Hey friends,

A few weeks ago, I drove out to a festival at a resort in Mafra, about thirty minutes from Lisbon, to try the Neera bed topper.

It is a mattress with speakers built into it, but instead of playing sound into your ears, it plays very low frequencies through the whole surface of the bed, into your body.

I left the experience relaxed, calm and like I had taken a much longer nap.

I was curious to find out why a vibrating bed can result in blissful experiences, falling asleep faster and more restorative sleep.

So I sat down with Igor, one of Neera's cofounders, for a podcast about Neera, and then I went down the research rabbit hole.

Here’s what I learned.

Nina

💬 In this note:

• 🔊 The Science of Sound, Vibration and Deep Sleep

• 📚 The Calamity Club

• ⚡️ Master Claude in 30-days

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#198: 🔊 The Science of Sound, Vibration and Deep Sleep

Millions of neurons are firing together in your brain all of the time, even in the deepest sleep.

The neurons fire together in rhythmic waves that we can measure by EEG, where we measure the speed in hertz (Hz) or speed per second.

These waves can then be simplified into frequency bands, which associate with a rough state of mind:

• Delta (roughly 0.5 to 4 Hz) is the slowest and largest wave. This is deep, dreamless, non-REM sleep. The more delta you have, the less aware you are of the world around you.

• Theta (4 to 8 Hz) is the drowsy in-between state, the drifting feeling right before you fall asleep, and it also shows up in meditation and daydreaming.

• Alpha (8 to 12 Hz) is relaxed wakefulness. Think eyes closed, calm, but awake. Alpha is what fades when you actually fall asleep.

• Beta (13 to 30 Hz) is alert, focused, task-oriented thinking (and also worry and rumination, which is why it is not what you want at 2AM).

• Gamma (above 30 Hz, often centered around 40 Hz) shows up when the brain needs to bind information from many regions at once, and it has become a hot research topic for reasons I will get to below.

Two of those numbers matter most for this story today.

The first is 1 Hz and below, the frequency of deep sleep.

The second is 0.25 Hz, which is even slower than any brain wave, and which turns out to be the magic number for rocking.

Why Rocking Works

Every parent knows a baby falls asleep in a moving car, and every commuter has nodded off on a train. That gentle, rhythmic motion makes us sleepy.

What we have not known, until quite recently, is what it does inside the brain.

In 2011, a team of researchers  at the University of Geneva built a bed that could either remain stationary, or rock gently at 0.25 Hz, which is one full rock every four seconds.

Illustrated elegantly in Figure 1A from their 2011 paper in Cell below. (cute)

The researchers asked people to nap on the bed, and compared to the bed when it was stationary.

Participants in the study fell asleep faster, spent more time in N2 sleep (non-REM sleep), and their EEG showed a boost in slow oscillations that mark stable, protected sleep.

The authors' explanation was that the swinging motion "exerts a synchronizing action in the brain that reinforces endogenous sleep rhythms." In plain words, the bed was nudging the brain's own sleep rhythm along.

But how?

Paul Franken's lab at the University of Lausanne, answered this question in mice in 2019.

His team showed that rocking put mice to sleep faster and kept them asleep longer.

This only happened if their otolith organs, the tiny sensory structures in the inner ear that sense gravity, head tilt, and straight-line motion, were intact and functioning properly.

Mice without a working inner ear sensory system got nothing from the rocking.

That means that the pathway that rocking and/or vibration reaches the brain, is through the inner ear, into the brainstem, and up into the circuits that time sleep.

Fun fact: The mice liked 1 Hz best, while humans liked 0.25 Hz. Mice have a faster heartbeat than humans (nearly 10x faster), so the faster rocking fits their much faster natural rhythms.

What Neera Actually Does

While it would be cool to have a giant rocking bed at home, it’s just not practical. (le sigh).

Neera Sleep is much more subtle, and something that would actually fit in your bedroom.

Inside the mattress is a sandwich of actuators, the same components that make a speaker cone move, enclosed in a waveguide that spreads the vibration across the whole surface of the bed.

Neera founder, Igor Me, told me in our podcast interview that the design goal was a sound that "shouldn't sound as a sound."

In my experience, you do not hear it so much as feel it, as if the vibration is a field you are floating in.

When I asked him how they chose the frequencies that the bed plays (for lack of a better word).

He said that the starting point was the same as this article's.

That our brain has frequency signatures in each stage of sleep, from alpha down through theta and delta.

In designing Neera Igor’s hypothesis was that if you could deliver those frequencies through the skin, you could help the body reach those states faster.

His reasoning is that we have far more mechanoreceptors (the pressure and vibration sensors in our skin, muscle and bone) than we have auditory receptors, and the mechanoreceptors feed straight into the primal, ancient, older parts of the brain without passing through the consciousness.

However, achieving those frequencies in a bed is an engineering challenge.

So what Neera does, which is very clever, is that it generates two much higher frequencies that are very close together and the interference between them produces a slow "beat" at the difference between them, which the body feels as a 2, 3 or 4 Hz pulse.

Igor's example was 20,000 Hz played against 20,002 Hz….resulting in a 2 Hz pulse.

He also told me it took a lot of algorithmic tuning to get a consistent effect across different bodies.

Essentially, your response and my response to the same frequency are not the same (which was a big surprise to me too).

The session I did was the daytime program, which is not designed to be below your perception.

You can very much feel the vibrations across your whole body.

It ran in three parts: a lymphatic drainage segment, then a non-sleep deep rest segment where the frequencies move down through the body, then a ramp back up toward alertness so you do not walk out groggy.

For me, it took me a while to drop into a meditative state, and once I did I stayed there, but each transition between segments ended abruptly enough that my thinking brain woke up and started counting programs.

I gave that feedback to the team.

Igor told me that their night program is a different thing entirely.

It runs at about 10% of the daytime power, because if the stimulation is too immersive, your prefrontal cortex switches on and starts paying attention.

Which is exactly the opposite of what you want at 11PM when you are trying to fall asleep.

Two other things I learned that are worth knowing. Neera has a "cat purr" program!!

How cute!

They tuned the Neera to the frequency range of a purring cat. Awww.

But most surprisingly, Igor told me half jokingly, that three people that they tested who hate cats could not feel it at all.

They really couldn’t feel the frequency of the cat purring.

Perhaps this is also why they hate cats. Because they can’t feel the lovely cat purr has been studied to lower cortisol, and well…also just bring us joy.

Neera also has a feature for what he called sleep inertia to address the problem when you wake up at 3AM and can’t get back to sleep.

In this program, the bed senses you’ve woken up, and it replays the frequencies of the sleep stage you just left.

He says most of those wake-ups cluster around the point in the night when core body temperature bottoms out and starts to rise again.

So far, Neera has run roughly 120 internal tests measuring heart rate variability, sleep scores from wearables and EEG. With self-reported results from participants across their sleep, recovery and relaxation protocols.

They’ve also observed that about 40% of people fall asleep during a daytime demo, including a handful who normally cannot nap at all.

He would love a proper longitudinal study and knows it is the thing that will earn more trust for Neera sleep, and I have connected him with a neuroscientist in Lisbon who has EEG and cortisol testing to design the study.

So, more to come from the Neera team as they expand their studies!

Vibration, Not Just Rocking

Which brings me to the question I wanted answered.

Are there any published peer-reviewed studies that vibration through a bed helps you sleep?

And I found one!

In 2017, Hiroshi Kimura's group in Japan built a bed that sits on a motor and slides gently back and forth, halfway between a rocking cradle and a vibrating mattress.

Check out this figure from their paper (that is hardly understandable) showing how they made a bed that moves a very small amount in order to create the vibration sensation.

Their experiment tested naps of ten healthy young men at 0.5 Hz, which resulted in one gentle cycle every two seconds.

What the researchers changed in the experiment was how far the bed moved on each cycle, from a 2.4 mm shift you can barely notice, up to a 7.5 mm one you would clearly feel.

Without any vibration/oscillation, the men took on average 14.7 minutes to fall asleep.

With the smallest 2.4 mm movement, that dropped to around 10 minutes.

The sweet spot is a vibration you almost cannot feel. This broadly aligns with Neera’s approach to nighttime use program, where the intensity is reduced to remain gentle and unobtrusive.

Then there is one more study that comes closest to Neera's two-frequency trick.

A team at Brigham Young University placed four vibration generators under the corners of a bed and tried two settings on 14 people with mild to moderate insomnia in 2021.

In the first, all four corners vibrated at 26.75 Hz.

In the second, the top of the bed ran at 26.5 Hz and the bottom at 27 Hz, so the two waves drifted in and out of phase with each other and produced a slow travelling wave at 0.5 Hz, the "beat frequency."

The result of the beat frequency is that the person on the bed feels it as a gentle wave rolling head to toe, which stimulates both the skin and the vestibular system, sensory system located in the inner ear (remember the experiment with the rocking mice from the beginning of this article). And the result is a feeling a bit like being rocked.

That is the same basic superposition principle Igor described: combining two nearby frequencies to create a low-frequency beat pattern that can be experienced through the body.

As a result, the beat-frequency led to participants falling asleep in under five minutes versus about seven minutes for the control, and participants rated the 0.5Hz experience as more comfortable and easier to fall asleep with.

And What About Sound or Vibration at 40Hz?

This specific frequency is interesting because 40Hz is the gamma frequency associated with high-level cognition, memory consolidation and, we now believe, glymphatic activation.

The glymphatic system is the waste removal system for the brain.

As we age, and especially in Alzheimer’s, gamma oscillations weaken and become disorganized.

In Nina’s Notes #171, I covered a study published in PNAS on January 5th that found that playing sound at exactly 40Hz for one hour a day helped the brains of older rhesus monkeys flush out amyloid-beta, the sticky protein found in Alzheimer's disease brains.

After a week of 40Hz sound exposure, amyloid-beta levels in the cerebrospinal fluid increased by more than 200%.

What that means is that the amyloid-beta wasn’t accumulating in the brain tissue where it causes damage, it was showing up in the fluid draining away from the brain and the brain was actively expelling its toxic buildup.

And remarkably, those elevated CSF amyloid levels remained five weeks after the sound therapy ended.

While I didn’t ask the Neera team which frequencies played during the last cycle when I tested the bed, the “ramp back up toward alertness” cycle…perhaps it included 40hz.

This means they could potentially offer a glymphatic activation program at 40Hz vibration in the future, possible idea!

My Final Question For the Neera Team was Around Pain.

After my session on the Neera, I also asked the team if they considered studying reduction in pain from the Neera bed.

Vibration has been shown to reduce certain types of pain by more than 40%.

This is a great alternative to pain killers and opioids which are often the last available option for people in chronic pain.

What happens is that naturally occurring mechanisms help to blunt the severity of pain signals sent to the brain. Participants may be distracted from the pain, or simply experience pain relief from the vibration.

While this is not on the roadmap for Neera at the moment, this could be very compelling for people in chronic pain, or recovering from injury, as falling asleep can be difficult as pain can keep a person awake.

Finding a way to reduce the pain, plus the soothing feeling of rocking or vibration, can be very powerful for this group of people.

What I Am Taking Away

A slow rhythmic input, whether it is a rocking hammock, a moving car, a vibration you can barely feel, or a soft beat in your headphones, seems to help the brain find the rhythm of sleep.

Louder and stronger seems to work against you.

And the closer the input is timed to what your brain is already doing, the better it works.

While we wait for the Neera to reach our homes (reserve one here), we will just have to experiment with sounds…or a fully rocking bed, to fall asleep faster.

📚 Book of the Week

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

Rating: ★★★★★

Ok, the first 15% of this book…I was bored. AND THEN, everything shifted and I couldn’t put it down.

I was reading until 1AM most nights last week.

The story starts with Meg, whose mother disappears one night before Christmas, and she is taken to an orphanage in rural Mississippi. In a second storyline, a young woman named Birdie, and her family are struggling and she goes to visit her sister, who had married into a wealthy family, to ask for money. Birdie arrives and is asked to volunteer at the orphanage, where she meets Meg and becomes determined to help her.

The rest of the story captivated me more than any book I’ve read in recent years. If I could give this book six stars, I would.

The Calamity Club is written by the author of The Help.

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We are going to Master Claude Code in 30 days for business women.

Topics include how to automate replies so your inbox is already handled before you wake up, making websites, creating a social media “command center” to manage posting across social channels, and automating invoicing.

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If you are already using Cowork and Code, great! You will find the use cases, and live-builds truly valuable.

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🗣️  Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢Spotify, 🟣Apple Podcasts, 🟠Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

This week I sit down with Ekua Yankah, founder of Awodee, a social epidemiologist who left a long career in the UN system, learned the power of big period data at Berlin's Clue, and is now building the research infrastructure to cure endometriosis, fibroids, and PCOS, conditions affecting over 170 million women worldwide.

Ekua’s founder story starts with a diagnosis. Her doctors found a 9cm, baseball-sized ovarian cyst at 23 years old, then found more than 10 fibroids, and recommended surgery at 39. She navigated symptom-free menopause with tai chi, qigong, and acupuncture (her experience, not a prescription). Through this experience she learned the harsh realities of the medical system and the gaps in women’s health. Like why insurers file these conditions under "fertility" or "pre-existing" and refuse to pay.

Her company Awodee's is focused on research-ready data collection with partners like Nigeria's Fertitude, women as co-creators, starting with a self-funded 200-woman study in Kenya.

We also discuss Lupita Nyong'o's 75 fibroids, the "Period Insurance" dream, and the first-day-of-your-cycle leave policy at Awodee.

Watch & listen to the whole episode on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts

Timestamps00:00 Teaser: a 20-year mission to cure fibroids00:49 Welcome: Nina's first in-person interview, meet Ekua and Awodee01:50 From the UN system to FemTech at Clue03:23 Ekua's story: a 9 cm cyst at 23, 10+ fibroids, surgery at 3906:08 The "Period Insurance" dream: six-month data check-ins08:07 Why insurance calls it "fertility" and won't pay11:07 The Big Three decoded: endometriosis, fibroids, PCOS13:56 Lupita Nyong'o's 75 fibroids and going public15:33 You are the expert on your own body18:18 Funding gaps, environmental factors, and unequal care20:39 Awodee's model: research-ready data, women as co-creators23:04 Not an app: partnering with Fertitude and existing trackers26:10 The womb as ancestral technology: Daoism meets longevity28:41 Ekua's routine: TCM, qigong, and a symptom-free menopause32:13 The self-funded 200-woman pilot study in Kenya37:36 Where to start if you suspect endo, PCOS, or fibroids41:31 Rapid-fire: qigong, funding blind spots, harmful myths43:51 First-day-of-cycle leave: working with your cycle45:53 How to find Ekua and what's next for Awodee

RESOURCES

Clue - Period Tracking App - https://helloclue.com

Endometriosis Society of Kenya - https://www.facebook.com/Endometriosiskenya/

Lupita Nyong'o Fibroids Campaign - https://www.foundationwomenshealth.org/lupita

Traditional Chinese Medicine - Ovarian Breathing - https://example.com/ovarian-breathing

ABOUT DR. EKUA YANKAH:

Social epidemiologist with a PhD from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and 15 years at UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF and WHO. Founder of Awodee, a frontier health research platform closing the data gap on African women's health. Her personal longevity journey through Tai Chi, Yoga and Traditional Medicine runs alongside her epidemiological work, making her a rare bridge between ancestral practice and global health science.

CONNECT WITH EKUA:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/africanwomenshealth/

ABOUT NINA'S NOTES:

Nina's Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

CONNECT WITH NINA'S NOTES

Newsletter:https://www.ninasnotes.xyz

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninapatrick/

Website:https://www.ninapatrick.xyz

Do you like Nina’s Notes? Can you share it with a friend and ask them to subscribe??

It would mean the world to me.

Xo,

Nina

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💬 In this note:

• 🏥 YOU are the Treatment

• 📚 I Make Envy on Your Disco

• ⚡️ Master Claude in 30-days

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#196: 🏥 YOU are the Treatment

For the last decade, there has been a movement towards “personalized medicine” in healthcare.

I even wrote in edition #46 of this newsletter, about what Peter Attia called “Medicine 3.0” and I hypothesized what “Medicine 4.0” a.k.a “Med4” would look like.

Medicine 3.0 is the era of prevention.

Medicine 4.0 is the era of personalization.

I hypothesized that Medicine 4.0 will have regenerative care using advanced stem cell therapies that can move us beyond transplants and give doctors the ability to repair and replace damaged organs.”

And we are moving in that direction. Where the patient can produce their own treatment for their disease or damaged organs.

This is even available to us right now, it’s not a dream for the future, it’s called autologous medicine.

Autologous Medicine

Autologous medicine procedures use a patient's own cells, tissues, or organs instead of donor material.

You own cells = a personal treatment = YOU are the treatment.

Risk of rejection is low because the cells are from the patient’s own body.

The opposite of this is allogeneic treatments.

Allogeneic treatments use donor cells or an organ from another person.

We’ve all probably heard about this. For example, a patient needs a kidney transplant, they can get a kidney from an organ donor but allogeneic treatments have a higher risk of immune rejection and graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) because the cells are from a donor.

This risk reduces with autologous treatments because there is no “donor,” you are your own donor.

There are autologous medicines available right now, which encompass a broad range of FDA-approved cell, gene, and tissue engineering treatments that use a patient's own collected cells to target specific diseases, mainly blood cancers and solid tumors.

For example, there are CAR T-Cell immunotherapies like Kymriah, Yescarta and Tecartus which modify a patient’s own T-cells to target proteins found on blood cancers including ALL large B-cell lymphoma and mantle cell lymphoma respectively.

Beyond CAR T-Cell immunotherapies, there are other autologous cell therapies that can harvest a patient’s immune cells to expand them to fight solid tumors such as Amtagvi (lifileucel) and Tecelra (afamitresgene autoleucel).

One of the biggest wins in personalized medicine and autologous therapy of this decade is Casgevy and Lyfgenia, both are autologous hematopoietic stem cell (HSCs) therapies which are used to cure sickle cell disease and severe beta-thalassemia by harvesting a patient’s own cells, editing them and giving them back to the patient.

Furthermore, autologous cells are being used to rebuild physical tissue and structures without the risk of donor rejection.

Notably, MACI (Autologous Cultured Chondrocytes) uses a patient's own cartilage cells grown on a collagen membrane to repair knee cartilage defects.

Autologous medicine completely flips the current treatment model.

We are moving from generalized, off-the-shelf treatments toward personalized medicines that we know will work with your body.

We now have the opportunity to move away from a one-size-fits all methodology, and towards a future where organ donation may not be required because we are able to generate our own organ and tissue repairs and replacements from our own genetic material.

With autologous approaches, the patient’s own biology becomes the starting point to creating personalized medicine.

So What are Those Starting Materials?

Your own biology. Your own cells.

The place to start repair is with your own stem cells.

Stem cells are the cells in your body that can become any type of cell, a nerve cell, skin cell, liver cell….anything.

Where are those stem cells? How do we get access to them?

I’m sure most of you are familiar with embryonic stem cells. These exist only in early-stage embryos, amniotic fluid and perinatal stem cells found in umbilical cords.

Embryonic stem cells raise many ethical concerns but fortunately are not the only source of stem cells in the body.

Adult stem cells live in specific tissues like bone marrow, fat, hair and skin and are there to repair damage.

Scientific research has also discovered a way to turn any type of cell back into a stem cell.

In 2006, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka discovered a group of four proteins (genes) that can turn adult cells back into stem cells, aptly named the Yamanaka factors after their discovery, and earned a Nobel Prize in 2012.

When an adult cell is exposed to the Yamanaka factors it becomes an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC). iPSCs can now grow into any cell type in the body.

While this discovery is groundbreaking, why hasn’t it taken over?

Mostly because of manufacturing cost and time. But there are also regulatory concerns, especially around genomic instability and the risk that the cells could turn into cancer cells.

Some scientists are exploring partial reprogramming of the adult cells by using short bursts of exposure of the Yamanaka factors to make old cells young again without losing their specific job or function.

iPSCs were supposed to be the gateway into regenerative medicine and personal rejuvenation.

The technology is arriving, but we still have technical challenges. One of those challenges is that iPSCs are only as good as the adult cell you started from. If that adult cell had accumulated a lot of mutations, it will have an epigenetic memory that it will carry into the iPSC.

Your Cells and Your Body Have an Expiration Date

Our cells are aging.

They are aging according to the 12 hallmarks of aging, including DNA mutations and the accumulation of senescent cells to name a couple.

We can measure the biological and chronological age of our cells using epigenetic tests, like the Horvath methylation clocks.

The stem cells you have today are the youngest you will ever have.

Your stem cells at age 35 will not be the same stem cells you have at 65. Although you are the same person, those extra decades can accumulate damage within even your stem cells.

The problem is you need regenerative medicine and rejuvenation when you are old and this is the precise time when your body is the least capable of delivering it.

So Where Do You Actually Get Stem Cells?

Harvesting stem cells from bone marrow, adipose tissue or blood all require medical procedures.

To extract stem cells from bone marrow, you need to put a needle into the iliac crest of the bone and aspirate them out. This is a very invasive painful surgery which requires sedation.

You can collect stem cells from fat through a liposuction procedure.

Or alternatively, stem cells can be retrieved from your peripheral blood, which requires apheresis. Apheresis is a process where blood is drawn, then passed through a machine which separates it into platelets, plasma or white blood cells, then the remaining blood is safely returned to the body.

None of these procedures are what a healthy 30-something wants to do on a regular day of the week.

However new research has shown that there are other sources of stem cells without invasive medical procedures, and one of those sources is the hair follicle.

The Hair Follicle

You have ~100,000 follicles on your head.

Each follicle contains many different cell types, including keratinocytes, dermal fibroblasts and mesenchymal stem cells.

What is most interesting about the hair follicle is not just that it contains stem cells, but that it is a replenishing source.

Our hair falls out, the follicle regrows. This is a replenishing source of stem cells, which allows for a non-invasive, relatively painless collection in less than 30 minutes, with no recovery time.

That’s a huge change from a bone marrow extraction. (Ouch!)

I Sat Down With The Founder Of Acorn Biolabs To Talk About This

Dr. Drew Taylor CEO at Toronto-based Acorn Biolabs, the first non-invasive follicle-based cell banking service.

Want to watch our conversation? It’s on the Nina’s Notes Podcast. Watch it here.

Here’s how it works.

• First you meet with a doctor for a consultation

• Then you will meet with the doctor to collect the hair follicles. They take ~50 intact follicles.

• Then they test them for viability

• Viables ones go to cryopreservation at -180℃

Collection costs vary depending on the doctor and on-going storage costs ~$10/month.

Acorn Biolabs can use those banked cells to create their YOU^TH Secretome. That is the result of the banked cells being cultured to produce exosomes and growth factors that are formulated into a personalized topical product.

This is something you can do today. It’s available now, it’s not something that we have to continue to wait for.

Banking cells are also a bet on future therapies that are currently being trialed and approved.

When you cryopreserve your hair follicle cells, you lock those cells in time at their biological age. Acorn’s own marketing language says that they are “halting the effects of aging.”

They say that the best time to bank your cells is right now. They even recommend banking your cells as young as 12 years old, because the hair follicles are mature at that age and it’s possible to collect enough healthy hair.

What makes this so interesting is that the cost of banking your cells now is low, relative to the irreversibility of not having it done.

It’s giving you future self options and it’s better to have the optionality than not.

If you do it now, you will have the youngest possible version of YOU as the treatment.

Medicine 4.0 won’t just be personalized.It’ll be time-shifted.

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📚 Book of the Week

I Make Envy On Your Disco by Eric Schnall

Rating: ★★★★★

I love reading books about cities I’ve lived in, and of all of those cities, reading about Berlin always resonates. (If you want more stories set in Berlin, recently I read Perfection (BOTW #159) and The Deserters (BOTW #181).

I Make Envy On Your Disco took me right back to Berlin. Sam Singer is a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor from New York, with a rocky relationship back home, who arrives in Berlin for a gallery opening expecting a quiet work trip.

Instead the city does what it always does to visitors who let their guard down, it pulls him into something messier and more alive than he planned for.

💻 Join My 30-Day Claude Challenge

This is for my Ladies Who Claude. Ladies who are entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small business owners.

Join my 30-Day Master Claude Code For Businesswomen Challenge.

In the Challenge you will get:

1. Daily 10min video lessons delivered to your email

2. Real use cases, real builds, and tips from over 300+ hours of coding with Claude

3. Once a week live calls with me

4. Access to a community of women building together

You don’t need to be savvy with Claude. I’ll get you all on the same level.

If you are already using Cowork and Code, great! You will find the use cases, and live-builds truly valuable.

We start September 21.

Apply here to join.

🗣️  Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢Spotify, 🟣Apple Podcasts, 🟠Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

When Igor said this, I had to go and try out the Neera bed myself, and afterward I interviewed Igor about the innovative science and technology behind Neera. It is a device designed to improve sleep through vibrational frequencies and personalized algorithms. In our conversation we explore how this technology can transform sleep quality and overall well-being.

Topics:

• Science of vibrational frequencies and sleep

• Personalized algorithms for sleep optimization

• Acoustic and mechanical engineering in sleep devices

• The role of frequencies in regulating nervous system and chakras

• User experience and self-reporting in sleep tech

• Future developments in vibrational sleep technology

Timestamps:

• 0:33 Who Igor is and what Neera does

• 1:19 Why he built it: devices measure, apparatuses act

• 2:57 Why sleep is the highest-leverage longevity target

• 4:05 “See how it feels” and the phrase that sold it

• 5:30 Where standard sleep advice runs out

• 6:32 The mechanism: frequencies through touch, not ears

• 9:48 Do solfeggio frequencies and brainwaves connect?

• 11:24 Making 2 Hz on a mattress without a giant speaker

• 12:38 Composing a state, and AI programs on request

• 15:02 Personalization: wearables, self-reporting, onboard sensors

• 17:23 Nina’s session, and the cat purr program

• 20:12 Chakra frequencies and the 96% blind test

• 21:54 Inside the mattress: actuators and waveguides

• 24:57 Validating with EEG and the cost of clean sleep research

• 27:05 Day programs vs night programs

• 28:43 Who it works best for: athletes, NSDR, day reboots

• 29:58 Sleep inertia and the 3am wake-up

• 32:53 Catching micro-wakeups and returning you to sleep

• 35:06 The first week, and napping vs the 20-minute program

• 39:12 Hardest part: hardware or software?

• 41:15 The one non-responder

• 42:09 Launch & Founders Club

ABOUT IGOR:

Igor is the co-founder of Neera. They are building nervous system regulation hardware for high performers. Over 15+ years in deep tech, he was design director on YotaPhone, the first dual-screen smartphone, and co-founded Gero (disease prediction from wearable movement data) and Atmotube (air quality sensing, 70,000+ units shipped, used in research at Stanford and Harvard).

CONNECT WITH NEERA:

• Website

• Neera LinkedIn

• Igor’s LinkedIn

ABOUT NINA'S NOTES: Nina's Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

CONNECT WITH NINA'S NOTES

• Newsletter:https://www.ninasnotes.xyz

• LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninapatrick/

• Website:https://www.ninapatrick.xyz

A few months ago, longevity influencer Bryan Johnson, announced on X that he has a chronic autoimmune disease.

He started the “Don’t Die” movement, truly believing he could live forever. On his socials he would post bold claims about the number of nighttime erections and boast about his impeccable sleep quality and organ health.

Yet, somehow he missed finding a chronic disease.

What does this say about measurements and healthcare?

That’s what today’s newsletter is all about.

Let’s go.

Cheers,

Nina

💬 In this note:

• 🏥 Bryan Johnson Has A Chronic Illness

• 📚 Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books

• ⚡️ Sleepscroll

  Subscribe now

  ---

#194: 🏥 Bryan Johnson Has A Chronic Illness

Last month Bryan Johnson announced on X that he has autoimmune gastritis (AIG), with the clickbait title “My stomach is eating itself.”

Ok Bryan…drama.

In that same post, he detailed the trial-and-error of testing and missing the true diagnosis over several years.

He’s enraged he didn’t find it sooner.

The earliest signal was his low ferritin, a measure of the body’s stored iron.

Bryan had changed his diet and tried oral iron supplements, but his ferritin stayed low.

And according to his reports, it stayed low for about a decade.

Once his team finally decided to chase after the root cause of the low ferritin, they turned to antibody blood testing, an upper endoscopy and five stomach biopsies from three regions of his stomach.

That rigorous testing is what finally produced the diagnosis.

Why A Decade Of Data Didn’t Say Anything

Ferritin measures stored iron, while hemoglobin (the common measurement for iron on routine blood tests) measures circulating iron.

When your iron stores run low, your body protects hemoglobin first. It drains the reserves to keep your blood count looking normal.

It is possible to be completely iron depleted with a perfectly normal CBC.

Hemoglobin is the lagging indicator, and ferritin is the leading one.

Standard care is built around the lagging indicator, hemoglobin. Because that is how anemia is defined and diagnosed.

Important note: Ferritin is not commonly measured on blood tests, even on my last blood panel here in Portugal, they didn’t include it, my doctor’s only measured hemoglobin. Ask your doctor to include ferritin on your blood tests, especially if you are a menstruating woman.

Bryan wasn’t anemic, so the low ferritin kept getting ignored.

Secondly, there is another problem.

The bottom of the ferritin reference range marks depletion, not sufficiency.

That number is derived from a population that includes plenty of iron deficient people.

Sitting above the bottom of the range reads as “ok” on a lab report, instead of “your iron tank is empty” in your body.

The real problem was the non-response.

His doctors recommended higher iron diets, even iron infusions.

But the ferritin didn’t move into the normal range.

His doctor thought that it was the dose. They thought, ok we will just give Bryan more iron.

They switched the formula and tried to add other supplements. But that loop can run for years, as you want to supplement for a given period of time before retesting.

But an intervention (like IV iron infusions) that should work and doesn’t is diagnostic information.

Iron that goes in and doesn’t stick means you're either losing it, or you can’t absorb it.

Also, Bryan already had an autoimmune thyroid disease.

Autoimmune gastritis and autoimmune thyroiditis cluster together often enough to have a name, thyrogastric syndrome.

Low iron blunts the conversion of the thyroid hormone into its active form, and low thyroid function impairs how the body handles iron.

Each one makes the other harder to fix.

And this information was sitting in Bryan’s medical records the whole time.

The data was there the whole time!

He, and his care team, missed the interpretation.

I can only think about all of the women with immune-mediated conditions who struggled for decades to get a diagnosis (ahem…endometreosis), without a private care team, without unlimited testing panels, without anyone willing to keep digging to find a diagnosis.

Endometriosis takes an average of 7 to 10 years to diagnosis.

Most of those women never get their endoscopy equivalent.

What does this mean about testing in the longevity space?

The thing is….Bryan did catch his diagnosis early.

Even if he doesn't believe it.

His biopsies showed atrophy confined to the acid-producing lining, with the rest of the stomach spared.

Most people get diagnosed years later, when they are anemic and have B12-related neuropathy.

He cited a study where roughly 18% of people with precancerous gastric lesions carried the autoantibodies and only about 1% had ever been diagnosed.

So the frequent testing did work, eventually.

Just not in the way the longevity narrative promises.

It didn't prevent him from ever getting autoimmune gastritis.

What it did produce was a decade of anomalies that finally escalated to actual clinical medicine.

Even the most measured man still needed an endoscopy, five biopsies from three regions of the stomach, and antibody testing.

Testing generates hypotheses.

The value of a testing panel is entirely determined by whether anyone is willing to chase the outlier that doesn't fit.

And the longevity model is built to optimize markers that respond to levers, not to investigate the one that refuses to.

💻 Join My 30-Day Claude Challenge

This is for my Ladies Who Claude. Ladies who are entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small business owners.

We are going to Build Your Client Machine in 30 days.

That means we will automate prospecting leads, automate outreach, generate proposals and chase invoices, all with Claude.

In the Challenge you will get:

1. Daily video lessons delivered to your email

2. Real Use Cases, real builds, and tips from over 300+ hours of coding with Claude

3. Once a week live calls with me

4. Access to a community of women building together

You don’t need to be savvy with Claude. I’ll get you all on the same level.

If you are advanced, not to worry. You will find the use cases, and real builds truly valuable.

We start September 7.

Apply here to join.

📚 Book of the Week

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller

Rating: ★★★★★

In the small town of Troy, Georgia, a local woman born and raised in Troy, Lula Dean, has taken on the mission of ridding the town of any inappropriate books (which she may or may not have ever read herself).

Once all the inappropriate books are removed from the library, she sets up her own little lending library outside her house full of appropriate books.

One day, someone takes the dust jackets off the books in Lula’s library, and hides the “banned” books underneath - literary classics, gay romances, Black history, witchy spell books and more. The neighbors who borrow these books find their mindset shifting and lives changed.

I really enjoyed this book because it allows you to analyze tough topics like racism, prejudice, sexual assault and other heavy issues through a more light hearted storyline.

⚡️ Check This Out

Doomscrolling, that is nothing at all about doom and gloom.

It’s actually designed to put you to sleep.

A starry night, where you can scroll and scroll and scroll.

Double-tap to light up stars, and count sheep.

Give it a try the next time you find yourself endlessly scrolling before bed.

🗣️  Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢Spotify, 🟣Apple Podcasts, 🟠Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

I asked Drew if we were heading toward a future where my younger cells become a currency I could trade. He didn’t say “no”.

There’s a version of you from ten years ago. Skin that bounced back, hair that grew in thick, cells that healed fast and inflamed less.

That version is gone.

Unless you saved it.

This week on the Nina’s Notes Podcast, I sit down with Drew Taylor, CEO of Acorn Biolabs, whose team figured out that the stem cell goldmine we’ve been drilling into hip bones to reach has been sitting at the root of your hair this whole time.

With their protocol, you pluck about hairs from the back of your head at your doctor’s office, the follicles get shipped to a lab, checked for viability, and dropped into liquid nitrogen at -196°C.

At that temperature there’s no metabolism. No aging. Nothing.

A version of you, frozen mid-sentence in storage for when you need it.

And, banking those cells costs less than Netflix. $190 a year for frozen storage.

Acorn has already taken plucked hair follicles, turned them into iPSCs (induced pluripotent stem cells which can become anything) and turned them into cartilage, bone, fat, and neurons. They even pushed those neurons into the exact dopamine-producing cells that Parkinson’s destroys. Acron is also exploring using their protocol to create pancreatic cells for type 1 diabetes, and natural killer cells that hunt down senescent and cancerous cells, the same population that falls off a cliff as we age.

Oh, and three patients have reported their gray hairs coming back. Nobody was tracking for that!

I also asked - Who actually owns your cells if the company gets acquired? Does banking at 12 versus 45 create a two-tier longevity system? He answered both without flinching.

Watch & listen to the whole episode on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to the future of healthcare and cell currency

02:05 The significance of cells in regenerative medicine

06:19 Innovative methods for stem cell collection from hair follicles

08:26 From plucked hair to banked cells: the process explained

15:31 The secretome: what it is and how it benefits skin and hair

24:40 Protocols and treatments for skin and hair regeneration

28:30 Using AI to enhance regenerative medicine workflows

37:32 Future therapeutics: from 3D printed organs to cell therapies

44:28 Ownership, accessibility, and the future of cell banking

52:39 Sci-fi visions of medicine: bioprinting and organ regeneration

53:26 The importance of early cell banking and next steps

LINKS

Acorn Biolabs - https://acorn.me/

Cell Banking - https://acorn.me/cell-banking/

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/drew-taylor-65b6ab10/

ABOUT DREW TAYLOR:

Dr. Drew Taylor is Founder and CEO of Acorn Biolabs, a regenerative medicine company pioneering the use of a person’s own cells to power longevity, aesthetics, and personalized healthcare. With a PhD in stem cell bioengineering, he leads development of the world’s first non-invasive platform for banking hair follicle stem cells and YOU™, an autologous secretome for skin rejuvenation, hair restoration, and recovery. His work has been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and NewBeauty, and Acorn now partners with more than 200 medical practices across North America.

ABOUT NINA’S NOTES: Nina’s Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

CONNECT WITH NINA’S NOTES

Newsletter: https://www.niasnotes.xyz

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninapatrick/

Website: https://www.ninapatrick.xyz

Hey Friends,

I’m super excited to announce that I have published a new psychedelics and longevity guide. I wrote this for . You can find the guide on their substack and website.

Read it here

I have been giving lectures about longevity and psychedelics for several months. I most recently gave one at the House of Beautiful Business Conference in May in Athens, and I’m so glad that there are enough recent publications to actually write a guide about the connection between the two.

Check out the guide and tell me what you found interesting.

If you want me to write guides about something else, can you drop your ideas in the comments?

I’d love to hear them.

Xo,

Nina

Subscribe now

🗣️ Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can also find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

I also co-host Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED!

🎙️ Mondays: LT UNLOCKED interviews with leading longevity innovators, clinicians, and scientists

📰 Wednesdays: Nina’s Notes in your inbox with interviews, deep dives on longevity & neuroscience

🎙️ Fridays: LT UNLOCKED News, a weekly news roundup of the latest in longevity

Find Longevity Technology UNLOCKED on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Seriously, Claude knows how to Code, and once you know how to use Claude…then you know how to code too.

I’ve taught this live class many times now, and every single time, the women leave the room, empowered, excited and ready to keep building with Claude Code

Before my class

My students felt “confused and a bit overwhelmed with what it could do.”

After my class

I recorded my class so you don’t have to wait for the next live cohort.

It’s called Level Up With Claude Code, and it’s the exact class I teach in person.

Grab the Recording

Why I built this

I’m a scientist. I have a PhD, I’ve built four companies, and I still spent months treating Claude like a fancy Google…asking it questions, using it as a thought partner and then just…moving on.

It wasn’t until I took my first Claude Code class and learned what it can really do that my life changed.

Now, I have a full-time intern: eager, occasionally forgetful, and getting better every time I use it. For only $20/month.

That shift, from talking to Claude to building with Claude, is what my Level 1 class teaches.

What’s actually in it

You get the full class, recorded start to finish. IN my live class, I have alot of time to build, so press pause on the video and build alongside the class as we go. I do include some parts where things load slowly or I have to nudge Claude in the right direction, because that’s real, and I want you to see what real looks like.

You’ll learn:

• The 6 ways to actually use Claude: Chat, Cowork, Code (both the desktop app and the terminal), Design, and Science

• How to connect your tools so Claude can see your inbox, your calendar, your notes, and all of the other software tools you use every day

• How to build and schedule a real recurring task. I walk through setting one up live, dictated by voice, start to finish

• How to use Claude Code in the terminal without being scared of it (it just looks like MS-DOS from 1990, and it’s not actually scary…its powerful)

• How to build something playful first. We build a browser game together, because learning can be fun too

• How to create a CLAUDE.md file so you never have to re-explain who you are, how you write, or what you care about, ever again

• A real working example. You build your own, and I demo 1 I built and start building something new

You’ll leave with at least one thing built and one thing automated.

You will build something that actually saves you time by the end of the recording.

Who this is for

This is for the women who’ve been curious about Claude but haven’t had a reason to sit down and actually learn it properly.

You don’t need to know how to code.

You don’t need to understand how large language models work.

I don’t, and I don’t need to, and neither do you.

You just need 90 minutes and a willingness to talk to your computer and tell it what you want to do.

The details

Level Up With Claude Code: the full recorded Level 1 class $99. One-time payment, yours to keep and rewatch. Pause. Play. Build. Go back to it.

Get Instant Access

And if you finish this and want to go further, to build real, complex automations around the actual messy problems in your business, applications are open for the Ladies Who Claude Mastermind a small, three-month cohort with weekly live sessions and office hours with me directly.

Come build something with me.

Love from Lisbon,

Nina

John Krakauer, neuroscientist & neurologist, builds therapeutic games for a living, and he is also one of the most honest skeptics you will hear on what actually helps the brain. In this conversation we get into the messy truth behind brain training, why he does not buy most of the hype, and the one long-term study on dementia that he genuinely cannot explain away.

Subscribe now

From there we go somewhere bigger. We talk about why AI keeps looking smarter every year (and why part of that might be us getting a little dumber), why "uploading your brain" belongs in the same bucket as imagining a plane flying backwards, and why the whole idea of longevity might be a misnomer, since most people do not want more years, they want to be young again.

In this episode you will learn:
- How most brain training falls short of what it promises, and the surprising result that made Krakauer pause
- Why language lets us describe impossible things fluently, and what that means for claims about consciousness and brain uploading
- Why medicine reaches for the gadget and skips the hard behavioural work, and why it can be harder to rehabilitate doctors than patients
- What immersive, almost psychedelic digital experiences might offer for healing without any drug involved

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to John and his work in neurotechnology
02:06 Overview of the Champlimaud Institute for Brain Research and Repair
03:59 Digital Neurotherapeutic Center and its impact
06:51 Comparing Hopkins and Champlimaud's approaches to neurotherapy
09:55 The concept of digital psychedelics and immersive experiences
15:02 Decoupling psychedelic experiences from drugs
19:52 Long-term effects of brain training and cognitive games
24:50 The potential of digital psychedelics in stroke and neuroplasticity
29:56 The importance of sleep, diet, and exercise for brain health
34:58 The future of brain uploading and collective consciousness
40:06 The role of exergaming and immersive therapy spaces
44:48 Prevention and treatment of stroke and neurodegenerative diseases
49:54 Barriers to behavioral change in medicine and wellness
55:07 The cultural and societal aspects of longevity and aging
01:00:09 The human desire for youth and the meaning of aging
01:04:58 The limitations of AI and the imagination of future technology
01:09:56 Book recommendations and reflections on culture and philosophy

Here’s a few stats that made me want to throw my laptop across the room.

Only ~1/3rd of women use AI at work.

There’s a 25% gender gap in adoption between men and women.

Only 9% of women use AI multiple times a day.

Meanwhile every headline out there is telling us AI is about to change how we all work and live.

So I did the only thing that made sense to me, I opened up my living room in Lisbon and started teaching my girlfriends how to use Claude.

And my program, Ladies Who Claude was born.

That was three weeks ago. Since then I’ve taught more than 30 women across group classes and private sessions. Next week I’m moving the class out of the living room and into a larger venue in central lisbon for a class on July 22 from 17:00 - 19:30. Sign up here.

This week’s note is the story of what happened and what my students have built.

Cheers,

Nina

P.S. Before I dive into the note - Please answer this poll

In this note:

• 💻 Ladies Who Claude: What 30 Women Built in Three Weeks

• 🎥 A Original Animation Created in 30m with Claude Code

• ⚡️ Claude’s Science Beta

Subscribe now

#190: 💻 Ladies Who Claude: What 30 Women Built in Three Weeks

I learned Claude Code through Nick Sarafa’s class back in April and wrote about it here.

It completely changed my life.

In the very literal sense that I don’t start a task anymore, I go to Claude.

Let me repeat that.

I do not start a task. I do not open a spreadsheet. I do not open a software.

I just go to Claude first and tell Claude (with my voice, not typing) what I want to do, then I watch Claude help me do it.

This is the future.

No more software. No more keyboard.

It’s not only a mindset shift but a tooling shift too.

So when I read that women are adopting AI at a fraction of the rate that men are, I couldn’t just be annoyed about it on the internet.

It’s not just that women aren’t adopting AI. This also means they aren’t learning the new tools that support AI. They don’t yet know that soon the keyboard will be obsolete.

And that made me want to bring a room full of actual women together to do something about it.

I’ve always believed women learn differently without men in the room. Something opens up.

People actually say “wait, can you say that again” instead of nodding along and then Googling it later.

So that’s the room I built.

From My Living Room to a Waitlist

Three weeks ago it was me, my laptop, and a handful of friends on my couch. Since then it’s turned into group Zoom classes, hours-long private 1:1 sessions, an in-person workshop planned for next week, and a growing community in a WhatsApp chat.

I’m sending the WhatsApp group a weekly Monday prompt “What are you building this week?” and I’m impressed by every reply of what these ladies are building.

I’ve also started doing 10-minute onboarding calls for every person before the in-person classes so we don’t waste time downloading software during class time.

And now, the next step is my new in-person class at a bigger venue in central Lisbon (Sign up!).

I did not see this coming three weeks ago.

I just wanted to teach my friends.

The Four Ways I Teach Claude

Every session starts the same way because there are four doors into using Claude, and most people only know about one of them.

Chat is the one everyone already knows. Drafting, brainstorming, asking basic questions. Using it as a thought partner.

Cowork is where you start to see the power of AI. This is where you connect your Gmail, your calendar, your Google Drive (and more), then let Claude run light automations and scheduled tasks for you.

Claude Code in the desktop app where you start actually building things. Tools, workflows, small apps, and websites.

Claude Code in the Terminal is the deep end and also the most powerful Claude tool. It’s where Claude was natively built, and it’s the only one with real persistent memory through local project folders.

Almost everyone arrives only knowing Chat, and by the end of class everyone has all 4 options installed and has built their first AI automation.

That’s a win in my book.

The Moments That Made Me SO SO Happy

One of my students, Grace, runs a communications agency across three time zones and told me she resisted Claude “so much” before the class. By the end of our session she said,

“My productivity is insane. Like, I’m quick anyway. But now I’m, like, chaining it. It knows my tone of voice. It’s talking to all my tools. It’s in the Google Drive. It’s in my shoes. Like, it’s just amazing.”

It’s in her inbox, her Drive, her tone of voice, and she said her productivity now feels insane.

That’s Ladies Who Claude in one sentence.

Hayriye, a chef and restaurant owner, opened her session with “I’m a chef, I don’t need AI,” and by the end of class was connecting her restaurant’s Gmail to manage orders.

She almost downloaded a lookalike app with a logo just close enough to Claude’s to fool her, which is a useful thing to watch out for if you’re just getting started. Always download directly from the source, not just the first result in a Google or app store search. (FYI - Claude desktop app can only be downloaded from the Claude.ai/download link.)

One participant created a time-audit and she watched Claude surface that her job search should be her top priority right now, instead of a packed social calendar of Lisbon summer events. (Harsh Claude, but ok).

She also used Claude Code to diagnose why her laptop storage was full, and found close to 150GB of forgotten screen recordings from 2023 she didn’t even know she had.

And then I introduce all my students to my favorite app of all time right now, WisprFlow, the speech-to-text tool I recommend in every single session. I talk at 185 words a minute and type at 80, so the math there isn’t even close. One student clocked in even faster, and asked me, only half joking, why she would ever type again.

Suzy’s Idea Is Now Part of the Program

At my last in-person class on Monday, Suzy (an IFS therapist who came in with a healthy dose of resistance) suggested we end with everyone sharing what they built. I loved it so much that it’s now a permanent part of my program format. Some of the best ideas in this whole program haven’t just come from me, they’ve come from the room.

Nicole, who joined from Barcelona, had already built her own website and brand guide with Claude before ever meeting me.

She mentioned offhand that her WhatsApp group of 27 professional moms was already trading AI tips, things like grocery lists for nannies, school email triage, and multilingual homework help. There’s clearly a “MomBosses Who Claude” workshop waiting to happen, and we’re piloting it.

And there’s Joseph, a private client referred from a ‘Ladies Who Claude’ Alumna, who is a fractional CFO trying to build a slower paced life.

He asked me the question I think everyone secretly wants to ask: has this actually made you more money, or is your life just easier?

My honest answer is both. Claude 100% has made my life easier. I’ve created more hours in the day to enjoy my life - to spend time with friends and do ceramics.

I’ve also made money with Claude. I’ve had Claude help me design guidebooks that I’ve been able to launch within 3 hours, a task that would have taken me hiring a designer and a week’s worth of time before. Claude has helped me to create prospect lists for sales outreach that have landed me podcast sponsorship deals.

And well….*clears throat* I’m launching a movement to empower women with AI because of Claude, and money is flowing in through that too.

Claude helped me to build the entire Ladies Who Claude website and payment pages in one day, making launching this company the easiest launch I’ve ever had.

Mastering Claude is like having a personal assistant with you 24/7. However, you also have to think about Claude the way I’d think about an eager intern, smart, fast, occasionally saving a file in the wrong folder, but completely unbothered when you point it out.

That analogy I took from Nick Sarafa’s class back in April, and I believe it gives people more patience with AI because we shouldn’t expect perfection from AI, just like we don’t expect perfection from humans.

Want to Join Ladies Who Claude?

Next in person class is Wednesday, July 22 at 17:00 - 19:30 in Central Lisbon.

The online program is TBA, but you can sign up for updates on the Ladies Who Claude website through the contact form.

Head to ladieswhoclaude.com to see what’s coming up, or just reply to this email and tell me where you’re stuck with AI.

I read every single message.

🎥 Content of the Week

No book this week, and honestly no show either. The only thing I’ve actually consumed lately is my own AI experiments, so we’re counting that. Besides that I’ve been teaching women how to AI in my living room.

But yesterday, Claude blew my mind. AGAIN.

I built a 20 second teaser trailer for an upcoming guidebook I am launching.

I prompted Claude Fable 5 with this super simple prompt in the terminal:

“I want to create a 20-second teaser trailer for my upcoming guidebook, Longevity and Psychedelics. I can give you the videos of three lectures I gave on the topic. I can also give you the entire text of the guidebook, and I want you to use Higgsfield to create the teaser trailer.”

14 min later, Claude created an animation - gorgeous, colorful, all on its own with no brand direction or creative guidelines.

Then I just had to give it a voiceover file with my own voice, add the Nina’s Notes original jingle, and some small edits. Another 14 min later I had this.

I can’t believe it.

This would have cost me a few hundred dollars, hiring a designer and an animator, and probably 2 weeks of my own time.

⚡️ Check This Out

Claude Science Beta just went live.

I’ve clicked around in it for 10 minutes and I can already tell you this would have saved me at least a year of my PhD.

The first suggested task “Map Recent Literature of the Subfield,” is what most first-year graduate students spend a year doing.

I had to try it.

I asked Claude Science to map the literature of the Psychedelics + Longevity field, which is a small emerging field, and after 20 minutes. It gave me these 2 figures and a list of 42 of the most relevant papers.

This is insane. It’s built for exactly the kind of research-heavy, cite-your-sources, repeatable biology lab bench work that I used to do in my PhD and at my biotech startups.

I’ll report back as I dig deeper.

But already, Wow.

I wish I had this 10 years ago.

Looking for My Podcasts?

You find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

I also co-host Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED!

• 🎙️ Mondays: LT UNLOCKED interviews with leading longevity innovators, clinicians, and scientists

• 📰 Wednesdays: Nina’s Notes in your inbox with interviews, deep dives on longevity & neuroscience

• 🎙️ Fridays: LT UNLOCKED News, a weekly news roundup of the latest in longevity

Find Longevity Technology UNLOCKED on 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, and 🔴 YouTube. We just hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube!!!

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Frederik Dierick, a family and sports medicine physician turned founder of Pioneer Wellness Group, to explore how hospitality could become one of the most effective (and most overlooked) tools for helping millions of people live longer, healthier lives.

Listen & watch on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, & 🟣 Apple Podcasts

Frederik makes the case that hotels and resorts are uniquely positioned to deliver science-backed longevity care at scale: guests arrive with time, attention, and motivation that almost never exists in a doctor’s office. We dig into what it actually takes to build a luxury wellness experience that’s grounded in real clinical science (not spa-day wellness theater), why nutrition is the most sensitive topic in medicine, where AI fits in as a health accountability partner, and what it will take to democratize longevity so it’s not just for the ultra-wealthy.

Subscribe now

CHAPTERS

• 00:00 The Journey to Longevity Medicine

• 05:47 Creating Transformative Experiences in Hospitality

• 12:01 Practical Applications of Health in Hospitality

• 18:00 The Future of Longevity in Hospitality

• 23:57 The Challenges of Personalized Medicine

• 29:10 Challenges in Patient Care and Systemic Issues

• 38:35 Democratizing Longevity Medicine

• 45:07 Nutrition: The Most Sensitive Topic

• 51:16 The Future of Health Hospitality

ABOUT DR. FREDERIK DIERICK Dr. Frederik Dierick trained as a family and sports medicine doctor before founding Pioneer Wellness Group, a consultancy on a mission to turn hotels and resorts into the world’s most powerful health platforms. He works at the intersection of clinical medicine and hospitality, helping brands build wellness experiences rooted in real science rather than trend-driven spa treatments.

CONNECT WITH PIONEER WELLNESS GROUP:

• Website: https://www.pioneerwellnessgroup.com

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederikdierick/

ABOUT NINA’S NOTES
Nina’s Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

CONNECT WITH NINA’S NOTES
Newsletter: www.ninasnotes.xyz
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninapatrick/
Website: https://www.ninapatrick.xyz

Keywords: longevity, health optimization, hospitality, wellness, science, experience, behavior change, AI health coaching, preventive medicine, luxury wellness

Can a 5-minute brain scan detect dementia years before symptoms?

Jurij Dreo, co-founder and CTO of BrainTrip, draws on 20+ years of EEG research to reveal how brain activity can be measured, interpreted, and used to catch the earliest signs of cognitive decline and dementia — often before they’re visible or irreversible.

In this episode of Nina’s Notes, host Nina Patrick (PhD) and Jurij explore the real potential of EEG technology, why it’s been underused in clinics, and where brain-health diagnostics are headed next. If you care about protecting your memory and measuring your cognitive capital, this one’s for you.

🎙️ Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts & YouTube.

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 – The fascination with the brain
03:49 – Neuroscience vs. genetics in clinical practice
06:17 – Understanding EEG: the hidden talent
11:50 – EEG waves and brain health
18:31 – EEG in cognitive decline & dementia
25:32 – Cogniscore: a new approach to brain health
29:26 – Understanding Cogniscore & cognitive assessment
32:24 – The accessibility of EEG testing
35:34 – Advancements in EEG technology
38:24 – Interpreting cognitive assessment results
44:17 – Next steps after cognitive assessment
45:59 – When to get a Cogniscore assessment
47:43 – Daily practices for brain health
52:01 – The brain of Marie Curie

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• Why EEG beats other brain-imaging tools for early detection

• How brain waves reveal your mental and cognitive state

• The challenges of turning EEG research into clinical tools

• How EEG can flag early dementia and cognitive decline

• How AI and machine learning decode EEG data

• Network-level brain activity and why it matters

• How accessible EEG assessments are right now

• The future of EEG for diagnosing brain disorders

ABOUT JURIJ DREO
Jurij Dreo is a Slovenian leader in neuroscience and brainwave analysis with over 20 years of experience. His work targets one of the defining health challenges of our time: cognitive decline. Through validated brain-monitoring methods, he’s built a system that detects the earliest signs of memory loss — making it possible to intervene before decline becomes irreversible. From clinical research to directing EEG labs, he bridges science and real-world application, setting new standards for how high performers protect and strengthen brain function over time.

BrainTrip: https://braintrip.net/
BrainTrip LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/braintrip/
Jurij Dreo LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jurij-dreo-38360b198/

ABOUT NINA’S NOTES
Nina’s Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

CONNECT WITH NINA’S NOTES
Newsletter: www.ninasnotes.xyz

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninapatrick/
Website: https://www.ninapatrick.xyz

#EEG #BrainHealth #Dementia #CognitiveDecline #Neuroscience #Longevity #BrainTrip #Neurotech #MemoryLoss #NinasNotes #AIinHealthcare #Biohacking #HealthyAging #Neurotechnology #DigitalHealth

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been teaching AI to my friends in my apartment.

For one friend, we built her social media system, automated her client follow-ups, and started a video research agent, from scratch. She walked in saying she wasn’t tech savvy. She walked out with a running system.

I’ve now done this with five women, one-on-one, in my apartment. And I keep thinking: why is this only happening in my living room?

So I’m opening it up.

This Tuesday, June 30th, I’m running my first online session. 90 minutes, small group, we build your first AI workflow together. €39, 20 spots.

Below you’ll also find three ways to work with me privately if you want something more hands-on.

Join the Online Sessions! Limited Spots

💬 In this note:

• Why the AI gender gap made me start something

• What Ladies Who Claude actually is

• Online Claude Code Session will be on June 30th - more details

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Why I Started Ladies Who Claude

I kept reading the same article in different formats. In the workplace, men use AI more frequently than women.

Almost two-thirds (64%) of women say they never use AI at work, compared to 55% of men.

And when it comes to AI power users, they’re more likely to be men, 14% of men use AI multiple times a day, versus only 9% of women.

Then I found the student data, and it hit harder. A YouGov survey of UK university students found that only 27% of female students were using AI apps like ChatGPT at least once a week in their studies, compared to 43% of their male peers.

And only 38% of female students said AI was important to their future work, versus 57% of male students.

And it's not a familiarity problem. Harvard Business School research found that women are adopting AI tools at a 25% lower rate than men on average, and when women were given equal access to ChatGPT in a study, they were still 13% less likely to try it.

Access alone isn't closing the gap.

Why? Half of women say that using AI at work feels like cheating. Only 43% of men agree.

Meanwhile, the International Labour Organization found that women's jobs are almost twice as likely to be exposed to AI disruption as men's. 29% of female-dominated occupations face GenAI exposure, compared to 16% of male-dominated ones

So women are less likely to be using the tool, and more likely to have their jobs disrupted by it.

I read all of this and thought: okay, no.

Not on my watch.

What I Did About It

It started with a session in my apartment.

A friend wanted to understand AI, the real, useful, “here’s how this saves you three hours on Tuesday” version.

So I sat down with her, walked her through Claude, built a few things live, and watched her face when it worked.

Then I did it again with three ladies. And again, and again.

Now we have a WhatsApp group. A lot of voice notes at 11pm saying “I just automated this thing.”

Ladies Who Claude is a space for women who want to get better at using AI in real life and real work, without needing to become “AI people.”

This week I ran a full five-hour session with my friend Vika. We set up her entire social media command center in Notion, built an automation that writes and sends client follow-ups, and started a video research agent that scouts content for her reaction posts. She says she is not “tech savvy,” and she left the session with a running system.

⚡️ This Tuesday!

I’m running my first online AI session June 30th at 6pm GMT (10am PST). In 90 minutes, we will build your first workflow together. You will leave the session with something that runs.

It’s a small group Just 20 spots, link closes when full. Only $39.

Join the Session on June 30th!

More ways to work together:

1. 90-Minute Strategy Deep Dive
One 1:1 session. We look at your business, your workflows, and where AI can actually move the needle. You leave with a custom roadmap and a few things you can do immediately.
→ Book here

2. 5-Week AI System Coaching
A private container where we build your AI systems together. Implementation support, structure, and someone in the room with you while you actually set things up.
→ Book here

3. 2-Week AI Intensive
High-touch sprint for founders and operators who want to move fast. We map what matters, build the tools, and leave you with systems your team can actually use.
→ Book here

If you want more details on any of these before booking, just reply to this email.

Thanks for reading Nina’s Notes. If you know a woman who should be in that room, forward this.

Subscribe now

Hey friends,

At Longevity Day, Xico Teixeira did a live demo of the biofeedback of your brain when you do a breathwork session.

He led us through three rounds of breathwork while he wore an EEG headband, the one produced by Muse, and displayed his brainwaves on the screen for us to watch.

I interviewed the founder of Muse, Ariel Garten, for the Nina’s Notes podcast last year. Watch the episode here.

If you want to watch your own brain move from the alpha and gamma waves while awake to the theta waves of sleep and deep relaxation, you can grab a Muse headband yourself and train your brain at home.

Use this link and code NINA to get 15% off a Muse headband!

Cheers,

Nina

💬 In this note:

• 🌙 Your Cycle is a Superpower (and a Filter)

• 🎥 Pantheon

• ⚡️ Ferning

Subscribe now

#187: 🌙 Your Cycle is a Superpower (and a Filter)

Ladies and Gentleman… I’ve been telling a few of my friends how I date in accordance with my menstrual cycle and my girlfriends have looked at me with a raised eyebrow and been like - you what??

This knowledge is really too good to gatekeep and long time readers know that’s never been what Nina’s Notes is about.

So let me school you on the menstrual cycle (Men, don’t stop reading because I know you don’t know this) and how you can use it to improve your dating life and relationships.

What’s Actually Happening in Your Cycle

Listen up. I’ve found a world-class hack here.

If you’re a woman who’s not tracking your cycle, you are missing some extremely useful data pertaining to your own life.

And if you’re in a relationship with a woman, and not paying attention to her cycle, you’re leaving a lot of good evenings on the table.

Let me explain.

The menstrual cycle runs on rotating hormones, primarily estrogen and progesterone, that shape your energy, your mood, your confidence, your social drive and even how attractive you find other people.

It also determines how attractive other people find you.

You may think, Nina, you’re starting to get woo over here but let me stop you. This is well-established endocrinology.

Today, we are going to focus on the two big phases of the women’s cycle.

Get Social In Your Follicular Phase

The follicular phase starts the first day of your period and runs through the first half of your cycle, until ovulation.

Estrogen is rising. And as it climbs, your energy starts to rise with it.

Your social drive is on full blast and many have a desire to be out in the world.

You may want to go out. You might feel a little flirty. You’ll want to put on heels and go out on the town.

Research shows that higher estrogen is associated with increased extroversion, greater risk tolerance, and more positive social engagement.

This is the phase where you actually want to make plans. When putting on the heels and going out sounds like a really good idea.

If you’re actively dating, these are the fun times of the cycle to go out on those first or second dates. Your energy is high, you’re curious, and you’re probably going to have a good time.

Ovulation is When You’re At Your Peak Confidence

Right around the middle of your cycle, estrogen peaks and you get a surge of LH (luteinizing hormone) that triggers ovulation.

This is your peak energy and confidence window.

You’ll be finding people very attractive. And importantly, people will also be attracted to you.

Studies have found that during ovulation, women rate strangers as more attractive.

During ovulation women are perceived by others as more attractive.

Women display more confidence and assertiveness in social settings during this time as well.

Warning: Use this information wisely. I once stopped a man riding a bike during my ovulation phase, he dismounted and asked me on a date with one look. Ladies, we are goddesses here.

There’s even research showing women are more likely to take financial risks and make faster decisions during this window. Proceed with caution.

You’ll notice it if you pay attention. More eye contact. More energy. A slight tendency toward impulsive decisions that feel justified in the moment.

It is a great time to meet someone new, but you also might accidentally fall for someone you would normally swipe left on. Again I’ll say, proceed with caution.

If you’re in a relationship - this is a great time to impress your lady with a night out. Dress up. Take her out. Show her off.

The Luteal Phase: I Hate Everyone

After ovulation, you enter the luteal phase. Estrogen drops. Progesterone rises. The second half of the cycle for many women feels noticeably different.

Lower energy. More introverted. Less interested in socializing. A lower threshold for annoyance.

As I like to put it: I hate everyone.

This is a completely normal, physiological response to shifting hormones. It’s not a character flaw. It’s not you being difficult. It’s progesterone.

Now the worst part of this phase (in my opinion) is the late luteal phase, the days right before your period, when PMS symptoms peak.

Estrogen and progesterone are both low. Your body is winding down, meaning that is not a great time to plan a big night out or a loud restaurant or anything that requires significant social engagement.

🎯 The Filter Hack (This One’s Actually Good)

Now, drum roll please…here’s the dating hack.

If you go out on a date during the luteal phase and you don’t hate that person, that’s actually a really strong signal.

Your tolerance for social stimulation is low. Your energy is down. Your threshold for annoyance is high. Yet you still enjoyed their company?

That person passes the filter.

Compare that to a date during ovulation, when legit ANYONE can seem charming and attractive and the world feels sparkly. Of course you liked them. But how do they hold up when you’re in “I hate everyone” mode?

Track your cycle. Date across phases.

The summary:

• Luteal phase = First dates (The real filter: you won’t be charmed by someone mediocre)

• Follicular = Second dates and beyond (high energy: you’ll actually enjoy it)

• Ovulation = Existing relationship territory only (you might accidentally fall for someone you’d normally swipe left on)

Try this out and see who makes the cut.

👫 If You’re in a Relationship With a Woman

This section is for you.

I’m not going to tell you to memorize a calendar but if you want to be an A+ partner, download a period tracking app and track her damn cycle. And pay attention, because the research here is genuinely useful.

Follicular phase: She has energy. She wants to be out in the world. This is the time for plans. The dinner reservation, the weekend trip, the party you’ve been putting off. Lean into it. She’ll have a good time and so will you.

Ovulation: She’s likely at her most social and most energetic. If you want to try something new together, this is a good window.

Early luteal: Energy starts to dip. A quieter evening starts to look more appealing than a loud bar. Consider a low-key date at home, something that feels special but doesn’t require performance.

Late luteal (pre-period): This is the time to be gentle. Not because she’s fragile, but because her body is working hard and her tolerance for unnecessary stress is legitimately lower. No need to plan anything ambitious. Just be kind and show up.

This is not tiptoeing. It’s about not scheduling a big dinner party the week before her period and then being surprised when it doesn’t go well.

If you work with the biology, everyone wins.

The Science Bit

For anyone who wants the actual mechanism:

Estrogen acts on dopamine and serotonin systems in the brain, which is why higher estrogen is associated with elevated mood, motivation, and social engagement. It also appears to dampen the amygdala’s fear response, which may explain the increased risk tolerance and confidence during the follicular and ovulatory phases.

Progesterone, by contrast, has a calming but also sedating effect, partly through its interaction with GABA receptors. It’s not a villain, but it does shift the nervous system toward rest and withdrawal.

These differences are not subtle. You can feel them in your body, they’re measurable on brain imaging and documented across dozens of studies in behavioral neuroendocrinology.

Your cycle is one of the most powerful modulators of your brain and behavior, cycling through every single month.

Learn it. Use it to your power my goddesses!

📘 Thinking of Diving Deeper? Check Out My Guidebooks.

You can download all 9 and more at ninapatrick.xyz/guidebooks. Or if you want everything in one place, the guidebooks, the full deep dives, and early access to events, just upgrade to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers get the complete guidebook library included.

Upgrade To Paid

🎞️ Content Of The Week

Pantheon now on Netflix

Rating: ★★★★★

What if your consciousness could be uploaded to the cloud after you die?

Pantheon is an animated sci-fi drama where a teenage girl starts receiving mysterious messages online, which turn out to be coming from her recently deceased father, whose consciousness was uploaded following an experimental brain scan.

Two companies have cracked the code on “uploaded intelligence,” and they’ve chosen to deploy it in the same way: stripping the uploaded minds of everything but their professional skills so they can keep working, without end, in the afterlife.

Season Two picks up in the wake of a global internet shutdown, with a race to find the one uploaded intelligence that can protect humanity against the other ghosts in the machine.

It has a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and was criminally cancelled after one season as part of a $400 million tax write-down at AMC. Season Two had already been produced and was pulled before it ever aired. The CEO had abruptly left the company, the network was in chaos, and any platform interested in picking up the show would have had to compensate AMC for the tax hit it had already taken. Thankfully, it eventually found its way to Netflix.

One of the most thought-provoking shows I’ve watched on the intersection of consciousness, identity, and technology. Highly recommended!

This was a reader recommendation by Grace. Thanks Grace!

⚡️ Check This Out

This is what cervical mucus looks like under a microscope!

Named after the distinct fern-leaf patterns that appear around ovulation, this is called the Fern Test.

It’s one of the most beautiful things happening in a woman’s body that you’ve never seen.

Cervical mucus is a gatekeeper. It protects from pathogens, fosters healthy bacteria, and helps sperm reach the reproductive tract. It also changes visibly across a woman’s cycle, which is exactly what we see with the fern test.

Wow!

🗣️ Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can also find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

I also co-host Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED!

🎙️ Mondays: LT UNLOCKED interviews with leading longevity innovators, clinicians, and scientists

📰 Wednesdays: Nina’s Notes in your inbox with interviews, deep dives on longevity & neuroscience

🎙️ Fridays: LT UNLOCKED News, a weekly news roundup of the latest in longevity

Find Longevity Technology UNLOCKED on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Thanks for reading Nina’s Notes #187. If you like this newsletter, click the share button and send it to a friend.

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Edited by Wright Time Publishing

Hey friends,

When I went to Athens in May for The World Beautiful Business Forum, I completely was thrown off of my routine - exercise, eating, everything.

Here I am, a longevity expert, and I couldn’t hold it together over a 5 day conference.

It made me think about what I usually do to stay fit, eat healthy, and sleep properly when I travel. I also thought back to the professionals that I’ve interviewed and I wanted to make a practical list for you, and for myself, the next time I’m at a conference with 12+ hour programming each day.

Here’s what I’ve found. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Nina

💬 In this note:

• ✈️ Maintaining Your Routine While You Travel

• 📚 Brimstone

• ⚡️ “Go to Sleep” - Claude

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#186: 💪🏼 Maintaining Your Routine While You Travel

When we travel, we have many things that throw off your routine - jetlag, early morning meetings, late night social events for work, or staying up late and sleeping in because you’re enjoying your holiday.

I’ve interviewed several professionals about what they do to stay healthy and fit on the road, and how they recover from the grind of constant travel.

Fighting Jet-Lag

Sleep Flying East, Stay Awake Going West

When traveling west, stay awake on the flight. Most Europe-to-US flights take off in the morning, so you’ve already slept. Stay awake on the plane, land in the afternoon in the US, and do your best to stay awake until at least 8pm/9pm local time before going to bed.

The exception to this rule is if you are traveling west and you cross the international date line, for example flying from California to Australia. In this case, sleep on the plane, you will land in the very early morning in Australia, and you’ll need the rest.

Eat Before and After the Flight. Avoid Plane Food.

You want your circadian rhythm in sync with the new timezone, and eating is one of the fastest ways to kickstart that adjustment.

Your first meal after landing should align at a proper mealtime in the local timezone - should be at breakfast, lunch or dinner.

When you arrive at your destination, have a coffee to keep you awake until bedtime. Take melatonin to fall asleep and stay asleep. I take 10mg of melatonin to fall asleep and get a full 7-8 hours of sleep in the new timezone.

One thing I noticed for me, is that the bigger timezone gaps, the easier I find the adjustment. Long-hauls like LA to Sydney, or Lisbon to San Francisco are more manageable than two- or three-hour shifts like Lisbon to Athens, or Vegas to NYC.

Get Off the Plane and Straight To the Gym

This is one of my secret hacks. On a redeye flight from the US west coast to east coast, I usually land at 5am - too early to check in to the hotel, and too early to even meet anyone for breakfast.

So I book an early morning workout class to attend right when I land.

The perks: lockers for your luggage, showers, blow dryers, etc. But more than logistics, it kick-starts your metabolism, gets your muscles moving after hours in a seat and mentally signals to your brain that the flight is over.

You arrive into the day already feeling like yourself.

I also book the earliest morning fitness classes if I wake up too early in the new timezone.

How Formula E World Champion Lucas Di Grassi Fights Jet-Lag

When I interviewed Luca di Grassi, Formula E World Champion, Formula 1 and WEC Le Mans driver, he told me that his jetlag has actually gotten worse with age. And yet, he still has to fully adjust within 2-3 days while on tour driving.

To adjust quickly, he takes probiotics and prebiotics for jet-lag, specifically because travel disrupts the microbiome. Pre-/Probiotics are an easy thing to pack and a genuinely underrated hack.

I’d added my own version to this so that when I arrive somewhere new, I always find a big healthy salad for my first real meal. It’s simple, helps with digestion, and makes you feel like you’re taking care of yourself when everything else feels disrupted.

JJ Virgin’s Travel-as-Lifestyle ToolKit

JJ Virgin, triple board-certified nutrition expert and fitness hall of famer, doesn’t treat travel as an exception to her routine. She told me in our recent interview that she built her routine around the fact that she’s always traveling.

She chooses hotels specifically based on the gym quality. Full stop.

She has a dedicated travel workout plan that divides the body into 4 parts - upper push, upper pull, hip/thigh hinge, power core - so that she can train anywhere and with whatever equipment there is available.

If she can’t make it to the gym - like right before she gets on stage for a talk, she does her hotel room circuit: up-downs, jumping jacks, and air squats. It just takes twenty minutes and really counts.

For timezone adjustment, she takes creatine HCL (not monohydrate). The monohydrate form causes bloating where the HCL form does not and absorbs better at lower doses. She takes four doses on heavy travel days versus her usual one or two doses. She described a recent trip where she went from the Amazon → Egypt → New York → LA and the creatine HCL, she said, is what kept her functional.

On a recent trip to Bali, she stopped over in South Korea specifically to adjust time zones. At the hotel gym, she found people from age 30 to age 100, all in matching PE outfits, just going about their workout like it was the most natural thing in the world. Because, for them it was. And that’s the normalization we are missing.

Whether it’s Lucas adjusting his microbiome between Tokyo and Shanghai, or JJ choosing a hotel by its squat rack, the people who maintain their health while traveling don’t just wing it.

They build systems so that the decision is already made before the jet-lag hits.

You don’t need to be a Formula E driver or a fitness hall of famer to do this.

Pick one thing, like a travel workout you can do in less than 30 minutes (I love Kayla Itsines workouts!), a supplement you pack without thinking, a rule about what you eat when you land, and make it automatic. The routine doesn’t have to survive the trip perfectly, showing up matters the most.

📘 Thinking of Diving Deeper? Check Out My Guidebooks.

You can download all 9 and more at ninapatrick.xyz/guidebooks. Or if you want everything in one place, the guidebooks, the full deep dives, and early access to events, just upgrade to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers get the complete guidebook library included.

Upgrade to Paid

📚 Book of the Week

Brimstone by Callie Hart

Rating: ★★★★★

It’s summer and we’re back with the fairy smut.

Fae-vampire hybrid Queen Saeris Fane and Kingfisher are back for a sequel. The book launches right in, and if you read Quicksilver a while ago (for me over a year ago, it was the BOTW #153).

Quicksilver ends with a massive cliffhanger after Saeris has this wild, otherworldly encounter with the gods…and they expect you to remember all of that when you’re thrown back into this world, trying to remember characters, plots, and chaos.

About 15% in my brain started to settle back down and remember a thing or two.

So my biggest recommendation is to read them back-to-back if you can! Or at least re-read the last chapter of Quicksilver before launching into Brimstone.

⚡️ Check This Out

Claude often tells me to go to sleep, or to stop working.

As per several Reddit users, they are also getting these suggestions to “get some rest.”

Some people like Claude’s commitment to self-care, while others find it intrusive, annoying or confusing. Because the worst part is that Claude does not seem to know what time it is.

Often I get messages telling me to “get some rest” first thing in the morning when I continue the tread of a conversation.

Good news: Anthropic is looking to fix the quirk.

However, I have to admit, when I run out of tokens it perfectly aligns with lunch or dinner time and a few hours later the tokens reset and I think that is really helpful for my mental health - thanks Claude.

🗣️ Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can also find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

I also co-host Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED!

🎙️ Mondays: LT UNLOCKED interviews with leading longevity innovators, clinicians, and scientists

📰 Wednesdays: Nina’s Notes in your inbox with interviews, deep dives on longevity & neuroscience

🎙️ Fridays: LT UNLOCKED News, a weekly news roundup of the latest in longevity

Find Longevity Technology UNLOCKED on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading Nina’s Notes #186. If you like this newsletter, click the share button and send it to a friend.

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

Hey friends,

Last week I curated a stage of 30 speakers covering longevity topics ranging from sleep, breathwork, and women’s health to consciousness and cryopreservation.

It was my first full day event that I’ve curated and it was a huge success, overcapacity with standing room only. Barely anyone left because they didn’t want to give up their seats. Highly engaged audience!

Some feedback that just melted my heart:

“Really brilliant day Nina! You put together such a great event and I loved alllll the talks.”

“Incredible event. I wish I could have stayed the whole day. All of the speakers were so good.”

“Longevity day was the place to be in Lisbon last week.”

“Part of me wishes we could turn back time and do it all over again today, tomorrow, and the day after. Thank you once again for creating such a special experience.”

Cheers,

Nina

💬 In this note:

• 🫩 The Exhaustion No One Is Diagnosing Correctly

• 📚 Yellowface

• ⚡️ Fart Sensor

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#185: The Root Cause of Exhaustion No One is Diagnosing Correctly

I have one colleague that I meet with multiple times a week and every time we open the video chat, the conversation starts with a “this week is AHHHHH” followed by the breakdown of why the days have been insane, the meetings back-to-back, and the impossible volume of work.

This isn’t one bad week or a deadline that got away from him.

This is every week.

This is normal.

Another friend of mine only had time to have a catch-up call with me on her way to the airport because she is flying from Boston to SF multiple times a month now for work.

Another texted me at 9pm telling me she is wrecked.

Meanwhile, my calendar is also full. Podcast interviews, events, writing, ceramics, padel, dance, calls I said yes to. I worry about fitting things in. But I’m not exhausted the way they are.

My calendar has the same density, but something is different.

A packed calendar can lead to exhaustion or it can be fulfilling.

Something is wrong with how we are talking about what occupies our time, and how we feel after that time is spent.

When we look at the calendar, we think we have too many meetings, too much screen time, too much stimulation.

The story we tell ourselves is we’re doing too much. So the answer is subtractive.

The advice is cancel the meetings that don’t need to exist. Do a digital detox. Try a dopamine fast. Block your calendar. Say no more often. Take the vacation you’ve been putting off.

Some of this is good advice. Some of it works for a week.

But none of it solves the thing.

Most of us experience the Sunday Scaries.

The day you’re supposed to be recovering. You rest, you do the slow morning, you take the walk, you don’t check your email. And by Sunday night the dread is there anyway. Monday looms ahead of you. You’re so anxious about the week ahead that you start making the to-do list on Sunday night, just to “get ahead.”

You trade your last hours of the weekend for the illusion of control over the next day coming.

Or you try having an early night mid-week.

You finally have an evening with nothing on it, no work dinner, no call, nothing you said yes to three weeks ago and now regret. You think okay, this is it.

I’ll go to bed at ten. I’ll get the full eight hours. I’ll wake up actually rested for once. The alarm goes off and you’re just as wrecked as every other morning. Because one good night doesn’t undo the twenty before it. You’re exhausted from the last six months, and a single early bedtime can’t pay down that kind of debt.

And vacation doesn’t even seem to fix it. My colleague went to Morocco for his birthday and he didn’t bring the laptop.

He did it right, the actual disconnection. But then the first call we had after he got back, the conversation opened the same way it always does. “This week is AHHHH.”

A week back at his desk and the vacation was already gone. Whatever it refilled, it wasn’t what was actually empty.

So if it’s not too many meetings, and it’s not too little sleep, and it’s not the missing vacation, what is it?

Self-Determination Theory

When I really started to dive into it, I realized that the reason for the exhaustion is not from doing too much. It’s from doing too little of your own choosing.

There’s a framework from psychology called self-determination theory (SDT). It says humans have three basic psychological needs we have to meet to function, and autonomy is one of them. Not autonomy in the grand sense of running your own life. Autonomy in the granular sense: being the one who decided what you’re doing right now.

Chronic low-autonomy environments produce a specific kind of depletion that looks like tiredness but does not respond to rest. You can’t nap your way out of it.

This is also why I’d be just as exhausted as my colleagues if I spent a week doing things I didn’t pick.

The shape of the week matters less than the ownership of what fills your time.

There is an obvious objection here…”But I chose my job. I chose to have kids. I chose this life. So why am I exhausted?”

All true, but choosing the container isn’t the same as choosing what fills it day to day.

You picked the job, but you didn’t pick the 6am meeting.

You picked parenthood, but you didn’t pick that you need to bring homemade muffins to school tomorrow morning.

Macro-autonomy doesn’t substitute for micro-autonomy.

The depletion happens in the small moments. The meeting you didn’t schedule, the muffins you didn’t volunteer for, the Slack message that pulls you off the thing you were actually choosing to do.

Each one is too small to protest but the accumulation is the whole game.

If you’ve been wondering why you can’t seem to rest your way out of this, it’s because the problem was never how much you were doing. It was how little of it was yours.

So, What Actually Refills The Tank?

Side quests, hobbies, and weird small projects that nobody asked you to do. The thing you are doing because you want to, not because it’s on your to do list.

These replenish, because they are self-directed.

This is why the couch fails at being rest. Sitting there scrolling isn’t lazy, your body genuinely needs something, and something with a low cognitive load. The couch/scrolling is a reasonable guess at that.

But the deficit was never inactivity, it’s again the ownership of the tasks.

And unfortunately, scrolling doesn’t supply that ownership. It just supplies cheap dopamine.

Wellness coaches often frame this as a novelty problem. It makes hobbies sound like a brain hack, pull the lever and get the reward.

Essentially saying, “do new things because dopamine.”

But it actually is “do chosen things because your nervous system is starving for evidence that your life is yours.”

Doing side quests is a way to reclaim your autonomy.

Therefore, your hobby, your padel game, the side project you’ve been pushing away for months, they all have a deeper purpose. These aren’t novelty-seeking or dopamine-chasing or productivity-coded self-improvement. They are evidence-gathering for your nervous system.

Your nervous system needs proof that your life belongs to you.

And the only thing that supplies proof is actions that you chose to do actively.

The chosen action is the only thing that shows your nervous system that you are in charge.

That’s why a nap you chose to take can refill the tank, but a vacation your boss prescribed to you doesn’t.

The Biggest Villain is both Work Culture and Wellness Culture

Work culture is the obvious villain in this story and wellness culture is its sidekick.

Both are about optimization, and both promise that if you tune your schedule correctly, you’ll feel better.

Some of this has real science behind it. Meeting timing, morning routines, sleep windows, these things do affect how you feel. The wellness industry didn’t invent the underlying research.

But it took the research and wrapped it in a prescription, and the prescription asks you to perform optimization inside a structure you didn’t design.

Sleep needs are individually determined. Some people are wired to wake at 5am and some at 9am, but the underlying biology is well-established and it’s called your chronotype.

Nonetheless, wellness culture has decided that 4:30am is virtuous and 9:00am is lazy, causing some people to spend years trying to force themselves into a schedule their biology was never going to accept.

But you didn’t choose any of it. You inherited that structure from a wellness influencer, whose body, schedule and life happen to work that way, and now you’re trying to fit yourself into their container.

The core of this problem is actually due to a demanding work culture. Most people don’t have enough autonomy in their schedules to discover what their body actually needs in the first place.

So they fail, and they’ll conclude they lack discipline. Discipline was never the problem. The prescription was wrong for them, and the prescription was never theirs to begin with.

Even worse, many people now again have to force themselves into a schedule that doesn’t fit their biology with the return to office mandates.

After years of working from home, and being more productive by nearly every available metric, millions of people are now back at desks, commuting, sitting through meetings that could have been emails, available in a way that’s mostly about being seen as available.

With the return to office, what changed is the granularity of choice.

When working from home, you decided when to make coffee. When to take a walk. When to step away to think. When to answer Slack and when to leave it.

In the office, those micro-decisions get absorbed by the environment. You don’t choose when you’re interrupted. You don’t choose when to be reachable. You can’t even choose to be in a quiet place in some offices.

Each loss is too small to protest. But each loss of choice wears you down, and the accumulation leads to exhaustion.

Performative availability is more important to companies now than ever. However no one is realizing that this is what causes exhaustion.

The expectation that you’re reachable at all times means your attention is never fully yours, even when no one’s contacting you. You’re holding a slot open. The waiting leads to the feeling of depletion.

Both cultures use the same trick. They give you the appearance of choice inside a structure you didn’t choose. The morning routine looks like authorship. So does the open-plan office with the unlimited PTO. The wrapping is autonomy. The contents are someone else’s blueprint.

The next time you feel the exhaustion that rest doesn’t touch, the question to ask yourself is how much of this week did you actually choose.

Not the job, not the city, not the life, the container is already chosen. Reflect on the hours. The meetings. The morning. Tuesday afternoon between 2 and 4. The thing you’re doing right now.

If the honest answer is “I did not choose much of this,” you don’t need a vacation. You need a side quest. Something small, chosen, slightly pointless and entirely yours.

Your nervous system needs proof that your life still belongs to you.

That’s the antidote to exhaustion. Not less of your time, but more of it spent the way you decided it should be.

📘 Thinking of Diving Deeper? Check Out My Guidebooks.

You can download all 9 and more at ninapatrick.xyz/guidebooks. Or if you want everything in one place, the guidebooks, the full deep dives, and early access to events, just upgrade to a paid subscription. Paid subscribers get the complete guidebook library included.

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📚 Book of the Week

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Rating: ★★★★★

I’ve seen this book over and over as a bestseller and definitely waited too long to pick it up.

I didn’t know what to expect, from the title I assumed a white woman impersonating an Asian woman...and while there is some of this going on, it’s more subtle than I originally thought.

The story is about a famous Asian writer Athena, and her supposed best friend and struggling writer June Hayward, the cutthroat publishing industry, cancel culture, and how far a woman will go to obtain the fame and fortune she thought she wanted.

What surprised me most about this book is that I hated all of the main characters. It’s rare to read a book and not relate to a character in some way, empathize with them, or at least find them somewhat endearing.

But this batch of characters, they are all terrible people! June is the worst of them all, but Athena is not innocent either. At moments you really want to jump into the book, grab June and tell her to do the right thing, which does make for an entertaining read.

The novel is fast paced, exhilarating, and I found many evenings when I couldn’t put it down because I really needed to read my characters out of bad situations, only to be surprised when the next situation was worse than the one before.

Great beach read or one for a long plane ride.

⚡️ Check This Out

Scientists have invented underwear that measures your farts.

Researchers at the University of Maryland built a tiny wearable sensor that attaches to underwear and tracks gas production around the clock, measuring hydrogen, methane, and hydrogen sulphide released by gut microbes as they break down your food.

As lead researcher Professor Brantley Hall put it, we don’t actually know what normal fart production looks like, and without that baseline it’s hard to know when someone’s gas output is truly excessive.

Apparently, the team has found that healthy adults fart an average of 32 times per day - around double the previous estimate.

However their findings also show that daily farts can range from as few as 4 to as many as 59.

This data could help unlock new insights into food intolerances, IBS, and other digestive conditions.

🗣️ Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can also find the Nina’s Notes podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

I also co-host Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED!

🎙️ Mondays: LT UNLOCKED interviews with leading longevity innovators, clinicians, and scientists

📰 Wednesdays: Nina’s Notes in your inbox with interviews, deep dives on longevity & neuroscience

🎙️ Fridays: LT UNLOCKED News, a weekly news roundup of the latest in longevity

Find Longevity Technology UNLOCKED on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

Dr. Axel Schumacher spent 25 years at the forefront of genomics and epigenetic clock research and says your social life is a more powerful longevity biomarker than anything in your bloodwork.

In this episode, he walks through the Social Connectivity Value (SCV): a framework he developed to map your social network, identify the relationships that drain your energy, and turn your social health into a number you can actually track.

What you’ll learn:

• Why loneliness can cost 12–20 years of healthy life (men are hit harder than women) and why the “smoking 15 cigarettes a day” statistic doesn’t change behavior without a way to measure it

• How to build a sociogram using Dunbar’s three layers, assign energy values to every person in your life (including the ones dragging you down), and calculate your SCV score

• Why looking for a romantic partner through your close friends almost never works, and the “super connector” strategy that statistically gives you access to 150 new people from a single introduction

What’s the link between loneliness, AI companions, and living to 150? We get into all of it.

Timestamps

• 00:05 – Intro

• 01:35 – Meet Dr. Axel Schumacher

• 02:21 – From Genomics to Social Science (The Pivot)

• 04:28 – How Loneliness Affects Your Health Span

• 06:36 – The Loneliness Epidemic & Declining Birth Rates

• 07:47 – Why Is Social Health So Hard to Measure?

• 09:56 – The Holt-Lunstad Meta-Analysis Explained

• 10:47 – Introducing the Social Connectivity Value (SCV)

• 12:44 – The Sociogram: Mapping Your Social World

• 13:13 –Building Your Sociogram: Mapping Social Connections

• 14:54 – The Dunbar Layers: Your 3 Social Circles

• 15:22 – The Invisible Load: Identifying Energy-Draining Relationships

• 17:03 – The Invisible Load of Toxic Relationships

• 20:09 – The Role of Family and Close Connections

• 22:38 – What Is Your SCV Score?

• 24:51 – How Your Nervous System Responds to Others

• 28:08 – Tracking Your Social Life Like a Biohacker

• 30:44 – Introverts vs Extroverts & Social Energy

• 31:49 – AI Companions & The Future of Connection

• 35:31 – Should Your Partner Be Everything?

• 37:34 – Weak Ties & Super Connectors

• 41:37 – The Mathematical Magic of Super Connectors

• 42:57 – Rapid Fire: Social Media — Net Positive or Negative?

• 43:51 – SCV vs Epigenetic Clocks: Which Matters More?

• 44:59 – The Best City for Human Connection

• 47:12 – One Weekly Habit to Protect Your Social Health

ABOUT DR. AXEL SCHUMACHER: Longevity scientist and epigenetics researcher with over 25 years of experience, believes the most powerful biomarker for how long you live isn’t in your blood it’s in your relationships. After decades at the forefront of genomics and biomarker discovery, he now focuses on quantifying human connection, developing the Social Connectivity Value (SCV), a first-of-its-kind framework to measure your social network as a health metric and longevity tool.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Website: https://www.grailmaster.com

• YouTube ‘Inside the Dating Mind’: https://bit.ly/4s2U2i4

• Axel’s Longevity Protocol: https://bit.ly/4qIL0pZ

• Sociogram Preprint with DOI: https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/m6h58_v1

• X: https://x.com/TheGrailmaster

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_grailmaster/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/draxelschumacher/

ABOUT NINA’S NOTES: Nina’s Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

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A weekly, digestible, non-technical read on health & science.

By Nina Patrick

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💬 In this note:

• ⚠️ 40% of Women with PMDD have Suicidal Ideation

• 📚 Big Swiss

• ⚡️ The Egg Chooses

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#183: ⚠️ 40% of Women With PMDD Have Suicidal Ideation

Last month was a very very stressful month for me.

I was dealing with two separate situations where I felt responsible for a lot of unhappy people. It was the kind of stress that gets under your skin, has you playing back decisions and conversations, and sticks with you for a while.

And somewhere in the thick of it, in the week before my period, I had a strange thought.

What if I just...disappeared? What would happen to all of this?

Not dramatic. Not scary at the moment.

More like my brain doing a weird stress calculation: if I remove me from the equation, what changes?

It passed quickly. And when my period came, those thoughts lifted completely.

I looked back on it afterward and thought: that was odd. Why did I think that?

So I started asking questions.

What’s Actually Happening In Your Brain During PMS

The week before your period is the late luteal phase. Progesterone and estrogen both start to decline as the body prepares for menstruation.

As women, we all know this…

What we don’t talk about is the cascade of neurochemical events happening in a woman’s brain, that most women have never been told about.

In the late luteal phase when progesterone drops, so does a metabolite called allopregnanolone (ALLO).

ALLO binds to GABA receptors in the brain. GABA is your main inhibitory neurotransmitter. Think of it as the brake pedal.

GABA prevents your nervous system from going into overdrive by blocking specific chemical messages, effectively slowing down brain activity to induce calmness, focus and sleep.

Therefore, you become more reactive, more sensitive to stress, and find it harder to regulate.

At the same time, falling estrogen reduces serotonin and dopamine activity, which are the neurotransmitters most closely associated with mood, happiness and motivation.

The prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for emotional regulation and rational decision-making, becomes less responsive during the luteal phase.

So to recap, in the late luteal phase, we lose the protections of estrogen, progesterone and GABA, which makes every emotion hit harder.

Other people’s moods can feel like your own. The interpersonal friction that you could easily brush off in the follicular phase, like their thoughts are theirs, not mine, now lands like a verdict.

The good news is that this is not a personality flaw.

This is pharmacology happening in your brain. Every. Single. Month.

And no one explains it to you. Until now.

The Thoughts No One Names

Most women know about PMS.

We’ve been told about the usual symptoms. You know, bloating, cramps, irritability, crying at ads for insurance.

What nobody told us, is that for some women, the luteal phase can also bring darker thoughts.

Intrusive ones.

The kind you don’t mention at dinner.

Things like: What if I weren’t here? What if I just stopped?

Not necessarily thoughts of self harm.

More like a morbid ‘what if…?’ that your brain serves up when it’s overwhelmed.

What I learned when I started diving into this is that there is a clinical spectrum in regards to these kinds of thoughts.

Clinicians distinguish between passive suicidal ideation (a wish to disappear or not exist, without intent to act), active ideation, and active planning with intent.

What I experienced, and what I suspect many women experience in the luteal phase under stress, sits somewhere in the gray area before and below the clinical threshold.

It’s not nothing.

And it’s not a crisis.

More like the mind reaching for extreme metaphors when it’s under heavy load.

For women that may experience these darker thoughts, it is possible they could have Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), which is a severe, chronic form of PMS.

It causes debilitating emotional and physical symptoms during the two weeks before menstruation, which disappear shortly after a period begins.

PMDD is highly disruptive to daily life and requires targeted treatment.

For clarity, this experience is not a one time thing. This is something that happens monthly, for decades of a woman’s life.

And when I dug deeper I found out that researchers have actually looked at this. (T God!)

In a clinical sample of 110 women with confirmed PMDD, 39.1% reported suicidal ideation during the late luteal phase.

That’s nearly 40% of the women with PMDD experiencing suicidal ideation!!!

And no one is talking about it.

The silence problem isn’t the only stigma.

It’s that we’ve built a mental health vocabulary organized solely around crisis, and it skips over everything in the vast gray zone.

Women having these thoughts, can feel disturbed or ashamed, they may not even mention them to anyone.

And the worst part is that they may never learn that the menstrual timing is the cause.

PMS vs. PMDD: Where’s the Line?

PMDD affects around 5.5% of menstruating women.

And you may read that stat and think..oh 5.5% - that is not that bad.

*PAUSE*

Let me elaborate.

There are approximately 1.8 Billion menstruating women globally.

1.8 billion × 5.5% = ~99 million people with PMDD globally

Equalling roughly 100 million women.

100 MILLION!

That’s more than the entire population of the UK and France combined.

That’s more people than the population of Germany.

*picks jaw back up off the floor*

Despite that scale, no mainstream app tracks the darker symptom vocabulary!

And suicidality isn’t even in the diagnostic criteria yet.

grrrrr.

Anyway, what happens in the PMDD brain is fundamentally a neuroendocrinological condition, not a mood disorder in the traditional sense, but a sensitivity condition.

The body produces normal hormonal fluctuations, but the brain responds to them abnormally.

Research published in 2024 showed that people with PMDD don’t just have reduced ALLO during the luteal phase. They have altered sensitivity to ALLO itself.

In these women, normal allopregnanolone levels can paradoxically trigger anxiety and mood disturbances rather than calm. For them, the receptor is calibrated differently.

The key diagnostic signal for PMDD is that symptoms must lift in the follicular phase.

The stark contrast of feeling like a completely different person across the cycle, is not just anecdotal. It is actually the diagnostic data.

For years, many women with PMDD were misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder because no one tracked the cyclical pattern.

Can you believe that?!? We are women, with cycling hormones and no one thought to check the menstrual cycle with symptoms!!!

The International Association for Premenstrual Disorders published a paper in 2025 arguing that suicidality should be formally investigated for inclusion in the PMDD diagnostic criteria, noting that major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar II already list it in the DSM-5.

I agree that clearer recognition could prevent exactly this kind of misdiagnosis. And it would help doctors and medical professionals recognize the seriousness of PMDD.

I’ve wondered recently if some of what I’ve experienced in particularly bad luteal phases might qualify as PMDD, or at least sits closer to it than I thought.

It’s possible, but as I thought this, I realized I’m someone who knows what PMDD is. I have a pharmacology background and even with that knowledge, I only learned PMDD existed as an adult.

No one told me when I might have most needed to know.

It Doesn’t Stop at Reproductive Age

…or should I say, and more bad news…

A 2025 review found that 84% of studies showed some association between the menopausal transition and increased suicidality.

One study found that perimenopausal women were seven times more likely to report suicidal thoughts compared to pre- or post-menopausal women.

Suicide rates among women aged 45–55 are notably elevated, which maps almost exactly onto the typical perimenopause window.

Perimenopause involves years of erratic estrogen swings before levels finally settle.

It is not a smooth descent.

And the women most affected are often those who already had significant luteal-phase symptoms earlier in their reproductive years. Which means perimenopause symptoms are a continuation of ones they may not have even known they had.

We talk about hot flashes.

We don’t talk about this.

The Tools Gap

I use Clue to track my cycle.

I like Clue because it has strong data protection. It’s a German company and the women behind it coined the term “FemTech”.

Overall, I’ve found it useful. But when I tried to think about logging something like “had a dark thought this week,” there’s no option for it.

There’s an option for “mood swings.”

There’s an option for “sad.”

There’s a redirect to an external resource if you select anything that sounds serious. That’s it.

They offer 13 emotions which cover a range of feelings, but it is definitely lacking.

And when you go to search for a feeling and it isn’t there, you don’t feel heard.

Clue App I love you! I really do…but reducing feelings to a group of just 13… downplays our emotions.

And women’s feelings are already downplayed 24/7.

I also found a study which confirmed what I suspected, that there is currently no menstrual and mood tracking app with the full capability to accurately capture PMDD symptoms to aid with diagnosis

There’s no normalized, non-alarming language for darker luteal experiences.

No way to log “felt like a burden today” or “I want to disappear” without it feeling like you’re flagging a serious crisis.

So women don’t log it. The pattern never becomes visible. The symptoms are never connected to the calendar.

The irony is that the research is ahead of the tools.

The IAPMD paper calling for suicidality to be included in PMDD diagnostic criteria was published in 2025

Meanwhile, the apps millions of women use to track their cycles still redirect you to a hotline rather than help you track a pattern.

Awareness is the Protection

When I had that dark thought last month, I was genuinely stressed.

But because I’m a scientist who’s a big nerd, I rigorously track my cycle.

And luckily for me, I thought I’m in the luteal phase. I’ve had a brutal few weeks. This is probably just my brain reaching for extreme scenarios because the chemical brake is off. It will pass.

And it did.

The knowledge that this is temporary, that there’s a pharmacological explanation, that it lifts, is itself protective.

This is not a replacement for treatment when treatment is needed.

But it can be a first layer of protection for the potentially millions of women who are in the normal-to-mild range and have no framework for what they’re experiencing.

Tracking your cycle, including the emotional and cognitive symptoms, along with the physical ones, can turn a confusing experience into a pattern.

Once you have a pattern, you can prepare for it. You can take steps and preventative measures with added awareness.

And eventually not feel ambushed by it.

Women deserve that framework.

We should have been given it years ago.

Does This Resonate?

I’ve never written about this before, partly because it’s personal territory and partly because I wasn’t sure how to frame it. I’m still not sure I’ve got it right.

But I think it’s one of the most underserved topics in women’s health, because the cultural permission to talk about it hasn’t been granted yet.

Quick Poll - Would love your answers 🙏🏽

📚 Book of the Week

Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

Rating: ★★★★★

Finally a 5 star book! I’ve been reading some mediocre books this year. Apologies dear readers, but now we have a clear 5 star, no excuses, brilliant read that had me cackling.

Big Swiss is hilarious, awkward, cringe and honest.

The story follows Greta, a transcriptionist for the local sex therapist, who goes by the name of Om, in the small town of Hudson.

Om’s newest client, who Greta knows from her initials FEW, captivates Greta with her traumatic past and sexual repression and she dubs her “Big Swiss”.

One day at the dog park, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’ voice and decides to approach.

Loaded with intimate details of Big Swiss’ life, while Big Swiss is completely unaware, the two become friends and lovers…and chaos ensues.

Pick this one up, you won’t regret it.

⚡️ Check This Out

The egg chooses.

For centuries, the story of fertilization was framed as a race.

Millions of sperm, one winner, fastest takes all.

Turns out that’s…WRONG!

A study out of Stockholm University found that eggs actively release chemical signals, called chemoattractants, that don’t only attract sperm but also select which ones get through.

Different eggs release different signals.

Different signals attract different sperm.

The egg can even ignore the first sperm to arrive if the chemical compatibility isn’t right.

This study was published in 2020.

It’s now circulating Instagram like breaking news.

Which raises the real question, why did it take six years to go viral?

Why wasn’t this the headline everywhere the moment it was published?

We’ve had this information. We just weren’t talking about it.

Probably because the title of this paper, no offense to the authors, is “Chemical signals from eggs facilitate cryptic female choice in humans”.

Cryptic female choice in humans = what does that even mean!!??

Thank you to the journalists that extracted “the egg chooses” from “cryptic female choice” you’re doing the lords work 🫡

Human sexual reproduction builds an entire narrative around sperm…the speed, the competition, the conquest…making it all sound powerful, while female choice is “cryptic” and that the egg is passive in the process.

When it was the egg calling the shots the whole time!

The egg had the power and scientists just weren’t looking for it. That…in addition to the main article in today’s newsletter…is something worth sitting with.

🗣️ Looking for the Nina’s Notes Podcast?

You can also find the Nina’s Notes podcast on 🔴YouTube 🟢 Spotify, 🟣 Apple Podcasts, 🟠 Substack Podcasts where I interview entrepreneurs and have an archive of 100+ voiceovers of previous Nina’s Notes.

I also co-host Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED!

🎙️ Mondays: LT UNLOCKED interviews with leading longevity innovators, clinicians, and scientists

📰 Wednesdays: Nina’s Notes in your inbox with interviews, deep dives on longevity & neuroscience

🎙️ Fridays: LT UNLOCKED News, a weekly news roundup of the latest in longevity

Find Longevity Technology UNLOCKED on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Edited by Wright Time Publishing

Don’t forget to grab your ticket for Longevity Day

I have a discount code for the first 20 people to sign up!

Use code: NINASNOTES20 for 50% off

Get a Longevity Day Ticket

Nina’s Notes is a media partner for Longevity Summit Dublin: June 24–26

Three days in Dublin bringing together clinicians, investors, researchers and founders working on the science of ageing. One of Europe’s leading longevity events and I’ll be covering it directly for Nina’s Notes readers.

If you’re in Europe, this is worth the trip!

→ Grab your ticket

Subscribe now

This week on the Nina’s Notes Podcast, I sit down with Nahid Zokaei, an Oxford researcher, cognitive neuroscientist, and founder of Cerebella, to explore why menopause may be one of the most overlooked neurological transitions in a woman’s life.

We talk about the connection between menopause, brain fog, memory loss, and Alzheimer’s risk, why women are often dismissed when reporting cognitive symptoms, and how hormonal changes can directly affect the brain during midlife.

Dr. Zokaei also shares the science behind estrogen and brain health, the future of non-drug cognitive therapies, and what women can do today to better protect their long-term cognitive health.

KEY TOPICS:

• How hormonal changes during midlife affect memory, focus, mood, and cognition.

• Why menopause-related brain fog is a real neurological symptom, not “just stress.”

• Exploring why women make up the majority of Alzheimer’s patients.

• How estrogen supports memory, cognition, and overall brain function.

• Why women’s midlife health has been historically overlooked in science and healthcare.

• How non-drug cognitive interventions may help support women’s brain health.

• The importance of sleep, exercise, hearing health, and staying mentally active during midlife.

TIMESTAMPS:

• 00:00 – Why 60% of Alzheimer’s Patients Are Women

• 00:39 – Leaving Academia to Build a Women’s Brain Health Startup

• 05:13 – The Menopause–Alzheimer’s Link Explained

• 06:27 – Understanding Menopause and Brain Health

• 13:55 – Brain Fog Is Not Taken Seriously And What Brain Fog REALLY Means

• 17:36 – Women Are Being Gaslit About Menopause Symptoms

• 19:18 – Menopause as a Window to Prevent Alzheimer’s

• 23:34 – Why Most Brain Training Apps Don’t Work

• 29:06 – Building Brain Games for Women in Midlife

• 35:11 – Early Symptoms Women Should NEVER Ignore

• 38:35 – Why Women’s Health Research Is So Behind

• 42:11 – What Women Can Do TODAY for Better Brain Health

• 45:41 – Why So Many Women Quit Their Jobs During Menopause

• 47:21 – The Worst Advice Doctors Give Women
  

ABOUT NAHID ZOKAEI: Nahid Zokaei is a cognitive neuroscientist, Oxford researcher, and Founder of Cerebella, is focused on advancing women’s brain health through science-backed digital therapeutics and non-drug cognitive interventions.

After more than a decade researching dementia, cognition, and aging, she now works at the intersection of neuroscience, menopause, and Alzheimer’s prevention helping redefine how women’s cognitive health is understood and supported during midlife.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Website: https://www.cerebella.health/

WhatApp Community: https://chat.whatsapp.com/H5tNvI5LPAE4OmOOeBrHc1

Professor Aimee Spector’s Lab: https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/1239-aimee-spector

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ABOUT NINA’S NOTES: Nina’s Notes explores the intersection of longevity science, neuroscience, and human optimization. Hosted by Nina Patrick, PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and longevity researcher, each episode translates cutting-edge research into actionable insights for living longer, better.

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💬 In this note:

• ✍🏼 Writing Is Thinking. What Happens When We Replace Writing for Dictation?

• 📚 The Deserters

• ⚡️ Turn Your Spareroom Into A Data Center

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#181: ✍🏼 Writing Is Thinking. What Happens When We Replace Writing for Dictation?

I’ve been using Wispr Flow for a few weeks. It’s an incredible speech-to-text tool that can clean up the raw transcript into texts, emails, anything you need really.

It’s great for remembering a quick thought, and talking to the LLMs.

But I’m noticing I’m using it more and more to replace the effort of actually writing.

It’s nearly replaced journaling for me.

I still sit at my table with my journal open and start to write, but then by some compulsion, I pick up my phone to dictate into Wispr Flow or Claude instead of taking the time to write out the thoughts slowly.

Even as I got ready to write this article, I was tempted to dictate it into Wispr Flow rather than take the time to type it out.

Wispr Flow also does this terrible thing where they tell you your words per minute in the corner of the desktop app home screen. I speak at 181 words per minute. My typing speed is 61 words per minute. (For reference, “A fast typing speed is generally anything above 70 words per minute (WPM)...nowhere close to our speaking speed.)

I speak at 3x my typing speed, and that number glares at me every time I open the Wispr Flow desktop app.

No wonder it seems daunting to stare at a blank Google Doc and think - this is going to take a while.

But, that’s the point.

Writing Is the Cognitive Work

Writing is the art of slowing down.

There is a friction that happens when you write.

You have to choose the next word intentionally.

Even in a stream of consciousness you’re still making micro-decisions, selecting, pausing, reconsidering.

When I dictate, a lot of what comes out sounds like this:

“I guess what I mean is probably…” “I’m thinking, okay, so the thing is...”

Those filler phrases rarely make it into written work because writing focuses you to skip past the throat-clearing and get to the actual thought.

The choosing of the word, the pausing and reflecting while writing is part of the craft.

It is not inefficiency, it’s where clarification happens. It’s where good explanations are made and practiced.

You often don’t know what you think until you’ve done the writing.

Who Wrote This Message?

Are we losing this layer of cognitive work as we all start to leverage the speech-to-text?

Then instead of doing the cognitive work ourselves, we leverage an LLM to make sense of what we mean, and then we send it off to our friends, family and colleagues with barely an edit.

We’re already getting such a flood of AI-slop to read on the internet, and now this is coming into almost every form of online written communications - not just blog posts, newsletters, news media and bad LinkedIn posts - It’s coming into text messages and Instagram messages where people have set up AI agents to reply back to their messages for them.

Forcing us to ask ourselves “Was this written by AI?” and analyze the messages we get.

I’ve definitely found myself wondering if this sort of over-polished, neutral, bloodless prose that sounds like nobody, is actually how my colleagues email people?

Was this text truly written by my friend? Are they too busy, or too lazy, to simply type a quick response?

However there are advantages to using speech to text. For myself, I can get the raw, unedited tone of my voice, the tangents (or ADHD subplots…) and the uncertainties. Speech-to-text can put a spotlight on my tone in the way I think out loud.

I often forget what I said but luckily Wispr Flow keeps the history, so I can go search for it later.

But is this harming my memory?

What the Neuroscience Says About Writing vs. Dictation

There is solid research that shows that information that you produce yourself (the generation effect), even if it’s just restating something you learned in your own words, is retained significantly better than information that you passively receive.

Writing forces that generation.

Dictation, especially if you know it will be cleaned up for you, is much more passive.

You are outputting content, but you aren’t necessarily constructing or crafting it.

When you write, you have to hold an idea in your working memory. When you hold it there, you are evaluating and revising it before it hits the page. Then you do more editing and revising.

This is a metabolically expensive task, and it is cognitively generative.

Speaking and dictation externalize that mental load. It flows through you which feels easier and that’s because it is easier. It is metabolically and cognitively easier.

However, that hard work of compression, understanding and evaluation doesn’t happen.

Or…it gets outsourced to an LLM for editing and clean-up which makes us all sound the same anyway.

There is also research suggesting that the act of writing doesn’t just record an idea, it actually changes the idea.

There is the constraint of needing to convey your message linearly, and having to commit to one word before the next, that forces a resolution of the idea that speaking doesn’t.

You can talk in circles for 20 minutes and feel like you’ve thought something through.

However if you try to read a transcript of that circular talking, you’ll be confused and probably bored.

Now if you instead spend that 20 minutes trying to write down the thought, you’d probably expose the holes in your thinking faster, and come to a consolidation of the idea.

It’s also worth examining that there is a difference between retrieving a thought or idea - which we can do through dictation, and then forming a thought or idea.

Writing, at its best, forms the thought into an idea that can then be communicated clearly.

And that effort of formation of the thought to an idea, expending the cognitive energy to do so, seems to me like a way to sustain and improve our cognitive health.

To be fair, there are real advantages to dictation.

I’m not going to tell you to delete Wispr Flow. I’m still using it.

But, I am going to be more intentional about when I reach for it. Quick thoughts, voice memos, talking to an LLM, fine.

When I sit down to actually think something through, I want to feel that friction. The slowness isn’t the bug. It’s where the thinking happens.

This newsletter took me longer to write than it would have to dictate. I noticed every time I wanted to pick up my phone.

I left the holes in my thinking exposed until I had to actually resolve them on the page and I think I understand what I believe about dictation vs writing now, in a way I wouldn’t have if I’d just talked it out.

Maybe that’s the test worth applying: Is this something I want to retrieve, or something I want to form?

If it’s the latter, put the phone down. Open the doc. Choose the next word intentionally.

Your brain will thank you…and possibly even remember it.

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📚 Book of the Week

The Deserters by Mathias Enard

Rating: ★★★☆☆

The Deserters follows two parallel timelines, one present-day and one set during a past war, for most of the book though you’re waiting for the moment they converge. That anticipation is either the novel’s greatest tension or its greatest frustration, depending on your tolerance for ambiguity. For me, it was the latter.

The war-era timeline carries a mysterious soldier at its center and I kept reading to find out who he was.

SPOILER ALERT!

That question never gets answered. The two storylines never fully meet, and if you’re the kind of reader who needs narrative resolution, that absence will leave you genuinely unsatisfied.

That said, both timelines are emotionally rich. The writing captures pain, love, and the particular sorrow of lives shaped and broken by conflict. There’s real craft here and clearly a lot of intention behind the structure.

But intention isn’t always enough. A dual timeline story lives or dies by the payoff, and this one left me hanging. I finished it respecting the ambition of the author more than I enjoyed the experience.

⚡️ Check This Out

Oh dear lord.

California startup Span is partnering with Nvidia to turn your home into a mini data center.

The average household uses only about 42% of its allotted power. Span wants to fill that gap by installing “nodes” packed with 16 Nvidia GPUs and roughly $500k worth of hardware, then use that spare electricity to run AI compute.

In exchange, homeowners get their energy and internet bills subsidized.

The startup has outfitted one home so far, with around 100 more rolling out in a pilot program later this year.

Whether you’d actually want a $500k server rack humming away in your spare bedroom is a different question entirely.

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