J.D. Moyer

science fiction author, beatmaker, against fascism

Category: Metaprogramming Page 28 of 30

Low-Hanging Fruit Part III (Quality of Life)

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On May 13

In Metaprogramming

Full speed ahead towards all possible fantasy futures.

All of us, to different degrees, engage in imaginary narratives regarding our futures.  Imagination takes work, and most people (myself included) tend towards laziness, so these narratives are often fuzzy.  We have vague ideas about what we’ll do, where we’ll go, who we’ll meet, and so forth.  Sometimes these vague narratives lead us into action and fulfillment; other times they continue indefinitely, running parallel to the inertia of the reality of our lives.

Fear (of death, injury, disease, poverty, failure, loneliness, shame, or change itself) holds us back.  We postpone action for fear of what that action will cost us.  On the other hand, fear can also propel us; considering our own impermanence and limited time on this planet can kick us into gear.  Fear of where our current life trajectory will lead us, if we don’t change our direction, can be equally motivating.  To get to where we want to be, it’s usually necessary to take some risks, to put it on the line, to face our fears, and really go for it.

That’s not what this post is about.

There are other changes we can make in our lives — small changes — that can enormously influence our quality of life.  These changes often have zero (or close to zero) associated cost or risk.  How can we more easily identify these possible changes?  Simple, low-effort actions that result in big positive change are the low-hanging fruit of life (also see Low-Hanging Fruit Part I – Charity and Low-Hanging Fruit Part II – Health).  Implementing positive change can become a habit in itself; small changes can cascade into big changes.  If you’re not feeling geared up enough to turn your life upside down in your quest for greater satisfaction and happiness, you can always start small.

Immediately Actualizing Your Most Accessible Dreams

View from my flat in Paris.

Do you have any expensive fantasies?  Maybe you’d like to own a flat in Paris; you could jet in, stay for a week or two, reconnect with your French lover, and drink crates of obscenely expensive wine.  Maybe you’d like to own a baseball team.  Or perhaps you’re the private island type, or maybe you fancy yourself a space pilot or hot-air balloon circumnavigator, Richard Branson style.  Personally I would like to build a massive prehistoric garden, with Jurassic-era plants, fossil replicas, and maybe animatronic dinosaurs.

Aside from the prehistoric garden, lack of money usually isn’t what’s stopping me.  There are lots of things that we might fantasize about doing for years, or even decades, but keep putting off for no good reason.  We can afford it, we can make the time, and yet for some reason we don’t start.  I’m not sure why this is, but I know that when I can break through the inertia and just do the things I want to do, it’s immensely satisfying and results in a big quality of life jump.  For example:

  • The $2 espresso cup — I’ve always enjoyed drinking coffee out of an espresso cup, but I prefer the taste of drip coffee to espresso.  I bought myself a couple small espresso cups at IKEA for about $2 each, and I get immense pleasure every morning drinking drip coffee out of my little espresso cup.  The coffee stays hot, and I can drink an impressive six to eight cups each morning without feeling overcaffeinated.
  • Ferns — we bought some ferns and planted them.  I love ferns.  It’s not my dream garden yet, but $15 at the nursery went a long way towards helping me imagine my grandiose prehistoric garden.  Ancient plants — essentially unchanged for millions of years.  I love looking at those things.

    Just add dinosaurs.

  • Become a writer — a lifelong dream that I’ve only pursued in earnest since becoming a father.  What’s involved?  Writing every day, or at least most days.  That’s it.  Outside of pens and notebooks, costs are nonexistent.  I’d like to eventually find an agent and get published, but for the moment I’m happy writing and blogging (the latter counts as self-publishing, and the blog only took an hour or so to set up).  Why did I wait so long to start?
  • Live and work abroad — both Kia and I have wanted to do this for years, but it took us awhile to take the plunge.  We’re going to live and work in Costa Rica for six weeks.  We’re renting a house in the jungle, bringing our kid and our laptops, and getting on a plane.  How’s it all going to work out?  I have no idea — I’ll let you know.  But so far it looks like the cost of the trip will be similar to the cost of staying at home.  We don’t have to sell our house, uproot our lives, etc. — we’re just picking up and going for awhile.  If it works out well then maybe we’ll experiment with longer trips.  Reading The Four Hour Workweek definitely encouraged us to take the leap.

None of these changes involved any more risk than I would otherwise experience in daily life (in terms of safety, I live in Oakland and drive a car — is riding a bicycle in Costa Rica going to be more dangerous?).  What I lose in billable hours to writing, traveling, staring at my ferns, and drinking excessive amounts of coffee out of my little espresso cup will hopefully be made up by new ideas, new relationships, and passive income from royalties down the road (that may sound optimistic, but it has worked out that way for time I’ve spent writing and producing music, and I’m no musical genius).

What’s your easily accessible dream that you can immediately implement?  I’d like to know — please comment below.  I once asked an acquaintance what she would do if she won $20 million in the lottery.  She said she’d like to produce an off-Broadway production of the musical Hair.  What would that cost, $20K?  She didn’t mention what she’d do with the remaining $19,980,000.

Identify High Stress Areas — Reduce 10%

What’s the most stressful part of your week?  What activity, person, or place makes you tense your shoulders or gives you that uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach.  Is it traffic or your commute?  A co-worker?  Dealing with your financial accounts?

Is there a course of action you can take that can reduce the stress level by 10%?  This might not sound like much, but if you think about it in terms of a 10% quality-of-life improvement, it’s worth thinking about the problem.

For example, can you:

  • change your commute time to avoid traffic
  • negotiate a swap of tasks or chores with you co-workers or co-habitators so that you don’t have to do that job you hate (and vice-versa)
  • limit communication with your most high maintenance client/co-worker/customer
  • complete a task online instead of in-person (DMV, filing forms, etc.)
  • change your mode of communication around a contentious issue
  • become more accepting of other people’s behavior, and ask for more acceptance of your own behavior

In relationships (marriage, work, whatever) people have different stress levels around different topics.  Discussing some topics (money, future plans, child-rearing practices, etc.) might be easy for one person but stressful for the other.  The more sensitive party will find their heart rate increasing, their body tensing up, and other physical manifestations of stress when the topic is raised.  It’s important to not corner someone and force them into a conversation when they’re not ready, or allow yourself to be cornered when you’re not ready.  It’s acceptable to say “I don’t want to discuss this right now — can we discuss it at x time instead?”  Ambush conversations are a significant source of stress, and they’re easily avoidable.

In my own life, the demands of fatherhood can sometimes be a source of stress.  Like all parents, Kia and I have been forced to find ways to deal with the demands of small, vocal primate with limited table manners and even more limited self-sufficiency.  I in particular had a hard time adjusting to the absence of vast expanses of free time that used to dominate the landscape of my life and consciousness.  I’d chosen to make a living as a freelancer, forgoing the 9-to-5 lifestyle, mainly because it afforded me opportunities to read books in the middle of the day, stare at the trees for hours on end, and generally avoid people telling me what to do and when and how to do it.  Now a young creature, partly of my own making, charming but also demanding, was making mincemeat of my free time, peaceful sleep, and hard-won lounging about lifestyle.  Worse than a tyrannical boss!

I’ve managed to reclaim aspects of my preferred vacation-like existence, enough so that I’m generally quite happy.  The solution was straightforward; pay for and use more outside childcare than we actually needed.  This, combined with help from my daughter’s enthusiastic grandparents, allows me not only to maintain my sanity but to have enough free “space out” time so that I can spend time with my daughter without any feelings of resentment.  The extra expense requires more financial discipline in other areas, but buying myself more free time feels like money well spent.

Implementing this plan required some acceptance from Kia, which I asked for and she has generously given.  She has mentioned that she didn’t realize how important my “down time” (for entertainment, spacing out, doing nothing, etc.) was for my psychological well-being until there was real pressure on that time (and I turned into a miserable sod, for a while).

The alternative to analyzing and reducing your stress is lower quality of life, and eventually “Id Rebellion.”  If the landscape of your life is weighted too much towards what you experience as drudgery and toil, your subconscious mind will eventually grab the reins; you’ll find yourself acting out (drugs, excess drinking, shutting down emotionally, isolating yourself, gambling … insert your own variety of “bad behavior”).  This happens to everyone at one point or another, and we may or may not emerge unscathed.  I think a measured, analytical approach to stress reduction can mitigate episodes of Id Rebellion.

Internal Entitlement (not Enlightenment)

I’m not suggesting that we should live small; that we should be satisfied with eking out small pleasures in life.  If you hate your job, or if you have big relationship problems, then big change is a prerequisite to happiness.  And if you have big dreams then you should pursue them.  But small changes lead to big changes.  When we’re proactive, and take 100% responsibility for our own actions and experience of life (regardless of how much we can actually control), then positive change becomes habitual.  More and more we feel entitled to complete enjoyment of life.

This sense of internal entitlement — an allegiance to our own preferences — is different than expecting that the world owes us a living.  And it’s not the same as steamrolling people and insisting that we always get our way.  It is about finding out what makes you happy, and what doesn’t, and doing more of the former and less of the latter.

This simple way of living can be threatening to people that defer their own enjoyment of life for no good reason.  You might become a positive threat; your proactive attitude might be interpreted as a criticism of their own way of life.

However I think that’s probably the exception — most people in your life who notice you making changes will be inspired to make positive changes of their own (and those changes may then inspire you in turn, thus creating a positive feedback loop).

I’d love to hear about your own experiences in either of these areas — stress reduction and dream implementation.  What actions did you take and how did it affect your quality of life?

Pick the Low-Hanging Fruit, Part II (Health) — continued

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On April 15

In Health/Body-hacking, Metaprogramming

Berry berry yummy.

This post is a continuation of Pick the Low-Hanging Fruit, Part II (Health).

4. Reduce artificial light in the evening.

Are you sleep-deprived?  Do you “try to go to bed earlier” and fail, night after night?  I’ve been there.  If you enjoy browsing the internet or watching TV or playing video games or even just reading, you may, like many other people, fail to get sleepy in the evening (even when your body and mind are exhausted).  You know what’s keeping you up?  It’s the artificial light (blue spectrum light in particular).  At least according to this book, the blue light (equivalent to day light) is blocking the serotonin to melatonin conversion process — and the melatonin is the hormone/neurotransmitter that tells your body it’s time to go to sleep (and makes you feel sleepy).

I’d always thought of myself as a “night owl” until I tried an experiment; go without artificial light in the evening.  I found that without light bulbs, the TV, or the blue glow of the computer screen keeping me up, I would often be yawning by 9pm (otherwise my “natural” bedtime would be midnight or 1am).

The experiment I conducted was not easy.  But there are two very easy steps you can take in the same general direction.

  • use fewer lights in the evening — no need to have the whole house ablaze
  • download and install the free f.lux software on your computer — if you do then it won’t be your computer that’s keeping you up!

5. Exercise intensely 1-2 minutes a day, at least a few times a week.

All the latest exercise physiology research is pointing to these two general conclusions:

  • intensity (achieving maximum heart rate, lifting maximum weight) is more important than duration
  • less is more (recovery time is very important, over-training is very damaging)

If you really go for for that 1-2 minutes, you’re going to achieve MOST of the benefits in the following categories:

  • cardiovascular fitness (maximize heart rate)
  • strength (maximize weight lifted, move very slowly and with good form, stress muscles to the point where GH is released)
  • bone density  (especially with jumping or sprinting — both stress and thus strengthen the long bones)

What qualifies as intense?  Sprints, jumping and leaping, body-weight exercises (pullups, pushups, chinups, bar dips, etc.), carrying/lifting/pushing heavy objects, running up stairs — that sort of thing.  The best exercises are the ones that you actually enjoy doing — don’t bother with exercises that feel uncomfortable, boring, etc.

Most of the people flogging themselves in the gym aren’t improving their health.  Instead, they’re spiking their cortisol levels, stressing their joints, overburdening (and possibly enlarging) their hearts, and probably boring themselves to death in the process.

6. Floss before you brush.

My “floss every day” intention used to lead to flossing three or four times a week.  I would wait until right before going to sleep to brush my teeth, and half the time after brushing I would be too tired or lazy to floss.

Gum health is massively important for overall health.  Even mildly inflamed gums can raise your risk of heart disease (“leaky gums” are an open door for pathogens to waltz right into your bloodstream, thus giving your immune system a constant low-grade battle which can lead to chronic inflammation and the formation of arterial plaque).  Even knowing this, AND having a family history of both heart disease and gum problems, wasn’t enough to get me to religiously floss every day.

The trick that worked for me was switching the order.  I don’t think I’ve missed a day since.  Flossing doesn’t seem difficult anymore, because I’m not waiting until I’m exhausted to do it.  Even more important is anchoring the less ingrained habit (flossing) to a more ingrained habit (brushing).

One other thing I’ve noticed is that flossing is easier and faster if I’m not looking in the mirror.  Something about the visual feedback slows down the process — I can floss more quickly (and just as thoroughly) by touch alone.

The low-fat diet is just crazy.

7. Eat more fat.

In general, carbs (sugars and starches, including bread and pasta) cause the release of insulin, which lowers your blood sugar.  This makes you want to eat more carbs.  Eating dietary fat, on the other hand, leads to the sensation of fullness.  It’s easier to avoid overeating if you tilt the balance away from carbohydrates and towards healthful dietary fats.

There are a few types of dietary fat you want to avoid, including trans fats (hydrogenated vegetable oil), highly processed fats (like canola oil), old/rancid fats (processed vegetable and seed oils are especially vulnerable), and overheated vegetable/seed oils.  These oxidized fats can damage your health in a number of ways.

The good news is that most fats that are delicious are also health-promoting, including butter (especially from pastured cows), olive oil, coconut oil, fatty fish, chicken fat, and beef fat (again, especially from grass-fed/pastured cows).

Keeping a good ratio between Omega-3 fats (from wild-caught fish and grass-fed animal sources) and Omega-6 fats (from nuts and seeds, seed oils, and grain-fed animal sources) will support overall health, including immune function, heart health, mood, and blood sugar regulation.  Most people consume too much Omega-6 and not enough Omega-3.  Taking supplemental fish oil is the easiest way to improve this ratio (you can check out this site and this study to see which brands are best and which ones to avoid).  Keep fish oil refrigerated.

These days the prevailing wisdom says that we should avoid saturated fat to maintain optimum health and avoid heart disease, but the actual evidence behind this claim in extremely weak.  Most of the studies that claim saturated fat harms our health don’t control for intake of salt, refined flour, trans-fats, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, and processed food.  For example, a typical dietary study might compare the health of people eating the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.) to the Mediterranean diet — in other words hamburgers, hot dogs, white bread, corn oil, soda VS. fresh fruits and vegetables, fish, olive oil, beans, and whole grain. Conclusion: saturated fat is bad for you!  Really?  What about all the other junk on the S.A.D. side?  What about all the protective effects of the healthful foods on the Med side?  Studies like this don’t prove anything about saturated fat in particular.  Next time you see a headline that proclaims the evils of saturated fat, drill down and take a look to see what foods were actually being consumed by the study participants.

The original Ancel Keys “7 countries” study that got us collectively believing in the evils of saturated fat was based on cherry-picked (in effect, falsified) data.  Ancel Keys only included data from countries where both dietary saturated fat and heart disease were high — and left out data from countries where dietary saturated fat was high and heart disease was low.

The latest clinical research shows there is no relationship between eating saturated fat and getting heart disease.  Here’s the direct link to the meta-analysis.

For detailed discussions and numerous citations to the studies behind these assertions about dietary fat, I encourage you to explore Dr. Eades’s site and Mark Sisson’s site.  That is, if you like butter, and bacon.

Pick the Low Hanging Fruit, Part II (Health)

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On April 12

In Health/Body-hacking, Metaprogramming

A small serving of fruit.

In my first post in this series I wrote about “low-hanging fruit” in regards to charitable giving.  I shared my opinions regarding which organizations are working effectively and transparently to improve people’s lives by tackling big problems with relatively straightforward solutions.

Today I’ll write about applying the same “low-hanging fruit” principle to personal health.  What steps can we take to improve our health, energy, longevity, and vitality that aren’t that hard? Why not start with the easy stuff?

Personal health regimens often appear to be complicated and difficult, but I think that for most of us there are easy steps we can take that can radically improve our health.

1. Get your vitamin D levels up to between 40-60 ng/ml.
Up to two-thirds of people in the U.S. have “sub-optimal” levels of vitamin D — not low enough to result in rickets but low enough to increase vulnerability to certain types of cancer, reduce bone density, reduce immunity, and negatively affect more or less every organ in the body.  If you’re curious, search for the studies online and read the opinions of various medical experts.  Quite a few doctors and researchers have A LOT to say about this topic, and there is no shortage of clinical research.

My personal experience of taking 5000IU a day (I take one 5000IU capsule a day, along with fish oil or sometimes cod liver oil) over this last winter is the following:

  • deeper, more restful sleep
  • general better mood (very little “feeling down” and frequent “happiness for no discernible reason”)
  • no serious colds and no flu (a couple times this winter I felt almost sick for a couple days, but never “full blown”)
  • cessation of asthma symptoms (most of my asthma symptoms went away after switching to something more closely resembling a paleolithic diet, but I don’t think I’ve had a single flare-up since starting on the vitamin D)

I’m also impressed by the inverse relationship between vitamin D levels and many types of cancer.  I’ll get my blood level checked at my next checkup and see what the results are … if they’re above 60 ng/ml I’ll back off on the supplementation as there can be negative effects from blood levels that are too high.  However some doctors say that keeping levels as high as 60-90 ng/ml is ideal.

A full winter’s supply of vitamin D shouldn’t cost you more than $20 or $30.  One pill a day if you take the 5kIU size, and it’s no big deal if you miss a day.  You also want to make sure you’re getting enough calcium (sardines, canned salmon, dairy, greens, almonds) and magnesium (greens, cocoa/dark chocolate, nuts and seeds, beans) in your diet.

If 5000IU seems high (it looks high compared to the U.S. RDA), consider that 20 minutes of sun on your bare skin can generate up to 20,000IU (depending on a number of factors, including how tan or naturally dark you are, time of year, time of day, latitude, how much skin is exposed, etc.).  You generally get enough vitamin D from the sun before you burn (vitamin production shuts down so you can’t get too much this way).

2. Start consuming green tea, dark chocolate, and/or red wine on a regular basis.

C’mon, you’ve got to enjoy at least one of these flavors, no?  While pill-form antioxidants have come up short in clinical studies, regular consumers of these three antioxidant-packed foods show lower risk for heart disease, cancer, and dementia.  The relatively low amounts of sugar, caffeine, and alcohol in these foods will do you less harm than the polyphenols will do you good.

If you find the taste of green tea to be too bitter, you’re probably brewing it wrong.  Get loose-leaf tea from China, quickly rinse it with very hot water (not quite boiling), then brew it for as short a time as 30 seconds.  Brewing too long or using fully boiling water can result in a bitter taste (though both methods will also increase polyphenol content, so you have to find a balance).

In terms of red wine, this page presents a good overview of which varietals contain the highest levels of polyphenol antioxidants.

With chocolate, the processing method can remove many of the healthful antioxidants.  I like to make hot cocoa out of minimally processed “raw cacao” (I don’t know what’s up with the funny spelling — that’s why I put it in quotes).  There are several brands but I’ve been buying the Navitas brand for awhile and I like the taste.  For one mug I use about 2T of the unsweetened powder and 1t sugar, boiling water, and a little whole milk.

3. Hang out more with your friends.

Commenting on your friends’ FB status updates doesn’t count.  But real social networks, the kind where you actually hang out and do stuff (or even just sit around and gossip) with your friends, is associated with longevity, lower blood pressure, reduced stress, lower risk of depression, and all kinds of good stuff.  And it makes life more fun.

If your “friends” like doing meter-long rails of cocaine, rows of Jager-bombs, crime, or extreme vertical-cliff snowboarding, this one might not apply.  Find a good Settlers of Catan group or something.

Coming up next …

I’ve been advised to keep my posts shorter if I want to keep your attention, so I’ll save 4-7 for the next post.

The All-Or-Nothing Reflex

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On March 23

In Metaprogramming

I meant to do that.

Kia and I noticed a new behavior on the part of our daughter, right around the time she started to walk and carry things.  If she was carrying, say, a glass of milk, and she spilled a little bit, she would immediately dump the rest of the milk on the floor.  At first we thought this was accidental, but it soon became clear the action was deliberate; if a little bit was going to spill, then all the milk was going on the floor.

She’s just turned two, and this all-or-nothing reflex is still in effect.  She and I were playing with Duplo blocks (the oversize Legos), and she had just constructed something she wanted to show Mommy.  Running into the other room, she dropped the creation; it broke into its constituent parts.  Instead of crying, she ran back to the table where we were working, dumped the box of Duplos onto the floor, and then swept the remaining Duplos from the tabletop onto the floor, until every last one lay underfoot.  The entire time she wore a look of grim, dire concentration; knit brow and pursed lips.

OK, I get it.  It’s unsettling to think that you’re not in control of life (randomly dropping things), so you reconcile your physical environment so that it feels like you’re in control (I meant to deposit all the Duplos on the floor).  Child Psychology 101, right?

What I found unsettling, after thinking about it, was that I still do this.  As do most adults, I think.

Why not break all of them?

The illusion of willpower is a rickety contraption, prone to constant breakdowns.  We do what we can to bolster the sense that we control ourselves and our lives.  Human beings are in the uncomfortable position of being 100% responsible for our own lives (whether we accept the responsibility or not), while not being 100% in control of our own bodies and minds.  We say things we don’t mean to say.  We eat things we don’t mean to eat.  We’re sometimes nice to people we don’t like, and mean to people we love.  We make plans and then do something else, or do nothing at all.  In every way the ship is big but the rudder is small; we want to control ourselves (and, even more frustratingly, others), but the best we can do is nudge.

Examples of the all-or-nothing reflex:

  • altogether quitting a new diet or eating plan after a few cheats
  • quitting an exercise plan after missing a few sessions
  • not going to class or stopping studying after falling behind in coursework
  • never calling a friend because you’ve owed them a call for a little too long
  • abandoning a creative project after hitting a difficult patch or getting stuck

We’re all familiar with these behaviors, right?  All basically equivalent to dumping your milk on the floor …

There is always a motivation for self-destructive behavior.  How do we subconsciously benefit?  The benefit of the all-or-nothing reflex is that we maintain the illusion that we’re in control, that we’re calling the shots.  We also avoid the burden or willpower expenditure of following through with the original plan (rebuilding the Duplo creation, literally or figuratively picking up the pieces).

This picture adequately represents the warring motivational subcenters of the human mind.

Zooming out, it’s worth analyzing our own self-destructive behaviors — even the minor ones.  If we consistently sabotage our own success in any particular area of life, there’s probably something we fear about change in that area.  What burdens do we imagine success will bring?  Are those fears realistic, or can we preserve the things we like about the status quo?

Sleep Experiment – A Month With No Artificial Light

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On March 4

In Evolution/Biology, Health/Body-hacking, Lifestyle Experiments, Mental Health, Metaprogramming

In an earlier post, I mentioned how my family (it’s not something you can do without your whole household participating) went without artificial light (including all electric lights, TV, and computers) after sundown, for all of June in 2009.  June, being the month of the longest days, was the easiest month for such an experiment.

“Full of Ideas” by Cayusa

Soon after writing that post, we decided to try the experiment again, but this time for the month of February — a month with much shorter days and longer nights.  I was traveling during the last week of February, so it was effectively only a twenty day experiment.  Still — both the effects and the experience itself were dramatic. In a nutshell: more sleep, better sleep, improved mood, and an entirely different rhythm to both waking and sleeping life.  There were some downsides too, which I’ll also discuss.

WHY

The first time we tried the experiment, in June 2009, we were primarily interested in catching up on sleep.  Our daughter was born in March of 2008 — after more than a year a full night’s sleep was still elusive.  As someone who had always been a night-owl at home, but never had any trouble going to sleep by 8:30 when camping, I already suspected that artificial light (as opposed to firelight, starlight, or moonlight) was what was keeping me from going to bed earlier.  Reading this article by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times confirmed that suspicion.

An even earlier, unrelated 30-day experiment (I’ve done over a dozen at this point), during which I resolved and attempted to go to bed earlier, had failed miserably.  On average I’d gotten to bed 45 minutes earlier; say quarter-after-eleven instead of midnight.  I just found it impossible to go to bed when I wasn’t sleepy (which I distinguish from tired — just because your mind and body need sleep doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll feel sleepy).  Just trying — willing myself — to go to bed earlier didn’t work very well — it certainly didn’t result in the kind of radical sleep improvement I was looking for.

On the other hand, the June experiment with no artificial light was a huge success.  Kia and I immediately started going to bed between 9 and 10 instead of around midnight.  We quickly caught up on sleep, sleeping ten or eleven hours a night at first, then normalizing around eight hours.  One thing we both noticed was a huge boost in mood — moments of unexplained, unreasonable joy would strike us at random times during the day.  I’m not talking about the calm sea of serenity — I’m talking about bursts of goofy delight — the kind that’s really obnoxious to the moody people around you.

So … we wanted to try it again.

THE RULES

Compared to June, February was a whole different ball game.  Some days in June the sky was light until 9:30pm — in February we ended up lighting the candles as early as 5pm.  I was concerned about not being able to get any work done, so we set 7:30pm as a cutoff for computers getting turned off.  Here’s a list of the rules we decided to live by:

  • no artificial light, including overhead lights, lamps, and the refrigerator light
  • candles allowed
  • computers allowed until 7:30pm
  • TV not allowed after sundown (except TV on computers until 7:30)

THE NEGATIVES

Anger
One thing I experienced during the experiment was anger and frustration at not being able to f*cking see anything.  Stepping on toys on the floor, bumping into table corners, searching for matches by moonlight — none of it fun.  Cooking by candlelight can also be difficult.  After a day or two I gained some awareness around what was happening emotionally.  I did choose to do this, after all.  The key to dealing with the anger was to conduct my actions more carefully, and with more foresight, during the long evenings.  Light the candles before it gets totally dark.  Make sure to light a couple candles in the bathroom.  Be vigilant about cleaning up toys (and getting our daughter to clean up her toys) before it gets dark.

Drip drip drip.

Wax
Wax is pollution.  Little wax drips, everywhere, are hard to avoid when you’re walking around (or stumbling over things) while holding a candle.  Scraping hardened wax off of tables and floors is a drag.  Kia was reading a book — it might have been a George Elliot novel, in which people who stay up late are called wax-drippers.  This seems to imply that, at least in pre-Industrial England, most people didn’t even bother lighting candles; they just went to bed when it got dark.

The pollution angle; it made me think about how entire classes of pollution can disappear, practically overnight.  In the horse-and-buggy age, major cities were covered in horse shit.  It was a serious problem, with no end in sight.  Once the car came along, the horse shit vanished.  Wax drippings similarly disappeared as a major problem with the advent of the electric light.  This book review in the New Yorker talks about the same idea in more detail.

If we’d had proper candle-holders with wide bases this problem could have been avoided, or at least attenuated.

Less Productivity
Sometimes getting in a couple hours of work (in the broadest sense, including creative work and “fun” work) after the kid goes to bed can make a day feel more productive.  Feeling productive, while not important for everyone, is important for my own mental well-being.  I don’t really buy into the idea of the Protestant Work Ethic (nobody works harder than Japanese salarymen, and they’re pretty far removed from any Calvinist cultural heritage), but I do feel better at the end of the day if I’ve created wealth, whether it be in the form of billable hours, progress on a music or writing project, fixing up the house — anything with a tangible, observable result that has at least a chance of positively affecting my own (or someone else’s) future experience.

It’s hard to be productive by candlelight.  I took to writing longhand in a notebook, which I’m still doing, but in the evenings I couldn’t work on music production (computer needed), clean the house (more light needed), work on programming projects (computer needed), work on artwork, contracts, or email correspondence for Loöq Records (once again, computer needed), or most anything else that results in feeling like I got something done.

No TV
This is more of a wash than a negative.  I didn’t watch any TV during the experiment — there just wasn’t any time.  I like TV — at least good TV — and I missed it somewhat.  It wasn’t that it wasn’t allowed — I could have watched my favorite shows during the day if I’d really made it a priority.

Now that it’s March I’m all caught up on Lost.  Thank you Hulu — the motives of the smoke monster are slowing becoming clear.

THE POSITIVES

Sleep
Going in, I wasn’t as sleep-deprived this time, but we immediately started going to bed earlier.  Sometimes I would sleep straight through the night, 10 to 6 or so.  Other times I would go to bed really early, like 8:30, and then get up around 2:30am.  This was alarming at first, but then I remembered that this sleep pattern was quite common in pre-electric light days.  When this happened I would end up reading or writing by candlelight for an hour or two, then going back to bed.  This is apparently called bimodal sleep, as noted in the Verlyn Klinkenborg New York Times article where he describes an experiment conducted by sleep researcher Thomas Wehr (Wehr ‘s volunteers have subjected themselves to to 14 hours of darkness each night):

What Wehr found was remarkable. The first night the volunteers slept 11 hours, and in the first weeks of the experiment they repaid 17 hours of accumulated sleep debt — i.e., they slept 17 hours longer than they would have called normal for the same period. It took three weeks for a sleep pattern to stabilize, and when it did it lasted about eight and a quarter hours per night. But it was not consolidated sleep, and it was not just sleep. Over time, Wehr explained, “another state emerged, not sleep, not active wakefulness, but quiet rest with an endocrinology all its own.”

Each night the volunteers lay in a state of quiet rest for two hours before passing abruptly into sleep. They slept in an evening bout that lasted four hours. Then they awoke out of REM sleep into another two hours of quiet rest, followed by another four-hour bout of sleep and another two hours of quiet rest before rising at 8 A.M. This pattern of divided sleep, separated by rest, is called a bimodal distribution of sleep, and it is typical of the sleep of many mammals living in the wild, which is to say that it is atypical of humans living in modern Western society. Yet in a forthcoming article, to be published in a volume called “Progress in Brain Research,” Wehr concludes that “in long nights . . . human sleep resembles that of other mammals to a much greater extent than has been appreciated.” Bimodal sleep, punctuated by quiet rest, was a pattern to which modern Americans reverted almost as soon as they were given the chance.

“In healthy people,” Wehr remarked, “this bimodal pattern of sleep would be called a sleep disorder, although the resemblance to animal sleep confirms its naturalness. And as people get older they revert to this pattern of divided sleep. Perhaps it gets harder to override it.”

I asked Wehr whether any of his subjects had gone crazy lying in the dark during those long nights.

None had. “Anyone could do it,” he said.

In addition to getting enough sleep each night, the quality of my sleep was definitely better.  We’re still co-sleeping with our daughter, now 2, and any restlessness tends to affect me most.  On bad nights I sometimes prefer the couch to our overcrowded bed.  However no couch for the month of February — when I was sleeping, I was out cold.

Illuminated.

Our daughter also got on an earlier schedule.  In January she’d gotten in a bad cycle of staying up until 9 — no fun for anyone.  She would get overtired and overstimulated, and falling asleep was getting harder and harder.  Immediately — by Day 1 of the experiment — she was fast asleep by 7.  What a huge relief.

With no artificial light, there is definitely more time in bed, half-awake.  Wehr refers to this state as quiet wakefulness.

Living year-round on midsummer time, with long days and short nights, “has obtained,” Wehr writes, “for so many generations that modern humans no longer realize that they are capable of experiencing a range of alternative modes that may once have occurred on a seasonal basis in prehistoric times but now lie dormant in their physiology.” While humans worry about how much further we can compact our actual sleep time, we’ve already jettisoned six nightly hours of quiet winter rest. In a most meaningful sense, those are transitional hours. Once in the night and once in the early morning, Wehr’s volunteers woke out of REM sleep, which is strongly associated with dreaming, into a period of quiet wakefulness quite distinct from daytime wakefulness. Perhaps as we’ve learned, over time, to sleep a less characteristically mammalian sleep, we’ve also learned to sleep a less human sleep.

Quiet wakefulness is great, especially when you’re not worried about not being asleep.  In other words, if you’ve already slept seven or eight hours (because you went to bed at 9pm), then being awake, or half-awake, in the middle of the night isn’t accompanied by fears of being tired the next day.  In this state, which sometimes persisted for more than an hour, I would let my mind roam … sometimes just watching my dreamlike thoughts, sometimes directing them a bit.  What will a character in my novel do next?  What color should I paint the garage?  It’s a great time to ask your brain questions which require creative answers.

Alternative Activities & Entertainment
During the long, candlelit evenings, without computers or TV, we found other ways to occupy ourselves.  We read by candlelight, we had friends over for after-dinner drinks and snacks, we played board-games, and, well, use your imagination.  The evenings were long and enjoyable.

Adventure Fantasy, Imagining The Past
The experiment gave our evenings an adventurous flavor.  We were roughing it (a little).  I would sometimes imagine we were living in the woods, far from civilization.  The experience made me consider how each generation lives differently, and that with new technologies we both gain and lose certain types of experiences.  It’s valuable to step out of the current technological zeitgeist — it changes the way you think and perceive the world.

CONCLUSION
The convenience of being able to flip a switch and have instant illumination can’t be overstated.  But the downsides of cheap light may be as serious as the downsides of cheap food.  Artificial light disrupts our circadian rhythms, prevents the production of melatonin, increases the risk of certain cancers including breast cancer and prostate cancer, and can generally wreak havoc with our health.  My guess is that artificial light is causally linked to obesity, depression, immune disorders, and cancer, not to mention daytime tiredness.

Candle time.

After the experiment I see artificial light as something like sugar.  We’re drawn to it, but too much is bad for us.  In fact, it seems to be bad for us in many of the same ways — sleep deprivation reduces insulin sensitivity in the same way excessive sugar intake does.

For me, gone are the nights of having every light in the house blazing.  The refrigerator light is back on, the bathroom light goes on when I’m in there, but otherwise it’s candles and maybe a mood light here and there.  Even with this limited artificial light, the glow from my laptop is keeping me up later.  Last night I slept from 11:45 to 6:15 — not bad but nothing like the solid eight hours I was getting most nights in February (one night I even slept eleven hours — I was tired and there was nothing preventing me from catching up).

I can function with as little as five or six hours of sleep as night.  But with that little sleep (especially for more than one night), I’m not at my best, or my happiest, or my most creative; I’m just grinding through life.  Since the only thing we have in life is quality of our consciousness, and sleep deprivation so obviously and negatively affects the quality of our consciousness, it makes sense to prioritize sleep.  Most people would agree, but almost nobody does dedicate enough time to sleep.  Why?  The ubiquity of artificial light.  It’s like going to a cake store, buying every delicious-looking cake, coming home and arranging them on your dinner table, and then resolving not to eat any sugar.

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