Sustainable living focuses on choices and behaviours that centre on living within our means to encourage human and environmental health. Sustainable development was first defined by the Brundtland Report in 1987. He aimed to present environment-related issues and challenges in the context of political, social, and economic development.   Today, the principles of sustainability are emphasised by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which want to preserve the planet for future generations.

Sustainable living is lifestyle and philosophy

The shift towards sustainability in our homes, communities, and lifestyles looks different for everyone. Individual actions can lessen our impact on the planet as they are part of the collective movement. Living a sustainable lifestyle can benefit our household, the community, economy and environment. It is important to note that the onus is not exclusively on the individual. Corporate and state-producing entities also need to address the planet's environmental issues.

Sustainable living is not a perfect system

We're consuming resources at an unsustainable rate.<ul><li>Reducing our energy use means more than turning off the lights. Investing in energy-efficient appliances can make a significant impact.</li><li>Water use has increased more than twice the rate of population growth in the past century. However, we can change how we use water and reduce our overall consumption.</li></ul>

Reduce your consumption 

A great place to start reducing our waste is learning how to recycle. <ul><li>Avoid purchasing single-use plastics and explore new ways to repurpose items before throwing them in the trash.</li><li>Composting is a great alternative to throwing out food in the trash.</li></ul>

Reduce your waste 

Finding new and sustainable ways to produce, reuse, create, and substitute products and services that you would otherwise purchase encourages self-sufficiency while lessening the environmental impact. <ul><li>Reduce the waste of unused goods by using what you have at home and within our means.</li><li>DIY possibilities are endless, from growing your food to sewing, making your own cleaning products, home goods, and beauty accessories.</li><li>If you can't DIY, try DIFO - Do It For Others. Exchange services and skills with community members.</li></ul>

Try a DIY 

When it comes to material things, shop less and with purpose rather than impulse. <ul><li>Consider purchasing goods that are well-made and less likely to have a high turnover rate.</li><li>Before looking for something new, try thrift stores or a local clothing swap.</li><li>If you are buying something new, try to support brands that have adopted sustainable practices.</li></ul>

Shop locally and shop fair-trade 

When you choose to take public transportation, car-pool, walk, or bike as a means of transportation, you are effectively offsetting your daily carbon emissions. Re-evaluate your investment portfolio and consider divesting from funds and stocks connected to environmental destruction.

Offset your emissions

The core beliefs of sustainable living go beyond our homes and communities. <ul><li>Familiarize yourself with local, sustainable initiatives in your community and find ways to contribute to your household.</li><li>Pay attention to national and international environmental and climate events and causes, and learn how your actions might have international reactions.</li><li>Promote environmental awareness with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbours.</li><li>Donate to sustainability initiatives.</li></ul>

Other things we can do for sustainable living

Sustainable Living is lifestyle and philosophy, sustainable living is as popular a term as it is nuanced. It is encouraged by renowned activists, NGOs, and

Stashed ideas

What Is Sustainable Living? - The Eco Hub

"Going green" can be used by some companies as a PR campaign to hide other not-so-earth-friendly practices. However, some companies try to make a real change. <ul><li>Conserve the resources you consume.</li><li>Reduce pollution, from soap down the drain to food packaging.</li><li>Conserve energy use.</li><li>Reduce consumption. Think twice before purchasing something. Think if you already have something similar you can use or consider buying used.</li><li>Reduce waste. Use items until you cannot use them anymore. This means fewer items end up in landfills, and there's less need to produce things.</li></ul>

Going green

Sustainability can be defined as, "the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance.” The earth is made up of finite sources, which means taking steps to ensure the earth will be able to sustain itself in the long term.

Sustainability

Eco-friendly means thinking about the ecology and ensuring the products you consume and the practices you keep have a minimal impact on the earth. <ul><li>Eco-friendly products are non-toxic - made without toxic materials, pesticides, or herbicides.</li><li>Eco-friendly products may be made with recycled materials.</li><li>Eco-friendly products contain ingredients that are sustainably grown or manufactured.</li></ul>

Eco-friendly

<ul><li>Take active steps such as not using disposable coffee cups.</li><li>Living sustainably is a lifestyle choice and journey. Start small and work your way up to more challenging ways of sustainable living.</li><li>Reduce light usage. Turn off lights or appliances when you aren't using them.</li><li>Use less water. Try taking shorter showers, and avoid unnecessary baths.</li><li>Drive less. Use other modes of transportation such as walking or biking instead of taking your car.</li><li>Reuse.</li><li>Buy local to reduce shipping fuels.</li></ul>

How to live greener

Confused about environmental terms? Learn what is the difference between going green and sustainability, and how to start living more eco-friendly yourself.

Going Green: What Does it Mean and How to Start

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

“In situations of low stress and safety, mind-wandering will be a gift, a pleasure, a creative force. In situations of high stress or danger, mind-wandering will be a torment.”

“The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking.”

We now live in ‘an attentional pathogenic culture’ – an environment in which sustained and deep focus is extremely hard for all of us, and you have to swim upstream to achieve it. It is not your fault you cannot focus.Attention spans are decreasing at the time we need them most. One of the biggest contributors to inaction on big issues such as climate change is the lack of focus. When attention breaks down, problem-solving breaks down.

The Attentional Pathogenic Culture

"Empathy is one of the most complex forms of attention we have – and the most precious. Many of the most important advances in human history have been advances in empathy."

<ul><li>Use pre-commitment to stop switching tasks so much.</li><li>Don't listen to negative self-talk - You’re lazy, you’re not good enough, what’s wrong with you?</li><li>Take extended times away from social media. </li><li>Embrace mind-wandering. Letting your mind wander is not a crumbling of attention but in fact a crucial form of attention in its own right.</li><li>Sleep is not a luxury. It is essential for sustained focus.</li><li>Embrace play and unstructured free time. This can be the greatest form of focus.</li></ul>

Improve Your Attention

<ul><li>Switching cost - You lose focus switching between tasks</li><li>Screw-up effect. When you switch between tasks, errors that wouldn’t have happened otherwise start to creep in.</li><li>Creativity drain - In the long run, you are likely to be much less creative.</li></ul>

Three Ways Task Switching Degrades Your Focus

Resolving clearly to do something and making a pledge to stick to it helps you focus.

Pre-Commitment Is Successful

<ul><li>The less you sleep, the more your world blurs in every way – the ability to focus, ability to think deeply, ability to make connections</li><li>During sleep, your brain cleans itself of waste that has accumulated during the day</li><li>During sleep, your energy levels are restored and replenished</li><li>Dreaming allows you to revisit stressful moments without releasing stress hormones, which makes it easier to handle stress.</li></ul>

Importance Of Sleep

<ul><li>On average, we will look at something negative and outrageous a lot more than something peaceful and calm</li><li>Every word of moral outrage increases the chances of retweets on Twitter and words that increased retweet rates are attack, bad, blame</li><li>Social media sites are designed to train your minds to crave frequent rewards</li><li>Social media sites get to know what makes you tick. They learn what you like to look at, what excites you, what angers you</li><li>Social media sites make you feel that you are surrounded by other people’s anger</li><li>Fake news travels six times faster on Twitter than real news.</li></ul>

Social Media Negativity

"Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening and how to get our attention back."--

Stolen Focus

<ul><li>We need to induce adversity & stress in our lives: ancestrally, we’re built to withstand stress to survive – now, our society is built on comfort, so we aren’t expending energy to live anymore.</li><li>Try to get low-intensity exercise every day – walk around the block after dinner.</li><li>Exercise vigorously (high-intensity training), 10-15 minutes per day, totaling 75 minutes per week.</li><li>Resistance train regularly to build and maintain muscle mass.</li><li>Cycle heat and cold exposure as often as possible, even every day. Vary the temperature in the shower or bath, or change the temperature in your house.</li></ul>

Podcast: Key Takeaways

80% of your future health is in your hands – it’s modifiable, 20% is genetic which you can’t do much about. You have the tools to change your ageing.

<ul><li>Ancestrally, we’re built to withstand stress to survive – now, our society is built on comfort, so we aren’t expending energy to live anymore</li><li>Adversity mimetics: things that mimic biological adversity that is conducive to better lifespan and healthspan</li><li>Adversity signals survival circuit and turns on specific survival genes</li><li>A single gene alteration can have a significant impact on an organism’s lifespan</li><li>Three main adversity sensors: mTor (senses levels of amino acids in the cell), AMPK (senses energy/glucose), sirtuins (sense NAD)</li></ul>

Go For Adversity

Get off your ass!

<ul><li>Sitting is bad for us: even if you work, alternate between a standing desk and sitting</li><li>Your body needs to be in a state where it is pushed to take in more oxygen and mimic hormetic effects</li><li>Exercise isn’t just for aesthetics: exercise can slow down cancer, reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, and reduce all-cause mortality</li><li>Most diseases are an accumulation of symptoms of ageing – if you slow the disease rate, you’ll reduce ageing</li><li>10,000 steps is not a magic number but when we move we burn calories and get the body into a better state</li></ul>

Sitting Is The Smoking

<ul><li>Vigorous exercise: get breathing rate and heart rate up for at least 10 minutes 3x/week</li><li>Exercise at least 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week</li><li>Exercise doesn’t just mean running: you can go for a long walk, paddleboard, skateboard, weight lift, play sports, etc.</li><li>Resting heart rate is a good measure of fitness, if it is high you’re either too stressed or unfit</li></ul>

Vigorous Exercise Routine

<ul><li>Resistance training or weight training supports the posture and the ability to stay upright.</li><li>It maintains hormone levels, improves balance and builds muscle mass.</li><li>In the U.S., 19 people per minute fall and break a hip which is close to a death sentence in older age.</li><li>You can boost testosterone by maintaining large muscle groups – legs, back, posterior chain.</li><li>In just 12 weeks, exercise can slow and kill senescent cells.</li></ul>

Resistance Training

<ul><li>As we age, muscles and brain become less sensitive to glucose</li><li>Muscles don’t bring in glucose as effectively and lead to damage in blood vessels and the brain which trigger disease</li><li>Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is made by muscles after exercise and stimulates the production of blood vessels which transport oxygen</li><li>People who exercise are epigenetically younger than people who haven’t based on the Horvath clock and other similar clocks measuring biological ageing</li></ul>

Glucose Sensitivity

<ul><li>Hyperbaric chamber: room or standing tube where pressure is increased and the amount of oxygen you breathe in is increased as a result</li><li>The science: hyperbaric chamber can reverse telomere shortening which will slow down the ageing</li><li>You can spend an hour in a hyperbaric chamber and read, meditate, etc.</li><li>Results of human studies on hyperbaric oxygen treatment: improved memory, increase in T helper cells, reversal of telomere shortening</li><li>Theory: hyperbaric chambers work similar to exercise and simulate hypoxia</li><li>Tested protocol: 5 sessions per week, 90-minutes in length, for 12 weeks  </li></ul>

Hyperbaric Oxygen Treatment

<ul><li>A huge benefit of being cold is the production of brown fat which revs metabolism, is high in mitochondria, burns white fat, and possibly secretes healthy hormones</li><li>Cryotherapy lasts a few minutes and can feel good for several days after</li><li>Start in middle age before it becomes harder to incorporate discomfort</li><li>If you don’t have access to a cryo-chamber: take a cold shower, sleep with fewer covers</li></ul>

Cold Therapy

<ul><li>Heat therapy is one of the most ancient therapies for ageing</li><li>Men who participate in the sauna a few times per week have about 20% less risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality caused by heart attacks</li><li>Sauna activates heat shock proteins which help fold proteins correctly and stimulate pathways that build blood vessels and make more mitochondria</li><li>There isn’t a verified protocol but it doesn’t seem like you can overdo it as long as it’s a dose you can tolerate and maintain</li><li>If you don’t have a sauna, take a hot bath or shower</li></ul>

Heat Therapy

In Episode 3 of the Lifespan Podcast, Dr. David Sinclair and Matthew LaPlante dive deeply into the science of non-dietary interventions that mimic adversity and promote health. They begin by highlighting how different types of physical activity (i.e., low-intensity aerobic exercise, high-intensity aerobic exercise, and weight training) protect against age-related disease and enhance longevity. David and Matthew additionally highlight the latest evidence behind hyperbaric oxygen therapy, cold therapy, and heat therapy. As they discuss different adversity mimetics, they also explain how these interventions influence aging at the molecular and physiological levels. Thank you to our sponsors:   Athletic Greens - https://athleticgreens.com/sinclair   Levels - https://levels.link/sinclair    InsideTracker - https://insidetracker.com/sinclair   Our Patreon page:     https://www.patreon.com/davidsinclair  Timestamps: (00:00:00) Introducing Episode 3: Exercise Hot Cold (00:01:01) A Pernicisous Element Called Iron (00:02:46) A Quick Primer on Free Radicals (00:05:42) Review of Dietary Takeaways (00:07:01) Sponsors (00:09:32 Biological Adversity & the Survival Circuit (00:13:24) Survival Sensors (i.e., mTOR, AMPK, and Sirtuins) & Communicators (e.g., Insulin) (00:17:25) Get Off Your Butt (00:19:40) Exercise Protects against Disease & Mortality (00:21:17) Daily Step Count and Walking After Eating (00:22:33) Exercise Activates AMPK and Creates More Mitochondria (00:24:03) Vigorous Exercise, Hypoxia, the Electron Transport Chain (00:28:19) Exercise Increases Glucose Sensitivity and Stimulates Blood Vessel Formation (00:32:13) The Epigenome and Biological Age are Impacted by Exercise (00:36:43) How to Measure your Biological Age (00:37:31) Exercise Recommendations (00:39:28) Wearables and Individualized Health Tracking (00:43:14) The Importance of Weight Training (00:46:08) Physical Activity & Senescent Cells (00:48:01) Wrap-up & Takeaways (00:49:47) Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (00:57:24) Cold Therapy (01:03:50) Applying Heat (01:07:04) Adversity Mimetics Produce Endorphins (01:08:07) A Basic Protocol for Mimicking Adversity (01:10:04) Next Week: Molecules & Supplements (01:10:45) Subscription & Support For the full show notes, including the peer-reviewed studies, visit the Lifespan podcast website. Please note that Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair is distinct from Dr. Sinclair's teaching and research roles at Harvard Medical School. The information provided in this show is not medical advice, nor should it be taken or applied as a replacement for medical advice. The Lifespan with Dr. David Sinclair podcast, its employees, guests and affiliates assume no liability for the application of the information discussed. Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac Special thanks to our research assistants, Adiv Johnson & Sarah Ryan.

Exercise, Heat, Cold & Other Stressors for Longevity | Episode 3

Ben is the founder and CEO of no-code startup Makerpad which he launched in January 2019. Makerpad is a new breed of company which can teach anyone anywhere how to build software solutions without coding.A serial no-code hacker and the king of side projects, Ben previously led Community at&nbsp;Product Hunt which was acquired by&nbsp;AngelList. Here’s his #BeyondWork story.

Beyond Work

I wake up between 7–8, have a coffee in bed and do some easy tasks like tweaking the site, replying to emails etc (it’s usually revolved around building something! — or fixing a build).Then I usually play tennis for 90 minutes BUT current circumstances mean I do an hour of exercise in the house or go for a half walk/run.

What does a typical day look like to you now?

Honestly not all that much. I work from home all the time anyway, the only change is I don’t go out to play tennis. There’s been a big influx of calls and reactive project building over the last few weeks which is fine and temporary.

How has Coronavirus impacted your life/work?

<ul><li>Shoe Dog by Phil Knight </li><li>Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull </li><li>This Is Not a T-Shirt by Bobby Hundreds </li><li>Who is Michael Ovitz? by Michael Ovitz </li><li>Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou </li></ul>

What five books would you recommend during self isolation?

I think lots more people will be paying attention to online education and no-code options which puts us in a very lucky position. Businesses will be looking to be more efficient and save resources where possible while trying to get their operations up to the same levels as before (if not way, way higher).

When this is all over, what will the opportunities look like?

As the world goes on lockdown, I wanted a way of documenting this unusual time via short interviews with founders and innovators including a peak into their work life and productivity tips. ⠀⠀ I hope…

Build, Call, Slack, Repeat

<h2>Where Facebook will recruit first:</h2>Category 1: Remote engineers who live within a 4-hour drive from existing company offices.Category 2: Facebook will hire near three new hubs in Atlanta, Dallas, and Denver.Category 3: The third phase of the plan consists of seeking out talent in the more rural areas of North America.So while Facebook invests in expanding its remote workforce and building new hubs, it will be reducing the salaries of existing employees

Facebook’s Remote Expansion and Hiring Plan

In the age of remote work, companies with workplace flexibility will attract the best employees in the world and keep them. They’ll also save money — even if they pay employees at a premium.&nbsp;The best remote talent will go where they are treated best — not paid the least. Setting salaries based on location will undermine Facebook’s recruitment efforts, making the company less competitive long-term.

Problems with Setting a Salary-Cutting Precedent

Building a remote work foundation with salary cuts sets the wrong precedent.&nbsp;You don’t “serve the community and unlock innovation” by telling employees their worth is tied to a physical location — or worse, an IP location — especially in the era of location independence.

Facebook’s Policy Will Prove Ineffective

In a recent town hall meeting, Mark Zuckerberg shared Facebook’s lessons and strategy for transitioning to remote work in the coronavirus era. But although he spoke of creating a “thoughtful and…

Facebook’s New Remote Salary Policy is “Barbaric”

Go all-in on something until you make a sustainable income from it, and then it’s best to start diversifying into other areas.<ul><li>Medium: you can make money on Medium in 2 ways - you can get money from the Partner Program as well as from the email subscribers you get from the platform.</li><li>With videos, you can make money both on Youtube and Facebook in ad revenue. Find ways to double-dip with your revenue streams.</li></ul>

Thoughts On Making Money Online

That was 10 months ago. I’ve since crossed the $10,000-in-one-month threshold a few other times, and I’m always in awe of the internet when I do. I don’t have much to offer people, honestly. I know…

How I Made $10,000 Online In One Month From 5 Different Places

<ul><li>What you want to do is a moving target. What you wanted 3 months ago is not necessarily what you want now.&nbsp;</li><li>Chasing what we want to do now always gets us closer to our personal legend.&nbsp;</li></ul>

How To Figure Out What You Want To Do

<ul><li>Forget money and forget reason. Trust yourself. That’s how to figure out what to do with your life.</li><li>Do stuff that scares the hell out of you. It’s almost like you SHOULD feel bad if you aren’t feeling challenged/awkward/weird on a day-in and day-out basis.</li><li>Honestly believe that you can do it.</li><li>Work hard. You gotta put in the work.</li><li>Do not get comfortable. Continue to challenge yourself.</li></ul>

How To Figure Out Your Purpose

To many I’m “successful,” but to be honest with you sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m actually doing. But, you see, that’s not what I should be focusing on. That’s not what you should be focusing…

How To Figure Out What You Want To Do With Your Life

Becoming more productive is about what you do less of, not more of.Often, the best way to improve your productivity is to identify the habits that are interfering with your productivity and eliminate them.

Becoming productive

<ul><li>Working in marathons instead of sprints. A sprint is a time-limited burst of focused, high-energy work on a specific task. You’ll find sprinting effective and enjoyable.</li><li>Coping with distractions instead of eliminating them. By adopting the coping mindset, we’re implicitly agreeing to and endorsing omnipresent distraction in our work life.&nbsp;</li><li>Using fear and criticism to motivate yourself. People are successful despite their negative self-talk, not because of it.</li><li>Doing other people’s work instead of your own.</li></ul>

Common habits that interfere with productivity

“The time that leads to mastery is dependent on the intensity of our focus.”

“To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.”

“Once you give yourself permission to stop trying to do it all, to stop saying yes to everyone, you can make your highest contribution towards the things that really matter.”

Often, the best way to improve your productivity is to identify the habits that are interfering with your productivity and eliminate them. When you do, you’ll find that you’re actually far more…

4 Things Productive People Don’t Do

<ul><li>Product connects customer needs with business goals, to produce goods and services that people use and buy, enabling the company to compete. As a field, it has become significantly more important to effective competition within the past few decades, particularly as the tech industry has risen.</li><li>Strategy considers the external and internal landscape to identify market gaps and opportunities, enabling the company to compete. As a field, it’s often held close to the executive team.&nbsp;</li></ul>Product and strategy aim to fulfill a company’s why. Product begins with the what. Strategy begins with the how.

How do product and strategy relate?

The coffee you’re drinking, the videos you’re streaming, and that pair of Converses you’re wearing — all your choices were driven by what was available and desirable. But who put those options there?Product managers (PMs) and strategists drive such decisions and thus shape your world. Both choose which problems to solve and which goals to go after. Both turn grand visions into tangible goods and market realities. But at the moment, their worlds are disparate

Your life is curated

<ul><li>Product managers find gaps of unmet needs using customer research. They identify problems with the strongest market impact by prioritizing the list by highest pain or widest reach.&nbsp;</li><li>Strategists find gaps in the market via competitive analysis. Strategists determine which opportunities can produce maximum new customer and/or business value.</li></ul>

Breaking into the market

<ul><li>Product managers win by addressing important unmet needs or addressing met needs better than all their competitors, to the point that they drive customers to switch products.&nbsp;</li><li>Strategists win by capturing opportunities in unique ways. They have figured out how to sell the same things cheaper (e.g. through strategic partnerships or complementary revenue streams) or how to create new value from what they’ve already got (e.g. by addressing new markets).</li></ul>

Breaking through to the top of the market

<ul><li>Product managers scale their solutions by meeting the needs of wider audiences. As their products are adopted by more diverse customers, they adapt their products to these new customers, who have different needs. This is known as the Technology (or Product) Adoption Curve.</li><li>Strategists scale their solution by improving their business model to undercut competitors and create new value. They might forge new partnerships to cut costs, identify new marketing channels by which to reach customers or find new revenue streams for the same opportunities.</li></ul>

Scaling success

<ul><li>Product managers continue to create new or complementary features and products to address evolving customer needs. As competitors catch up and markets reshape and customer expectations change, PMs evolve their products, continuously searching for today’s most relevant needs. To advance, adaptability is key.</li><li>Strategists continue to find new ways to create value for the business and for customers as competitors, markets, and customers change. To advance, flexibility is key.</li></ul>

Maintaining a competitive advantage at the top of the market

Some companies, particularly within tech, have figured out how to leverage the best of both worlds.<ul><li>Facebook has arguably mastered the balance of product and strategy, crafting solutions that empower their business by solving problems for their customers.</li><li>Amazon is (perhaps controversially) another elegant example of this balance. Customers' needs are met in the best way possible through a strategy that is incredibly difficult to replicate: their commitment to passing profits back to customers in the form of low prices gives it a strategic advantage almost impossible to crack.</li></ul>

Reconciling product and strategy

The coffee you’re drinking, the videos you’re streaming, and that pair of Converses you’re wearing — all your choices were driven by what was available and desirable. But who put those options there…

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Heidi Thompson
@heth

What Is Sustainable Living? - The Eco Hub

Going Green: What Does it Mean and How to Start

Stolen Focus

Exercise, Heat, Cold & Other Stressors for Longevity | Episode 3

Build, Call, Slack, Repeat

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Heidi Thompson@heth

What Is Sustainable Living? - The Eco Hub

Going Green: What Does it Mean and How to Start

Stolen Focus

Exercise, Heat, Cold & Other Stressors for Longevity | Episode 3

Build, Call, Slack, Repeat

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Heidi Thompson
@heth