Try This: How to improve memory, movement, sleep, and more

Try This readers, like many of you, I’m constantly looking to optimize or support a few key areas of my life: nutrition, sleep, focus, exercise, and community. These are fundamental to feeling good day-to-day. 

And today, I’m going to share some fascinating studies and sentiments to support each of these areas. 

High level: 

• A memory and focus hack I’ve been using daily (all you have to do is press play!)

• Why inactivity is killing us (and how to weave more movement into your daily life)

• Why sleep matters so much more than we think (a reminder to stick to your sleep goals) 

Let’s get into it! 

Boost Your Memory with Binaural Beats

This is one of my favorite hacks for focus and memory lately.

This Substack article from Brandon Luu, MD, highlights the benefits of binaural beats, created when you listen to two slightly different sound frequencies in each ear. 

Studies show that specific beta-range frequencies (14–20 Hz) can significantly improve cognitive performance. One study found that a 12-minute session of 14 Hz beats completely prevented the usual 30 percent attention drop that follows intense brain work. Even experienced meditators didn’t get that kind of protection.

Another study tested memory recall after people listened to different frequencies. The group that used 20 Hz beta beats remembered 27 percent more than the white noise group. 

Binaural beats work by synchronizing brainwaves (a process known as neural entrainment), which enhances communication between areas like the hippocampus and frontal lobe that are crucial for memory and attention.

If you want to boost attention, focus, and flow, this might be a powerful hack to try.

Here is a free evidenced based binaural beat audio that Dr. Luu uploaded to his YouTube channel: 14 Hz Binaural Beats to Combat Mental Fatigue — Shown to Prevent a 30% Drop in Attention

Exercise Isn’t the Holy Grail; It’s a Necessity   

There’s no doubt that exercise is critical for longevity, but it’s not that it’ll make you superhuman; it’s that a life without exercise is poison. 

That is the topic of this conversation between endurance athlete and science writer Brady Holmer and best-selling author Michael Easter.

In most hunter-gatherer communities, movement was woven into daily life; they didn’t "work out" because they always just moved. Even now, tribes who move throughout the day have virtually no signs of heart disease, whereas the Western world is riddled with modern diseases. 

While many people treat exercise and movement as a luxury, we actually need daily movement to just prevent chronic disease. In other words, exercise isn’t icing on the cake—it’s just a return to the baseline. 

If you have anyone in your life who is sedentary, works an office job, or puts movement on the back burner, I highly recommend sending them this conversation because lack of movement is really that detrimental.

I find that people get really hung up on working out “the right way,” but it’s not about that. Instead, many experts recommend “exercise snacks.” This is a way to weave in movement throughout the day in order to avoid being sedentary, which could help with energy, blood glucose, cardiovascular health, and more. I love this example of exercise snacks from my wife and sister-in-law’s company, beeya. 

Bottom line: If you don’t move at all, start moving. For the rest of us, yes, get in those strength training sessions, pilates classes, and long runs, and think about how you can inject movement into every part of your day. More on that here 👇

How to Easily Get More Steps In

Here’s what I’ve been doing to weave movement throughout the day and actually get 8,000 steps.

Everyone always thinks of really long walks to get in their goal of 8,000–10,000 steps. First of all, this can be really time-consuming, especially for people who don’t have big blocks of hours to walk. Second of all, this focuses all movement into one block in the day, versus getting movement in throughout the day. 

Instead, I love this advice by Greg Mushen to get up and walk for five or 10 minutes every hour. It prevents being sedentary and is an easy way to think about moving throughout the day. 

It could take a couple of weeks to get into the flow of this movement pattern, but I promise you, it's worth a shot!

172 Diseases Are Associated with Poor Sleep

I’ve written a lot about sleep before, and for a good reason. A massive study out of the UK Biobank looked at over 88,000 people’s sleep using wearable devices and tracked if their sleep behaviors (like when they go to bed, how regular their rhythm is, and how often they wake) impacted disease states. 

This research is so interesting because it used devices from wearables, rather than previous studies that have used self-reporting, which is often unreliable. Wearables told a different story, showing that what people think about their sleep can be very different from what’s actually happening.

Which, by the way, is pretty wild: 172 diseases were associated with poor sleep traits. And not just insomnia or fatigue. We’re talking diabetes, liver disease, Parkinson’s, COPD, depression, and even fractures. 

Nearly half of these diseases were tied to irregular sleep rhythm, not just short sleep. That means things like going to bed too late or having inconsistent sleep schedules could be just as risky as not sleeping enough.

This goes back to advice from a previous newsletter about picking a bedtime and sticking to it. Turns out, sleep regularity can decrease our risk of developing major diseases. You can read all about that and how to start this simple habit here. 

That’s it for this week. See you next week for more fascinating shares.

Happy Friday,
Dhru Purohit