Field Notes: Year-End Reflection Tools, Individualized Blood Test Ranges, Super Simple Chicken Stock Recipe, & More
Plus, play the Odyssey of the Body Connections-like puzzle game 🌟🌟
Hello, dear friends!
The year is winding to a close, which for me, always brings out a siren of reflection.
Do you wonder, too…
What really happened this year? Where did it go?
What was the best — and the worst?
How did you change?
How did your body change?
How did your mind? Your expectations? Your coping?
What did you learn?
What did you unlearn?
What are your hopes for 2025?
What can you do to influence your 2025? (More than we think, usually.)
Reflecting is how we learn. It’s how we knit new knowledge. It’s how we create a tomorrow that is different from yesterday.
Many free tools offer pathways for processing this year and imagining the next. I’m spotlighting a few resources below, along with other interesting links I’ve run across this month. Plus, I made a word game for you, just for fun, at the very end, a variation on Connections. 🌟
Wishing you a joyful and healthy 2025 ahead!
To our journeys,
Brianne
The first three links offer various ways to think about the year gone by and the year to come.
🗓️ Unravel Your Year workbook
In her annual free Unravel Your Year workbook,
walks us through reflecting on the past year and imagining the new year. She carves out space to release the losses of the past year and think through questions like: When did you feel most like yourself in 2024? (She also offers a Find Your Word guide to decide on a word that encapsulates your next year. I can never settle on one word and usually end up with two or three!)Download her free PDF workbooks.
🗓️ 7 questions from Mel Robbins
In this podcast episode, Mel Robbins shares 7 questions she answers at the end of each year with her husband, a year-end ritual they’ve been doing for 20 years. Here’s my paraphrase: 1) What were your highlights of the past year? 2) The low points? 3) What did you learn? 4) What do you want to start doing? 5) Stop doing? 6) Continue doing? 7) What’s one step you can take today to get started? She recommends we pull out our phone photos to go through the year and jog our memories, as so much gets forgotten.
🗓️ Five lists from Suleika Jaouad
I’m a fan of lists, so this short yet deep method is my favorite of the bunch. Suleika Jaouad suggests you “journal your way into the New Year” by making five lists out of these prompts:
What in the last year are you proud of?
What did this year leave you yearning for?
What’s causing you anxiety?
What resources, skills, and practices can you rely on in the coming year?
What are your wildest, most harebrained ideas and dreams?
Isolation Journals, her Substack, is also hosting a New Year’s Journaling Challenge.
📚 Why Does Literature Have So Little to Say About Illness?
observes in this Literary Hub essay that illness is left out across much literature, compared to other universal themes like love, war, grief. Why is there not more written about illness, she wonders, when it is so common? She muses on the difficulties of writing when one is sick, but ultimately concludes: “Most important, though, the experience of illness is underrepresented because it is so troubling to the healthy, who want to look away from the mortal news it brings.” Meghan ends with a call for more writing about the experience of illness: “The more representations of illness there are, the less it seems an individual sentence, and the more it becomes a human one.”🥣 Perfect uncluttered chicken stock
It’s the ideal time to make soup, so I am turning back to my favorite stock recipe, from Smitten Kitchen. It’s super simple: Let chicken wings, onion, salt, and garlic simmer in a slow cooker or on the stove for hours. I usually let my slow cooker run overnight, so for 12-24 hours. Then the broth can be used for all sorts of soups. You can even drink it straight up in a mug.
💗 When kindness becomes a habit, it improves our health
A plug for kindness from an NPR story: Research shows that helping others can lead to mental and physical improvements — one study even showed an increase in brain volume! Much of the research focused on volunteering. “Whether it's volunteering at a local food bank, or taking soup to a sick neighbor, there's lots of evidence that when we help others, it can boost our own happiness and psychological well-being. But there's also growing research that it boosts our physical health too, says Tara Gruenewald, a social and health psychologist at Chapman University.” The story focuses on the benefits of physically moving around and avoiding social isolation; I wonder if the benefit also comes from a feeling of agency and meaning.
💊 Mark Cuban: A Master Disrupter for American Healthcare
Dr.
interviewed Mark Cuban on his podcast, which made me pause and take notice — usually the esteemed research-physician-scientist has on fellow health experts, diving into the mechanics of cells or the personalization of normal ranges for an individual’s blood test.Mark Cuban, though, is an entrepreneur, a former Shark Tank judge, a part-owner of an NBA team. Q: What were these two talking about?
A: The cost of drugs in America and how to disrupt this pattern of high cost. It was an intriguing conversation, which you can watch on YouTube or read the transcript.
Mark started Cost Plus Drugs a few years ago, which cuts out the layers of middlemen in the drug industry and lists transparently how much extra is added on top of the cost from the manufacturer. Mark explains:
When you go to www.costplusdrugs.com and you put in the name of your medication, let's just say it's tadalafil, and if it comes up. In this case, it will. It'll show you our actual cost, and then we just mark it up 15%. It's the same markup for everybody, and if you want it, we'll have a pharmacist check it. And so, that's a $5 fee. And then if you want ship to mail order, it's $5 for shipping. And if you want to use our pharmacy network, then we can connect you there and you can just pick it up at a local pharmacy.
It's interesting. I think it's really fixable. This has been the easiest industry to the disrupt I've ever been involved in.
💉 Your Lab Tests
This is a more typical post from Dr. Eric Topol — deeply scientific with potentially huge implications. He dissects a new study in Nature that examines the importance of “personalized reference values” in bloodwork. Basically (if I’m understanding this correctly), blood test results usually rely on a general range of values. Say, a “normal” vitamin D or a “normal” white blood cell count falls in a certain range. But it turns out that each individual has their own normal range for 9 indices of the standard bloodwork, which “are stable over a 20-year period and fluctuate in a narrow range,” Dr. Topol explains. In fact, the study points out that “an individual’s 9 CBC [Common Blood Count] setpoints are different from 98% of all the other healthy adult patients in the cohort.” Wow! This is true across age, sex, race and ethnicity, the study finds.
The post is full of charts and stats. Here’s how Dr. Topol sums it up:
There are so many points to glean from this instructive report. Just like opportunistic machine eyes, whereby A.I. can “see” things on a medical scan that human experts can’t (I wrote about it here and here), individualized reference intervals or setpoints provide lots of information that we’re leaving on the table, not harvesting to help inform and manage patients. …
Just thinking of the 500 million CBCs done each year in this country, and how many each of us have had over the years (many more than 5), thereby making the person’s setpoint determination all the more useful, how much of a treasure chest of “free” information that is being left behind every day.
🫀Poem: Heartbeats by Melvin Dixon
The Poetry Foundation offers a Get Well Soon poem collection, which was labeled poetry “to send to a sick friend.” Well, I read a few of them, and these are not poems I would want to be sent in the deep well of sickness.
Still, they are interesting poems. Here’s one of my favorites — it has a catchy, heartbeat-like rhythm; its format is playful, like a great children’s poem. Though I enjoyed reading it, it’s still too much of a downer to be a get-well poem, I think!
It begins:
Heartbeats
by Melvin DixonWork out. Ten laps.
Chin ups. Look good.Steam room. Dress warm.
Call home. Fresh air.Eat right. Rest well.
Sweetheart. Safe sex.Sore throat. Long flu.
Hard nodes. Beware.
Read the full poem.
🌟 Just for fun … Make your own Connections game
Do you know the New York Times Connections game? You get 16 seemingly random words that you have to sort into four groups. It’s free, fun, and a new game comes out every morning. I play it almost every day.
I recently found a way to make your own Connections-like puzzle! Someone has built a website that allows you to input 16 of your own words and generate a game. Bless the creative people out there making free things for everyone.
I made us an Odyssey of the Body puzzle. See if you can solve it here.
Tip 1: At least one word could go in multiple categories, so be careful!
Tip 2: One common category is a fill-in-the-blank, either before or after the words. For example, consider the words: Rule, Fleece, Corral, State Warriors. All of them match Golden _______.
Did you enjoy this random game? More? Never again? Let me know! :)
Make a puzzle for a friend here.
In Case You Missed It: From the Archives
Last call for Winter Art Camp! It all starts Jan. 4. Make this year a more creative and connected year. I would LOVE to see you there!
Loved your Connections game! So fun that you can make your own (I also play almost every day.)