Human performance
Perform better as a founder or leader
I read a great deal about health, habits and performance, test most of it on myself, and write up what holds and what does not. A clinician’s eye, an operator’s schedule, and no wellness theatre.
This is educational writing, not medical care. I am a UK-trained doctor, but nothing here is a diagnosis, a treatment, or advice for your particular situation.
Why I write this at all
I spent my early thirties feeling like a much older man. Broken sleep from years of shifts, then founder hours on top, joint pain, brain fog, and a set of blood tests that came back reassuringly normal. Being told you are fine when you know you are not is a particular kind of frustrating, and it sent me looking properly at the evidence on sleep, food, movement, stress and the things that quietly compound.
Most of what I found was either genuinely useful and badly explained, or confidently marketed and thin. Sorting one from the other turned out to be a skill worth having, and it is the same skill I use at work when someone shows me an impressive-looking claim about a health product.
What I write about
Energy and metabolic resilience
Food first, stable energy, and the metabolic basics that decide whether a demanding week costs you a weekend or a month.
Sleep and recovery
The single highest-leverage habit, and the one most often sacrificed first. What actually works, including the unglamorous parts.
Habits, focus and decision quality
Habit design, attention, and the practical end of stoicism and meditation. Judgement is the asset your work depends on. It is also perishable.
Testing and measurement
What is worth tracking, what is noise, and what a normal blood test does and does not actually tell you.
Tried and Tested
Tried and Tested is the running series. The rule is simple: I try things on myself for long enough to have an opinion, then write up what happened and what the evidence says, separately, so you can tell which is which.
Cold exposure and breathwork. Habit stacking and getting things done. Time-restricted eating. Supplements, most of which do nothing. Swimming technique, of all things. Some of it has genuinely changed how I work. Some of it was expensive nonsense, and I will say so, because a series where everything works is an advert, not writing.
Start with five ways to get better sleep, the symptom self-check, or the core food plan.
Where this meets the day job
This is not a hobby bolted onto a healthtech career. Every health system I work with is facing the same arithmetic: demand rising faster than capacity, and no realistic amount of building your way out of it. Prevention and self-management are the only levers that bend that curve, and they run on exactly the unglamorous things this writing is about. Sleep, food, movement, stress, and whether people can sustain the changes they make.
Functional medicine training with the Institute for Functional Medicine gave me a useful framework for thinking about root causes rather than symptoms. It sits here as one lens among several, not as a belief system, and not as a service I offer.
Get the notes
New writing lands in Field Notes first. Occasional, practical, and free of wellness noise.
Everything here is education, not medical advice, and reading it does not make me your doctor. For anything about your own health, speak to your own clinician. Where I recommend a product and earn a commission from it, I say so on the page.
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