Welcome to the eighth edition of Airplane Mode, where less is more and the WiFi is always off.

Every week, we curate 3 impactful ideas for you to stop and ponder, taking you away from the algorithm and putting you back in control of your most valuable resource: your attention.

Use this newsletter as a signal to pause, breathe, and think, helping you realign with your purpose and clear out the ‘scroll pollution’ that clouds our brains every day.

Thank you for flying with 99 Lives 🐆✈️

If you’re reading this, you woke up today! Congrats! But while everybody reading this woke up today, we didn’t all wake up in the same way.

New research from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience has begun to shine a light on the way we wake up, analyzing over 1,000 awakenings on a second-by-second basis to understand the steps our brains take to start up each day.

Using recordings of the brain’s electrical activity (EEG), researchers have discovered that our brains wake up differently depending on what sleep stage we are in at the time we awaken.

They focused the study on the two most important sleep stages: REM sleep and deep sleep. REM sleep is usually the stage where we dream, while deep sleep is more restorative in helping the body recover.

Waking up from deep sleep is our brain’s default way to wake up, which is a bit like opening a cafe for the day or warming up before training, slowly turning things on until you are fully open for business or exercise.

When waking up from deep sleep, our brains start firing wake signals from the center, using slow waves to signal to our other brain regions that it’s time to wake up. This begins in the front of the brain and spreads to other regions. These slow waves permeate all brain regions, triggering faster waves that generate a sense of wakefulness.

However, when we wake up from REM sleep, these slow waves do not fire at all, leading to a much more abrupt waking process that jolts us awake without the warmup. It is this jolt that is directly responsible for the sleepy sluggishness we feel after waking up from a dream.

This research shows us another key factor in sleep quality comes down to waking up in the right sleep stage, aka not during REM sleep. Sleep cycles are traditionally 90-120 minutes, and there are apps like Sleep Cycle that can help choose an alarm window based on your bedtime, increasing your odds of waking during a lighter stage of sleep, not REM.

Democracy feels like it’s crumbling, but it might not be for the reasons you think.

In almost every IRL conversation I’ve had this year, most people are feeling a sense that the world is growing more chaotic every week. The old rules and democratic principles many of us have grown up with seem to be cracking, leading to a “democratic recession” and rise of populism and authoritarianism.

The thing is, it’s not just a feeling, the global democratic order has indeed been in decline for the last 18 years, known as ‘backsliding’.

One person who has studied and written on these aspects in depth is Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist who wrote a book in 1992 foreshadowing this backsliding called “The End of History and the Last Man”.

Fukuyama followed up on this topic recently in his Substack to discuss some unique aspects he believes are causing the rupturing of liberal democracy.

Drawing from Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the ‘last man,’ Fukuyama argues that "If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that cause has already been won, they will struggle against it.”

The “last man” is someone who doesn’t have a struggle to fight for. Comfortable, but unfulfilled, lacking the purpose or pride that comes from overcoming struggle.

Essentially, liberal democracy has produced so much peace and prosperity over the last decades, that there is nothing to struggle or fight for. Without an alternative or improved system to challenge democracy, people bored without a cause to fight for turn their attention towards destroying the very system that has given them prosperity.

A key element here is the idea of thymos, a Greek term meaning spiritedness, pride, or the desire for recognition.

Fukuyama argues that disrespected or marginalized individuals channel their thymos into anger, demanding dignity. This need to struggle, even when the just cause has already won, can turn citizens against democracy itself, simply for the sake of struggle.

This lens offers a fascinating psychological take on the current global chaos that goes beyond surface-level politics, showing how the human need for meaning, struggle, and recognition may now threaten the very systems built to ensure our freedom and equality.

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? Most of us have grown up thinking that we are one or the other (even though most of us are actually ambiverts).

But the truth is, your personality and introversion or extroversion are much more in flux than most of us realize. This is according to research results from a study carried out over the last 2 decades by Michigan State University.

This study was truly massive, following more than 2,000 participants over an 18-year span to understand how people perceive and manage stress day-to-day, and the impact that has on their personality traits.

Using the Big Five personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism), the researchers recognized these traits were much more fluid than previously thought, and the traits people exhibited truly depended on how much stress they encountered day-to-day and how they coped with that stress.

The less stress someone was dealing with, the research showed an increase in extraversion, agreeableness, and openness, with more resilience and better stress regulation.

The more stress someone was dealing with however, the more the research showed increases in traits like neuroticism (anxiety, depression, anger, reactivity), and a decrease in positive personality traits like conscientiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion.

The conclusions are powerful for all of us and our perception of ourselves.

Our personalities are indeed not fixed, but shaped by how we navigate daily stress over the years. And how we cope day-to-day with stress can lead to much more growth and success individually, while reducing negative traits like anxiety and depression that can sabotage our progress across all areas of our lives.

Thanks for reading the eighth edition!

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