Outline
Welcome to the twentieth (!) 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 🐆✈️
(This is one of the most important editions so far, and thus, is a bit longer)
🤔 Curiosity
Caffeine + L-theanine combo improves attention & focus when sleep-deprived
For as long as humans could speak or print, there have always been promises of remedies capable of giving us a quick fix some of our most typical human problems.
And in this short attention span world we live in today, it’s arguably more important than ever to vet these claims, to understand the true impacts of the things we do with our body or the things we put into our body.
One of the claims I’ve heard floated around in biohacker circles before is combining the likes of caffeine with a supplement known as L-theanine.
For those who haven’t heard of it, L-theanine is an amino acid that generally reduces distractions and mind-wandering, while having a calming effect on the body.
The idea is that by combining caffeine with a substance like L-theanine, we can get double the impact on our focus and attention that caffeine provides, without any of the jitters or anxiety.
Admittedly, I am a bit of a biohacker myself, and someone who has been extremely health focused since I became a teenager. This combo is something I’ve been interested to try at some point, and now there are some solid scientific data to back up the previous biohacker claims.
Researchers at Cambridge University recently published a study looking at the combination of these two substances, and found that in this case, the “bro science” actually checks out.
Published in the British Journal of Nutrition in August 2025, these researchers used a simulated on-screen driving game along with brain scans to determine the effects of combining caffeine and L-theanine.
First, each participant was kept awake for 17 hours, then received either a combo of L-theanine (200mg) and caffeine (160mg, about 2 cups of coffee), or a placebo.
They were asked to play this simulated driving game both before and after taking the combo, and the results showed conclusively that those who received the combo performed better both in their accuracy and reaction time, with the later improving by 10%, a pretty significant increase when driving on the road.
The researchers also used brain scans to determine the improvements here, noting that the specific brain signal they focused on, connected to attention and decision-making, was both larger and occurred more quickly.
The conclusion: The insights from this study are enough to suggest that this combination is a potent way to get our brains back on track and focusing at our normal levels, particularly when we are sleep-deprived. For real world, on-road situations, these results still need to be tested. But for those of us trying to squeeze out more productivity at work with reduced anxiety, this combo shows some serious promise.*
*even though L-theanine is an amino acid, always always always consult your doctor before trying new supplements 🙏
🗺️ Culture
The True Power of Growth Mindset
Most of the time, anything that brings big changes requires a lot of effort, there are no shortcuts in life. But growth mindset is one of them.
I can confidently say that growth mindset is one of the single most important concepts that any human being can learn.
As somebody who has always been focused on personal development, this has been one of the main drivers of my ability to consistently grow and improve myself, despite all that of the negative elements that our brain likes to bring up that slow most of us down.
Whether that’s anxiety, depression, doubt, or fear, growth mindset has been the single most important mindset that I ever applied. And it applies to anything in our lives.
The concept of growth mindset extremely simple, and there’s a very important scientific study behind it that shows exactly why it’s so impactful.
Growth mindset involves the belief that our abilities can improve through effort and learning. To do this, we have to separate our identity from our performance, which enhances our resilience and motivation in the face of challenges.
On top of that, growth mindset doesn’t just work logically as a way to understand how you can improve yourself, it actually increases our neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to change itself and grow, in response to experiences.
With a growth mindset, individuals learn to view challenges as opportunities for development rather than threats to their identity. Often, the way we think is not only tied to how we were raised as children, but how we were praised.
There’s a really impactful study that solidifies the impact of growth mindset, from way back in 1998. In that study, authors Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller studied children and looked at two different types of praise they tend to receive: superlative-based praise and effort-based praise.
Superlative-based praise is very common in the United States, statements that focus on a superlative that the child then ties directly to their identity. Some examples include:
“You’re so smart!” “You’re so beautiful!” “You’re so talented!”
All of these seemingly normal and harmless bits of praise actually create an identity attachment. If you’re always told that you’re beautiful, you’re going to measure your self-worth through your beauty. If you’re always told you’re smart, you’ll measure your worth through your grades or intelligence.
On the other hand, effort-based praise sounds like this:
“You worked really hard on that.” “I love how you didn’t give up even when you were struggling.”
And the results showed that this type of praise creates a completely different identity in the minds of children, and us adults.
Children who received superlative-based praise consistently showed poorer outcomes across nearly every metric studied. These children were trying to protect the identity they had been given, instead of focusing on the challenge or how to solve the problem.
As a result:
They avoided challenges later on
They took on fewer problems overall
They avoided harder challenges and chose easier tasks to maintain the label of being “smart”
Their performance decreased when problems became more difficult
They were more likely to lie or misrepresent their results in order to maintain their identity. They would inflate scores or outcomes just to feel competent.
Now compare that with the children who received effort-based praise.
Because their identity was not tied to success, but to effort, they responded completely differently to challenges. These children:
Took on more problems
Continued to take on harder and more difficult problems
Performed significantly better overall
Developed more motivation and resilience
Were more honest in reporting their results
They didn’t need to protect an image. Success to them, meant effort, not maintaining how they appeared in the eyes of others.
The conclusion is crystal clear: When success is tied to identity, people work harder to maintain the identity than to actually solve the problem. When success is tied to effort, people take on more challenges, perform better, and grow faster.
I truly believe this is one of the biggest “hacks” you can apply to your life starting literally right now.
Here’s how we can do it:
The first step is awareness. We need to become aware of all the ways we try to maintain our identity in the eyes of others instead of focusing on the problem in front of us and the effort we’re putting in. This is true of any level of self-growth or personal development. You can’t change something until you become aware of it.
Second, once you have that awareness, the next step is to distance your identity from performance. What we can do is not who we are. That’s a difficult concept in the United States and the Western world, but it’s something we have to work on breaking down every single day.
Third, instead of identifying strongly with success or failure, we need to focus on the learning process and the effort we put into it. This reduces fear of failure and increases resilience. Even when we get something wrong, the mindset shifts to:
“I’m close. I can get this next time.” “Okay, I understand my mistakes. I just need to approach this differently.”
Fourth, we must reframe mistakes. When we face setbacks, it’s crucial that we don’t get discouraged by being wrong. Instead, we analyze what went wrong, remove the negative emotion associated with it, and redirect that energy toward understanding and fixing the error.
🖇️ Connection
Even with more friends, young adults suffer the most from loneliness & lack of connection
We’re all living in an extremely paradoxical time right now. We have access to more information, more people, and more instantaneous communication than any human being ever before, and yet so many of us have never felt more lonely and disconnected…from the world, from others, and from ourselves.
Most of us attribute this to social media, smartphones, and the downstream effects of those technologies, and we’re not wrong about that.
This study analyzed over 5,000 adults between the ages of 18 and 95, and researchers examined several key elements:
Social well-being, including connection, companionship, perceived support, and number of friends
Social ill-being, including loneliness and social disconnection
Life stressors, such as major life changes, loss of friends, and perceived stress
To my surprise, the study found that younger adults experience higher levels of loneliness and disconnection even when they have more friends, compared to older adults.
As adults age, they actually feel more connected and less lonely over time, even as their number of friends decreases.
But wait, how exactly is that possible?
There are several reasons older adults tend to experience greater social well-being:
First, they focus more on fewer, deeper, and more meaningful relationships. They may have fewer friends, but the relationships they maintain are much stronger.
Second, older adults tend to engage in less social comparison and feel less pressure to maintain large social circles.
Third, they also have better emotional regulation, supported by fully developed brains and greater emotional maturity.
Fourth, their lives are generally more stable. They experience fewer major life changes and have more predictable routines, which supports a stronger sense of connection.
On the other hand, young adults experience the highest levels of social ill-being, much of which is related to constant change in their lives. Many young adults are moving, graduating, starting new jobs, entering or leaving relationships, and navigating major life transitions.
There is less predictability and more instability overall, and because of all this, young adults tend to experience higher relational turnover (more friends coming and going from our lives)
The conclusion: Ultimately, this study shows that while phones and social media do play a role in changing how we relate to one another, there are also structural aspects of young adult life that make this period especially prone to loneliness and disconnection. However, there are several ways we can use this information to change our thinking, feel more connected, and less lonely:
Focus more on the most meaningful relationships in your life
Reduce the value placed on having a large number of friends or a bunch of friends with shallow relationships
And the most important of them all, reduce our social comparison
No two lives are the same. We all move at different speeds, with different circumstances, and comparison truly is the thief of joy.
❓ Question of the Week
What is a specific superlative-based praise you received as a child that attached to your identity, one that always felt the need to protect and keep up?
🐆 Quote of the Week
“Why should we all use our creative power? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money.”
—
Thanks for reading the twentieth edition!
You can count on Airplane Mode arriving in your inbox every week, just in time for you to switch off & reconnect with the topics that matter most.
