mandarine

The problem: racing thoughts

I have always had a little difficulty to fall asleep at night, especially during exciting or otherwise eventful periods of my life. My head remains on problem-solving overdrive and keeps juggling frantically with ideas, hopes, fears and I can find no ’standby’ button to calm things down for the night. Then I have to wait for sleep to stifle this dance, like a slow rising tide of foam in a giant foam party, and this can take between half an hour to two hours.

Up until a few years ago, it would be fine as it only happened once each night, when I went to bed. But as I get older, any time I wake up in the middle of the night, the hubbub of thoughts awakens too, with less and less slumber power to fight it with.

It probably does not qualify medically as acute insomnia, but believe me that when I am awaken several times each night by a newborn baby (this is going to happen again soon), by a son with whooping cough, by a cat demanding that the door be opened, by a snoring wife, or by a bad dream, and I toss and turn for one hour each time, this begins to eat away the hours of sleep. The next day, I find myself craving for an afternoon nap just like true insomniacs.

The clue: books

However, there is one thing that can slow down the mental race and make me fall asleep in an instant: books. Not every kind of book. Thrillers and detective stories generally keep me awake. But a good old Victorian novel, a slow paced chapter of Proust, or any nonfiction work has a huge doze-off power. By forcing my mind to focus, these books keep my ideas tame, leaving the dance floor open for a fast sleep invasion.

This is great, but if I fall asleep with a book on my lap and the light on, I am bound to wake up soon. And if I close my book, rearrange the pillows and switch the light off before I am fully asleep, there is a 50% chance that my head has the time to revert to overdrive mode before I am properly set for sleep.

The solution: an ipod and audio-books

I found the solution when I started listening to audio books. It was a chance discovery: I was trying to listen to ‘Treasure Island‘ by R. L. Stevenson, and thought it a good idea to listen to it in bed before going to sleep just like I would with a real book. After one week, I had still not been able to go beyond the first chapter, as I would always fall asleep within the first five minutes.

This was it: this was the solution to my insomnia issues, and it has been how I have kept insomnia at bay for the past two years.

I have identified the following pattern: the first time, the text is new, and the interest of novelty delays sleep for a couple of minutes. Yet I fall asleep within ten minutes generally. Next time I listen to the same chapter, the novelty wears off, but I can still focus. This makes for the fastest sleep effect - less than five minutes. Then after twenty or fifty times, I know the first five minutes by heart, and I have to wait for five minutes of new text before I fall asleep.

One 15′ short story by Maupassant lasted almost one year before its sleep-inducing power became insufficient.

The technical requirements

• I choose an audio-book which is interesting enough to keep me focused. Dull stories may allow my mind to wander away, so that the soundtrack only adds to the cacophony of ideas. The same goes with music, by the way. I have seldom found music that would be captivating enough to prevent my mind from escaping to the circus of ideas.
• I choose a narrator with a soft voice, and a narrow dynamic range: I do not want to have to turn the volume up to listen to whispered lines and then be woken up by sudden roaring as the narrator experiments with pirate voices in a dialog. Note that this requirement is also valid for any sort of outdoor listening (car, airplane, bicycle,…)
• I set the volume as low as possible. The objective is to be able to hear everything to stay focused on the story, but not be disturbed after I fall asleep.
• I use an MP3 player with the best autonomy (and a rechargeable battery). Although I do not recommend it for those who are (like me) suspicious of proprietary formats and windows-only sluggish and buggy proprietary syncing software, my Sony NW-E405 MP3 player has a breathtaking autonomy of 50 hours.
• I use comfortable earphones. As I like to sleep on my side, I often have only one earbud on, and the other one under the pillow. The earphones have to have sturdy cords and connections too, as there can be a lot of wear and tear. The ones which last longest are not necessarily expensive: I have had my little 6€ Philips earphones for three months now, and both ears are still functional (whereas I have had 20€ earphones go kaputt in both ears after less than a month).
• Unless you have an MP3 player which is capable of playing only the specified track and then stop, you want to upload only one or two tracks to the player at a time. Otherwise, you’ll be draining the battery each night as the novel keeps playing to the end, and you’ll probably be woken up at some point. With only one or two tracks in the novel, I can ask the MP3 player to play only the album corresponding to the novel, and the reading will stop (hopefully when I am already asleep).
• An important detail: you probably want to choose an MP3 player which can fast-forward fast (this can only be tested by trying, as it is not often mentioned in the specs). This allows you to skip the first five or ten minutes of a given chapter once you know those minutes really by heart. In this respect, my Sony is appalling: the maximum fast-forward ratio is limited to 2x or 3x, so that I get cramps in the fingers before I can get to the point I want. This feature is very important if you intend you use the same player for listening to podcasts or audio-books in your waking hours: audio-book or podcast tracks can be one-hour long. No way I am going to keep the fast-forward button pressed for fifteen whole minutes just to get to the part I want.

There you go: my very efficientest way of falling asleep or going back to sleep within ten minutes. 90% efficient (for me at least, which is what matters most to, well, me). And not addictive. When I do not have my MP3 player or the battery is empty, I just revert to ordinary sleep patterns (and I use earplugs as a compensation).

Where to find audio-books

For an unlimited supply of free ammo, go to LibriVox.

When I was a kid, my parents had a very hard time making me eat. I seem to be affected by a rare physiological indifference to hunger. It is by no means anorexia, as I always take great pleasure in food. Only I never feel a physiological urge to eat before I actually start eating. I do feel uneasiness in the stomach in the hours around meal time, but there is no unconscious drive to really eat something — quite unlike the sensation of thirst, which clearly tells me I must drink. Therefore I generally have to decide consciously that I should eat if I want the gurgling in my stomach to subside.

When I was a kid, I was so keen on whatever I was doing when it was in fact time to eat, that the conscious decision had to be enforced by my parents.

When appetite rules

However, once I got started eating, appetite kicked in, and as I grew up, it gradually took over. Around the time I got married, I became quite a cook, so that every meal became a temptation for greed. Whereas my childhood meals were often quite bland (pardon Maman), now was the time of elaborate veloutés, engineered sauces and delicate seasonings. Every other meal, I would eat until I was full. By the time I turned 30, there was no denying that my weight was diverging. Nothing worrying by anybody else’s standards, but I was too used to being slender to simply accept my new waistline.

The increase in riding mileage bought me some respite, but hardly. As appetite ruled my eating habits, I would often not stop until the reward of eating another bite was counterbalanced by the growing abdominal uneasiness of having eaten too much. Had I had a slightly different metabolism (and a more sedentary life), I would have reached a hundred kilos in no time.

Then two things happened this summer.

Fasting is not starving

I read a booklet about survival in an urban environment in times of crisis. The author had been a journalist and/or a relief volunteer and had often had to live for weeks in besieged cities all around the world. One of the first chapters was about dedramatizing fasting. It was quite a revelation to me. The main message was that one could fast for up to two weeks without feeling horribly hungry (after the first couple of days), that there were no damages to the body, and that many people actually felt better. Because I had been chased by my parents to always come eat at fixed hours, I think I had not even contemplated the possibility of not eating. To me, skipping a meal had always meant the beginning of starvation.

I put this to the test by fasting for two days (i.e. supposedly the worst period of a longer fasting deal). It confirmed what I had believed: I did not feel especially hungrier than on normal days, and providing that I drank enough, I felt no worse in the stomach than how I usually feel in the hour or two before lunch or dinner.

Fasting is however an essentially intermittent practice, as it is certainly not sustainable. Therefore I could not turn fasting into a routine. I could decide for two meals a day instead of three, but this was not socially convenient, though: at work, one of the moments I like best is re-inventing the world with colleagues at lunch. I could not possibly skip lunch on a regular basis. And I do need my breakfast and my dinner.

I don’t really want to eat that much

So I decided I’d try to eat less, with an objective of eating roughly 50% less than the usual quantity. And to my surprise, it was not the tantalizing ordeal I had believed it would be.

There came the second revelation: the frustration coming with the swallowing of the last mouthful of an excellent dish is completely independent from the number of preceding mouthfuls.

In fact, this is probably the very same mechanism as in the survival instinct theorem: just as I do not really want to live long but I never want to die now, I do not really want to eat more - I just always want the next mouthful.

And the corollary: I feel much better when I stop eating before I am full, because I get the same frustration of having to give up on the next mouthful, but without the additional discomfort of “feeling stuffed”.

Fewer obligations for a simpler life

These revelations came as I was sketching my overall design about how to live a simpler life, focusing on the core business of life, which is essentially living, and outsourcing the rest (debt slavery, wage slavery, consumerism, etc.). At that moment, it occurred to me that I had been giving way too much importance to eating habits: I had to have three meals a day, and unless I managed to prepare lunch and dinner with the traditional structure “starter, main course and dessert”, I felt this was no true meal. In the long run, this perspective was turning me into the daddy equivalent of what both my grandmothers had been: catering slaves. Fortunately, my spouse was doing half the work, and I did not have five kids, but it was the same spirit of inescapable culinary duty.

So I decided two things:

1. instead of eating as much as I could without getting too fat, I would eat as little as I could without getting too thin. I would essentially not modify what I was eating: I like meat, butter and cheese too much; but I would eat roughly half as much as I used to (except for breakfast, which I am currently trying to promote to a complete meal).
2. and I’d stop being so demanding and strict about eating habits. We do not need perfect meals all the time. If I have played too long with my son or we’ve been having tea with friends and now it’s too late to prepare a conventional dinner, there is no shame in drinking a bowl of soup and some oatmeal or a yogurt. In fact, I am now convinced it is OK to skip meals when we do not really feel like eating. Maybe just a salad or a herbal tea, to keep the bio-clock on the right tick.

A brief account after five months of testing

I thought I’d share some of this here, but first I had to make sure I was not going to screw up miserably. I only speak from hearsay, but I believe that diets often fail because of adverse surrounding social conventions. The only convention I am swimming against is quantity, and really this is no big deal.

At home, I can be a little stricter: I have shifted the proportions towards more vegetables and less meat and carbohydrates.

The net result after five months is absolutely stunning. Predictably, I have lost a few pounds, going back twelve years in time, then stabilized my weight (more than that would probably be unhealthy). But in addition, I have been feeling a lot better:

• In my body, I believe this change was necessary to get all the benefits from the cycling I do. I feel fitter without a doubt.
• On the health front, I think I have never been that well in a really long time. It has been the first winter I have not had so much as a common cold…so far (keeping fingers crossed); it proves nothing, but it feels good.
• And in my mind I feel freer. I feel as if I am not addicted to food anymore; as if I could do without. Obviously this is not true, but I know I can take a break from food any time a want; food has become a means instead of an end, and this really feels like freedom.

I just hope Food will be OK if we just stay friends

I get angry when I see theories and schemes which do not acknowledge failure and justify an eternally delayed success by trying to turn the guilt on me. They tell me that I did not try enough, that it will work only if I do more, that if I do not do exactly as they say, if I make but one false step, it will fail and be worse than if I had done nothing. These are totalitarian theories. Generally, they do not deliver.

Below is a list of such theories, which have consistently failed in the past but keep asking us for more:

• capitalism will reduce poverty
• communism will improve people’s lives
• GMs will feed the third world
• preventive war will stop terrorism
• increasing agricultural yields will abolish hunger
• vaccines will eradicate infectious disease
• the telethon will find a cure against myopathy
• science is good

If you look around, you can find such theories by the dozen. They always have the same modus operandi: an unchallengeable basis relying on circular logic, unquestionable dogma or good intentions. Let us quickly flip through the list above. [more]

I used to be very heavily prejudiced against homeopathy and alternative medicines (acupuncture, aromatherapy, reflexology, you name it), for the following reasons:

• the homeopathic system is founded on pure dogma (law of similars); it is invoked repeatedly, without having been put to the test in the first place.
• the theoretical models and the underlying concepts invoked are disconnected from the rest of science.
• the more serious the clinical trials, the less evidence there was in support of an efficacy above placebo effect. It also seemed rather suspicious that homeopathic theory (one doctor, one patient, one treatment) had arguments to refuse randomized double-blind clinical trials as adequate evidence.

Now that I have been married for ten year to someone who feeds me latin-named sugar grains on a regular basis, I will share with you how I managed to come to terms with homeopathy in a rational way, without having to split my personality or sell my soul. I confess it is a rather jesuitic move. Such moves tend to be quite customary to me, and it makes me wonder whether I would be able to keep any sort of principles in troubled times, but this is another matter altogether.

[more]

Une fois n’est pas coutume, here is a short thinking post.

Lemma 1

Have you ever been astonished by how children can be sweet in the morning and then turn gradually obnoxious as the day wears on? How a tired kid becomes an irrational yelling tyrant, switching back and forth between crying tantrums and exalted naughtiness so that an external observer could hardly tell it was the same person?

Would you not agree that fatigue carries the same sort of influence over our personality as adults, by eroding our best traits and leaving only the sharp angles? When we are tired, we are more shortsighted, less patient, more selfish, less optimistic, more agressive, less calm …

Lemma 2

When electricity was not even science fiction and candles were so expensive, only the rich could wake late at night. Everybody else went to bed shorty after nightfall, and rose shortly before daybreak. In Europe, this meant at least 10 hours of sleep in winter, and probably a little over 7 hours around the summer solstice, complemented by a good two hours of siesta, as there was no air conditioning to allow any work done during the hot afternoon hours.

The XXth century successively introduced electrical lighting, coffee, TV, and stress, the four ingredients of our shrinking sleep time. Between 1960 and nowadays, the average duration of sleep in the US has shrunk by 2 hours. Just in the past twenty years, TV programes have delayed the average bedtime in France by at least thirty-five minutes. I remember when the evening movie would start at 8:30, when now it seldom starts before 9:05. Apparently, our average sleep duration has plummeted from 10+ to 7- hours in less than a century, and the trend is sharper in urban areas.

Theorem

Technology-induced sleep deprivation is turning us all into irrational yelling tyrants, switching back and forth between crying tantrums and exalted naughtiness — especially in urban areas.

Proof

Trivial from Lemmas 1 & 2

Corollary

Dump your TV, do not turn on the lights when it’s getting dark, and go to sleep — now. You’ll thank me tomorrow.

A few references

http://www.sante.gov.ma/Leministre/Communique/2004/article/obesite.asp
http://morphee.biz/article-5374545.html#nogo
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/university/publications/research/issue-8/sleep.pdf
http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/full/89/5/2119

PS: researching references, I have realised that this sleep deprivation issue has gone so far that it is now also a public health emergency.

Three thousand miles and sixty thousand feet(*): this is the total distance and total uphill climb that I travel on my bicycle each year, mainly for commuting purposes. In eight years, my mileage will be the length of the Earth’s circumference. Well, to tell you the truth, I am shamelessly bragging about something that has not happened yet: [more]

I have recently seen Le Malade Imaginaire for the second time. As I remembered it from my youth, this play was pure comedy, making fun at how grotesquely irrational and arrogant XVIIth century doctors were in the eye of icon playwright Molière. This time, I was taken aback at how contemporary this depiction of medicine suddenly looked to me.

[more]

A decreasing life expectancy

Recent studies (although fortunately controversial) in the US and France show that life expectancy could soon be decreasing because of the obesity and diabetes ‘epidemic’, chemical poisoning and other lifestyle-induced effects. Hard to believe when everybody has always told us that we would live longer and longer. In a recent radio broadcast (see [1]), agricultural engineer and whistle blower Claude Aubert provides the following explanation. [more]