Roadmap: Activities

Lifestyle and activities that support metabolic health beyond diet: light, breathing, movement, and social contact. If you're not sure what to do with your time, pick something from the categories below.

Daily rhythm

Light, food timing, and stress reduction add up to a simple daily template. The point is to avoid the two things that push the body into the stressed, glycolytic state described in Basics: prolonged blood-sugar drops and mistimed light exposure.

• Get morning light soon after waking. Natural sunlight, or a bright incandescent/red light if it's dark or cold outside, shortly after getting up. Darkness itself registers as stress: cortisol starts rising as soon as the lights go off, and cytochrome oxidase degrades the longer the dark lasts. Light exposure acts on the whole body, including its repair processes:

  Light, play, environmental variety and exploratory conversations stimulate the whole organism in an integral way, stimulating repair processes and developmental processes.

  — Ray Peat

• Eat soon after waking, don't start the day fasted. Blood sugar falls overnight, and in a hypothyroid person adrenaline and cortisol rise to compensate, peaking around dawn; eating breakfast is what brings those stress hormones back down. See Diet: Meal timing and blood sugar for the physiology.
• Don't let long gaps open up during the day. A long midday gap without food lets blood sugar drop and the same stress-hormone response kicks in as with skipping breakfast. Smaller, more frequent meals keep the digestive system working and avoid this; see Diet: Frequency.
• Get outside and move at some point in the day, ideally around midday when light is brightest. A walk works better for this than it might seem:

  A walk through interesting and pleasant surroundings consumes more energy than does harder but more boring exercise.

  — Ray Peat

• Build in something relaxing and something meaningful, beyond whatever's merely productive. Chronic low-grade stress from an over-scheduled, joyless day suppresses metabolism the same way dietary stressors do; see the stress cascade in Basics. A day with no unstructured, enjoyable time in it is still a stressful day even if nothing goes wrong.
• Wind down before bed rather than staying wired into the evening. Avoid bright blue-heavy light (screens, overhead LEDs) late at night; incandescent or red light in the evening is gentler on the systems that regulate sleep onset. See Sleep for more. Blue-light-blocking (amber/orange) glasses are a cheap substitute for dimming every light in the house.
• Try the carrot salad, or browse ReciPeats for a new recipe
• Eat ripe fruit when it's good: fresh-squeezed OJ from sweet oranges, or ripe lychee in season, are easy fast sugar
• Eat until you're full and no more; eat things that make you feel warm; eat enough fiber to keep you regular

Adapt the timing to your own schedule; the important part is the shape of it: light and food early, activity and something enjoyable through the day, wind-down at night. Skipping a meal or missing light exposure and trying to compensate later defeats the point.

Social

• Spend time with people you trust
• Make new friends
• Hug a loved one: a 20-second hug is long enough to raise oxytocin and blunt the blood pressure and heart rate response to stress; a 3-second hug isn't.
• Make time for ordinary physical touch and affection:

  Touch is ten times stronger than verbal or emotional contact, and it affects damn near everything we do.

  — Ashley Montagu

• Do (or get someone to do) something you've been putting off out of fear or avoidance
• Call your grandma

Therapeutic

• Sit under a chicken/brooder incandescent infrared lamp: red light can restore mitochondrial enzyme activity within a minute or two, and shining it through the head of rats raised brain oxygen consumption and cognitive performance; see Red light
• Buteyko breathing or bag breathing: raises body CO2, improving oxygen delivery to tissue via the Bohr effect Re-breathing into a paper bag for a minute or two, three or four times a day, has lowered blood pressure by 10 to 20 points in some people.
• Drink sparkling water: delivers CO2 to the gut, which can help digestion, constipation, and blood flow
• Bath with supplements (eg. magnesium or baking soda)
• Aspirin soap
• Donate blood: lowers stored iron and unsaturated fat levels in the blood; Ray Peat recommended it as a way to lower excess iron, and a randomized trial of iron-reduction phlebotomy found lower cancer risk and mortality in a peripheral arterial disease population, though that is a specific patient group, not a general-population result.
• Sauna: a 20-year Finnish cohort study found regular sauna use (4-7x/week vs. 1x/week) associated with a 66% lower risk of dementia and 65% lower risk of Alzheimer's; increased BDNF is one of several proposed mechanisms (alongside cardiovascular effects and reduced neuroinflammation).
• Chew mastic gum
• Basic skincare: in shaved rabbits exposed to sunlight, skin on a high-PUFA diet wrinkled and aged quickly, while skin on a saturated fat diet resisted burning and aging.
• A good, surprising laugh:

  The therapeutic effect of laughter, which is produced by surprise, can be seen in terms of a basic organismic process of organizing resources, creatively adapting to produce a new state of readiness.

  — Ray Peat

Outdoors

Walking is a better form of exercise.

— Ray Peat

• Walk in a natural area: a Stanford study found that a 90-minute walk in nature (vs. an urban environment) reduced activity in a brain region linked to rumination and depression, and walking overall is associated with reduced all-cause mortality risk; walking in nature has also been linked to a boost in creative-output measures of around 60% in a small study
• Walk outdoors for 20-30 minutes, sitting or walking, dropped salivary cortisol with no added benefit from a specific type of nature
• Sunlight: free, supports vitamin D production. See Sunlight

  Sunlight can cure depression & increase intelligence.

  — Ray Peat

• Grounding / walking barefoot on grass: the earth's surface acts as a source of electrons, and since the head is positive, bare feet on the ground reinforce that polarity. See Grounding.
• Hike, ruck, or camp
• Time at higher altitude, occasionally: cancer and heart-disease mortality fall with elevation in US data, a counterintuitive finding that contradicts the idea that altitude's lower oxygen is simply bad for you.
• Gardening or tending plants

Creative

• Any hands-on creative outlet as a low-stress way to externalize and process thought
• Crafting (knitting, sewing, crochet): in one survey, the large majority of participants reported feeling calmer, happier, and more accomplished afterward
• Photography, painting, or drawing
• Writing: journaling, poetry, short fiction
• Playing music or humming:

  Every time you make sounds on a musical instrument, you are stimulating organized processes in your body, it's a kind of nourishment.

  — Ray Peat

  Bhramari (humming) pranayama specifically has been shown to improve heart-rate variability and reduce stress more than physical activity, emotional stress, or sleep in one study

Manual

• Woodwork
• Chop wood: in a within-subject field study of 51 forager-farmer men in the Bolivian Amazon (recruited age range 16–80), one hour of felling trees with metal-headed axes raised mean salivary testosterone by 48.6% (201.9 to 300.0 pg/mL), and age had no effect on either the baseline or the rise; a separate soccer study in the same villages, with the same saliva protocol, found a 30.1% rise.

  Muscle contraction activates the synthesis locally in the muscle of testosterone and decreases cortisol activity. So, good physical work is probably the central thing to keeping your testosterone up.

  — Ray Peat

• Build something with your hands

Sport

Concentric resistance training has an anabolic effect on the whole body.

— Ray Peat

• Concentric resistance training: see Bodybuilding & Weight loss
• Friendly sparring for technique:

  I don't think martial arts are necessarily too stressful.

  — Ray Peat

• Short sprints:

  Sprinting is probably o.k.

  — Ray Peat

• High-intensity interval exercise: sensorimotor cortex GABA rose 20% after a session in one study, correlated with the rise in blood lactate
• Swimming
• Dancing: in a 2024 review of randomized trials in adults with major depression, dance, walking or jogging, yoga, and strength training all eased depressive symptoms, and dance had the largest effect. Confidence in these results was low or very low, and the dance result rests on only a handful of small trials; see Depression: Exercise.

  I think the experience of having fun or doing something meaningful powerfully overrides the toxic effects of lactic acid and serotonin.

  — Ray Peat

Animal

• Spend time with a pet, or consider adopting one from a shelter
• Walk a dog: dog ownership has been associated with a 40% lower risk of dementia in observational studies, likely partly through more time outdoors and more daily walking (slow walk after meals increases motility)

See Animals

Mobility

• Stretching and posture work: address stiffness and misalignment directly rather than waiting on diet and hormone changes alone
• GOATA: a movement-correction system built on slow-motion analysis of natural movement patterns; no clinical studies behind it yet, treat it as a cheap, reversible practical tool rather than a proven protocol
• Foam rolling or self-massage: a two-week daily heat-plus-massage protocol lowered serum cortisol and norepinephrine versus baseline in healthy adults
• Regular walking barefoot on varied terrain to rebuild foot strength, see Walking and the Outdoors section above

Mentally challenging

• Play chess or another strategy game. In mice, living in an enriched environment from adulthood improved immune function and extended lifespan.
• Read: see the reading list and Library
• Learn a new skill:

  Cytochrome oxidase in the brain can also be increased by mental stimulation, learning, and moderate exercise.

  — Ray Peat

• Seek out something unfamiliar: a new place, skill, or subject.

  The exploratory reflex is activated by novelty, by anything which isn't understood.

  — Ray Peat

• Treat studying or practicing a skill as play rather than a chore:

  I think everything should be play. The studying. You need to think of play as a property of life, and it's a type of thinking.

  — Ray Peat

Relaxation

Warmth and quiet support relaxed, efficient breathing; noise and cold push the system toward the stress cascade described in Basics.

• Quiet time, or listening to music
• Put bioenergetic.live on in the background
• A timed daytime nap, aimed at a personal low point rather than a fixed clock time, can restore energy without wrecking night sleep.
• Yoga: one small study found a single session increased brain GABA levels by 27% immediately afterward, versus no change in a reading-session comparison group, with other studies reporting reduced anxiety and depression in women
• Tai chi:

  Some of those who claimed extreme longevity practiced controlled breathing and tai chi (involving imagery, movement, and breathing), typically in the early morning hours, when stress reduction is most important. As far as I know, there are no studies of carbon dioxide levels in practitioners of tai chi, but the sensation of warmth they typically report suggests that it involves hypoventilation.

  — Ray Peat

• A good night's sleep

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