Intelligence: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
TLD Intel: a monthly roundup of events, articles, books, videos and podcasts to help you live The Life Delicious!
Hello December!
I know you’re busy so let’s get right to my TOP 3 PICKS:
1. ARTICLE: Cycling is ten times more important than electric cars for reaching net-zero cities | The Conversation
“Tackling the climate and air pollution crises requires curbing all motorised transport, particularly private cars, as quickly as possible. Focusing solely on electric vehicles is slowing down the race to zero emissions. This is partly because electric cars aren’t truly zero-carbon – mining the raw materials for their batteries, manufacturing them and generating the electricity they run on produces emissions. Transport is one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonise due to its heavy fossil fuel use and reliance on carbon-intensive infrastructure – such as roads, airports and the vehicles themselves – and the way it embeds car-dependent lifestyles. One way to reduce transport emissions relatively quickly, and potentially globally, is to swap cars for cycling, e-biking and walking – active travel, as it’s called.”
I mentioned active transportation last week in Environmental Stewardship as a Spiritual Practice. It’s something that’s good for your wellbeing and the world!
It can feel overwhelming to have an all-or-nothing mindset about things, so just like the small shifts in behaviour we practice in The Life Delicious curriculum, why not try to add just a few active transports during the week?
My husband, Aaron, and I are trying to do one weekly school drop-off each on foot with the dog (a 90-minute trip), and when the weather permits, we take the tandem bike to school.
I also LOVE to get a nice treat on the weekends and we usually turn it into a family walk (the closest bakery is 4.5km round trip, and the closest ice cream shop is 5km round trip).
What can you do to reduce your carbon foot print that will also boost your mental and physical health?
2. ARTICLE: Taking it easy as you get older? Wrong. Age actively, Harvard researchers say | Harvard Gazette
Yes, yes, yes! “Because we evolved to be active throughout our lives, our bodies need physical activity to age well.”
I think this is such an important fact to know because, for me at least, it’s highly motivating and helps me keep my regular exercise routine (even if it's only 10 minutes – see below).
I have shared the incredible work of Harvard Medical School psychiatry professor John Ratey before. He’s the author of two fantastic books – Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain and Go Wild: Free Your Body and Mind from the Afflictions of Civilization – and has a great TED Talk called Run, Jump, Learn! How Exercise can Transform our Schools, and this is exactly what he preaches: that our body, and especially our brain, needs us to be physically activity (in some shape or form) every day.
“Just about everyone knows that exercise is good for you. Some people can even rattle off reasons it keeps your muscles and joints strong, and how it fights off certain diseases. But how many people can tell you the story of why and how physical activity was built into human biology?
“A team of evolutionary biologists and biomedical researchers from Harvard are taking a run at it (sometimes literally) in a new study published this week in PNAS. The work lays out evolutionary and biomedical evidence showing that humans, who evolved to live many decades after they stopped reproducing, also evolved to be relatively active in their later years.
“The researchers say that physical activity later in life shifts energy away from processes that can compromise health and toward mechanisms in the body that extend it. They hypothesize that humans evolved to remain physically active as they age — and in doing so to allocate energy to physiological processes that slow the body’s gradual deterioration over the years. This guards against chronic illnesses such as cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and even some cancers.
“The key take-home point is that because we evolved to be active throughout our lives, our bodies need physical activity to age well. In the past, daily physical activity was necessary in order to survive, but today we have to choose to exercise, that is to do voluntary physical activity for the sake of health and fitness,” Lieberman said.
“The researchers’ advice? Get out of your chair and get some exercise. “The key is to do something, and to try to make it enjoyable so you’ll keep doing it,” Lieberman said. “The good news is that you don’t need to be as active as a hunter-gatherer. Even small amounts of physical activity — just 10 or 20 minutes a day —substantially lower your risk of mortality.”
Just 10 or 20 minutes a day! You can do it!!
3. ARTICLE: Is communal living the future of parenting? An intriguing new movement is experimenting with the kind of co-living that defined families for millennia | The Guardian
“‘I grew up poor, with all the hell that came along with that,’ [says Prophet Walker]. ‘The thing that kept my sanity was the community around me, and what struck me was that even living in those housing projects, there was real, legitimate joy. Belly laughs, you know?’
"His North Star? To make communal living more prevalent in a country where the nuclear family has long been mistakenly idealized. In 2017, after graduating with a degree from Loyola Marymount’s engineering school, Walker teamed up with Joe Green, a Santa Monica-raised Harvard graduate who’s collaborated with tech glitterati like Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker of Napster fame. An odd couple if there ever was one, Walker and Green co-founded Treehouse, based in the Hollywood neighborhood of LA.
"It’s the first ever building in the city constructed from the ground up with the specific purpose of serving a communal audience and Walker envisions it as the first of a multi-national network of Treehouses that will redefine how we live. A grand vision, but an important one. Treehouse inhabitants enjoy weekly suppers, communal working space and the comfort that their co-residents share the five Treehouse core values: being kind, present, curious, responsible and candid.”
As a toddler mother and solo entrepreneur without family nearby and a husband who works long hours in film, I am wondering where do I get on the Treehouse waitlist?!
I am very fortunate to have a little slice of Treehouse in the townhouse complex we moved to right before the pandemic. We know nearly all of our neighbours, have made some incredible friends, and feel more support than we’ve felt in any neighborhood we’ve ever lived in (and obviously it’s harder to give and accept support, and gather together, while we try to annihilate this nasty virus).
But I’m ready to take it to the next level! Even before we had our daughter we long joked about communal living with our close friends, and now I’m wondering how many others have decided to actually do this, and what it feels like?
Thoughts?
MOVEMENT and CONNECTION are 2 of The Life Delicious’ 5 pillars of wellness, in addition to MINDSET, NUTRITION and SLEEP.
The Life Delicious is applied neuroscience for everyday wellness, empowering women leaders to reclaim their time and rediscover wellness!
I hope the articles above will give you some food for thought and help fuel your everyday wellness.
Best,
Catherine