After a mini hiatus, we are BACK!

Between 2026 planning, the first Airplane Mode Lisbon dinner, and Web Summit, we have been busy!

The first edition of Airplane Mode Lisbon went better than I ever could have expected & I am still feeling the love and gratitude from everybody who was there.

There will be a recap email coming to fill you in more about how the first edition went, and I am already cooking up the second edition for the beginning of January, so stay tuned for those emails!

With Web Summit out of the way, let’s get back to our regularly scheduled programming! 🛫

Welcome to the eighteenth 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 🐆✈️

Music is life. It’s one of the few, universal ways we connect with ourselves, others and the world, regardless of our age, culture or location.

We’ve all had days where we’re struggling with energy, mood or focus, only for that perfect song or artist to come on and give our brain a much needed boost.

Now newer research coming out about music and our brains is showing that we’re not just imagining this energy boost. Music truly revitalizes our brain in ways that typical rest does not.

In this new study, researchers asked college students to complete a mentally exhausting task for half an hour. Then, one group sat quietly in silence, while another listened to twenty minutes of calming instrumental music. The scientists tracked both how the participants felt and what their brainwaves were doing.

The results were crystal clear.

The group that listened to music felt noticeably less fatigued, and their brains showed signs of recovery. Specifically, their alpha wave patterns (the ones tied to our alertness) started returning to normal. Their slower brainwaves, which rise when we’re drained, began to fade.

The quiet-rest group didn’t experience the same bounce back either. Their minds stayed sluggish, even though they were doing “nothing.”

This study shows how music is a legitimate active recovery tool for mental fatigue. The rhythms and tones stimulate neural circuits that quiet stress, regulate mood, and reset focus.

It’s almost like the brain uses the structure of music to reorganize itself, to find rhythm again after being overloaded by chaos.

The conclusion: Mental rest is not the same as mental recovery. Silence slows you down, but music wakes you back up. The right sounds can pull your brain out of fatigue and back into flow, reminding you that rest doesn’t have to mean stillness. So if you’ve been grinding for hours and feel your mind slipping, words blurring, ideas fading, don’t just step away from the screen. Put on music that calms you, not music that competes with your attention. Give your brain a melody to find its footing again.

Each day that passes, the more I realize just how much resilience is one of the single most important qualities a human can possess.

All of us go through our own levels of trauma and adversity in life, but new research in the journal Cognition and Emotion decided to dive deeper into understanding how much stressful events in early life shape our capabilities to handle stress as adults.

Trauma always leaves scars, leaving most people to assume that childhood hardship makes you fragile. But this recent study suggests something more complicated: under certain conditions, early life adversity may reduce our sensitivity to stress later in life.

To study this, researchers asked over 200 young adults to rate how stressful a series of negative life scenarios would be, from getting fired, to a break up, to losing money.

At the same time, they also measured three traits: how much adversity each person faced in childhood, how neurotic they were, and whether they’d been depressed recently.

The patterns they found in the results told a very clear story.

People who had faced more hardship growing up actually rated future stress as less severe. Their feelings of stress rose more slowly as the events got worse. It wasn’t that they felt nothing when stressful things occurred, but their internal tolerance was tougher.

Psychologists call this “stress inoculation,” the idea that early exposure to difficulty can build a form of psychological callus that shields us later. In theory, this is the same way the vaccines we receive as children work.

On the other hand, people with high neuroticism (prone to worry, rumination, and emotional volatility) rated every scenario as worse.

But here’s the most interesting point. When the researchers accounted for depression, that effect disappeared.

The real driver wasn’t neuroticism, it was recent depression*.* Depressed participants consistently saw stressful situations as heavier, harder, and more overwhelming.

That matters, because it helps explain how depression sustains itself. The disorder doesn’t just make you feel low, it changes how we see the world. Every new challenge looks bigger, every small problem feels catastrophic. It traps us in a negative feedback loop where stress deepens sadness, and sadness amplifies stress.

The conclusion: Hardship in the past can harden or haunt us, depending on what comes after it. Depression magnifies stress, while early adversity, in some cases, dulls its impact and sting. The difference lies in whether pain becomes armor or open wound, and that depends on what kind of healing happens in between.

We like to think modern relationships are free from old judgments, that we’ve evolved past things like counting each other’s past partners. But a massive new cross-cultural study spanning 11 countries shows that people still care, even if they won’t admit it.

Researchers found that, across multiple continents and thousands of participants, both men and women still rated potential long-term partners less favorably when they had more past partners.

Going from 4 to 12 caused a steep drop in a person’s perceived suitability as a long-term partner, and from 12 to 36, an even bigger one. This wasn’t about conservatism or cultural differences either, the effect held in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Australia.

The number of past partners wasn’t the only thing that mattered either.

How those relationships were distributed over time changed everything. When someone’s past looked like a steep decline (more partners early, fewer later) they were viewed as more desirable.

When the opposite was true, with partner frequency increasing over time, interest fell sharply. It almost feels like these patterns of behavior still serve as silent signals about maturity, commitment, and risk. Even people who described themselves as sexually open & comfortable with casual sex were influenced by these cues.

Despite societal evolution on love and sex, humans still subconsciously weigh sexual history as information. Not necessarily moral information, but practical information that gives us clues about stability, selectivity, and future behavior.

The internet has turned “body count” into a cultural flashpoint, often framed as moral judgment or gender politics. But beneath that noise is a much older pattern of human psychology and biology, one that interprets sexual history as data for procreation and ultimately our survival.

The conclusion: No matter how modern we become or how much society’s ideals advance towards equality, our mating instincts still listen to ancient cues. It’s not as a simple as asking how many partners someone has had, but more related how their story unfolds and in what direction. Regardless of shifting societal normals, our biology still pushes us to value those whose number of new sexual partners shrinks over time than those who grew more sexually active over time.

Thanks for reading the eighteenth edition!

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