Actor Jonah Hill felt so compelled by the effective, action-oriented approach of his psychiatrist, Phil Stutz, that he created a hit documentary, Stutz, where we learned that Pain, Uncertainty, and the Need for Work are some of life's most unavoidable pillars. Now, Stutz and co-author of True and False Magic, Elise Loehnen, take these ideas a few steps further, and show us that with the right tools, we can flip them into levers for unlimited potential.

Truffld: In the film, Stutz, you mentioned that you have pity parties quite often when it comes to navigating your Parkinson's journey, but that you've essentially learned how to get out of that state quickly nowadays. How do you pull yourself out of those tough moments, and is it through use of the The Tools?

Phil: Rudolf Steiner, one of the guys that I studied, he says at the moment of death, real death, physical death, you see the you that you thought of as yourself – it's now spread out in front of you, so you're now seeing yourself from the inside out. What you think you're seeing out there now is the whole world because it looks like something that's starting from the inside and then ending up outside, so it's only natural that you think of it as the entire world, but that's not really the case. What's truly the case is what you thought was the whole world was really just you seeing things from a completely different angle. So what you become capable of is taking something that you think is outside you, and once you realize it's inside you, that gives you the power to change your opinion of yourself and of what you're going through. It gives you a familiarity and connection, and that's what I'm working on for myself now. 

Truffld: You talk about the power of continually co-creating with higher forces, and tapping into our own Life Force – a process with which we engage through connection to our body first, then connection to others, and lastly, connection to self. Tell me more about how we can integrate this pyramidal concept into our daily lives.

Phil: Life Force is a training ground for your intuition. Self-expression is one way that works well to help people connect to self. I tell people this (Life Force) is not a fortune teller. It won't tell you what you'll be when you grow up, but it's a directional indicator, and that's more important because really finding out who you are and connecting to yourself takes like 5,000 steps and then you're just getting warmed up.

Elise: What it attends to is this desire we all have that's like, 'Tell me what I'm supposed to be doing here, and I just want to know that I'm going in the right direction and I want to know the right next step.' Like, if I just knew, then I could move into my life and conquer the world. I just need to figure this out. And Phil reverses it and effectively says that you don't know anything until you – I see it as an engine revving – get yourself in motion and attend to this material realm and your body and your relationships with other people, because you don't create anything by yourself. You have to get your energy going before you have any chance of communing with some higher part of yourself that holds information that you need. Then it's, OK this feels good, I'm moving, now I'm ready to see what happens, what doors open, and whatever is supposed to happen or emerge in my life. But we instead, operate from this manual of: give me the map, tell me the destination, I'll put it in my GPS, and then I'll go. But it's not an effective way to live your life, that's for sure. It's disempowering. 

When I was in my 20s, I had this realization that no one's gonna save me; no one's gonna pluck me out of obscurity and make my life happen for me. Nobody's gonna recognize my talent – the Star Search model doesn't work. And that's the advice I give to other people who say they don't like their career or what they're doing. Get yourself in motion. And I like that Phil makes it so concrete and simple: pick up a pencil, go on a walk around the block, call your mom or your college roommate; whatever it is, you gotta get it going before anything will happen.

Truffld: In True and False Magic you show an illustration of curlicues that represent an individual's growth, and I wondered how many people in the world would persevere with something, with their dreams and goals, if they just understood that the curlicue pattern – opposed to a linear one – was all a natural part of the process.

Phil: The Life Force – you're not touching it or feeling it or understanding it unless you've seen it as something that just went through death. So, the Life Force is a post-death state. Whatever feels like it's post-death, is really the beginning of life. And that's what the curlicues illustration in the book is about. Life isn't linear or up and down, it's the curlicue. Those are things that help me. Life is a post-death state. Whoever created the universe was death. The universe was created by death, and in the recovery phase of that, at that point, you've actually connected with real life. 

Truffld: When I think about Universe One and Universe Two – Universe One representing the material world, and Universe Two, one of more meaning, depth, spirituality, etc. – I feel like as a human, while I gravitate toward Universe Two, and that's where I'm most content, I'm also pulled into Universe One. How do we comfortably break out of this sort of tug-o-war, and stay more in Universe Two?

Elise: I personally feel tethered to Universe One every time I try to break out of this belief of safety and security and money. I get slingshotted back in. I'm going to read Phil's words on this subject: 'It's impossible to fully avoid Universe One. Something that's impossible can also be very useful. In fact, sometimes the more impossible it is, the more you get out of it. There's a dynamic here that upsets people – it's a complete commitment to get out of Universe One, simultaneously knowing you're never going to get out of it. You live every day with the goal to live in Universe Two and hopefully you gain the faith that that will benefit you and everyone else.'

So, yes, I get it. We're constrained by Universe One, but as long as you fundamentally understand that the real value is Universe Two, then you can live in this sort of in between world of the reality of our material world and the promise of something different. I think our job as humans is to live in that third space where we're bringing the two together, and to try to constrain yourself to one of them isn't doable or realistic. 

Phil: Rudolf Steiner says that the universe is perfect because it's imperfect. What that means is, if all there was is wholeness, and nothing else, then you'd be included in the wholeness, and you wouldn't know that you exist. In other words, your sense that you exist comes from loss of wholeness. There's no real wholeness until you fail to capture it. 

Elise: It's like absent opposites. Like perfection. The whole thing falls apart if it's complete. Light doesn't exist without darkness. 

That's what Phil's genius is, too. It's turning this ephemera into concrete action steps, and then you have to repeat it over, and over, and over again. It's not a cognitive process. You gotta live it.

Phil Stutz graduated phi beta kappa from City College in New York and received his MD from New York University. He worked as a prison psychiatrist on Rikers Island and then in private practice in New York before moving his practice to Los Angeles in 1982. He is the bestselling co-author of The Tools, Coming Alive, and Lessons for Living.

 Elise Loehnen is the bestselling author of On Our Best Behavior and host of Pulling the Thread. She has co-written twelve books, five of which were New York Times bestsellers. She was the chief content officer of goop, and she co-hosted The goop Podcast and The goop Lab on Netflix. Previously, she was the editorial projects director of Condé Nast Traveler. Elise lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons.

Purchase True and False Magic on Amazon and Bookshop.

Award-winning author, economist, entrepreneur, wife and mother-of-three, Keisha Blair, is the embodiment of triumph over tragedy with a comeback story that is awe-inspiring. Keisha wrote a viral piece a few years back about the life lessons she learned after the sudden death of her 34-year-old husband, inspiring tens of millions since.

Truffld: In your book, Holistic Wealth, you referenced the time period after your husband, Garfield's death that forced a period of self-reflection. You took a sabbatical with your children, found solace among your roots in Jamaica, and stepped away from a high-velocity career path. Though the slower pace was ultimately the best route in terms of healing and growth, you did notice with a sense of unease, that a lot of your female colleagues were still full-steam ahead, rising the ranks in their respective career fields, and that made you feel a sense of urgency to catch-up. I see this often – perhaps it's societal or universal – where men and women alike are conditioned to focus on a job title, hitting certain corporate "milestones" or salary as metrics for success. How do we start to shift that mindset?

Keisha: This is something that we're all thinking about even more as we come out of Covid-19. I can give an answer based on economics since I'm an economist [laughing] – I honestly have a draft of an article I started to write that's titled, Economics Needs a Refresh, because I think that our societies traditionally were based on these very outdated notions of what productivity meant. And if we look at metrics like GDP at a country level – and given what I've been through and what I've learned – I'm seeing how flawed that is, especially during Covid because we're a society of burnout, and loneliness, and ill health to a point it sets us back; what I experienced as an individual, I feel as though we've faced now on a global scale. It [Covid] drove home to us how much more we need to be resilient, and so more resilient indicators of wealth are needed, which is why I came up with Holistic Wealth.

When my article first went viral, the book publisher at the time wanted me to write a money book but I couldn't do that because money alone didn't get me through the sudden loss of my husband; it was everything else – the financial security was a major pillar, yes, but the sabbatical that you mentioned, taking that pause and really healing, and figuring out what I was here on this Earth to do, and then it became so clear to me.

This is why it's also so important to create change from within our organizations, because when those setbacks come – women, mothers and our kids are usually most affected – we're in a state of crisis, and really need the tools in that toolbox that will give us that resilience. We have our economic resources and our moral resources, and the combination of the two is needed. During this pandemic our moral resources have been highlighted through how we protect each other, how we give back and reach out and consider one another as well as our mental and emotional health. As a policy person I've thought about the same question you're asking: Through our organizations and even at the state level, maybe we can think about how we define success at a larger level so that people will start to internalize that notion that their value isn't just tied to productivity; that if they can take a step back for a moment to re-evaluate, they'll come back even stronger than before and contribute in a more meaningful way.  

Truffld: Since Garfield's passing you've remarried and now have a daughter. You said in Holistic Wealth: "I will never teach my daughter that there's only one kind of woman to be." Can you expand upon that in how you implement this mindset in the way that you're raising your daughter?

Keisha: That line in the book means so much to me. We're sometimes raised to fit this societal notion of what we're expected to be and do, and I'd love to delve into this, maybe even writing a children's book, to explain to little girls that they can be all they want to be.

My daughter comes home nearly every day and tells me that the boys tell her she can't play a sport with them because she's a girl, and that she needs to come off of the field. Every day she comes home with these limiting messages – not limiting beliefs, because she thankfully doesn't believe it – but it's society telling her there's one type of girl to be. Looking back at my journey as a little girl, I didn't know I'd be widowed at age 31, and maybe in hindsight, who knows any number of things I would have done differently, but knowing what I know now is how can I play my card in helping her to be more resilient when she encounters challenges.

I'm in a male-dominated field as well where I have been given those 'women aren't good at math,' or 'women aren't good at economics' messages. The men get the promotions in the field quite often – it's kind of like an 'old boys' club,' so I know in my heart how difficult it is; I love to tell that little girl in me growing up, 'Don't even listen to what they're saying. Just go after it, and never, ever stop. You have a place and deserve to be here, regardless.'

Truffld: I read that you were "always trying to get somewhere fast," growing up because you were an only child and worried that if your parents passed, then you would be an orphan; you were determined to be self-sufficient as quickly as possible. One day you did feel orphaned, but through the loss of your husband. After Garfield passed, did you again feel a sense of urgency to live your life in a race against time?

Keisha: Absolutely. I experienced it as a child because when my parents had me, my dad was approaching age 50. But after my husband died it got worse because I kept thinking, 'I'm now a widow with two kids. I have to step up, be the best I can, and do more -- invest more, try to compensate for this ticking clock, and what if I die now? Then they're [my kids] orphans.'

I don't know if before my husband died it was my intuition preparing me or some sixth sense...I remember sitting in the front row of the theater [for Garfiield's funeral] beside my dad who I thought was old at the time while I was growing up, and he was the one who was still alive, and there was the casket with my dead husband right in front of me, who was just 34.

Truffld: You write quite a bit in Holistic Wealth about the importance of tapping into one's intuition. In the midst of this frenzied pace that seems to define Western culture, how can we be on the lookout for some of the indicators that are telling us it's time for a Holistic Wealth intervention?

Keisha: I remember from my experience feeling so burned out, so exhausted, feeling like I was on this hamster wheel; like life was meaningless. In the midst of losing Garfield I went through this existential crisis. If you feel like you've hit that brick wall in life where you're questioning the very notion of your purpose, and things seem chaotic around you to a point where you 'can't see the forest from the trees,' then I think that's the time for a Holistic Wealth intervention – to be able to hit that pause button to refresh, reenergize, refocus, and to reemerge differently from the type of life you've been living.

*To connect with Keisha, find her on IG, Podcast IG, FB, Twitter, TikTok, KeishaBlair, and to purchase Holistic Wealth.

Zara Rutherford is a Belgian-British aviator. At age 19, she became the youngest female pilot to fly solo around the world and the first person to complete a circumnavigation in a microlight aircraft after a five-month journey which began in Kortrijk, Belgium, on 18 August 2021, and ended on 20 January 2022.

Truffld: Throughout your global solo journey, you had 260 hours of flight time, which as a 19-year old with your life fully ahead of you, must have provided you with a lot of time to think – were you contemplative during that time? Listening to music? Or heavily focused on every moment of the journey?

Zara: Usually I was really focused on the flying. It was never easy in the sense that it was never boring. A boring flight is a good flight, and an exciting flight is a bad flight. I almost always had exciting flights [laughing]. It was usually weather-related; sometimes there was extreme turbulence; in California it was wildfires, for example. There was always something going on. But when I did have the quiet moments it was amazing – I would listen to music and sit back and enjoy the view.

Truffld: I'd also read that you came close to lightning strikes, and some other harrowing conditions. Even though you're trained well, poised and confident, how do you manage those nerve-racking encounters?

Zara: I was very nervous. The important thing when you're flying is to not let your emotions make the decisions. You have to do what's safest, not 'Oh, I'm panicking, let me make this really stupid decision which could cause me to lose my life.' You could actually track where I was throughout the entire journey, so when I was near thunderstorms I would actually orbit a few times to try to relax, catch my breath, as well as find the best way forward to avoid a bad decision. I had to do that in Alaska as well during extreme turbulence. Near the equator the storms just look like a big dark column. It's too high of an altitude so I can't fly over it, and then directly underneath the dark cloud it's quite blurry because it's just such heavy rain, and then every once in a while there's a lightning strike. Rarely do the lightning strikes shoot out horizontally, so I just needed to ensure I flew around with enough distance.

Truffld: You grew up in a family of aviators, with both parents as pilots. Most of us put our children in the backseat of a car, while you and your brother were just as frequently buckled into the backseat of a plane. Naturally, that experience growing up cultivated more a comfort level for you with flying, but many people have pilots in their family, and you're still the first and only woman to do this solo at such a young age. So, what – other than your exposure to aviation – differentiated your upbringing?

Zara: My dad always told me that nothing was impossible. He always said that whatever job or career path I chose, they would support me, and that was always in the back of my mind throughout my childhood. It made me believe that yeah, if I put my mind to something...I'll try my absolute best...but also my mom always told me that failing was completely fine; there's nothing wrong with that. So I tried and failed things many, many times – not flying around the world, but other things – to a point where failure for me wasn't a negative anymore. It was a learning opportunity, and every time I fail it brings me closer to succeeding.

Truffld: Internationally, five percent of pilots are women, and we know that STEM and STEAM programs are more of a push for girls now than ever. I interviewed Katty Kay and Claire Shipman last year who wrote The Confidence Code – it cited a lot of statistics regarding the inflection points where girls start to drop out of science and math-oriented paths which can also coincide with a decline in confidence at certain formative ages. Did you ever experience similar challenges through adolescence?

Zara: A hundred percent. I think when you're 12, 13, 14, I just wanted to fit in with my friends. I didn't want to be that one girl who liked flying. I really struggled with that because it was, 'Why should I pursue aviation if none of my friends are doing it?' And it's sort of a weird thing to do to be honest; so it would have been easier not to do it. I found a balance – when I was at school I didn't talk about planes, and at home I would fly planes and do my own thing. But as I grew up and knew who my solid group of friends were, I just didn't care what anyone thought anymore. When I was 14 I went to an all-girls school. I think that helped because being more individual was considered cool; it was encouraged.

Truffld: I read that 3/39 of your flights during your solo flight went according to plan.

Zara: It was really hard to keep flying because chances were that something would happen. It was usually weather-related or the wildfires like I mentioned earlier. Sometimes sunset was an issue. So it becomes hard to get back in the plane because you know that statistically something is going to happen, and so then you're just hoping that it won't be bad enough to cause major problems. I think once I got to Russia, I still had those stressful flights, but my comfort zone became a lot larger. So suddenly, having extreme turbulence where G-Force warnings were going off was fine, or cross-winds on landing or thunderstorms all became 'one of those things.' The second half of the world actually ended up being easier because by then I was more comfortable with the extreme stuff. My stress levels varied based on how many back-up plans I had. I loved flying through Europe because there's an air field every five minutes. However, in Siberia there were no alternate air fields because it's either the place I left from or the place I'm going to – those are my only options for landing, and after four hours I won't have enough fuel to get back so I have to commit to the plan; it's point of no return.

Truffld: You're off to college in the fall – where do you want to go? You'll study computer science or engineering, and I read that you'd like to [aptly] be an astronaut. Something tells me you won't want to be any astronaut, but one who accomplishes something record-breaking. On that note, fill in the blank: The next record I would like to break is ______.

Zara: Well, first of all I can't share which college I'd like to go to because I don't want to jinx it, and it's not Oxford or Cambridge because I missed the deadlines for those [laughing]. As for records, I want to see how many t-shirts I can put on in one minute. Seriously, I think I'm taking a bit of a break from world records and taking things one step at a time at the moment. But if I could even make coffee for another astronaut in space; if I could help humanity get a bit further with space exploration, then I'm happy, I've done my job.

Learn more about Zara and follow her journey on:

Main site: FlyZolo

IG: @flyzolo

FB: @flyzolo

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Arguably one of the most prolific investors in history, the documentary, Icahn, casts light on the billionaire's business and personal life, begging the question: activist investor or contrarian investor? Streamed on HBO.

The mastermind behind a carefully crafted image, Anna Delvey (AKA Anna Sorokin) played by Julia Garner, takes us into the life of a pseudo heiress living on the edge between fact and fiction. Streamed on Netflix.

"You have to live your life...If you're just constantly engaging in your profession and focused on what it is that you do, and you're missing out on the other experiences and the richness of life, then you're not really gonna be carrying a meaningful resonance or vibration that will be helpful to other people."

• Rich Roll
  (excerpt from The Tim Ferriss Show)

by Victoria Oldridge

Robert Stickgold is a professor of psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, and has published over 100 scientific papers, including in Science and Nature, and his work has been written up in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. He studies the nature and function of sleep and dreams from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, with an emphasis on memory processing. He also investigates alterations in sleep-dependent memory processing in patients with schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorder, and PTSD. His work is funded by NIMH. He is coauthor, with Antonio Zadra, of the new book, When Brains Dream.

Truffld: In When Brains Dream you explain that sleep helps us to form memories which inform our sense of self, and that our dreams' purpose is to identify, explore, and evaluate the significance of daily events, and to sift through neural networks. If the quality of our sleep is interwoven with the elements and moments from the day that our brain decides to 'tag,' and that dictates the memories that are created, then this supports the quote in your book, “We are what we sleep.” Ultimately, our sleep then determines our sense of self.

Dr. Stickgold: The brain will take information, integrate it with some old memory you have that you never would have though of combining it with during your waking time. People say to me, 'My memory’s fine. I don’t have any issues with it.' And I hate to say it, but I tell them it’s shallow memory, because the difference between being smart and being wise is in the quality of their sleep.

You can have poor sleep and still have great rote memory – someone will take a test and still have all of the key facts memorized. But they may have struggled on a comparative essay portion, for example, because they're not going through all of the necessary sleep stages throughout the night that facilitates synthesis of information. Now, we don't know exactly how the brain decides to 'tag' certain moments or events, but it does. There are 15 billion neurons and 124 trillion connections between them; that's 1000 times more connections than stars in the milky way.

If I were to ask you to tell me about yourself, at the first level you’ll tell me some basic information. And then, if you’re foolish – or if I’m trustworthy – you start to tell me about who you really are. During my sophomore year of high school, I can remember so clearly being in a chorus performance rehearsal and some other student was playing a song on the piano, and I turned to the person next to me and asked if he was playing a certain song – trying to appear knowledgeable – and he looked at me like I was an idiot and he said, 'No, it’s Rhapsody in Blue.' And I decided right then that I had to learn classical music. I mean, what a bizarre moment and cause for it. But I made that decision.

When I went off to college three years later, I bought Boston Symphony season tickets, listened to a Chicago classical music station all day long even to today. Is it really all because of that sophomore year conversation? I don’t even remember what I sang in that chorus because for some reason, my brain decided it didn’t care about that; it didn't tag it as significant. So, if we talk for many days and evenings, you start to tell me about the events of your life like this one I shared, and then we really start to learn about who each other is.

Truffld: I also read that sleep can have a pronounced impact on the efficacy of vaccines. As we continue to navigate Covid-19, I wonder about the variability of immune response that people are experiencing, especially due to our country's poor sleep regimen.

Dr. Stickgold: You give someone a hepatitis or flu vaccine and it’s not that they don’t produce any antibodies, it’s that they produce a third less if they don’t sleep well before and after the vaccine [*see study references below]. I actually wrote – after I read your pre-questions about the impact of sleep on antibody production related to the Covid vaccine – to the Director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, and I wrote: a) you have to tell people that if they don’t get sleep the night after they get their Covid vaccine, they’re not going to be protected from it, and b) then you have to collect the data. You have to say, 'When you go to get your Covid vaccine, you need to fill out this questionnaire that asks how much sleep you’ve had over the past five nights, and we have to warn you to get a full night’s sleep tonight,' and then see what the data looks like.

Truffld: Studies show that decrease in sleep duration and quality result in a slew of chronic illnesses, from Alzheimer’s, due to B-Amyloid build-up; diabetes, due to increased insulin resistance; compromised immune response, and a host of other conditions.

Dr. Stickgold: Yes, that's right. And in adolescence, 90% of the growth hormone is released during slow-wave sleep. So not only do you need sleep, but you need quality, deep sleep. The good news is that you get all of your slow-wave sleep in the first half of the night, so if kids are getting a solid four to five hours of sleep, they’re getting their growth hormone – they won’t though, get into REM sleep so they won’t be synthesizing what they’ve learned during the day.

We don’t know which sleep stages are associated with lowered immunity, but we do know that less sleep could cause stress [and vice versa], so perhaps managing stress levels while you sleep is what needs to happen. For example, we also know that flight attendants who do transcontinental shifts frequently, having to switch time zones and sleep cycles, have higher breast cancer rates compared to those who fly coast-to-coast and go home to sleep at night in their usual time zone.

Truffld: Our society in particular suffers quite a bit with insomnia, anxiety, and generalized sleeping disorders, in part, as you’ve stated, because we’re too 'plugged-in' throughout the day, so our brains aren’t able to process in real-time. Instead, we're bombarded with a myriad of thoughts and concerns when our head hits the pillow at bedtime. How can we mitigate this universal, nightly ritual so that we then don’t suffer the downstream health effects of inadequate sleep?

Dr. Stickgold: People like Oprah always say, 'don’t go to bed angry,' and I think that’s kind of what you’re saying: process these things to a point during the day where your brain can deal with it at night without it being so ramped-up. I don’t know that we have to do something explicitly intentional to mitigate this issue. It’s more about what we shouldn’t do. When you walk down the street you don’t see people who aren’t plugged-in. It’s really strange. When you go to a party, for example, they set the music to a level where you can’t think, because the belief and the culture is that you go to a party to just relax and not think. But we carry that noise into our whole day.

Going back to not going to bed angry: There’s this thing about relationships – if you’re not spending a certain amount of time actively working on it, then all that’s really left is the crap. So when you finally do have half an hour with your partner or with a friend, you don’t have time to talk about the good stuff because the bad stuff has to be dealt with. As we decrease the amount of time we spend alone with ourselves, to mind wander, to daydream, to muse, what happens is when we do have those alone minutes we have all of the hard, unpleasant stuff to deal with – that has to on some level be dealt with first, and then being with yourself unfortunately becomes aversive.

Truffld: Is there an ideal equation for sleep in terms of overall health optimization, or do we gauge it based on how we feel each day?

Dr. Stickgold: Sleep as much as you truly want to [easier said than done]. If you spontaneously wake up after five hours of sleep and jump up awake and alert, then go for it. If you can sleep every night as though you were on vacation, that’s the right amount of sleep. You know when you come back from that perfect vacation and walk into the office on your first day back, and you can’t even remember what you’re supposed to be doing? That’s how you give your brain what it needs to do while you sleep. For every two hours of information input, you need an hour of sleep to process it.

Truffld: In When Brains Dream you referenced the stress of having to do the heart dissection of a dog during graduate school and the nightmares that ensued in association with your infant daughter at the time, and that years later you had a son who was born with a congenital heart defect that required heart surgery at four months. You went on to explain that as much as we’d like to think that our dreams might be some sort of foretelling or 'magical' thinking of sorts, that the science tells us that’s not the case. I think that there’s an entrenched human desire to want to believe that dreams are some other dimension of something or other that’s trying to convey something to us outside of everyday life. But you also said, encouragingly, that despite the advancements in science, 'our dreams’ magic, mystery, and wonder will remain.'

Dr. Stickgold: My wife and I are both Jewish – she more than I – and she describes me as her 'beshert,' who’s the person that from the time we were born, we were meant to be with; a prescribed soulmate. There’s something wonderful to think that through all of the classes, parties, conventions, and crowds, that we were meant to come together. I don’t believe in that, but I think it’s equally awesome that we found each other anyhow. And I do think that our dreams tell us a lot. The answer is, our brains are creating wondrous discoveries as we dream. It’s putting things together in ways that tell us something that we would never know otherwise. I tell people, 'Never marry anyone because of a dream and never divorce anyone because of a dream,' but listen to what it has to say and wonder why.

I think it’s pointless to say that our only purpose in life is to survive and reproduce. We’re so much more than that. We create meaning, and meaning is an amazing thing – from a piece of music, to a poem, to something you blurt out to a friend that stops them in their tracks because they had an epiphany. You can find wonder in what’s there already. The questions that science answers are not questions of the heart, they’re questions at some level, of the mind. That won't change.

Truffld: On that note, thank you for the breadth of research you’ve contributed throughout the decades. I hope to be firing on all cylinders the way you are during this chapter of your life when I reach it, and thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

Dr. Stickgold: Thank you, and please, just don’t talk to my wife about my memory.

*Study on sleep deprivation following hepatitis B vaccine

*Study: Sleep enhances the human antibody response to the hepatitis A vaccination.

To learn more about Dr. Stickgold, watch Netflix's series, The Mind Explained (Dreams episode), and purchase this year's release of his book, When Brains Dream.

She's creative, versatile, and leaves us feeling strong, stretched, and refreshed. Kaylie Daniels focuses on sculpting, lengthening, and cardiovascular health.

Kaylie Daniels

Hi, Glow Babes! I’m so happy that you’re here. A little about me: I’ve been a yoga and fitness instructor for almost a decade and I love to create unique & challenging fitness classes. I created the Glow Method because I believe that we all have an inner glow ~ the ability to feel confident in o…

YouTube

Newly engaged couple, Juice and Toya, curate a channel chock full of resistance training: bodyweight, resistance bands, and weights, and a healthy dose of encouragement along the way.

Juice & Toya

Workouts | Food | Motivation | Lifestyle | + More

YouTube

Tiff x Dan (though we're still wondering where Tiff is...) might seem at the outset that it's guy-centric workouts, but these HIIT, resistance training, and AMRAPS suit anyone looking for some extra challenge.

TIFF x DAN

TIFF x DAN | AT HOME WORKOUTS | ABS WORKOUTSWelcome to our channel! We are two madly in love idiots sharing at home workouts + our favorite healthy meals. We never thought that 2020 would have us stepping away from the gym + getting creative with at home workouts, but here we are determined to mak…

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