lojicjay

[Clown World ™ 🤡 @ClownWorld]

This is the way 😭🤣

[lojicjay @lojicjay]

@TiffanyFong 🍻🍻🍻

[The Best @TheBestqueenx]

Hold my glasses, bro!

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The odds of being slapped by a random turtle in the middle of the ocean are low, but never zero.

[しらとあきこ @akipcs]

🚙

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.

His name is Qing Li.

He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.

The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.

Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.

He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.

Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.

The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.

The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.

Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.

Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.

Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.

The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.

The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.

When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.

Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.

This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.

A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.

The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.

Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.

They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.

The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.

After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.

What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.

But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.

The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.

Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.

Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“The distance between dreams and reality is called discipline.”

— Paulo Coelho

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

James Clear on how luck travels:

[Ian Miles Cheong @ianmiles]

Marc Andreessen just revealed the Elon Musk philosophy that completely broke his brain: "The best product in the world shouldn't even need a logo."

We all know Elon is relentless about quality. As Marc puts it: "Do you want the best car in the world or not, right? Like that's Elon's mentality... And it's working very well."

But at a recent event, Elon took this mindset to a completely different level. He dropped a perspective so jarring that Marc initially thought it was a joke.

Elon’s thesis? "You shouldn't even have to have your name on the product. It's just obvious. Everybody knows."

The logic is brutal but simple. If you build the undeniable, undisputed best thing in the world, everybody uses it. And because everybody uses it, you don't need to slap your branding all over it to prove it's yours.

Think about that. We spend endless hours agonizing over marketing, tweaking brand colors, and putting our logos on every square inch of what we build. But the ultimate flex isn't a flashy logo. The ultimate flex is building something so undeniably brilliant that its mere existence is the brand.

[Attas @TxRecon1]

The Japanese cultural exchange on Twitter has been glorious.

[marqix ☆ @fwmarqix]

I lived in Japan for a year. Most of my experiences were exhausting in ways I’d rather not get into, but this one still makes me laugh.

I was on the train in Osaka, minding my own business, when I noticed a group of school kids a few seats down. They were whispering, glancing at me, then whispering again. They kept passing a folded piece of paper between them as if they were planning something top secret.

I watched this go on for two stops.

Finally, one of the kids was pushed forward by the others. He walked over to me slowly, like he was approaching a wild animal that might bite. He stopped right in front of me, bowed politely, and held out the folded paper with both hands.

I opened it.

Inside was a handwritten note in careful English: “Hello. We think you are a very cool person. We are practicing our English. We hope this note is correct. Please give us a score.”

At the bottom, they had drawn a literal grading box, out of ten.

I looked up. Seven pairs of eyes were staring at me as if their entire semester depended on my response.
I pulled out a pen, wrote “10/10” in the box, and added a note: “Perfect English. Well done.”

The boy carried it back to the group. They read it together… and absolutely lost their minds. High-fives, jumping, and one kid even pumped his fist in the air.

Their teacher, who had been pretending not to watch from the end of the car, was biting her lip, trying hard not to smile.

I rode the rest of the journey grinning to myself.

That’s the Japan I always remember.

[aisha @spinelessaisha]

WHAT IS THIS MNEMONIC BRO

[JT @jiratickets]

how it feels to drop a perfect arigato gozaimasu for the cute waitress at the hot pot restaurant (she’s latina and the place is korean)

[Jordanreviewsittt @jordanreviewsit]

Babe wake up someone created Google Translate for LinkedIn

[internet hall of fame @InternetH0F]

At least he knows to choose between trimming his Nails and cutting his head off 😂

[NO CONTEXT HUMANS @HumansNoContext]

He accepted his fate 😭

[chaotic memes @memechaotic]

Nooooo.