Howard Beaumont

Editor of Clear Brain Daily

About

The office is a converted spare bedroom in Plano, Texas. The desk came from my old accounting firm when they downsized: oak veneer, worn at the corners. Two monitors sit on it. The left one runs the master tracking spreadsheet at all times. The right is for research, which usually means three open browser tabs and a study abstract I've been meaning to finish. A whiteboard on the east wall stays covered in handwritten ingredient lists and question marks. Below it, a low shelf holds every bottle I've tested, lined up in the order I started them, the earliest batch on the left.

I'm 55. Thirty years in public accounting, working with mid-sized businesses across the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and in three decades of client meetings I never lost a name. Then came the meeting with a client I'd billed every quarter for eleven years. I knew his coffee order and which school district his kids were zoned for. I stood up to close the meeting and his name was simply gone. I covered it badly and drove home without turning on the radio. It was the third time that had happened that month, not the first.

That was the moment early retirement stopped being a someday plan and turned into a near-term decision. The spreadsheet part came later. Fourteen months ago, I opened a blank one and started logging: one tab per supplement, one column per week, morning notes on what I noticed and what I didn't. My wife says it now has more tabs than our tax returns ever did. She meant it as a dig. I logged it as a benchmark.

The method settled into a routine over the first few months. Every morning, before the coffee has fully done its job, I log the same handful of things: how easily a name or word surfaces, how the first hour of work feels, how much effort a routine task takes, anything unusual physically. Same checklist, same time of day, for the length of the testing window. Cost-per-day runs alongside those notes the whole time, the way you'd track a line item against output. Eighteen products so far haven't cleared that bar, either the price didn't justify a detectable effect or there wasn't one to detect. One of them sat on auto-ship for two months before the data caught up with me. I canceled it on a Sunday morning and logged the date.

A few people keep the process honest. Neil Trevisan, a former colleague who worked alongside me for eleven years, is reflexively suspicious of health claims and sends me debunking links at strange hours. Pam Godfrey, a retired school librarian who lives down the street, asks the practical questions I forget to ask myself and remembers details sharply enough to embarrass me into better note-taking. Clifford Achebe, whose small business taxes I handled for fourteen years and who's stayed a friend since, runs a medical supply distribution company now and frames every product claim in terms of liability and evidence. He's the person I call before publishing anything that touches medical territory.

Old habits carry over. Checking a label's fine print before buying anything isn't so different from checking a client's fine print before signing off on a return. What appears on this site comes from that habit turned on my own supplement shelf, not from a medical credential. A doctor who knows your actual history is the right person to weigh in on cognitive symptoms, before you change anything based on what's tracked here.

Posts by Howard Beaumont

Disclosure

Some links on this site are affiliate links. Buy through one and I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It doesn't change what gets logged as a rejected product versus a keeper. The tracking runs the same whether a link pays out or not.