Evidence-anchored daily habits

The few daily habits with the strongest evidence behind them.

Most health content is noise. This is the handful of habits that account for most of the difference — each anchored to a peer-reviewed study.

Oil painting of a meadow path at golden hour — ochre sky, terracotta poppies, sage grass

The vault

Nine levers. That's it.

The vault covers nine daily practices. Each has the strongest available evidence and a specific, do-it-today action. Most health writing buries these under a hundred lesser things. This strips it back to what actually moves the needle.

Walking

47% lower all-cause mortality at 7,000 steps/day

Sitting

Break every 30 min — independent of total exercise

Sleep

Lowest mortality at 7 hours; shorter and longer both raise risk

Sunlight

Morning light improves sleep onset by ~22 min

Protein

1.6–2.2 g/kg/day across 3–5 meals maximizes lean mass

Coffee

3–5 cups, morning only — 10–15% lower all-cause mortality

Creatine

5 g/day + 3×/week lifting → +4.4 kg upper-body strength

Resistance Training

3×/week, 150–300 min/week MVPA total

Alcohol

IARC Group 1 carcinogen. No safe threshold for cancer risk

The newsletter

What lands in your inbox

One lever per email. The bottom line, the strongest study, one action you can do this week.
No filler. About 3 minutes to read.
Every claim links to a primary source. If we get it wrong, you can check us.

Weekly. No spam. Unsubscribe any time.

For builders

Or plug it into your AI agent

The whole vault is open-source on GitHub and structured to be machine-readable. Point Claude, ChatGPT, or any agent at it and ask it to score your routine against the evidence. It returns a citation-backed audit.

# Point any agent at the vault and ask:

"Read the files in the-daily-lever/ and compare
 them to my typical day below. Rank the gaps by
 evidence strength and suggest one change."

# The agent returns something like:
#  1. Sitting — 9hrs continuous; break every 30 min (prolonged-sitting.md)
#  2. Sunlight — zero morning light; +22 min sleep onset gain available
#  3. Protein — 2 meals/day vs 3–5 recommended ...

View on GitHub See a sample audit →

About

Aaron Bradford. I started this vault because I wanted a single source of truth for the daily habits worth optimizing — and I was tired of cross-referencing podcasts. Now I'm publishing it. I live by this routine; the studies are why.

Questions or a study you think belongs in the vault? hello@thedailylever.com