit, in one of the last discourses, Goenka said that we didn’t have to believe anything he said, and that the most important thing for us take away was the technique.

On Day 5, after my Vipassana-induced night-four insomnia, I must have looked thoroughly bushwhacked: the course manager offered me special accommodations - an evening meal. I refused, determined to complete the course as designed, though I appreciated the compassion behind the offer.

Outside of Meditation

Breaks in between meditations gave me the chance to stretch my body and get my blood flowing. The center’s trails wound through beautiful New England woods, past a babbling brook and a small meadow. Chipmunks, rabbits, and squirrels barely took note of us and seemed accustomed to the somewhat quiet, non-aggressive humans walking around. I enjoyed watching them play and scamper around. I spotted white-tail deer several times, and once, an enormous porcupine lumbering along. There was a sign deeper in the woods that said there had been a recent bear sighting and to be cautious around that area. “Course Boundary” signs marked the edges of our temporary hermitage, beyond which the real world continued its chaos without us.

At meals, we all sat at small desks in the men’s dining hall, eating silently. The food was so good, I’m sure some of us developed a craving for it - I thought they could have made it a little more austere. Breakfast and lunch (there was no dinner) were basically all you can eat buffets of delicious vegetarian / vegan food - on two separate days we had rich curries, one day we had Vietnamese vermicelli with tofu, vegetables and fresh herbs, and one day, to my astonishment, we had one of my favorite dishes: pho, the nourishing Vietnamese soup, complete with garnishes and sauces. There was always fresh salad with toppings and amazing freshly-made dressings, a wide variety of teas, 3 types of organic milk (whole dairy, soy, rice), fresh fruits, and local whole fat yoghurt. There was even a warm honey dispenser with a hand pump that I added into tea, yoghurt, and onto peanut butter toast. We certainly didn’t go hungry.

Twice during the course, I cried. Once while thinking about my father, who’d passed a year earlier. I desperately wished he could have experienced this—the silence, the simplicity, the potential for peace. The second time was pure gratitude, overwhelming appreciation for this place, this technique, these volunteers who made it possible for anyone to come and learn, regardless of financial means.

A Shift and The Finish Line

By day seven, the manic psychedelic energy of Day 4 had softened into clarity. I could sit for full hours without agony. Sensations arose and passed, arose and passed, and I watched them like weather patterns, neither grasping nor pushing away. The technique revealed its power not through mystical experience but through practical application. My addiction to a particular mobile game or the intense pining after a particular woman? I could now feel the physical craving arise when I thought about it, observe it objectively, and watch it dissolve.

A week before the course, I’d quit everything: alcohol, drugs, pornography. The course provided tools to observe these cravings without immediately reacting, to sit with discomfort without reaching for numbness, distraction, temporary ecstasy, or entertainment.

In my mind, Vipassana succeeds where purely intellectual philosophies like Stoicism fall short—it addresses the animal body’s role in mental patterns. You can’t think your way out of a panic attack, but you can observe the physical sensations, whether primal or conditioned, acknowledge their impermanence, treat them with equanimity and compassion, and gradually train your nervous system to respond differently to them. Such command certainly doesn’t happen over night, and even the 10-day course was just scratching the surface.

When noble silence ended on day ten, the dormitory halls exploded with conversation. We’d been through something together, even while rigorously alone. Stories poured out: who’d wanted to leave, who’d had breakthrough moments, who’d spent entire sittings planning their post-retreat meal.

Take-Aways

The mind-body technology I had acquired was invaluable. I could adjust, in a very real and durable sense, my reactions to the vicissitudes of life with my own mind, without the help of continuous therapy or psychedelic drugs? I could break thought and behavior patterns just by becoming more in-tune with the sensations of my body? In some ways, it made perfect sense, in line with some of the little I knew about neuroscience and how traumas and memories are stored not only in the mind but in the body as well. I wanted this technique to be given to everyone, taught in schools - are there really more valuable tools to have on life’s journey other than to have control over your reactions and thought and behavior patterns? I was curious about the future of Vipassana, so I talked to some of the volunteers and administrative staff.

The organization felt somewhat bureaucratic and disconnected from modernity (maybe by design?). The website looked straight from the early 2000s and had been a little frustrating to use. When I offered to help modernize their digital presence, I was warned about “ruffling feathers” and “egos” - in an organization teaching ego dissolution, the irony was not lost on me. I began envisioning “NeoVipassana”, the technique stripped of religious trappings, backed by neuroscience, more accessible and scalable. My entrepreneurial mind couldn’t help optimizing. Yet optimization-obsessed culture, perhaps we need spaces that resist efficiency, that demand we slow down and simply sit with what is. I just hope we can slow down fast enough.

It’s been weeks since I returned from the course. I maintain my daily practice and sobriety. I am feeling good. Software projects I’d procrastinated on are now progressing, I am less anxious about the future, feeling more grounded and empowered. I have been around friends doing some of my favorite drugs and haven’t felt the urge to participate; I do not feel the magnetic pull of mindless video games.

Would I recommend ten days of noble silence? Absolutely, with caveats. This isn’t a relaxation retreat, or a retreat at all - it is a course, and you are a student. It’s a mental and physical boot camp. You’ll confront behavior and thought patterns, addictions, every story you tell yourself. You’ll want to leave. You’ll question your sanity. You might not sleep for days.

But you’ll also discover that beneath the mental noise lies profound stillness, and the agency to change your mind is very much within your own power, the tools are within your own mind and body. Physical pain and pleasure is just sensation, and sensation is impermanent. You can observe your thoughts without becoming them. Liberation isn’t escape from reality but full presence with what is, as it is, knowing it will change. Wake up. Pay attention. All of this is temporary. And that’s precisely what makes it precious.

If you’re interested in taking a course, visit https://www.dhamma.org/

I am a sensitive sleeper, and have a dialed-in home sleep setup. When it comes to travel, I’ve become fed up with never knowing what discomforts I’ll find in my temporary accommodations.* So I came up with a compact travel sleep kit that has transformed my zzzs away from home and vastly reduced the number of exhausted days dealing with a sore back and/or neck.

I am a side sleeper - a dedicated knee pillow was the best discovery for improving my sleep quality at home and away, especially this model with a strap that keeps it from dislodging during sleep. Less stress on the spine. No more back pain in the morning. I’m sure back sleepers can find a similar under-the-knees memory foam pillow.

My small memory foam pillow beats pretty much every shape and size pillow I’ve had the displeasure of knowing at hotels and Airbnbs around the world. Some side sleeper folks may need a larger pillow - for reference, I am 6’1” 165 lbs.

I picked up this REI 10L compression stuff sack and it fits both my pillows perfectly. It also fits nicely inside my 28L daypack when fully compressed along with my laptop, a toiletries bag, a book, and a couple changes of clothes.

For an eye shade, I use a soft t-shirt - I prefer this over any eye shade with a strap I’ve ever tried. If you prefer a dedicated eye shade, there are many good ones to choose.

For ear plugs, I like my Loops with the mute added in. If I don’t want to wear ear plugs or want additional sound protection, I’ve found that a white noise app like White Noise Lite works wonders.

For me, sleep is one of the most powerful medicines I have access to. It is also something many people seem to struggle with, so I’m happy to share more about how I’ve been tuning my sleep.

*If you find that many Airbnbs and hotels offer you better sleep, you might take that as a nudge to invest more in improving your home setup!