The Clearance Principle

Once you accept the Clearance Principle, life starts getting better.

Anything that enters a system has a window to exit. Miss the window and it becomes a problem. Microbes linger and you get sick. Thoughts linger and you get depressed. Stimulation lingers and focus disappears. Insults linger and relationships rot.

Flying made this obvious.

I used to get sick after flights often enough that it felt normal. Not full blown sickness, but something like congestion, fatigue, and throat irritation just enough to annoy me on whatever trip I was on.

It’s no surprise. Flying is almost optimized to make you sick. Aircraft cabins run at desert-level humidity, drying out your nose and throat. You touch everything while packed next to strangers for hours, some of whom are sick. Sleep disruption blunts immune coordination. And after landing, you still aren’t breathing fresh air. Airplanes, airports, Ubers, hotel rooms are all sealed environments designed to keep out airflow.

What ends up happening is that new microbes arrive first in the nasal passages and throat, exactly where your defenses are weakest. And they sit there, waiting to spread into your body.

Then I read about a doctor who clears microbes immediately after landing. It’s so obvious but I never thought about it. As soon as he arrives, he uses nasal saline, xylitol, and gargles saltwater in his throat. He clears all that microbe exposure. That’s what I do now. I don’t get sick anymore.

Once you see clearance as the foundation of health, many things stop looking random.

Take a Lindy example. Traditions instructs, us to walk after meals. In Italy, the passeggiata after dinner. In India, Ayurveda recommends walking 100 steps after meals. Mediterranean cultures have evening strolls after eating. Chinese medicine prescribes walking after meals to aid digestion.

The mechanism is straightforward. Eating spikes glucose in the bloodstream. Skeletal muscle is one of the body’s primary glucose sinks. Contracting muscle pulls glucose out of circulation immediately, even without insulin, either burning it or storing it as glycogen. Walking turns your largest tissue system into a disposal mechanism at the exact moment blood sugar is highest.

@yourpositivehealth

Dr Casey Means on the benefits of short walks after a meal. Do you go for walks after meals?

The same pattern appears everywhere in nature. Rivers clear debris to the ocean. Wildfires clear dead undergrowth and suppress disease. Animals molt to shed parasites and damaged tissue. Tides clear coastlines. Forests shed leaves to open space for new growth.

Systems that can’t clear what accumulates eventually collapse.

This is the pattern behind everything we call healthy.

Most of Health is Really About Clearance

Exercise, sleep, and fasting are the three behaviors almost everyone agrees extend lifespan and improve health. That isn’t a coincidence. All three are clearance mechanisms.

Movement clears glucose and stress hormones from circulation. It drives lymph through muscle contraction. The lymphatic system has no pump of its own. It depends entirely on motion. Sit still long enough and waste accumulates.

Sleep flushes metabolic waste from the brain through the glymphatic system.

@thatsleepdoc

The Glymphatic System. One of the many reasons we sleep. #Sleep #sleepadvice #sleeptips #insomnia #docsofinstagram

Fasting creates windows where the body stops processing inputs and shifts into repair. Autophagy ramps up. Damaged proteins are broken down. Cellular clutter is removed. The system cleans house.

@mightypursuit

Fasting has become a craze in the United States. Some people are obsessed with it.
Others have never even heard what it can actually do.
A... See more

Ancient medicine built an entire medical system around the concept of flow and clearance. While the specific biological mechanisms they proposed (the four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm) have been debunked by modern germ theory and cellular biology, their focus on the body’s need to eliminate waste and prevent stagnation is directionally correct. Modern biology keeps rediscovering the same idea.

Type 2 diabetes is glucose that won’t clear from the blood. Cholesterol becomes dangerous when fat won’t leave arterial walls. Inflammation turns pathological when a response meant to resolve keeps running. Immune reactions become diseases when their off-switch fails.

Here's something you can test immediately.

Clearance and Focus

If you're like most people, you're already running through tasks before you're even at your desk. The mental load is circulating, things you need to do, emails to send, problems to solve.

Write them down. Create a checklist for your day.

Get them out of your head and onto paper or screen. You will feel your working memory get better after you’re finished writing down your list. Watch how the pressure drops immediately from your head because those tasks aren’t circulating anymore inside your head. You cleared them. This is why checklists work. They give cognitive load somewhere to exit. The tasks stop running in the background. Mental RAM gets freed up.

Focus works the same way. You're almost certainly carrying arousal from whatever you just did. Your nervous system is still elevated from the previous task. Attention is already partially allocated. Starting new work in this state means starting with congestion.

Clear first. Stare at a wall for two minutes. Let the previous state dissipate. Watch how different the next task feels when you approach it from baseline instead of from residue.

Clearance and Philosophy

Philosophy figured out the power of clearance early on.

In Stoicism, the task is to intercept impressions at the boundary. Challenge them early and they dissolve. Let them settle and they crystallize into belief, emotion, and action.

Buddhism arrived at the same position but developed a more refined instrument. Meditation trains attention to notice mental events earlier and shorten their dwell time. Thoughts arise, are observed, and pass. That’s one way to alleviate suffering.

Christianity draws the same distinction, but frames it morally rather than attentively. Temptation is universal. Unwanted thoughts arise in everyone. Orthodox theology treats this as morally neutral. The task is guard the heart the moment a thought appears. Dismissed thoughts carry no moral weight. Sin begins when the will consents, when a thought is permitted to shape desire and action. Lingering thoughts form habits.

Clearance and Humor

It’s no secret that if you’re a man who isn’t good looking or very succesful, you can still do well in the dating market. But only if you have a very good sense of humor.

Making someone laugh consistently is really a super power in this world.

The standard academic explanation is that humor signals intelligence. You're demonstrating quick thinking, pattern recognition, social awareness. That never quite made sense to me. I've known genuinely stupid people who were hilarious. They weren't signaling anything. They were just funny.

This is where the idea finally clicked.

Humor, making someone laugh, isn’t entertainment. It’s about clearance.

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