Three Bikes, Four Habits. How I Pick the Four Things When the Week Tries to Break Me
I just got back from the bike shop. Three bikes. Three.
Tilda’s bike got a flat tire. She borrowed Erna’s bike, but that one went flat the next day. Magnus lost his brake pads, those small parts that press on the wheel. I do not even know what they are really called. He realized he had no brakes halfway down a hill and managed to stop before anything worse happened.
Three bikes, one trip to the shop. And that was only part of the week.
The list goes on.
Two things in the house are broken. The repair guy still has not called me back. The school called twice. It is the kind of issue with kids that takes more than one call to sort out. I need to schedule a follow-up with the pediatrician, but I cannot get through on the phone. There are invoices on the kitchen counter, two weeks overdue.
By Wednesday, my wife stopped saying anything reassuring. She usually keeps track when I start to lose it. That was the sign.
On Monday, I thought, fine. I’ll handle it.
By Wednesday, I hoped this was not turning into a streak.
On Friday, sitting at the kitchen table, I just thought, how is this even possible.
This was the week.
The Letter Under the Letters
I am sure some of you have had a week like this, too.
A few weeks ago, I asked what you wanted me to write about. The replies were long. People wrote in detail. Sleep that does not help. Bloodwork at forty-five. Tendons that do not heal. Racing thoughts at midnight. Supplements, dementia, GLP-1 at a normal weight.
I read every reply twice. The topics were different, but underneath, the message was the same.
I cannot do everything.
One of you put it simply: there are too many good things to do, but you cannot do them all. Someone else wrote that tips do not stick. Give me the system. Tell me why.
That is what I want to give you this Sunday: a filter. Something to help you decide what fits into your week and what does not. It should be simple enough to use even on a Friday night when three bikes are at the shop.
The Jam Study
In 2000, two psychologists from Columbia and Stanford set up a tasting booth in an upscale grocery store in California. On some days, they put out 24 jars of jam. On other days, they put out six. Same store. Same day. Same shoppers.
The 24-jar booth attracted bigger crowds. More people stopped. More people sampled. By every measure of attention, more was better.
Then they checked who actually bought a jar.
Three percent of the people at the 24-jar booth went home with jam. Thirty percent of the people at the 6-jar booth did. Ten times the conversion rate from one quarter of the selection [1].
Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper put a number on something every executive already knows. After a certain point, more options do not help. They make it harder to choose. This effect is real, and in about 100 follow-up studies, it appears most often when decisions are complex, the stakes are high, or the person is unsure what they want [2]. That describes almost every health decision a busy adult faces.
The body has the same problem in different clothes. Hans Selye described it in the 1950s. Bruce McEwen named it in 1998. Allostatic load. The wear and tear of carrying physiological stress across multiple systems at once [3]. Your hippocampus, your immune system, and your metabolic regulation. They do not get stronger when you load them with seven new interventions on a Monday. They get worse. The body adapts to a small, repeated signal. It does not adapt to a long list.
Now add in every podcast, every protocol, every supplement, every breathwork app, every cold plunge, and every blood marker on the panel you are not even sure how to read. You are not weak. You are facing the same problem as the jam shoppers. Your aisle is just longer.
The Filter
The filter is three questions and one constraint.
Question one. Does it pull a lever I am not already pulling?
Most health routines are full of overlapping interventions. You are already doing Zone 2 cardio, and now you add a supplement that promises to improve VO2 max. You sleep for 8 hours, then add magnesium glycinate, magnesium threonate, and ashwagandha for nervous system support. The body is not a slot machine. Pulling the same lever twice does not give you double the results.
The dose-response curve flattens past a threshold. The first two sessions of a week of resistance training do most of the work. The third adds a bit more. After that, the gains shrink [4].
Choose interventions that target different areas. One should work your cardiovascular system. Another should work your muscles and bones. One should help your sleep. Another should help you manage stress. Taking three types of magnesium is just pulling the same lever three times.
Question two. Will it survive a bad week?
This is where most health advice falls short. A routine that needs twelve hours of free time on the weekend, four supplements taken three hours apart, and a cold plunge before sunrise is not a routine. It is a vacation.
The body responds to consistency over time, not to heroics on the days you happen to be free. Habits run when their context is stable. They die when it is not [5]. Phillippa Lally tracked how long it actually takes habits to become automatic in real life. The median was 66 days. The range went from 18 to 254 [6]. If your habit cannot survive a Tuesday with a sick child, it will not last long enough to become a habit at all.
Question three. Can I see the signal within eight weeks?
This is the rule that separates a real intervention from blind faith.
If you cannot detect a change after eight weeks, you are operating on faith. Some interventions are worth doing on faith. Most are not.
Eight weeks is not arbitrary. Aerobic capacity improves measurably in 4 to 12 weeks of structured training [7]. Strength gains show up within four to six weeks, much of it neurological at first [8]. If your intervention should affect biology’s clock and it hasn’t after eight weeks, change something.
The constraint: only four active habits at a time. No more.
Why four. The working memory of the average adult can hold about 4 items at once under load [9]. And because every executive I know who tried to install seven habits in January is down to one by March, and that one is usually the worst of the seven.
You have four slots. If you want to add something new, you have to remove something old. That process is the real work, and most people avoid it.
My Four
Here are mine.
Strength training, two or three times a week. Two is the floor. Three, when I have the energy and the calendar. Sessions are 45 to 60 minutes. Compound lifts. I do not chase variety. I track three or four numbers and try to move them slowly. In each session, I add 10 to 15 minutes of mobility and bodyweight strength work. At my age, the future cost of poor balance and stability is greater than most people think. A 2019 meta-analysis in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology found that resistance training, on its own, was associated with a 21% lower risk of all-cause mortality, independent of cardio [10]. Two sessions a week is the dose where the curve starts to flatten. Three would be marginally better. The flexibility is the point.
Cardio, two or three times a week. Same idea. Two is the floor, three when the body says yes. One Zone 2 session, 40 to 60 minutes at a pace where I could still hold a conversation. Another is harder, focused on VO2 max. Mostly cycling. Sometimes rowing or the echo bike. Sometimes rucking with a weighted vest or pack. Running is not an option for me. My back complains every time I try, and I have stopped fighting it. VO2 max is one of the strongest predictors of all-cause mortality across age groups [11]. The Erickson trial in PNAS showed that a year of brisk walking three times a week increased hippocampal volume by 2% in older adults [12]. The same mechanism is running in your forties. You just cannot see it yet.
Sleep protection. No phone in the bedroom. Lights out by eleven on a normal night. Alcohol has been the big cut. I drink far less than I used to and rarely within four hours of bed. This is the lever everyone wants to swap for a supplement. The supplement does not exist. Slow-wave sleep is when growth hormone pulses and the body undertakes deep recovery [13]. Lose that, and you cannot lift, think, or recover from the rest of your week.
Sauna, twice a week. Twenty minutes per session. This is the goal, and I hit it most reliably when we are at our vacation place, where the sauna is part of the rhythm. The Finnish cohort study from Kuopio followed 2,300 men for over twenty years. Four to seven sauna sessions per week were associated with a 50% reduction in cardiovascular death and a 40% reduction in all-cause mortality compared to one session per week [14]. The mechanism is partly cardiovascular load, partly heat-shock protein expression, and partly stress recovery. Two is not seven. The point is the lever, not perfection.
What I take. Three things, daily. Creatine. Vitamin D through the winter. Omega-3. That is the base load. Anything beyond that, I add only when there is a specific deficit or a stretch of stress I want to counter. Then it comes off again. The default is no.
What is not on the list? Cold plunge. The Oura ring. The Whoop band. Continuous glucose monitor. Tracking apps in general. Most other supplements. The list of what failed the filter is longer than the list of what passed. That is correct.
Letting go of old habits is the real work.
Your Sunday Audit
Take ten minutes today. Do this once.
Write down everything you currently do for your health. List your morning routine, supplements, workout schedule, sleep habits, meditation app, cold plunge plan, and food rules. Be honest. Include both what you say you do and what you actually do. Make two lists.. they are not the same.
Now run the filter on each one.
Does it target an area you are not already working on? If two things do the same job, keep only one.
Will this habit survive a tough week? If it falls apart when your child is sick or work gets busy, it is not a habit. It is just a hobby.
Can you see a result within eight weeks? If not, set a way to measure it. If you cannot measure it, either drop it or accept that you are doing it on faith.
Four is the maximum, not the goal. If three habits fit your life right now, then three is right for you.
Then the implementation. Peter Gollwitzer at NYU has spent thirty years on what he calls implementation intentions. The simple version: a habit attached to a specific cue, time, and place is much more likely to actually happen than a habit you “plan to do” [15]. Not “I will train more this month.” But “Tuesday and Friday at 7 am, I drive to the gym, I do the same five lifts.” Obviously, the load progresses, and the program varies as you adapt through the year. What stays fixed is the cue, the time, the place.
Choose a specific cue, time, and place for each habit. Write these down next to each of your four.
That is your task for this Sunday.
On Your Replies
I have read every reply, some of them twice or even three times. I will keep reading them, and the topics you share will keep appearing here, one Sunday at a time.
Thank you for taking the time to write. I know how busy your weeks are. Taking a moment to share your thoughts means a lot.
Many of you wrote something I did not expect: that this newsletter is your steady Sunday read, your favorite, and that it arrives when other things do not. That moved me. It is why I write.
I will keep writing. If you know someone who would benefit, please forward this issue and encourage them to subscribe. That is how this newsletter grows, and it is the only way I want it to.
In the Upward ARC framework, this whole piece is about Capacity. The discipline to keep doing the four things that matter, even when your week tries to break you. My week tried to break me. Three bikes are still at the shop. Two things in the house are still broken. The pediatrician responded to my email and said they will send me an appointment slot. The invoices will get paid on Sunday afternoon ;-)
The four things still ran. That is what they are for.
Stay healthy.
Andre
References
[1] Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995-1006.
[2] Chernev, A., Böckenholt, U., & Goodman, J. (2015). Choice overload: A conceptual review and meta-analysis. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 25(2), 333-358.
[3] McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840(1), 33-44.
[4] Schoenfeld, B. J., Ogborn, D., & Krieger, J. W. (2016). Effects of resistance training frequency on measures of muscle hypertrophy: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Sports Medicine, 46(11), 1689-1697.
[5] Wood, W., & Rünger, D. (2016). Psychology of habit. Annual Review of Psychology, 67, 289-314.
[6] Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.
[7] Murias, J. M., Kowalchuk, J. M., & Paterson, D. H. (2010). Time course and mechanisms of adaptations in cardiorespiratory fitness with endurance training in older and young men. Journal of Applied Physiology, 108(3), 621-627.
[8] Sale, D. G. (1988). Neural adaptation to resistance training. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 20(5), S135-S145.
[9] Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87-114.
[10] Saeidifard, F., Medina-Inojosa, J. R., West, C. P., Olson, T. P., Somers, V. K., Bonikowske, A. R., Prokop, L. J., Vinciguerra, M., & Lopez-Jimenez, F. (2019). The association of resistance training with mortality: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, 26(15), 1647-1665.
[11] Mandsager, K., Harb, S., Cremer, P., Phelan, D., Nissen, S. E., & Jaber, W. (2018). Association of cardiorespiratory fitness with long-term mortality among adults undergoing exercise treadmill testing. JAMA Network Open, 1(6), e183605.
[12] Erickson, K. I., Voss, M. W., Prakash, R. S., Basak, C., Szabo, A., Chaddock, L., Kim, J. S., Heo, S., Alves, H., White, S. M., Wojcicki, T. R., Mailey, E., Vieira, V. J., Martin, S. A., Pence, B. D., Woods, J. A., McAuley, E., & Kramer, A. F. (2011). Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 3017-3022.
[13] Van Cauter, E., Spiegel, K., Tasali, E., & Leproult, R. (2008). Metabolic consequences of sleep and sleep loss. Sleep Medicine, 9(Suppl 1), S23-S28.
[14] Laukkanen, T., Khan, H., Zaccardi, F., & Laukkanen, J. A. (2015). Association between sauna bathing and fatal cardiovascular and all-cause mortality events. JAMA Internal Medicine, 175(4), 542-548.
[15] Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119.
A note for new readers:
I’m a trained reconstructive facial surgeon, medical doctor, and dentist. Before launching this newsletter, I had a varied career: competitive freestyle wrestler, management consultant (McKinsey), entrepreneur (Zocdoc, Thermondo, and docdre ventures), and corporate executive (Sandoz). Today, I’m a Managing Director and Partner at BCG.
Husband of one. Father of three. Split between Berlin’s urban pulse and our Baltic Sea retreat. I’d rather be moving than sitting. Not just hobbies. Research. My body is my primary laboratory; I’ve been conducting experiments for decades.
If this is your first time here, welcome. I’m excited to share what I’ve learned and will continue to learn with you.
DISCLAIMER:
Let’s get one thing straight: None of this, whether text, graphics, images, or anything else, is medical or health advice. This newsletter is here to inform, educate, and (hopefully) entertain you, not to diagnose or treat you.
Yes, I’m a trained medical doctor and dentist. No, I’m not your doctor. The content here isn’t a replacement for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
If you have questions about your health, talk to your physician or a qualified health professional. Don’t ignore their advice or delay getting care because of something you read in The Upward ARC. Be smart. Do your research. And, as always, take care of yourself.