U PSTREAM E FFECTS #3: C HEMICA

CHEMICA

“... the human body is remarkably akin to a rubber bag... This isn't a glamorous topic, but it's worth considering briefly to complete our understanding of the rubber bag. Every day, you put in some quantity of food and drink. For the most part, your body efficiently disassembles these complex substances into their molecular constituents and makes them available to power the cells of your body. As in any chemical process, there's a residue of waste, and your body excretes this in the well-known ways. ... Intake, burning, and excretion determine, in large part, how you look, how you feel, and how many years you'll live. They do this because, through simple arithmetic, they control the contents of the rubber bag. Living, as we do, inside the bag, it's worth understanding how we're affected by these processes, then using that understanding to gain control of them.”

— John Walker, “Hacker’s Diet” 

***

THE THROES OF FEVER

Call me crazy if you want, but I’m grateful for the occasional times that I get significantly ill.

The nagging common cold? No, that I don’t appreciate. It’s just a little drag and hassle to deal with.

But full-on fever, totally incapacitated, the room is spinning?

I got a sort of paradoxical appreciation for that.

When your mind is in the throes of a deep fever, when you’re burning to pieces, it becomes obvious that the direct control we have our thoughts and performance in those moments is… somewhat low.

Tossing and turning frantically, kicking off sheets and blankets in a fit of madness, then grasping around in the dark room to pull any covers on top of oneself to stop the backlash of shivering and cold?

In an odd way, I live for those moments.

***

IF AN ELITE ATHLETE IS INJURED, IS HE HEALTHIER OR LESS HEALTHY THAN YOU?

But let us step back for a minute.

What is health?

This isn’t an idle question.

Actually, it’s perhaps of the most importance. 

If you're in the throes of a fever — you're not in good health. That’s obvious. Check. Got it.

Lying on the street in a pool of one’s own blood after motorcycle crash — not healthy! Easy. Got it.

But how about an elite athlete who is rehabilitating from a significant leg injury? Is that athlete healthier or less healthy than the average person?

This question is deceptively important, I think.

It can be tiresome to go the dictionary as part of an exploration, but let’s do so anyways.

Apple’s built-in dictionary defines “health” thus —

1. “the state of being free from illness or injury” [he was restored to health]

2. "a person’s mental or physical condition” [bad health forced him to retire]

Under that #1 definition of health, the injured athlete is less healthy than the average semi-sedentary office worker, what with the significant injury.

Under the second definition, the injured elite athlete likely comes out ahead with a great overall physical condition, with the exception of the particular injury.

***

"Word games," you say! "This is all semantics! What’s the point?”

Thank you for asking; I respect that immense practicality.

That’s why we’re here, after all — to make our lives better in practical ways. To think, but not just to think — to turn that thinking into results.

The basic idea of “Upstream Effects” is that we have a lot less in-this-minute control of our lives than we’d want.

To gain more control over our lives, we have to make things better for the future. In the present moment, we’re heavily under the influence of choices we made in the short-term and mid-term past.

I like coming down with an occasional illness that puts me to bed, my mind burning up and giving way to delusion, the room spinning — becomes it reminds me that my body’s chemistry and health can easily dominate my ability to think and act.

When you’re delusional with fever, you can’t do good work or really thrive.

But, when the fever breaks, inevitably I think something —

“I’m able to think clearly now that the fever has passed… but what if there’s levels of thinking and health so far above my normal life that are as big as the difference between a delusional fever and normal life?” 

***

THE DIFFERENCE

I’ll say it more explicitly.

The gap between an extremely sick person in the spin of fever, and the normal average-health American office worker?

I’m convinced there’s another gap, just as large, between that office worker and someone approaching peak health.

In other words, when I come out of a fever, wash the sweat from my body, I start thinking — maybe everyday life is a life of fever and illness; maybe I’m capable of much more.

***

EXPERIMENTS AND CORRELATIONS

Why do I think so?

I was always curious and tried to make little improvements since I was a teenager, but I started doing slightly more rigorous self-experiments and collecting data around time, productivity, health, action, and similar topics, six years ago, in early 2010.

Occasionally, some small operational change made a huge difference both in my subjective perception of healthiness, wellness, and well-being — but also practically, in terms of doing far more work and producing far more output of the work I wanted to do.

Every morning, I do a “Morning Routine” — a little checklist that ensures I do everything I should to start the day.

Adding “Drink Water” to it — and ensuring faithfully I do it — had an outsized effect on performance.

For about 81 weeks as of this writing, I’ve tracked my daily habits on a “Lights Spreadsheet”; it’s got entries like —

Did I adhere to set wake-time?

Did I wake 3+ hours before first appointments?

Is today clear/known?

Is health high, moderate, low?

Morning Routine

Meditate 10+ Min Zazen

Journal

Move Active Project(s) Forwards Early

Review Commitments and Time Sensitive

Recharge: Nap

Recharge: Music

Health & Athletics

Eat Right (Y: 8 Best Groups, Half: Nothing Processed, N: Something processed) 

Review Day

Plan Tomorrow

Set Wake Time

Sleep Well

I mark those with a simple green “Y” if I do them, a yellow “Half” if I partially did them, a red “N” if I don’t do them.

***

EXPERIMENTS AND CORRELATIONS, II

Over time, I started to see correlations — the one that surprised me the most was that, after about three bad nights of sleep in a row, everything in my life started to disintegrate.

My rates of eating right, working in the morning, following good habits — all of these fell apart after about three nights in a row of bad sleep.

I found recharging with music, health and athletics, and napping all super-correlated with success. The time it took to do these things literally paid for themselves — I’d have more energy in the evenings which would otherwise have been useless, I’d be more focused and on-point with less boredom and less anxiety during the day; I’d work more, and have a better time in the process.

***

DIFFERENT STROKES FOR DIFFERENT... GENETICS

One of the reason for the silly dogmatic arguments (“low fat! no, low carb! no, low fat!”) is because we all have slightly different genetic profiles, lifestyles, and body types.

This is very obvious when someone is allergic to a certain type of food or medicine, but only recently has the mainstream narrative caught up to the basic truth — different things work differently for different people.

It’s obvious, right? You probably know someone who can drink alcohol like a fish and be relatively unaffected, and you probably know someone who is flushed red and losing their balance after a single drink.

Likewise, there’s different abilities of the body to metabolize lactose — milk and milk-based proteins — some people can break them down and use them as a nice energy source without any negative consequences, others get more indigestion and milk doesn’t work well with them.

The obvious conclusion to this —

Relentlessly test what you put into your body, and how you interact with the world. Our sensitivities to caffeine and other stimulants, alcohol and other depressants, different types of foods and medicines, different amounts of sleeps and rhythms of work and rest — different patterns work for different people.

The payoff to improving yours, even slightly, is immense.

***

GET YOUR MIND AROUND IT: COMMIT TO BEING A SCHOLAR OF YOUR BODY

Here are three long-term commitments I recommend, that’ll make your life better and lead to far higher production —

1. Take very seriously your personal biochemistry, nutrition, consumption, rest, work, athletics, and environment. Experiment gradually to find out what works for you, and implement it.

This is so obviously of paramount importance; it’s shocking how many people leave this to chance or don’t think about it. You live your whole life in your body. Being illiterate as to what your body responds to? What a disaster, what wasted potential. Make a long-term commitment to think about this stuff and experiment. Not once, but a little bit, all the time, as an ongoing thing. It more than pays for itself.

2. Study what performance-oriented people do.

Reading abstract science is good, but too often a lab scientist trying to make a name for themselves takes two completely true results like “eating XYZ food decreases ZYX-type cholesterol” and “ZYX-type cholesterol correlates with heart attacks” — and then makes a completely dangerous jump to saying, “Everyone should eat XYZ food.”

These guidelines are very often wrong; the human body is very complicated and everything happening in it effects many different things.

I’m very interested in what performance-oriented people do over long periods of time. I strongly recommend you read about various types of athletics — endurance athletes, lifters, martial artists, tennis players, sprinters, etc — as well as soldiers, and any other profession that requires regular usage of the body.

You shouldn’t take an athlete’s guidelines as gospel, but if you start reading books and memoirs like “Open” by champion tennis player Andre Agassi (who reclaimed the #1 spot late in life, when most tennis players have already faded, and who actively managed his biochemistry with his coach), Finding Ultra and Ultramarathon Man by Rich Roll and Dean Karnazes, Easy Strength by Dan John and Pavel Tsatsouline. Read memoirs and guides by elite American, British, Russian, and Israeli soldiers on how they train, rest, and eat. 

Because these people are optimizing for different things, the guidelines will be different. A powerlifter is training for different things than an endurance athlete. But all of these books will give you ideas on experiments to run for yourself, adopting practices that people who push their bodies to the limits adopt to stay healthy and recharge.

3. Study the mechanics of action and biochemistry. This need not be painful.

This isn’t so hard to start learning, and the payoffs are huge. It’s shocking to me how people drink coffee and don’t understand caffeine’s mechanism of action.

(Briefly, one reason you get sleepy is because your body produces “adenosine,” a hormone that makes you start feeling sleepy. Caffeine molecules are shaped like adenosine, which blocks the receptors that adenosine normally binds to — thus, you’re still needing the rest, but you don’t feel it. Of course, the body is pretty smart, so it starts producing more adenosine if you regularly take caffeine — that’s what “tolerance building” is, and why you need more caffeine over time to produce a similar result.)

Read short pieces that teach you about biochemistry like "The Calculus of Caffeine Consumption" by Arvind Narayanan, and the Examine.com's Summary of the Science of Caffeine.

Start learning this stuff.

Examine.com is a masterfully good source for learning about all type of substances.

Gwern.net is run by a wonderful and thorough amateur scientist who cites his work highly.

Look favorably on science-oriented practitioners like Martin Berkhan of Leangains.com — even if his guidelines aren’t perfect for you, he’s science-oriented and talks about how food is processed in your body, how muscle is built, and various aspects of training and adaption.

It’s intimidating at first, but it doesn’t need to be. Start researching how caffeine works. How your body processes waster. How food is digested.

It’s your body , after all. What could be more important to learn?

***

FOUR EASY, PERHAPS LIFE-CHANGING TYPES OF EXPERIMENTS TO RUN

Once you commit to learning more about this stuff, here are four easy types of experiments to run.

1. Track and Correlate: The easiest type of experiment to run for your own life doesn’t require you to do anything different. Instead, simply do this — start tracking or writing down one type of performance that matters to you, and one area of your life you’re curious about.

If you’re a writer, you could track how many words you write per day. If you’re an administrator, you could track how much work you get done. If you regularly do any routine type of work (writing reports, doing safety inspections, building a type of repeatable construction, whatever) — track how long it takes you to get it done. Basically, whatever matters in your work, track that work.

At the same time, pick and track some variable related to your body — sleep time, wake time, hours slept, napped yes/no, what foods you ate, timing of the foods… anything. Don’t get overwhelmed, just start jotting the stuff down. Many apps these days make it easy to track a lot of things like this.

If you do this for just a few weeks, you’ll likely start noticing correlations — you’ll start seeing, “hey, when I eat oatmeal for breakfast, I do more work in the morning…” 

I really can’t recommend this type of tracking highly enough. It’s easy to do if you set a couple reminders, only taking a couple small minutes per day. The gains are life-changing if you realize that one type of thing pays off huge for you, or something is really holding you back.

2. Blacklisting: “I won’t do X” or “I won’t eat X.” In 2006, among other things, I quit drinking sugared soda entirely — and never looked back. I tried it for a while, and frankly, I never felt good when I had a Coke or Pepsi. Try blacklisting a food or activity for a short duration — a couple weeks, or a month. If you don’t already notice a change, then add it back in and pay attention to the results — I found that deep-fried food was a disaster for my body. I know people that can eat it without adverse effects, but I’m not one of them. I was also surprised to find that my body runs much better without protein powders or protein bars; yes, they’re convenient, but I’m overall healthier and feel better when I don’t have the stuff. Meanwhile, to get calories up if doing sports, I’ll slather foods with butter or olive oil — my body takes pretty well to more fat, surprisingly. Chicken with higher amounts of olive oil or butter performs better for me than a theoretically better macronutrient mix using powders and bars. Go figure.

3. Whitelists: The real game-changer, though it’s hard to implement, is doing whitelist experiments. I never felt healthier than when I cut down to exclusively eating from the following list of eight things: all fruits, all vegetables, oats, fish, poultry, eggs, cheese, good fats and oils. I literally wouldn’t eat anything else. The initial list was arbitrary, but that’s kind of the point — you can then experiment and slowly add or remove things. Cheese works fine for me, but is bad for others. It was very hard to switch onto this diet at first — I had strong cravings — but once it equalized, I felt much better overall. You can whitelist activities, too — picking a limited set of things you do for leisure. This doesn’t need to be permanent — just do a 3-week or 1-month experiment with a whitelist and see how your life changes. With a whitelist experiment, you only eat or do what's on the whitelist for a period of time. The list has to be chosen carefully, but if done well, it's very powerful.

4. Timing experiments: Finally, there’s plenty of things that are fine, but bad if you do them at the wrong time. Try doing some experiments with “no Internet for the first 3 hours of the day,” “only watching TV or movies between 11AM and 5PM,” (not too early in the day, to not throw off the day; not too late, to not keep you up), experiment with not eating after 3PM or try intermittent fasting. Many of the smartest, most productive people I know have strict rules around when they take caffeine and never do it after a certain time. If your work and lifestyle allows, consider experimenting with not showering immediately on waking and instead wait for the first lull of the day to shower and groom yourself — that was game-changing for me… I find I'm rather sharp when I first wake up, and showering when that sharp is a waste — instead, I try to make showering and grooming the first break I take during the take once I’ve gotten a little fatigued from working.

***

...AND THREE KEY GUIDELINES

1. Patience and Timescales: Too many people want to see revolutionary changes in the next 10 seconds from anything they try. Look, life is long, you’re going to be in your body for a long time. Most of these types of experiments don’t do anything immediately on the day they’re run; some of them (scaling back dramatically on caffeine or sugar) actually will hurt your performance for a little while before leading to dramatic improvement.

You don’t need to brute-force any experiment to immense results; it’s more like, you tinker with this stuff upstream, and wait a few weeks and see what happens. Your timescales on this type of experiment are weeks.

Likewise, don’t think of this as something you want to “get over with ASAP” — instead, look at it as a way of life of constantly improving as a human. There’s no hurry. There’s plenty of time. Run a couple little experiments at a time, when it occurs to you. It gets addictive and more than pays for itself. Patience is the way here; the gains add up immensely over time.

2. Pragmatism Around Adherence Rate: Adherence rate is how often you actually do what you’re going to try to do. We’ll cover this thoroughly later, but for now, the basic guideline is this — strongly consider adherence rate when you design an experiment.

For instance, I used to regularly start lifting weights, aiming for 3 times or 4 times per week, but then I’d fall off from the practice of it when I got ill or busy or whatever. Then, during a particularly busy period of my life, I said: “You know what, I’m going to keep lifting, but only once per calendar week at a minimum.” That was it. “Once per calendar week” also meant that sometimes I’d go two weeks between lifting weights — if I lifted one week on a Monday, and then another week not until Friday, it was nearly two weeks — but it still counted.

Since I adopted that practice, I’ve been lifting weights every calendar week without fail for many months now. If I have the opportunity and access to a good gym, I’ll scale up to three times per week or lift more. But if not, I keep going once per calendar week.

Likewise, it might make more sense to blacklist some foods you don’t even like all that much, rather than your favorite foods, to start. I used to have a problem adhering to very strict diets; on the whitelist I mentioned above (chicken, fish, eggs, cheese, oats, all fruit, all vegetables, oils/butters), there’s actually a few types of “junk food” I can indulge in — potatoes or sweet potatoes doused in butter or olive oil, and the more sugary fruits like pineapple. And I love cheese. Some of these foods are, in theory, probably not the best things to eat, but I can actually stick with this and adhere to it.

Adherence is key. Keep it in mind when designing experiments; design experiments you can adhere to.

3. Almost Always Use Limited Duration Trials: There’s many things I’ve permanently quit in my life and never gone back to, but these days, I recommend everyone starts with a limited duration trial — 3 weeks or a month, typically. If it’s December 5th, it's not so hard to quit candy for the rest of December. You can say, “Ok, once New Year’s hits, I can eat candy all I want.” If someone really tries to push candy on you at Christmas, you can say: “Well, I’m not doing candy all December. Experiment. Come January, sure, but for December — no way, 100% not.” It’s a lot easier psychologically to commit to do something of limited time duration. Also, just as importantly, often some experiment’s payoff actually won’t be as good as expected — then you can just adopt the behavior again, no problem, nothing lost.

***

A BRIEF REVIEW OF NICOTINE GUM FOR SALIENCING EFFECT

We're all adults here, right?

So much advice and guidance out in the mass market world assumes that much of the audience will be children, unable to size up risks and downsides and tradeoffs.

I imagine the typical reader of this is many cuts above the average, which is why I'm comfortable reviewing nicotine gum. 

Nicotine, though? Isn't that dangerous? Won't it kill you?

Well, in short, no —

"Britain's Royal College of Physicians, which sets health standards in the U.K., concluded in a 2007 report on nicotine addiction that "medicinal nicotine is a very safe drug" and "there are no grounds to suspect appreciable long-term adverse effects on health.”" 

— "Chew On This: Sticking With Nicotine Gum for the Long Haul", Wall Street Journal

After doing an intense amount of research, I started using nicotine for its saliencing effect.

What's that mean?

From my reading and research on the topic, it seems to me that nicotine itself is nowhere near as addictive as commonly imagined.

It's indeed a powerful stimulant — almost as powerful as caffeine — but it seems like it's less addictive on traditional parameters (withdrawal, tolerance building) than most others.

Rather, nicotine seems to lead to habit formation when it's done. In other words, it's not that nicotine itself is so addictive, but rather, it makes whatever you do simultaneously with it become far more likely to be habitual.

It seems to me that that's a big part of why cigarettes are addictive: there's the stimulant component, but also, the tactile/feel component of smoking. The act of taking a cigarette from a pack, putting it in your mouth unlit, lighting it, inhaling a drag as the thing flares to life — this is a very physical pattern that's pleasurable for many people to do. If cigarettes were healthy and good for you, that pattern would be almost meditative, wouldn't it?

Now, let me make myself explicitly clear: tobacco is extremely bad news, and anyone considering nicotine gum or patches must do immense research and make extremely sure they never become a tobacco user.

But, assuming one can manage that, I was very interested in if I could use nicotine to form new habits and, generally, live a better life.

Thus, I set up my nicotine rules:

1. There's only three contexts I'll chew nicotine gum.

2. These are extremely controlled and planned.

3. I will never take nicotine in a form factor that even remotely resembles tobacco (no vaporizers, no inhaling, nothing like that).

4. I don't do it every day.

5. I never use outside of the three contexts for any reason. I especially don't use it for a calming effect, when stressed, or for any reason besides the three contexts.

The three contexts?

(1) Working on my biggest project in detailed work reps,

(2) doing administrative work,

(3) while lacing up my running shoes after already having decided on the day's running plan.

But, used in these contexts, nicotine gum seems to work very well for me.

Again, I spent a lot of time designing the contexts I'll use it in. In the two working contexts, I'll only do it with a notebook open besides me and the things I want to do written down. Then I'll do the work in order.

I won't use it for any work: only the largest project I'm working on, or a certain type of admin work that I was historically bad at (getting through all paperwork, details, etc).

The mild anticipation of nicotine, which is indeed pleasurable, might or might not have led to doing more project work. But it's almost certainly led to getting more admin complete promptly.

I don't have any strong opinion about brand: I've used generic nicotine gum from CVS Pharmacy, I've used the major brand Nicorette, and I've chewed a Korean brand I picked up in Seoul.

The only other major decision to make is if you want stuff that tastes okay or tastes poorly/medicinal. I think I actually prefer brands that taste worse, to remind me that I'm using it in a medicinal/pharmacological context, not for pleasure or euphoria.

I find Gwern's article on nicotine to be a good place to start researching if you're thinking of it:

http://www.gwern.net/Nicotine

I also want to make a final recommendation: if you're in any danger of becoming a tobacco user (you quit cigarettes/nicotine cold turkey recently, or you occasionally smoke with a drink or at a party) — then absolutely stay away from nicotine. A small chance of becoming a tobacco user isn't worth it. It's an expensive habit in every way; it's very bad for your health even if you never get cancer.

But nicotine gum? Well, I did a couple years of research before I started doing it, and I'm glad to work it into my routine. Caveat emptor and do your own research, go slowly if you're considering it, but it's worked well for me.

***

TAKING BIOCHEMISTRY SERIOUSLY

Nicotine is good for me, sure, but biochemistry is far more about self-study, experimentation, and setting good rules than it is about any tricks.

Try any of the four types of experiments -- Tracking/Correlation Experiments, Blacklisting Experiments, Whitelisting Experiments, and Timing Experiments.

They're game-changing, life-changing even: it can make a world of difference if you're currently timing your life poorly, eating something that you're even mildly allergic to, not sleeping or hydrating, or otherwise out of sync with your body. 

If you do design more rules in this area for yourself, remember the three guidelines: Use patience and let timescales work for you, be pragmatic about adherence rate, and start any experiments with limited duration trials.

It really actually doesn't take much time to run small experiments, and the payoff is greater levels of energy and more thriving across your entire life. Take this area seriously, and periodically run a small experiment. When you discover ways to get immensely more energy, clarity, and health, it leads to a positive multiplier across all of your life.