The research behind every suggestion
Every tip in LyfeConnex rests on at least five independent peer-reviewed sources. Here is all of it, guidebook by guidebook, with a link to every paper.
- Peer-reviewed sources
- 202Peer-reviewed sources
- Guidebooks
- 11Guidebooks
- Sources behind every claim, at least
- 5+Sources behind every claim, at least
- Passages, each with its sources
- 191Passages, each with its sources
Five independent sources, or it is not in the app
A claim makes it into LyfeConnex only when at least five independent peer-reviewed sources agree on it. When the evidence is thinner than that, the advice is left out, however popular it is.
What counts as a source
- Peer-reviewed research papers
- Consensus statements from scientific bodies
What never counts
- Press articles
- Books
- Blogs
- Preprints
The guidebooks
One for each tracking tab, with the same seven sections, so once you have read one you know where everything is in the next.
Sleep
Adults need at least seven hours a night, and most do best between seven and nine; two weeks of six-hour nights blunts attention as much as a night with no sleep at all.
Read the guidebookExercise
The world's health bodies agree: one hundred and fifty to three hundred minutes of moderate activity a week, or half that if vigorous, plus muscle-strengthening work on two days.
Read the guidebookNutrition
Diet is the single largest modifiable cause of early death worldwide, and the risks that matter most are too much salt, sugar-sweetened drinks and processed meat and too little whole grain, fruit, vegetables, nuts and fibre.
Read the guidebookHygiene
Washing hands with soap cuts gut infections by about a third and respiratory infections by about a fifth; it is the cheapest medicine there is.
Read the guidebookMeditation
Mindfulness programmes reduce anxiety, depression and stress by a moderate amount in the pooled trials, comparable to other active treatments, and reduce the chance of depression coming back.
Read the guidebookLearning
Two techniques beat everything else in the learning-science reviews: testing yourself and spacing study out; rereading and highlighting feel productive and barely work.
Read the guidebookSkills
Skill grows with deliberate practice, focused work on what you cannot yet do; it explains a large share of the difference between performers in music, games and sport, and plain hours explain much less.
Read the guidebookEducation
Showing up is the strongest single predictor of grades in the pooled studies, ahead of admission scores and study skills.
Read the guidebookReflection
Writing about difficult experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes on a few occasions improves health and mood by a small but reliable amount, most when the writing looks for meaning as well as feeling.
Read the guidebookHabits
A habit is a behaviour triggered by a context rather than a decision, and it forms through repetition in a stable setting; in the field study it took a median of sixty-six days, with a range from eighteen to over two hundred.
Read the guidebookGoals
Specific, hard goals produce higher performance than vague ones or 'do your best', a finding replicated across hundreds of studies and four decades.
Read the guidebook
What the library rests on
Every source, by the kind of study it is.
- Meta-analyses
- 76
- Reviews
- 49
- Trials
- 33
- Other studies
- 29
- Consensus statements
- 9
- Cohort studies
- 6
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