Category: Health

May is National Foster Care Awareness Month — a time dedicated to recognizing the resilience of youth in foster care and the critical role we all play in supporting their journeys. For many of these young people, stepping onto a college campus is not just the start of a new chapter — it’s the start of a new life. That’s why Move-in Day Mafia exists: to ensure foster youth aren’t just seen during their college transition but truly supported.

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New Rooms, New Beginnings

For many, college is a time of firsts — first taste of independence, first real shot at shaping a future, and first steps into a world of possibility. It’s a season of discovery, excitement, and the thrill of the unknown. For many first-generation college students, these emotions run even deeper. But for young people emerging from the foster care system, the experience is often marked by an entirely different reality: survival.

Imagine stepping onto a college campus carrying every belonging you own in a single backpack. No parents to help set up your dorm. No family to send you care packages. No blueprint for how to navigate this brand-new world. Just hope — and the sheer will to succeed against the odds.

“Only 3–4% of youth who age out of foster care ever earn a college degree — Move-in Day Mafia is determined to change that.”

The hurdles facing foster youth are staggering. According to The National Foster Youth Institute, only about 3–4% of youth who age out of foster care ever earn a college degree. Many never even get the chance to enroll. The reasons are as heartbreaking as they are complex: unstable housing, lack of financial resources, emotional trauma, and an absence of reliable adult support. Even after overcoming these obstacles to reach a university, many foster youth find themselves isolated, ill-prepared, and overwhelmed.

That’s where Move-in Day Mafia comes in.

Move-in Day Mafia exists with a powerful, clear mission: to ensure that students from the foster care system are not forgotten as they step into college life. Their work begins with the basics — turning bare dorm rooms into safe, welcoming homes. A simple comfort like a real bed, a desk stocked with supplies, or a closet filled with essentials can mean the difference between feeling like an outsider and believing you belong.

For some of these students, a dorm room is the first stable place they’ve ever called their own. It’s their sanctuary, their launchpad, and their first real taste of what it means to dream without limits. And yet, without support, even something as basic as a furnished room can seem out of reach.

More than a Makeover

Through its involvement with Move-in Day Mafia, Cisco is helping bridge that gap. Beyond providing financial support, Cisco has mobilized its employees and resources to directly uplift these students — helping to furnish dorm rooms, supply technology needs, and ensure that no student walks into college empty-handed.

An inspiring example of this commitment is Cisco’s ongoing support for the “Adopt a Scholar” program. Through this initiative, Cisconians come together to purchase care package items for students preparing to begin their college journeys. These care packages are filled with essentials like bedding, toiletries, school supplies and even personal notes of encouragement. It’s a collective effort that brings the Cisco community together in support of new beginnings, sending a powerful message to each student: you are seen, you are valued, and you are supported.

Together, Move-in Day Mafia and Cisco are making sure that these young people — who have already faced more adversity than many do in a lifetime — have a foundation to build on. They’re sending a message that someone believes in their potential, that they are not alone, and that their dreams are valid.

For every pillow placed on a bed, every lamp set up on a desk, every laptop connected to Wi-Fi represents a new beginning. A fresh start. A way forward. Because every child deserves the chance to not just survive college — but to thrive.

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The federal government announced Wednesday that it is cancelling a contract to develop a vaccine to protect people against flu viruses that could cause pandemics, including the bird flu virus that’s been spreading among dairy cows in the U.S., citing concerns about the safety of the mRNA technology being used.

The Department of Health and Human Services said it is terminating a $766 million contract with the vaccine company Moderna to develop an mRNA vaccine to protect people against flu strains with pandemic potential, including the H5N1 bird flu virus that’s been raising fears.

“After a rigorous review, we concluded that continued investment in Moderna’s H5N1 mRNA vaccine was not scientifically or ethically justifiable,” HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon said in a statement.

“This is not simply about efficacy — it’s about safety, integrity, and trust. The reality is that mRNA technology remains under-tested, and we are not going to spend taxpayer dollars repeating the mistakes of the last administration, which concealed legitimate safety concerns from the public,” Nixon said.

He added that “the move signals a shift in federal vaccine funding priorities toward platforms with better-established safety profiles and transparent data practices. HHS remains committed to advancing pandemic preparedness through technologies that are evidence-based, ethically grounded, and publicly accountable.” The official did not provide any additional details.

Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center, said the decision was “disappointing, but unsurprising given the politically-motivated, evidence-free rhetoric that tries to paint mRNA vaccines as being dangerous.”

“While there are other means of making flu vaccines in a pandemic, they are slower and some rely on eggs, which may be in short supply,” Nuzzo added in an email. “What we learned clearly during the last influenza pandemic is there are only a few companies in the world that make flu vaccines, which means in a pandemic there won’t be enough to go around. If the U.S. wants to make sure it can get enough vaccines for every American who wants them during a pandemic, it should invest in multiple types of vaccines instead of putting all of our eggs in one basket.”

The cancellation comes even though Moderna says a study involving 300 healthy adults had produced “positive interim” results and the company “had previously expected to advance the program to late-stage development.”

“While the termination of funding from HHS adds uncertainty, we are pleased by the robust immune response and safety profile observed in this interim analysis of the Phase 1/2 study of our H5 avian flu vaccine and we will explore alternative paths forward for the program,” Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “These clinical data in pandemic influenza underscore the critical role mRNA technology has played as a countermeasure to emerging health threats.”

The administration’s move drew sharp criticism from outside experts.

“This decision puts the lives and health of the American people at risk,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown School of Public Health, who served as President Biden’s COVID-19 response coordinator.

“Bird Flu is a well known threat and the virus has continued to evolve. If the virus develops the ability to spread from person to person, we could see a large number of people get sick and die from this infection,” Jha said. “The program to develop the next generation of vaccines was essential to protecting Americans. The attack by the Administration on the mRNA vaccine platform is absurd.”

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota agreed.

“This decision will make our country far less prepared to respond to the next influenza pandemic,” he said in an email. “This is a dangerous course to follow.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the H5N1 flu virus has spread to 41 dairy herds, and 24 poultry farms and culling operations, and caused 70 human cases. While the virus has had a high mortality rate in other countries, so far H5N1 has only caused one death in the U.S. and has not shown any signs of spreading easily from one person to another. But infectious disease experts are concerned that the more the virus spreads, the greater the chance it could mutate into a form that would spread from person to person, which would increase the risk of a pandemic.

“I worried that if I stopped tracking macros, I would lose my physique.”

After years of careful macro tracking, Dr. Fundaro finally admitted to herself that the method no longer worked for her. Yet she was afraid to give it up.

If anyone should feel confident in their food choices, it would be Dr. Gabrielle Fundaro. After all, Dr. Fundaro has a PhD in Human Nutrition, a decade-plus of nutrition coaching experience, and six powerlifting competitions under her belt.

Yet, when she was really honest with herself, Dr. Fundaro realized that she felt far from confident around food. For years, she’d used macro counting as a way to stay “on track” with her eating.

And it worked… until it didn’t.

After years of macro tracking, Dr. Fundaro was tired of the whole thing. She was tired of making sure her macros were perfectly in balance. She was sick of not being able to just pick whatever she wanted off a menu and enjoy the meal, trusting that her health and physique wouldn’t go sideways as a result.

Yet the idea of not tracking freaked her out. Every time she quit tracking, she worried:

“What if I don’t eat enough protein, and lose all my muscle?”

“What if I overeat and gain fat?”

“What if I have no idea how to fuel myself without tracking macros? And what does that say about me as an expert in the field of nutrition?”

The more Dr. Fundaro wrestled with macro tracking, the more she wanted to find an alternative.

Something that would support her nutritional goals while also giving her a sense of freedom and peace around food.

Calorie counting wouldn’t do it. That was just as restrictive as counting macros—maybe more.

Intuitive eating didn’t seem like a good fit either. Intuitive eating relies heavily on a person’s ability to tune into internal hunger and fullness cues to guide food choices and amounts. After years of relying on external cues (like her macro targets), Dr. Fundaro didn’t feel trusting enough of her own instincts; she wanted more structure.

Meanwhile, at the gym, Dr. Fundaro began lifting based on the Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) scale—a framework that helps individuals quantify the amount of effort they’re putting into a given movement or activity. It’s considered a valuable tool to help people train safely and effectively according to their ability and goals. (More on that soon.)

While using the RPE scale in her training, Dr. Fundaro found she was both getting stronger and recovering better. There was something to this combination of structure and intuition that just worked.

And then, it dawned on Dr. Fundaro like the apple hit Sir Isaac Newton on the head:

If Rate of Perceived Exertion could help her train better, couldn’t a similar framework help her eat better?

With that, the RPE-Eating Scale was born.

Dr. Fundaro has since used this alternative method to help herself and her clients regain confidence and self-trust around food; improve nutritional awareness and competence; and free themselves from food tracking.

(Yup, Dr. Fundaro finally trusts her eating choices—no macro tracker in sight.)

In this article, you’ll learn how she did it, plus:

• What the RPE-Eating scale is
• How to practice RPE-Eating
• How to use RPE-Eating for weight loss or gain
• Whether RPE-Eating is right for you or your clients
• What to keep in mind if you’re skeptical of the concept

What is RPE-Eating?

Invented by Gunnar Borg in the 1960’s, Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE) is a scale that’s used to measure an individual’s perceived level of effort or exertion during exercise.

Though Borg’s RPE uses a scale that goes from 6 to 20, many modern scales use a 0 to 10 range (which is the range that Dr. Fundaro adapted for her RPE-Eating scale).

Here’s the RPE scale used in fitness.

Rating	Perceived Exertion Level
0	No exertion, at rest
1	Very light
2-3	Light
4-5	Moderate, somewhat hard
6-7	High, vigorous
8-9	Very hard
10	Maximum effort, highest possible

Originally used in physiotherapy settings, the scale is now frequently used in fitness training.

For example, powerlifters might use it to choose how heavy they want to go during a training session. Or, pregnant women might use it to ensure they aren’t over-exerting themselves during a fitness class or strength training session.

Because human experience is highly subjective and individual, the scale allows the exerciser to judge how hard they’re working for themselves. A coach can provide a general guideline, such as “aim for a 7/10 this set,” but it’s up to the client to determine exactly what that means for them.

Dr. Fundaro had used the scale many times with herself, and clients. She always appreciated the sense of autonomy it gave her clients, while still providing some structure.

So, she decided to take the same 1-10 scale and its principles, and apply it to eating.

Here’s what the RPE-Eating Scale looks like:

The goal with RPE-Eating is similar to RPE when training: Develop the skills to determine what is sufficient for you, without having to rely on other external metrics (such as apps or trackers).

How to practice RPE-Eating

If you’ve ever practiced RPE-training, you’ll know it takes some time to get used to. RPE-Eating is the same.

Don’t expect to be in lockstep with all of your body’s internal cues at first, especially if you’ve been ignoring them for a long time.

With this in mind, apply the steps below to practice the RPE-Eating process.

Step #1: Get clear on your goals.

RPE-Eating is not just another diet.

“It’s not about aiming to change your body,” Dr. Fundaro explains. “It’s not about feeling more control over your diet. Nor is it about feeling like you’re eating the ‘optimal’ diet.”

If your priority is maintaining a specific physique (such as staying ultra lean) or changing your body (building muscle or losing fat), this method can be adapted for that, though it isn’t the most efficient one to use.

Instead, RPE-Eating is about sensing into what your body needs and giving yourself appropriate nourishment—while building inner trust and confidence along the way.

“You have to trust that you’ll be able to nourish your body, and that you’ll be okay even though things may change in your body,” says Dr. Fundaro.

Admittedly, this can be challenging to do. It can also be difficult to let go of the expectation that you’ll hit the “right” macros at every meal—which RPE-Eating isn’t specifically designed to do.

However, if your goal is to build more self-trust, RPE-Eating can be a great tool to help you do that.

Step #2: Practice identifying your hunger cues

Before we explore this step, let’s distinguish between two motivators for eating.

First, there’s hunger. Hunger occurs when physical cues in your body (like a general sense of emptiness or rumbling in your stomach, or lightheadedness) tells you that you require energy—known to us mortals as food.

Then, there’s appetite. Appetite is our desire or interest in eating. It can stay peaked even after hunger is quelled, especially if something looks or tastes especially delicious—like a warm, gooey cookie offered after dinner that you feel you have to try, even though you’re technically full.

While it’s normal to eat for both hunger and appetite drives, the two can become mixed up. Especially if we have a history of dieting and tracking food.

The RPE-Eating scale helps you tap back into those true physical hunger cues, and learn the difference between hunger and appetite.

To put this in practice, try this before your next meal:

▶ Using the RPE-Eating scale mentioned above, identify your current level of hunger. Record the number on paper or the notes app on your phone.

▶ Then, eat your meal with as much presence as possible. (Note: This in itself takes practice. It can help to limit distractions, such as eating at the table rather than in front of the TV, and focusing on the flavors and textures of the food you’re eating, and how you feel eating it.)

▶ About halfway through the meal, check in again. Based on the scale, how hungry are you now? As before, record the number.

▶ If you’re still hungry, finish your meal. When you’re finished, repeat the same process, writing down where you are on the scale.

▶ Once you’re done, take a minute and tune into what your body feels like. What does it feel like to be full? “Download” that feeling into your mind and internalize it in your body, as if you’re updating your phone with the latest software.

Repeat this for as many meals as you can. Aim to do it for one meal a day for a week or so, or for as long as feels good to you. Don’t worry if you forget: simply repeat the practice when you can.

The more you practice this, the better you’ll become at being attuned with your actual hunger cues. With time, you’ll likely find you develop more trust in your internal compass than what the latest diet tracker says for your needs.

(For more on fully-tuned-in, mindful eating, read: The benefits of slow eating.)

Step #3: Get to know your non-hunger triggers

Have you ever come home after a super stressful day and you’ve basically thrown yourself onto a bag of chips or a carton of ice cream?

We might like to imagine ourselves eating every meal mindfully, using the RPE- Eating system to a tee, but life rarely works like that.

Chances are, there are certain situations that trigger you to eat more quickly, mindlessly, and beyond the point of hunger.

That’s okay.

Dr. Fundaro’s suggestion? Aim to become more aware of the situations that cause you to overeat in the first place.

To do this, you can practice something we use in PN Coaching: Notice and name.

When you find yourself scarfing down food faster than you can blink, simply try to notice what’s going on.

Can you name a feeling—such as anxiety, or sadness?

Can you identify a situation or moment that happened before you started eating—say, an argument with your teenager, or a nasty email from your boss?

Once you’ve identified the feeling, event, or person that’s triggered you to eat compulsively, see if you can also identify what you might really be needing or desiring.

Eating for comfort is normal. However, if it’s the only coping method we have, it can cause more problems than it solves in the long run.

When you find yourself with an urge to eat mindlessly, consider what non-food coping mechanisms might help you feel better. That could be 10 minutes away from your computer to close your eyes and breathe, a walk outside, or a quick call to a friend to rant—or just talk about something completely unrelated.

Getting to know your non-hunger eating triggers—plus widening your repertoire of self-soothing methods—is just as valuable as getting to know your hunger cues. Over time, this awareness will allow you to eat with more intention.

Step #4: Eat for satiety AND satisfaction

Even when you’re “adequately fueled” from a physical perspective, you might still feel unsatisfied from an emotional perspective.

That’s because, according to the RPE-Eating framework, eating should fulfill two criteria:

▶ Satiety describes the physical sensation of being full; your calorie or fuel needs are met.

▶ Satisfaction describes a more holistic feeling of being nourished; your calorie needs are met, but your meal also felt pleasurable.

If you ate to satiety only, your calorie needs might be met and your physical hunger quelled, but you might still feel unsatisfied—maybe because chocolate is on your “don’t” list, and even though you’ve eaten everything else in your kitchen that isn’t chocolate, nothing quite “hit the spot.”

In other words, you can eat to satiety at every meal, yet still be “restricting” foods.

You may not be restricting calories per se, but you may have banned entire food groups—baked goods, pizza, or whatever else curls your toes. This can lead to a feeling of constantly needing to police yourself, and doesn’t leave much room for the flexibility and spontaneity that real-life (enjoyable) eating requires.

(Plus, avoiding particular foods tends to work like a pendulum: restrict now; binge later. If you want to learn how to stop those wild swings, read: How to eat junk food: A guide for conflicted humans)

Satisfaction is a key part of eating.

After all, humans don’t just eat for adequate nutrients and energy. We eat for other reasons too: pleasure, novelty, tradition, community, enjoyment.

So, to take your RPE-Eating to the next level, Dr. Fundaro recommends trying it with meals and foods you genuinely enjoy.

If any foods or meals have been “off-limits,” try eating them using the RPE technique. (Macaroni and cheese, anyone?)

Practice using the scale with a variety of meals (including those you may have restricted previously), and notice how you feel over time.

With experience, you’ll get to know what it feels like to adequately fuel yourself with a variety of foods—including those you genuinely enjoy.

How to use RPE- Eating for weight loss or weight gain

According to Dr. Fundaro, the best way to use RPE-Eating is in a weight-neutral setting.

While it could be used for weight modification, she doesn’t recommend treating it as another way to hit your macros or “goal weight.”

“I’m not anti-weight modification,” Dr. Fundaro explains. “I’m pro safe weight modification. I compare weight loss to contact sports. There are inherent risks but they can be mitigated through best practices.”

Dr. Fundaro elaborates: “Since RPE-Eating removes macro-tracking, which can increase risk of disordered eating in some people, and relies on biofeedback and non-hunger triggers, RPE-Eating provides a safety net that macro-tracking alone doesn’t provide.”

But if you do want to use RPE-Eating for intentional weight change, what should you do?

Dr. Fundaro recommends aiming to hover around the ranges that support your goal.

(As a reminder, a 1 to 3 on the RPE-Eating scale is categorized as “inadequate fuel; a 4 to 7 is categorized as “adequate fuel”; and a 8 to 10 is categorized as “excess fuel.”)

▶ If the goal is weight gain, you’ll likely aim to eat within the 7 to 8 range for most of your meals.

▶ If the goal is weight loss, you’ll likely aim to eat within the 4 to 5 range for most of your meals.

A key thing to remember is that you would never use RPE-Eating for extreme weight-modification such as for a bodybuilding competition. “That would be like using physio exercises to prepare for a powerlifting competition.” In other words, it’s not the right tool for the job.

Hold up, bro: Isn’t this just feelings over facts?

If you’re skeptical and think this is just eating “based on your feelings,” keep in mind that RPE was once laughed at by lifters, too.

These days, RPE and autoregulation are widely accepted in gym culture and have been studied as a valid method for managing and guiding your training. ¹

RPE isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty accurate and incredibly convenient. A lot more convenient than, say, using a velocity loss tracker for every set. ^{2 3}

And while it might seem like it’s all feelings-based, the RPE scale is actually built around practicing the skill of interoceptive awareness—the awareness of internal sensations in your body.

The better you get at the skill of interoceptive awareness, the more you’ll be able to use that awareness to make informed decisions about your training.

RPE-Eating is similar: It builds the skill of sensing into your own body, and lets your internal sensations guide your decisions.

Similar to how the bar slowing down on a squat would indicate you’re getting closer to failure, experiencing the absence of hunger at the end of your meal would indicate you’re closer to being full.

Instead of tracking your glucose levels to validate your perceived hunger, you use internal cues that correlate with lowered blood sugar and coincide with hunger.

And, let’s be real: Being mindful of stomach grumbling or general hunger pangs is much more convenient and accessible than tracking glucose readings.

This process will not be perfect. You may undereat or overeat at first. But over time, with practice, you’ll build the core skills of RPE-Eating.

Are there downsides to RPE-Eating?

While this tool can be helpful, it’s just a tool. A screwdriver is great, but it isn’t useful when you need a hammer.

RPE-Eating can be great for helping you become more aware of your internal hunger cues and build a better relationship with food along the way.

It can also be more laborious. It requires paying real attention to your feelings (physical and emotional), and reflecting on them.

This can be difficult for anyone—but especially people who aren’t able to sit at the table and have a leisurely meal, like parents with small kids, or people with work schedules that require eating on-the-go.

If this is you, just use RPE-Eating when it does work for you—or simply pick and choose specific steps to use in isolation. For example, maybe you try RPE-Eating on the occasional quiet lunch break. Or, maybe you focus solely on developing your awareness of hunger and fullness cues, without trying to change anything else.

If you’ve been tracking macros for a long time, it can be hard to stop.

Tracking macros isn’t inherently bad. It can actually be a helpful tool to teach you more about nutrition. But it’s also not something most people want to do for the rest of their lives.

The problem is, if you’ve depended on tracking your food intake, stopping can feel scary.

In these cases, RPE-Eating can be used as a kind of off-ramp to help transition away from rigid and restrictive macro tracking.

(It can also help loosen the compulsion to “always finish your plate.” Though macros tracking and habitual plate-cleaning may sound different, they’re actually similar: both rely on external cues—such as macro targets or what’s served on your plate—to determine when you’re “done.”)

RPE-Eating won’t take away all the scary feelings that may come with changing ingrained ways of eating.

However, it can provide some structure and language to help you, or your clients, eat with less fear, less stress, and a bit more confidence.

“The goal,” says Dr. Fundaro, “is to know that you’re nourishing yourself—and you don’t need a food tracker to do that.”

References

Click here to view the information sources referenced in this article.

Dry lips are something I think about more in the winter, but they happen in the summer too. Especially when you live in a really hot climate or sweat a lot (like I do). This lip balm recipe features healthy tallow for a natural way to pamper your lips!

What is Tallow?

Some of the latest health trends have featured vegan and plant-based ingredients. And while there are some really good plant-based skincare ingredients, animal based ones can be a nutritional powerhouse. If those ingredients come from pasture-raised, free-range, and otherwise healthy animals that is.

Tallow is making a comeback and getting it’s time in the limelight. This ancient, animal based fat comes from cows, but you can also render fat from pigs (lard), and other animals. Sheep tallow is also supposed to be really good, but I used beef tallow in this lip balm.

Tallow is naturally high in the fatty acids palmitate, stearate, and oleate. Our skin’s top layers are largely composed of lipids (fats), and this barrier needs to be protected to avoid skin damage. Since tallow is an animal fat it has the unique ability to interact with our skin’s lipids. A meta-analysis also found that tallow may increase the fatty acid composition in our skin, plus it hydrates and moisturizes.

Altogether this makes tallow a great option for protecting and moisturizing our lips. You can read more about tallow’s benefits here.

Other Lip Nourishing Ingredients

Tallow on it’s own will work just fine, but it is temperature sensitive. It also doesn’t travel too well in a lip balm container. I’ve added beeswax to this recipe to add some more firmness and provide even more of a protective barrier on skin. You can make this with half tallow and half beeswax, but I also wanted to add a liquid carrier oil.

I used apricot oil, but any liquid carrier oil will work. Olive oil, avocado oil, jojoba oil, macadamia nut oil, and sweet almond oil are all good options.

And lastly, I used some essential oils to give it a nice scent. Be sure to use ones that are safe for lips to avoid any irritation or photosensitivity. The last thing you want is to slather on some lime flavored lip balm before a day at the beach and get a nasty lip sunburn! Here’s a list of some essential oils that are safe to use on the lips (as long as they’re diluted).

• Sweet orange
• Lavender
• Rose
• Frankincense
• Grapefruit
• Patchouli
• Peppermint
• Geranium
• Tangerine

You can also mix and match to create your own scent! The recommended maximum dilution ratio for lips is often (but not always) 4 to 5 percent. This recipes uses the essential oils at 2%, but you can change the amount (or omit) if desired. You can find high quality essential oils here.

How Many Lip Balms Does This Make?

Typical lip balm tubes hold just a little less than 1 teaspoon. This recipe will fill about 10 lip balm tubes, but you can increase or decrease the amount as desired. I used metal lip slide tins and this recipe yielded 5 of those.

More Lip Recipes

If you’re on a roll and feel like making more DIY lip recipes, here are a few of my favorites.

Are you a lip balm fan? What are some of your favorite flavors or scents to use? Leave a comment and let us know!

Introduction

As AI adoption accelerates across industries, businesses face an undeniable truth — AI is only as powerful as the data that fuels it. To truly harness AI’s potential, organizations must effectively manage, store, and process high-scale data while ensuring cost efficiency, resilience, performance and operational agility. 

At Cisco Support Case Management – IT, we confronted this challenge head-on. Our team delivers a centralized IT platform that manages the entire lifecycle of Cisco product and service cases. Our mission is to provide customers with the fastest and most effective case resolution, leveraging best-in-class technologies and AI-driven automation. We achieve this while maintaining a platform that is highly scalable, highly available, and cost-efficient. To deliver the best possible customer experience, we must efficiently store and process massive volumes of growing data. This data fuels and trains our AI models, which power critical automation solutions to deliver faster and more accurate resolutions. Our biggest challenge was striking the right balance between building a highly scalable and reliable database cluster while ensuring cost and operational efficiency. 

Traditional approaches to high availability often rely on separate clusters per datacenter, leading to significant costs, not just for the initial setup but to maintain and manage the data replication process and high availability. However, AI workloads demand real-time data access, rapid processing, and uninterrupted availability, something legacy architectures struggle to deliver. 

So, how do you architect a multi-datacenter infrastructure that can persist and process massive data to support AI and data-intensive workloads, all while keeping operational costs low? That’s exactly the challenge our team set out to solve. 

In this blog, we’ll explore how we built an intelligent, scalable, and AI-ready data infrastructure that enables real-time decision-making, optimizes resource utilization, reduces costs and redefines operational efficiency. 

Rethinking AI-ready case management at scale

In today’s AI-driven world, customer support is no longer just about resolving cases, it’s about continuously learning and automating to make resolution faster and better while efficiently handling the cost and operational agility.  

The same rich dataset that powers case management must also fuel AI models and automation workflows, reducing case resolution time from hours or days to mere minutes, which helps in increased customer satisfaction. 

This created a fundamental challenge: decoupling the primary database that serves mainstream case management transactional system from an AI-ready, search-friendly database, a necessity for scaling automation without overburdening the core platform. While the idea made perfect sense, it introduced two major concerns: cost and scalability. As AI workloads grow, so does the amount of data. Managing this ever-expanding dataset while ensuring high performance, resilience, and minimal manual intervention during outages required an entirely new approach. 

Rather than following the traditional model of deploying separate database clusters per data center for high availability, we took a bold step toward building a single stretched database cluster spanning multiple data centers. This architecture not only optimized resource utilization and reduced both initial and maintenance costs but also ensured seamless data availability. 

By rethinking traditional index database infrastructure models, we redefined AI-powered automation for Cisco case management, paving the way for faster, smarter, and more cost-effective support solutions. 

How we solved it – The technology foundation

Building a multi-data center modern index database cluster required a robust technological foundation, capable of handling high-scale data processing, ultra-low latency for faster data replication, and careful design approach to build a fault-tolerance to support high availability without compromising performance, or cost-efficiency. 

Network Requirements

A key challenge in stretching an index database cluster across multiple data centers is network performance. Traditional high availability architectures rely on separate clusters per data center, often struggling with data replication, latency, and synchronization bottlenecks. To begin with, we conducted a detailed network assessment across our Cisco data centers focusing on: 

• Latency and bandwidth requirements – Our AI-powered automation workloads demand real-time data access. We analyzed latency and bandwidth between two separate data centers to determine if a stretched cluster was viable.  
• Capacity planning – We assessed our expected data growth, AI query patterns, and indexing rates to ensure that the infrastructure could scale efficiently. 
• Resiliency and failover readiness – The network needed to handle automated failovers, ensuring uninterrupted data availability, even during outages. 

How Cisco’s high-performance data center paved the way

Cisco’s high-performance data center networking laid a strong foundation for building the multi-data center stretch single database cluster. The latency and bandwidth provided by Cisco data centers exceeded our expectation to confidently move on to the next step of designing a stretch cluster. Our implementation leveraged:

• Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) – Offered a policy-driven, software-defined network, ensuring optimized routing, low-latency communication, and workload-aware traffic management between data centers.  
• Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and Nexus 9000 Switches – Enabled high-throughput, resilient, and dynamically scalable interconnectivity, crucial for quick data synchronization across data centers. 

The Cisco data center and networking technology made this possible. It empowered Cisco IT to take this idea forward and enabled us to build this successful cluster which saves significant costs and provides high operational efficiency.

Our implementation – The multi-data center stretch cluster leveraging Cisco data center and network power

With the right network infrastructure in place, we set out to build a highly available, scalable, and AI-optimized database cluster spanning multiple data centers.

 

Cisco multi-data center stretch Index database cluster

 

Key design decisions

• Single logical, multi-data center cluster for real-time AI-driven automation – Instead of maintaining separate clusters per data center which doubles costs, increases maintenance efforts, and demands significant manual intervention, we built a stretched cluster across multiple data centers. This design leverages Cisco’s exceptionally powerful data center network, enabling seamless data synchronization and supporting real-time AI-driven automation with improved efficiency and scalability.  
• Intelligent data placement and synchronization – We strategically position data nodes across multiple data centers using custom data allocation policies to ensure each data center maintains a unique copy of the data, enhancing high availability and fault tolerance. Additionally, locally attached storage disks on virtual machines enable faster data synchronization, leveraging Cisco’s robust data center capabilities to achieve minimal latency. This approach optimizes both performance and cost-efficiency while ensuring data resilience for AI models and critical workloads. This approach helps in faster AI-driven queries, reducing data retrieval latencies for automation workflows. 
• Automated failover and high availability – With a single cluster stretched across multiple data centers, failover occurs automatically due to the cluster’s inherent fault tolerance. In the event of virtual machine, node, or data center outages, traffic is seamlessly rerouted to available nodes or data centers with minimal to no human intervention. This is made possible by the robust network capabilities of Cisco’s data centers, enabling data synchronization in less than 5 milliseconds for minimal disruption and maximum uptime. 

Results

By implementing these AI-focused optimizations, we ensured that the case management system could power automation at scale, reduce resolution time, and maintain resilience and efficiency. The results were realized quickly.

• Faster case resolution: Reduced resolution time from hours/days to just minutes by enabling real-time AI-powered automation. 
• Cost savings: Eliminated redundant clusters, cutting infrastructure costs while improving resource utilization.  
  • Infrastructure cost reduction: 50% savings per quarter by limiting it to one single-stretch cluster, by completing eliminating a separate backup cluster. 
  • License cost reduction: 50% savings per quarter as the licensing is required just for one cluster. 
• Seamless AI model training and automation workflows: Provided scalable, high-performance indexing for continuous AI learning and automation improvements. 
• High resilience and minimal downtime: Automated failovers ensured 99.99% availability, even during maintenance or network disruptions. 
• Future-ready scalability: Designed to handle growing AI workloads, ensuring that as data scales, the infrastructure remains efficient and cost-effective.

By rethinking traditional high availability strategies and leveraging Cisco’s cutting-edge data center technology, we created a next-gen case management platform—one that’s smarter, faster, and AI-driven.

 

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To most people, the eight-person team was indistinguishable from the hundreds of other scientists and researchers cut in April during the mass firings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But for many clinicians who specialize in women’s health, losing the team responsible for the CDC’s contraception guidelines was a devastating blow to women’s health.

“ I just remember feeling like — of all the things — I think contraception shouldn’t be controversial,” says Dr. Angeline Ti, a family physician in the Atlanta, Georgia area who specializes in reproductive healthcare.

The team was responsible for aggregating and disseminating best practices around contraception in a set of guidelines called U.S. Medical Eligibility Criteria for Contraceptive Use.

“I knew that things were gonna happen at CDC, but I thought that these guidelines were so important,” says Ti. She says she uses the guidelines “pretty much every time” she sees a patient for contraceptive care.

Other doctors describe feeling equally shocked. “I mean, there is no other resource that is doing this,” says Dr. Andrea Braden, an obstetrician in Atlanta, Georgia. “All the OB-GYN’s use it.”

Representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Trump administration did not explain why the CDC team was cut. It was eliminated in April as part of the reduction of the Women’s Health and Fertility Branch of the Division of Reproductive Health.

NPR reached out to HHS for comment on this story, but did not receive a response.

 An indispensable app

Busy doctors who are seeing many patients, says Braden, simply do not have time to comb through all the latest medical research. So, the CDC team made recommendations available in an app that doctors could download and easily reference with questions about contraception, including how to navigate the topic for patients with specific conditions and diseases. It was downloaded 440,000 times, according to the CDC.

“The app was just a game changer for us,” says Braden. “That was very clearly organized, really easy to digest, and it was such a nice quick reference for us. It was a resource that we all trusted intuitively.”

The current guidelines are still accessible, while the team charged with updating them no longer exists.

Doctors caution that even though the recommendations were issued relatively recently, without careful monitoring they will soon be out of date. “ Medicine is not static,” says Dr. Deva Sharma, a hematologist who said the guidelines are a critical part of her medical practice. “It’s constantly evolving and improving.”

The team issued guidelines most recently in 2024. One example of a change that Braden says had a significant impact on her conversations with her patients is around recommendations for breastfeeding mothers using birth control. The new guidelines for the first time acknowledged that some contraception can jeopardize milk supply in nursing mothers.

This update, she says, represented a sea change in a way of thinking about the importance of empowering patients to make their own decisions about breastfeeding. “ That was such an important aspect of the update,” says Braden. “It helped us guide our practice, rather than tell people what they need after they have a baby. It really put the patient at the center of the conversation.”

For some patients and doctors dealing with specific conditions, conversations about contraception can be matters of life or death. Sharma specializes in treating women with Sickle Cell disease — an inherited red blood cell disorder — which puts patients at a much greater risk of life threatening complications in pregnancy than people without the disease.

Sharma calls the termination of the CDC team “detrimental to women’s health,” and also recalls vividly the moment she found out when a colleague sent her a message. “I remember just feeling overwhelmed and devastated,” says Sharma.

In the recent guidelines, the CDC team changed recommendations for women with Sickle Cell Disease, which already puts patients at increased risk for blood clots. Doctors who treat this disease say they now rarely prescribe certain forms of contraception to their patients due to new evidence suggesting these kinds of treatments can create an even greater risk.

Braden says she is still feeling confused as to why such a valuable resource was eliminated. “ I don’t understand,” she says “Why them? Why this sector of medicine? This is a waste.”

She warns that doctors will not be able to compensate for the medical updates that this guide provides. “ Medicine changes so quickly and it is very difficult to keep up with all of it,” she warns. “New data comes out — new research comes out — and we find out that there’s a better way to do things. Contraceptive medicine is no different from that.”

Missing treatment options are hard to measure 

Many patients will not necessarily know about medical updates they do not benefit from, but Teonna Woolford is one patient who does understand the utility of the CDC’s guidelines around contraception.

Born with Sickle Cell Disease, Woolford started a non-profit, Sickle Cell Reproductive Education Directive, that advocates for patients like herself. Woolford says the disease is often characterized by uncertainty and difficulty in making hard decisions around treatment.

“Having the guidelines was really like a proactive approach to addressing contraception,” says Woolford. “There are a lot of knowledge and research gaps on this subject.”

Sickle Cell Disease disproportionately affects people of color, a group that Woolford notes has not historically enjoyed parity in reproductive justice. “The removal of the CDC team to me just reminds me of darker times in our history when people of color were oppressed,” she says.

Black women in the United States have disproportionately high rates of maternal mortality.

Dr. Braden sees the team’s elimination as a setback to women everywhere. “It really hurts those of us in women’s health — to target something like contraceptives.” says Braden. “This is basic healthcare for OBGYNs and it was really defeating. I would say I felt angry and sad and confused.”

She and other doctors point out that many women in the U.S. can no longer legally terminate pregnancy. They say that makes it especially important for them to be able to make an informed choice about the best ways to prevent becoming pregnant in the first place.

“ Bodily autonomy has been taken away from women in various states,” says Dr. Sharma, who practices in Tennessee — a state with strict abortion laws. “We’ve slashed people’s rights to make decisions,” she says. “Now we’re taking away evidence-based recommendations.”

While our ancestors relied on their senses to assess how they were doing, increasingly, we rely on gadgets.

Today, if you’re curious enough, you can measure your heart rate, your step count, your exercise intensity, and your sleep quality—sometimes all on one sleek device.

In the best cases, these devices offer a bridge between what you subjectively feel and what you can objectively measure.

This is generally a really cool and amazing thing.

Our subjective feelings and assessments matter, but they’re not always the most reliable. Us humans just aren’t particularly skilled at quantifying our experiences and behaviors with cold precision.

Take, for example, a colleague of mine. He believed he was eating within a narrow caloric window, but after careful tracking, he learned that he was putting away a bonus 500 Calories a day—in barbecue sauce.

That said, some of us are better than others.

Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter, was reported to have been able to call out his 100 metre time within a tenth of a second of the stopwatch readout.¹

That’s outlier performance, to be clear, but it still makes you wonder:

How good are you at assessing yourself?

And, how can you improve your accuracy through the wise use of technology—like fitness trackers—to help you make better decisions about your health?

In the following article, we’ll tackle the above, plus we’ll address:

• How accurate are data trackers in the first place?
• When is tracking helpful? (And when is it not?)
• Can you train yourself to more accurately assess things by feel?

Let’s get into it.

First, how accurate are data trackers anyway?

Not all data is created equal.

Some brands produce better products than others. This is not just hardware but also the quality of their software and datasets.

Beyond that, not all things are equally easy to quantity.

For example, heart rate and step-count data are generally reliable,² but many other types of outputs—from calories burned to movement velocity—have substantial margins for error.

The below chart shows the reliability of various tracking devices.

(If you’re curious, we cover the accuracy of various progress indicators in more detail here: Are Fitness Trackers Worth It?)

Next, when is tracking actually helpful?

The good: Tracking devices offer us more data about our behaviors and bodies than ever before.

The bad: Tracking devices offer us more data about our behaviors and bodies than ever before.

“What’s really remarkable,” says Samantha Kleinberg, a computer scientist who studies decision-making, “is that even a tiny amount of surplus information has a big negative effect on our decision-making.”³

That’s the paradox of tracking: Too little detail makes it tough to make the right decision, but so does too much.

This can be expressed as an inverted U, with the sweet spot at the top of the curve.

Today, it’s surprisingly easy to have too much information.

Consider the analysis paralysis you feel after scanning hundreds of reviews from the various taco places in your neighborhood. (All you wanted was a decent el pastor, but now you don’t know which taqueria to pick!)

Finding just enough information to make good decisions is an art form—especially in the world of health and fitness, where it seems like everyone is trying to outdo each other when it comes to providing more science, more customization, and more complexity.

But when all that information starts to blur together with no clear path forward, what should you do?

For starters, you can ask yourself a simple question:

Does tracking increase my wellbeing and performance?

If the answer is a clear yes or no, you know what to do. (Either continue tracking as you were, or drop the gadget and walk away.)

If you’re a little fuzzy, here are three signs to watch for to help you determine if tracking is helpful—or not.

Sign #1: Tracking is decreasing your stress and validating your method(s).

When Zak’s coach raved about the benefits of zone 2 cardio, it sounded logical. But when the rubber on his running shoes hit the road, Zak second-guessed everything. Zak prided himself on his ability to grind, and simply didn’t trust that something that felt easy could also be effective.

Yet, the data didn’t lie. As the weeks went by, Zak watched his resting heart rate drop—along with his recovery time from hard runs. With that reassurance, Zak began to relax about the process—and his resting heart rate dropped further.

Zak hadn’t trusted his feelings, but he did trust the data from his heart rate monitor.

Using a tracking device enabled Zak to calibrate his own perceptions so they were more accurate and realistic.

If you’re a coach who has a client like Zak who’s high performing but doesn’t know it, tracking can help build confidence and reduce the anxiety that they’re “not good enough.”

Here, you empower them by shining a spotlight on existing performance. Expert assurance can go a long way but can also be bolstered by reliable data.

(Recently, many people have begun using continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs, in order to “optimize” their blood sugar levels. This can help “validate” certain food choices… but it can also be a waste of time. Read more: Should people without diabetes use CGMs?)

Bad omen: Tracking is increasing stress or negatively affecting performance.

Sometimes, data can stress you out without any upside—like when you receive poor scores about things beyond your control.

Take the new parent of a newborn who gets a poor sleep quality score.

Tracking has a time and a place. When scores are beyond your control or your priorities lie elsewhere, tracking can create unnecessary stress and is counterproductive.

You can always revisit tracking when circumstances or priorities change.

Sign #2: Clear feedback from data is enhancing your motivation and ability.

For a behaviour to take place, you need three things⁴:

• Motivation: A compelling reason or desire to take action toward achieving something. This can come from external sources (your spouse is urging you to quit smoking) or internal drives (you’ve always dreamed of running a marathon).
• Ability: You have a combination of skills, plus opportunities to express them. (For example, you know how to do a simple resistance training routine, and you have 20 minutes a day to execute it.) This may involve overcoming constraints like time, money, mental and/or physical effort, social pressures, and changes to routine.⁵
• Prompt: A prompt is a cue or instruction that elicits an action. (For example, when your GPS tells you to turn left, or when your restless legs “remind” you you’re due for a walk.) Critically, even with high levels of motivation and ability, you may not take action—or the right kind of action—without a prompt.

Fitness trackers shine when you’ve got plenty of motivation and ability—and just lack the prompt.

Take my client, Margaret. She used to have a glass of wine most nights, believing it helped her sleep better. Once she started wearing a sleep tracker though, she saw that her sleep quality was much poorer the nights she imbibed. Once she received this prompt—her sleep score—she adjusted her behavior.

When you highlight important data, the right choices become clearer.

When it comes to changing behaviours, sometimes all it takes is one key piece of data. As they say, “Once you see it, you can’t un-see it.”

(PN’s CEO Tim Jones used the feedback he got from various lifestyle trackers to finally reduce his genetically high cholesterol levels—and built a richer, more meaningful life in the process. Read more: How This Guy Cut His Cholesterol in Half Without Drugs)

Bad omen: Data collection is decreasing motivation or ability.

When Jan, an avid recreational cyclist, found out he could view—then demolish—the records set on local biking trails, he set to work. But as those records were destroyed, so too was his ability to ride for enjoyment. His focus on speed left him under-recovered and eventually led to burnout.

If workouts have become more about the numbers and less about technique, experience, or even enjoyment, tracking is likely no longer helpful.

Sign #3: Tracking is helping you understand yourself better.

The harder you work, the better your results.

Right?

Not necessarily.

This belief tends to get grinders like Zak into trouble because they think they’re making progress—but really they’re just getting in their own way, even inhibiting performance and recovery.

Meanwhile, there are also many people who chronically underestimate their effort and capacity, and would benefit from turning up the heat. Here, data can help us more accurately understand our own potential.

Let’s look at high-intensity interval training (HIIT) as an example. HIIT workouts alternate fixed periods of intense effort with fixed periods of rest. However, these fixed periods of rest are just estimates of recovery times.

Heart rate data can create a more individualized picture of actual recovery needs, which may be faster or slower than you expect.

Sometimes, the mind says yes but the heart says not quite yet.

A good coach does more than just simply ask for more. They also help keep clients out of the unproductive “junk volume” zone, where fatigue accumulates but performance doesn’t improve (and maybe even worsens).

By looking at real-time metrics of output, fatigue, and recovery, you can better understand yourself and your clients, and help keep everyone training and recovering efficiently.

Bad omen: Over-reliance on data is making you lose touch with your own senses.

When you become overly reliant on data, you risk losing touch with your own sense of how you feel, whether that’s hunger and fullness levels, energy and fatigue, or something else.

A relevant example is “The Great My Fitness Pal Blackout.”

In January of 2019, the calorie-tracking app (with a reported 200 million subscribers!) went down for a day. Pretty minor—unless you happened to be tracking your macro and caloric intake and waiting for the app to tell you exactly how much you could eat that day… which I was.

When the app wouldn’t load, I recognized the mild panic I felt was unhelpful. My overreliance on the app had disconnected me from my own internal signals, and without it, I felt adrift. Since then, I’ve shifted my focus to how energetic I feel and one of the oldest tracking technologies available: the mirror.

(If you feel like you’re lost without your besties—your phone and your apps—there’s a name for that. There are also ways to develop a healthier relationship with your tech. Read more: What is nomophobia?)

3 ways to use fitness trackers to help you make more accurate self-assessments

Before we get to how to do the above, let’s talk about why assessing things by feel can be so important.

Whether it’s body fat percentage or movement speed, even supremely motivated and capable clients will experience diminishing objective results from their training.

The scale stops dropping, the number of plates you’re able to load on the bar plateaus, or—gasp—your race time even regresses.

Motivation based purely on progress or other extrinsic goals⁶ will fall away during these times.

However, exercisers who focus on feelings of mindfulness⁷, mastery, meaning⁸, and success⁹ develop a more resilient practice. They also enjoy the process more, whether that’s the process of running, lifting, winding down for a good night’s sleep, or just enjoying a meal.

So, although objective data can provide essential feedback and guidance, you’ll only reap the full benefits of your practice—that is, enjoyment and results—if you maintain connection with your felt experience.

And good news: You can actually use fitness trackers to calibrate and even improve your ability to accurately sense what’s happening in your body.

Here are three ways to do it.

1. Check in with yourself before you check the data.

Can you imagine asking someone how their vacation was and then waiting for them to look at their photos to be able to answer? That’s what it’s like when you rely purely on external data about your own experience.

Whatever the metric—how far you biked, how many calories you consumed, or how fast your heart was beating—the simplest way to work mindfully with tracker data is to pause, breathe, and then tune into the powerful (if not always accurate) prediction-making powers of your brain.

Once you’ve checked in with yourself, you can calibrate your self-assessment by comparing the detailed (if not always accurate) outputs of your fitness tracker.

Over time, you may be able to narrow the gap between two.

(Note: Don’t forget to regularly update your app. Algorithms and data sets are regularly adjusted for better predictive accuracy.)

2. Develop mental shortcuts that can occasionally stand in for objective measures.

The coaches I work with regularly ask people to estimate the boundaries of their strength (such as how many reps they can do at a given weight until failure).

Novices are often terrible at estimating this—and regularly off the mark by five or more reps. However, the use of objective trackers can help calibrate their understanding, and most people can reduce their margin of error dramatically.

In theory, you might use fancy tools like accelerometers or blood lactate measurements, but our coaches just ask, “For a million dollars a rep, how many more reps do you think you could do?”

Though there’s nothing objective about this question, most clients are able to use the prompt as a kind of shortcut to understand maximal effort. (After all, that last rep may be worth seven figures!)

The question also leverages the rate of perceived exertion (RPE)—your perception of how hard you’re working—which is one of the most validated sensory-driven approaches.

Not everyone is automatically good at estimating RPE, but most people can improve their skills by mapping their felt experience with occasional calibration with objective data.

3. Keep developing your ability to dial into your senses.

Trackers have components like accelerometers, GPS, and gyroscopes to sense data about speed, distance, and more.

But humans are no slouches either.

We have…

• Mechanoreceptors that respond to pressure, vibration, and the joint angles change
• A vestibular system that monitors balance and angle changes
• Proprioceptors that clock the speed and rate of length-change of muscle spindles
• Thermoreceptors that register register warming or cooling
• Chemoreceptors that detect chemical changes, such as scent or taste, as well as changes in the bloodstream
• Nociceptors—part of the body’s alarm system—that sense threat and send signals of potential harm or distress

And that’s only a partial list.

You have access to an incredibly rich network of sensory information—something that technology cannot begin to touch.

All of this information is fed into the powerful pattern-recognition machine of your nervous system.

To continue honing your ability to use this rich network of sensory information, regularly check in with what and how you’re feeling.

When you learn to calibrate your own senses with objective data, you can leverage all the cool advances in wearable tech—while still keeping your own experience front and centre.

References

Click here to view the information sources referenced in this article.

If you’re a coach, or you want to be…

You can help people build sustainable nutrition and lifestyle habits that will significantly improve their physical and mental health—while you make a great living doing what you love. We’ll show you how.

If you’d like to learn more, consider the PN Level 1 Nutrition Coaching Certification. (You can enroll now at a big discount.)

While I won’t claim an award for organization or minimalism with my nightstand… it is a carefully curated hub of tools and essentials. They support my health, improve my sleep, and set the tone for a productive day ahead. I also mentioned in my habit-stacking podcast and post that the nightstand is also a great place to put visual reminders of healthy habits since it’s the first thing I see in the morning. 

Let me walk you through everything on my nightstand and explain why it’s there.

1. Quart-Sized Mason Jar With Salt

First things first: hydration. On my nightstand, you’ll find a quart-sized mason jar filled with water and a teaspoon of high-quality mineral salt dissolved in it. Why? Because rehydrating first thing in the morning is non-negotiable for me. Overnight, we lose water through respiration and sweat, leaving our bodies dehydrated. Adding a pinch of salt to water provides essential electrolytes, helping to:

• Replenish hydration levels
• Support adrenal function
• Balance blood pressure
• Kickstart digestion

Sometimes, I mix it up by dissolving the salt directly in my mouth before drinking plain water. Either way, this small morning ritual has a big impact on my energy levels and overall well-being. Lately, I’ve been using these microplastic-free salts. Check out these posts and this podcast for more about why I love salt! 

2. Morning and Evening Supplements

A good night’s sleep is only half the battle; what you do in the morning matters just as much. I keep my go-to supplements on my nightstand to ensure I never miss them. Here’s what I’m taking and why:

• Magnesium Breakthrough: I take magnesium in the morning because I’m an inverse modulator, but many people find it’s more effective at night. Magnesium is essential for hundreds of processes in the body. It supports muscle function, reduces stress, and promotes energy production. It’s also fantastic for balancing hormones and improving sleep quality.
• PectaSol: This modified citrus pectin is my go-to for gentle detoxification. It binds to heavy metals and toxins in the body, helping to eliminate them safely. I’ve found this helpful in my autoimmune recovery journey and take it regularly now to keep inflammation in check. 
• MassZymes: A digestive enzyme supplement that aids in breaking down proteins and improving gut health. It’s especially helpful if you’ve indulged in a heavy meal the night before. I take this in the morning and evening on an empty stomach, but also sometimes take it with meals to improve digestion. It works differently when taken with or without food, so I mix it up and often do both. 
• Just Thrive Probiotics: A healthy gut is the foundation of wellness, and probiotics help maintain that balance by supporting digestion and immunity. I also take this with or without food at different times. 
• Neural RX from Wizard Sciences: This one is a game-changer for brain health. It supports cognitive function, mental clarity, and focus. I typically take this in the morning for an energy boost. Sometimes I take it at night and typically have vivid dreams when I do. 

It looks a little cluttered, but having these on my nightstand helps me remember to take them and I’m a lot more consistent this way. I like glass jars like these that help them look better. You’ll find the same jars on my kitchen table with other supplements that the kids and I take during the day. 

3. Essential Oils for Better Sleep

Sleep is sacred in my house, and Vibrant Blue Essential Oils are my secret weapon. I’ve curated a collection of blends specifically for relaxation and sleep from my friend Jody at Vibrant Blue:

• Parasympathetic: Calms the nervous system and promotes deep relaxation.
• Fascia Release: I’ve been focusing on lymph and fascia lately and love this one for gentle movement and mobility before sleep. 
• Lymph: A powerful mix of oils designed to support the lymphatic system. I love this in combination with having my feet up on the wall and lying on an acupressure mat at night. 

I apply these oils to my wrists, neck, and the bottoms of my feet before bed, and the difference in my sleep quality is remarkable.

4. Detox Support: CytoDetox and Carbon Cleanse

I also keep CytoDetox and True Carbon Cleanse here. I’ll often take Cytodetox in the morning and evening and True Carbon Cleanse at night, along with Pectasol and Masszymes. These are designed to. 

• Support cellular detoxification
• Bind to environmental toxins
• Promote overall energy levels and battle inflammation

Taking these regularly helps me feel energized and clear-headed.

5. Be Serene for Stress Relief

Modern life can be overwhelming, so I’ve made it a priority to manage stress effectively. Be Serene is a blend of adaptogenic herbs and natural compounds that helps:

• Reduce stress
• Promote relaxation
• Balance mood

It’s my go-to when I need to unwind at the end of a long day.

6. Blue Light Blocking Orange Glasses

Let’s talk about light hygiene. My orange-tinted blue light blocking glasses are essential for reducing exposure to artificial blue light in the evenings. Blue light can suppress melatonin production, making it harder to fall asleep. By wearing these glasses, I:

• Protect my circadian rhythm
• Improve my sleep quality
• Reduce eye strain

I also try to switch to lower and red/amber lighting in our whole house at night and avoid screens and bright lights as much as possible after dark. 

7. Books I’m Currently Reading and My Journal

Reading is part of my wind-down routine, and I always have a few books on my nightstand. Right now, I’m diving into titles on personal growth, health, and wellness. My Kindle also lives here for digital books.

Currently I’m reading or re-reading: Awareness by Anthony de Mello, Man’s Search for Meaning, The Reclaimed Woman by Kelly Brogan, Braiding Sweetgrass on the recommendation from a friend, The Four Agreements, and Power vs. Force by David Hawkins. 

Alongside my books is my journal and my planner, where I:

• Reflect on the day
• Jot down gratitude lists
• Plan for tomorrow

This simple practice keeps me grounded and focused.

8. Daylight Computer

Speaking of avoiding blue light at night… this has been a game changer. 

Yes, I have a dedicated computer for nighttime use, though this is quickly becoming my daily use computer as well. This Daylight computer is designed with low EMF emissions and zero blue light, making it ideal for reading or writing in the evening without disrupting my sleep cycle. It’s a lifesaver for late-night inspiration sessions. It can integrate most apps and I use it for listening to audiobooks and podcasts, working on writing in Google Docs, taking notes, digital journaling, listening to music, and more! 

9. Mouth Tape

Mouth tape might sound odd, but it’s a game-changer for breathing. By gently taping my mouth shut at night, I ensure I breathe through my nose, which:

• Improves oxygen intake
• Reduces snoring
• Enhances sleep quality

It’s a small tweak with big benefits.

10. Sound Machine and Blackout Shades

Creating the perfect sleep environment is non-negotiable. My sound machine produces calming white noise to drown out distractions, while my 100% blackout shades ensure complete darkness. These have been a game changer and can make my room completely dark even in the afternoon. I keep the remote for the shades on my nightstand for easy access.

11. Charger for My Oura Ring

My Oura Ring is my favorite wearable for tracking sleep, activity, and recovery. Its charger has a permanent spot on my nightstand so it’s always ready to go.

12. Face Roller and Gua Sha Tools

Skin care is self-care, and these tools help me de-puff and relax before bed. The gentle massage improves circulation and lymphatic drainage, leaving my skin glowing. I use the rollers from here and these gua sha tools and face cupping tools.

13. Silk Bonnet and Sleep Scrunchie

Protecting my hair while I sleep is a priority. My silk bonnet and scrunchie prevent breakage and keep my hair smooth and tangle-free.

14. Lamp with a Red Light Bulb

Finally, my nightstand features a lamp with a red light bulb. Red light doesn’t interfere with melatonin production, making it the perfect choice for bedtime reading or relaxing.

The Takeaway

My nightstand isn’t just a collection of random items; it’s a wellness powerhouse. Each item serves a purpose, supporting my health, improving my sleep, and helping me wake up refreshed and ready to tackle the day. Whether you’re looking to upgrade your sleep environment, enhance your morning routine, or simply find new ways to prioritize wellness, I hope this peek into my nightstand inspires you to create your own health-focused haven. Sweet dreams!

What do you keep on your nightstand? Leave a comment and let us know!