Your Brain Needs Fresh Air: The Hidden Reason Exercise Makes You Feel Amazing

We all know exercise is good for us, but here's what your gym might not tell you: the biggest benefit might not be the workout itself—it's the fresh oxygen flooding your system.

Think about it. The activities that make us feel most alive—hiking, swimming, skiing, even a simple walk—all happen outdoors. That's not a coincidence.

 

The Indoor Crisis We Don't Talk About

The average person spends 90% of their time indoors, breathing air that contains:

• 2-5x more pollutants than outside air
• Higher CO2 levels that literally make you think slower
• Recycled pathogens and off-gassing chemicals

Studies show just 90 minutes in nature reduces activity in your brain's rumination center—that part that keeps you stuck in negative thought loops. Meanwhile, prolonged indoor time increases depression risk by 60%.

 

Your Body is Starving for Real Air

When you exercise outdoors, you're not just burning calories. You're:

• Supercharging your mitochondria with oxygen
• Bathing in negative ions from natural environments
• Absorbing phytoncides from trees that boost immune function
• Breaking the rumination cycle that indoor living enables

Research proves that "green exercise" outperforms indoor workouts for mood, energy, and cognitive function.

 

The Simple Fix That Changes Everything

You don't need a gym membership. You need fresh air.

 

Start Small:

• Morning oxygen boost: 5 minutes outside before checking your phone
• Lunch break reset: Walk around the block instead of scrolling
• Evening wind-down: 10 minutes of outdoor breathing before bed

Level Up:

• Exercise outdoors at least 3x per week
• Work near an open window when possible
• Take calls while walking outside
• Eat one meal outdoors daily

Your 7-Day Challenge

For one week:

1. Track your outdoor time
2. Replace one indoor activity with its outdoor version daily
3. Notice your energy, mood, and sleep

Most people report feeling dramatically different within 72 hours.

 

---

What indoor activity will you move outside today? Share your experience and inspire others to reclaim their right to fresh air.

AWS Q CLI Zsh setting

 

If you want to pull in your local .zshrc settings for each shell launch, you can follow the following steps:

1. copy the following content to a new file named "myzsh" and put it somewhere in your local bin folder. I put it under ~/bin/myzsh

#!/bin/zsh
# More robust wrapper that handles -c flag properly
if [[ "$1" == "-c" ]]; then
    source ~/.zshrc
    eval "$2"
else
    # Fallback to regular zsh behavior
    exec zsh "$@"
fi

2.

chmod +x ~/bin/myzsh
export AMAZON_Q_CHAT_SHELL="$HOME/bin/myzsh"

And use q chat as you normally do. in my case, it was able to see all the aliases I defined in my .zshrc file while before doing this it couldn't see them.

How to decouple MCP servers from the MCP clients.

You can easily decoulple your MCP servers from your MCP clients with the existing stdio <-> tcp tool, such as ncat (which is part of the nmap tool). Without any code changes to the existsing MCP servers available, you can serve them on a TCP port. For example, this is how I run the filesystem MCP server

ncat -lkp 7002 -e "/usr/local/bin/npx -y @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem /tmp"

On the mcp client side (such as Claude desktop or Cline), you would simply run another ncat as client to connect to the server

ncat 127.0.0.1 7002

That’s all. now you are serving MCP server over the network. Of course you can run multiple MCP servers on different ports.

on MacOS, you can install nmap with brew: brew install nmap

how to view a text file with multiple color highlights

Use the "rg -p" (like grep) command to search for the term and use the option `--color 'match:fg:COLOR` to specify the color. You can chain multiple rg commands. Then at the end use "less -R" to view the output. 

 

For example, the following command search within the bible, highlight the search term, but also highlights the book/verse of the line

 

rg -p $1 ~/Downloads/esv-bible-2001.txt \

| rg --colors 'match:fg:magenta' -p ':[0-9]*[A-Za-z]+ [0-9]+:[0-9]+' \

| less -R