Seth's Blog

After trying the Shangri-La Diet, Jazi yechezkel zilber found that other aspects of my research (“stuff of seth”) were relevant to his life:

Years ago, I was part of a community where people would be up early praying etc. For an hour and then eat together. I noticed that going there in the morning was good for me, but was puzzled by the effect. I hypothesized it was the social effect per se.

At some point, I stopped this (what the hell do I have with religion and prayer?) and noticed that I got depressed. I remember that the depression came with a delay. It was funny to see it, as I could not make sense of it. But this I remember well. The depressive effect was not the same day as not going to the prayers but tomorrow (or later?).

I was not having early awakening then. Afterwards, I started having periodically early awakening, I cannot remember the frequency, but it was there and annoying. Now when going to the community, I had two hours between awakening and eating. Whereas at home I would eat immediately after waking. Another thing that puzzled me was how I came to wake up naturally *before* my scheduled wake-up time. I used to wake up much later. With food anticipation it makes perfect sense. I woke up two hours before conditioned feeding.

The Amish have extremely low rates of depression — and eat communal breakfasts. The story about early awakening reminds me of a student who told me when you told us this in class I didn’t believe it but lately I started waking up too early and was puzzled until I realized I had changed my breakfast.

• Low-level radon exposure appears to reduce lung cancer
• Dubious science of climate crusaders. “The committee included members whose careers depended on global warming alarmism, and the predictable result was that not one word was changed.”
• Graduate school in the humanities is for the already-privileged. What’s especially interesting about this column is that it appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which you might expect to be pro-establishment.
• Rediscovery and opposition to the ketogenic diet for childhood epilepsy. “One of the reasons that the ketogenic diet is not popular at this point is because there’s not a big drug company behind it, selling it to doctors.”

The January 2011 issue of Bottom Line/Health has an article called “Dirty Drugs” about popular drugs with bad side effects. It is based on an interview with an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard named James Rudolph. It contains the following:

Insomnia. Most OTC drugs taken for insomnia, including the allergy medicine Benadryl and sleep aid Sominex, contain diphenhydramine. It can cause constipation, difficulty concentrating, urinary retention, and trouble with eye focus — and stays active in the body for 12 to 18 hours, which can cause next-day grogginess.

My advice. Avoid taking diphenhydramine for insomnia.

Better. Practice good sleep habits. Examples: Go to bed at a reasonable hour, and maintain the same schedule every night. Exercise regularly but not within two hours of bedtime — it will make falling asleep more difficult. Take a warm bath before bed to help you relax.

I agree, insomnia drugs are bad news. But the “better” advice could be a hundred years old.

Effect of one-legged standing on sleep. Six signs of the profound stagnation in health care.

In the mid-1990s I discovered that seeing faces in the morning raised my mood the next day. If I saw faces Monday morning, I felt better on Tuesday — not Monday. This discovery and many other facts suggest that we have an internal oscillator that controls our mood — in particular, how happy we are, how eager we are to do things, and how irritable we are. For this oscillator to work properly, we must see faces in the morning and avoid faces and fluorescent light at night.

In rich countries, almost everyone gets nothing resembling the optimum input. One of the problems this may create is bipolar disorder. A week ago I posted how a friend of mine used my faces/mood discovery to control his bipolar disorder. After that post, a man I’ll call Rex wrote to me thanking me — that post had inspired him to try to control his own bipolar disorder that way. Before knowing anything about whether he would be successful, I decided it would be good to follow and record what happens. Either way — successful or not — it should be revealing.

I am going to post his story in several parts. The first few parts are background.

My first full-blown bipolar episode was at 29 years of age.  (I am now 37.) (more…)

I fixed a few problems and eliminated the one Windows-specific function so it can be used with Macs.

The new version is here.