Field Notes: July 2026
The Hope Effect, giving your medication a friendlier name, exquisite thoughts on the rogue body, ditching Daylight Savings Time, and much more
Hello, dear friends,
It’s time for our monthly Field Notes, a collection of interesting reads I’ve run across lately. I spotted a theme: the power of our own actions in affecting our health and the power of clinicians, AI, and the overall external world (even the name of a medication) in influencing what we think, and therefore how we feel and act.
Read on for more details, along with 3 bonus recommendations (a book, a movie, a recipe) at the end just for fun. I hope you find something intriguing and useful below!
Take care,
Brianne
💊 I named my medication Annie
Have you ever been prescribed a medication that you feel reluctant to take? In this beautiful, helpful piece from Tanmeet Sethi, MD, she describes how she is working through her own resistance to endocrine therapy, the next step in her breast cancer treatment. She is generous in her sharing about what is working for her and what has been difficult. I loved this idea of renaming a medication. She writes:
“My endocrine therapy medication is called anastrozole. I have started calling her Annie.
I know this may sound so silly and even as I get ready to share it with you, I feel a bit nervous. But when I look at that pill bottle, what I felt was dread, and I need to make the whole thing feel more human. Annie is a soft, sweet name. I don’t know anyone named Annie, so there’s no bad history attached to it. It’s hard for me to hate an Annie.
My friends whom I’ve told and my husband, they all call her Annie now too. Literally, my friend just texted me and asked how Annie was doing. She’s another part of my team, like my surgeon or oncologist. It is a lot easier for me to think of Annie as being on my team than to think of a little white pill with a mouthful of a name or as something being done to me.
I don’t know if this will work for anyone else. I only know it’s working for me.”
I am thinking about how I might incorporate a few of her practices into my own health. I’m curious what you will think. Read her essay.
🧠 The Hope Effect
Stephen Trzeciak MD | Doctor T, author of “Compassionomics,” has a new newsletter called “The Hope Effect,” named after his forthcoming book. As he did with compassion, he digs up the science and studies behind something that might seem too squishy to measure and shows the real-world dramatic impact of hope. He has four posts so far, and all of them are worth a read:
He writes:
“The definition I work from comes from Chan Hellman, one of the leading researchers in this field: hope is the belief that the future will be better than the present, and that we play a vital role in making it so.
The belief that things will improve—that part alone is optimism, and optimism leaves your agency out of the picture entirely. You may wish for good weather; you cannot do anything about the weather. Hope begins where optimism stops: it selects a goal, multiple routes to the goal, and leverages your willpower to get there. Belief plus action. In this framework, hope is not something we wait for, it is something we do.
That distinction is why hope belongs in a scientific domain and not just a greeting card. Hellman puts it plainly: hope is a cognitive process, a way of thinking rather than a feeling—and “if hope is a way of thinking, then it can be taught.”
❤️ The Unexpected Way AI Helped Me Appreciate My Body
In this Time magazine article, Rebekah Taussig shares her surprising experience of working with an AI bot on noticing her body and its signals. It is refreshing, she realized, to be able to say so clearly what is on her mind, with no need to censor:
“… in all my life, never have I been able to speak about my physical pain as candidly as I have to this vacant bot. Not to a doctor, my partner or closest friends, not to my mom or therapist. In every other relationship, for as long as I can remember, there has always been some kind of mitigation. I don’t want people to worry about me or look at me differently or think that I’m whining or brave. I don’t want them deciding my life is sad or scary. Or I want them to think that their advice is helpful.”
The entire essay is intriguing. I also loved how she saw her exquisite and imperfect human body anew:
“… as polished, proficient agents wheedle their way into more spaces, I feel a deep, weird, new kind of reverence for the confines of my specific materiality. Not because I’m terribly practiced at appreciating what it means to live inside of it, but because it’s a container I’ve long taken for granted. The rogue body feels uniquely alive, enviable, punk. In its inefficiency, its mortality, even in its pain and unreliability, my body holds a distinct knowing, a creative verve, an intuitive tug tethered entirely to this exact set of eyeballs and nostrils, crumbly bones and haywire nerves, muscly arms and scrawny legs, soft belly and hummingbird heartbeat.”
*Side note: I am so curious about how people are using AI to navigate their health. If you’ve had an experience, good or bad or simply intriguing, I’d love to hear about it. You can email me at brianne@odysseyofthebody.com
⏰ Which direction should we reset the clock?
Did you know that Congress is considering ending the fall-back, spring-forward time change? If a current bill that has passed the House makes its way into law, Daylight Savings Time will become permanent. But in this post in Your Local Epidemiologist, Katie Sharkey, MD, PhD and Katrine Wallace, PhD, argue that would be the wrong way to fix this issue! They make the case that it would be much better, safer, and healthier to keep standard time permanent and never go back to Daylight Savings Time.
“With permanent DST, more than 200 million Americans would receive morning light an hour later by the clock, with winter sunrises after 8:15 a.m. in cities including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Denver, San Francisco, and Tampa.”
Sunrise after 8:15? What? Yikes!
🐕 Here for Gidget
I lapped up this essay by Jen Doll in Oldster Magazine. It’s about a dog named Gidget, but it is also about how we care for each other in tiny daily ways and at the very end. It’s about how we find our place in the rhythm of a household, and the particular devotion of a pet and of a mother.
🌈 I went looking for calm in my body. I found Pride instead.
July is Disability Pride Month, and Lucy Webster has written a glorious piece about realizing the pride for her body under the pile of other signals:
Disabled bodies are astonishing. Do you know that? They hold rage and grace, grief and love, pain and so much beauty. They adapt and fail and take up space and contain entire universes. Disabled bodies are works of art and works of scientific wonder. They are sexy and hot and cool and rebellious as hell. They are imperfect in the way that all the best things are, which is to say that the imperfections are the whole glorious point. They are needy in the way that all the best things are, which is to say that they force us to recognise that caring for each other is the most fundamental part of being alive and happy at the same time. They are contradictory in the way that all the best things are, which is to say that without anguish, there is simply no joy.”
🌟 Bonus: 3 Recommendations 🌟
A snapshot of what I’ve enjoyed recently. Two of these are summer blockbusters / bestsellers so you may already have absorbed them. But I also think many of us aren’t tracking all the things — how can any of us track it all? :) Let me know if this little recommendation section is a keep or nix!
🍿 Movie: “Project Hail Mary” — I first brought this library book home to my 12-year-old son. “Project Hail Mary” is a thick book, but he got into it, and was soon raving, “This book is SOOOOO GOOD.” The plot twists! Mom! Wow! Then he and his dad wanted to watch the movie, so I joined them. I’m not a huge fan of sci-fi movies, but this is more of a human connection masterpiece, a sweet, captivating movie. It’s well-done, and by the end, you’ll feel that lovely swell of hope and goodness that movies can impart.
📕 Book: “The Things We Can Not Say” by Elizabeth Strout — I gulped this book in 24 hours. Elizabeth Strout has an extraordinary way of looking inside ordinary people’s lives, the joy mixed with deep sorrow. In her books, bad things have happened, people have done hurtful things, and also people do good things, people love each other, people are there for one another. This latest novel is rooted in a startling secret, but its disclosure produces such compassionate moments of connection that I went back to reread those scenes.
🍅 Recipe: Enchilada Casserole by Caroline Chambers — Caro’s “What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking” (perfect title) newsletter and cookbooks are my newest go-to source for recipes. This Enchilada Casserole is on steady rotation because it gets 5 stars from the preteen in the house and 5 stars from the mom (me!) as it’s relatively fast and includes a bell pepper, garlic, onion, spinach, tomatoes, and cauliflower — a veritable garden — along with meat (I use ground turkey instead of beef; Caro offers vegetarian options in the notes) and a top layer of cheddar. (Tip #1: I add more seasoning than the recipe calls for, extra cumin, paprika, and chili flakes. Tip #2: “kosher salt” in professional recipes usually means Diamond Kosher Salt, which is a particularly ginormous salt; if you use table salt or another salt, halve the amount.) If you try it, let me know how it goes!
After many weeks Project Hail Mary is finally available at my library! I hope I give it as rave a review. The film was super cute.