Tag: Health

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1074 and Go Go Go

I feel as if I had a lot more trepidation about the future before the pandemic. I wasn’t so sure if I had a clear view of how my own personal philosophies were meant to engage with the scramble of building, and then surviving, my own life. That seemed like a luxury for people higher up the hierarchy of needs than I was.

I feel like I got a lot wrong even as I see how I was equipped with so many tools that I used clumsily. I wish, in some ways, that I’d been surer of my own knowledge earlier. I didn’t trust myself. I felt like a Cassandra doomed to see dire outcomes.

And yet I retained some sense of optimism. You can see my doomer arcs clearly across the written records as systems failed me and then failed others. Natural disasters and chronic illness in very real ways forced me to overcome any inclination towards a culture of nihilism. I found that I couldn’t give up.

There was no comfort to be found in saving myself but I did. And now I find myself simply done with trying to muddle along. I am getting much louder about my own alliances and beliefs. I am updating my priors and throwing myself into fights. I am choosing sides even when I don’t care for all my compatriots. Neutrality is easier to maintain at the edge of an empire surely but I hard limits on what I find to be acceptable compromises in a free society.

Categories
Internet Culture Medical

Day 1069 and Fever

I both literally have a fever in my own body while I am watching a fever burn through one of my favorite extremely online communities in the form of effective acceleration memers versus a heavily armed establishment unit of academic utilitarians. Who would like you to know they aren’t effective altruists I’m sure.

I myself enjoy a good internecine debate as I became a Calvinist as an adult because fuck it the Reformation is the home of the institutional skeptic. Flame wars are the modern 95 theses. And naturally everyone involved thinks their counterparts are reactionaries. Tyranny of small differences.

I’d say more about this but it’s later in the day and like I said I am running a fever. My immune system is remarkably active so I’m honestly shocked a fever got through at all. I actively beat my immune system into retreat so whenever it gains ground I am annoyed and confused. So it’s probably best if I sign off as it’s never a good idea to be letting your fever dreams get the best of you.

Categories
Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 1068 and Routine Versus Speed

I always find myself disappointed by how much time I put into health. Perhaps it’s a sign of how high expectations are for performance in the tools we use daily that it seems preposterous that it should require a third of your time in maintenance.

Perhaps this is an unfair intuition on my part. For every hour of flight the F-16 needs around 17 man-hours of maintenance. I’d prefer to not be quite so resource intensive as a fight jet but maybe fighting entropy does require 8-10 of my day.

As I try to do more with my days and push myself to do more in less time I still have to put in the effort to stay at my old baseline. I put my faith in the miracles of compounding. What was once a huge effort is now a habit.

I try to fight my tendency to optimize even as tracking my own data has its benefits. Most of my inputs are just a refinement on existing heuristics. Occasionally I’ll find someone who has a fix so might better than what I’ve been doing it fundamentally resets my understanding of my works model. It happens more than you’d think.

In accelerating I must apply more energy to my existing systems. Or course the old systems seem to call out depending more. As I push for performance my body demands its sleep, its fuel and any other number of needs. Sometimes it’s a want. It’s not always clear so I test.

Categories
Travel

Day 1064 and Faster San Francisco

I am energized by my day. Any residual pain from the challenges of travel have been mitigated by rest, exercise, meditation and lots of medication.

If I could to give only one argument in favor of acceleration, it would be our capacity to improve medicine. I’d like to find a cure to my ankylosis personally, but it’s bigger than all that. I believe we should do everything we can to improve the health and well being of humanity.

I do so much to balance my own health and wellbeing just so I can keep working and contributing to the startups I love so much. Often I miss so much of life that others take for granted like socializing together. Hobbies, socializing and much of the tapestry of living together is off limits to me as energy budget is too high.

I’d like more capacity in life so I can chose not only to work, but to go to meetups, dinners and whatever else folks get up to in their leisure and community hours.

I am not one for FOMO while I’m in bed recovering, but on the occasional day where I get to do leisure activities I am reminded that I could have more of life if we agreed to prioritize the acceleration of medicine. My energy budget is only limited by the state of our healthcare.

On that note I’ll be at an e/acc meetup tonight in San Francisco. If you think you see me do please come up and say hello. I’d love to meet you. I’ll be wearing the leopard dress I have come to think of as the “spot me in the wild” outfit as well as three distinct wearables.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 1063 and Overclocked

Since acceleration is within my meme space so heavily I am pushing myself to go faster. Predictably that introduces some instability in my Julie equilibrium. That’s a fancy way of saying I currently feel like shit.

I’ve been a bit immobile for the last couple hours from hitting some type pain wall from overclocking myself. I’d hope it would pass so I could focus and write but it’s getting late on the West Coast and it doesn’t seem likely.

It’s possible this isn’t entirely the fault of excess strain from travel and it is in some manner hormonal. I wonder if at some point an artificial intelligence will be able to deduce my follicular and luteal phases by sentiment analysis on my blog.

Feels like a compelling argument for restricting government power over your bodies doesn’t it? Imagine the unceasing eye of Sauron collecting context clues about your reproductive system and the right to bodily autonomy goes poof.

Anyways I’m out for the night to go do battle with the pain so I can accelerate more tomorrow.

Categories
Community Culture

Day 1059 and Socializing

The hardest part of any holiday for me is the socializing. I enjoy spending time with our friends, neighbors and family. It’s just such a high cost activity.

The twinge of jealousy that I feel towards the extroverted and able body is real. I don’t necessarily want to change who I am. I’ve come to terms with my body’s limits and my own preferences. But I sure wish I could turn myself into a high energy extrovert without any health issues when I need it.

I feel drained from the short round of social interactions I had over the past few days even though I enjoyed every minute of it. I just see it in my biometrics.

My heart rate variability dipped into the teens. I got blinking reds on on stress, energy and health on my Welltory monitor. Whoop is recording high strain scores despite me doing little but sitting and talking. I have been sleeping 9 to 10 hours a night for over a week.

I suppose acceleration is tiring. But oh how I long to not have the normal pleasures of life be so damaging. Because I am going to chose my passions over socializing. It’s much easier to justify my work and spending my energy on my portfolio of startups. Advocating for causes close to my heart. If I have a limited budget I rarely chose to spend on the pleasures of company or socializing.

Categories
Biohacking Internet Culture

Day 1054 and Extra Strain

This year has had a number of absolutely crazy weekends where it’s felt as if the entire world was having the rules written overnight. Seemingly unrelated bits of the world will flare into supernova attention grabbers.

Off the top of my head, I can recall weekends devoted to aliens, bank collapse, room temperature super conductors, war in Israel and fear we’ve summoned artificial intelligence.

The fact that we can participate in the narratives as they emerge on social media means that every type of influence actor does just that. And it’s exhausting even as it’s occasionally a fun interactive game.

Today I found myself with a poor Whoop recovery and more physiological strain that is ideal. You can see it in my awful heart rate variability. Nevertheless I tried to stick to good routines, possibly to my detriment.

My afternoon went from enjoyable walk to migraine to a low stability.

You can see my Welltory data after I went for a forty minute walk. My HRV tanked and I went into a migraine pattern. Thankfully Imitrax, meditation, and a short non sleep deep relaxation exercise got me stabilized in about two hours.

Categories
Medical

Day 1043 and Differential Diagnosis Failure

I’m throwing something up here as I am fairly certain I’ll be out for the rest of the day. I have thrown back an entire pharmacy in an attempt to remedy a barrage of symptoms that are so intense I can barely process.

I thought I had a cold or potentially some kind of flu based on my initial symptoms like heightened respiratory rates, congestion and pain in my muscles. But as the day progresses I’m not so sure. The mucus is clear and was easily improved by a Mucinex and cortisone nasal spray. The remaining symptoms of lowered body temperature (which feels feverish) a migraine, and tight muscles are now much more acute. I guess the cold medicine I took was a waste of liver stress.

It’s messy and conflicting and neither myself, my husband, my doctor nor the artificial intelligence chats have managed a differential diagnosis.

My hope is that with the sheer variety of drugs that we have thrown at this that I’ll be passed out for the foreseeable future. Maybe a full twenty four hours of sleep can fix this. Hopefully you will see me cheerful tomorrow.

Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 1042 and Oh Dip

For the last three days I’ve been experiencing a significant dip in energy and function in the later afternoon around 4pm.

Not only am I fatigued, but I seem to have some sort of either allergic response or potentially common cold symptoms. It’s a little unclear as I don’t have consistent symptoms nor do I have a fever.

Some of it is probably jet lag as I returned home to Montana after a month in Europe over the weekend. I haven’t quite recovered my sleep deficit as I am pushing very hard on my workload as well.

I tried doing a bit of polyphasic sleeping today to see if it might help abate the intensity of the dip. The idea behind polyphasic sleep is to get your required 7-8 hours not in one monophasic chunk at night but across your own natural energetic ebbs and flows.

I did a packed morning of work and meetings and then slept between the hours of 3-5pm. I do feel better having been asleep during the dip but I could feel the symptoms rising while in the light sleep mode. I wasn’t able to fall into deep or REM sleep.

Whatever is happening I clearly need more rest. My attempts at diagnosis of any other symptoms and their proximal causes are unlikely to matter if I’m not getting adequate rest. In which case, I’ll try to sleep more at night and add in some naps till it passes.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1041 and Short Notice

I’m extremely frustrated right now. I didn’t get much sleep last night. I won’t get into the details, but it’s mostly because I was overstimulated by a very long workday after what was a very productive week.

I didn’t think it would matter if I was a little fucked up today from overexertion yesterday as I didn’t have any major obligations.

Except I got invited to mid-morning to something tonight. I wasn’t obligated to go but really wanted to do so as the guest of honor may end up having a significant impact on my life. And I’ve had an interest in it which I’d expressed months ago.

Now I had strong interest in attending as it won’t be a repeatable opportunity. So I wanted to push myself to go. I did my best through the afternoon to rest and prepare myself. But ultimately my body just couldn’t do it.

I cascaded into a migraine from the smell of my husband’s cologne. All my efforts to try to be restorative with the few hours of my afternoon were gone through a single small instance of environmental stressor. An obvious sign that I shouldn’t be going anywhere if something small could set off symptoms.

Now I’d like to say that I could have made it if I’d slept more. Maybe if I’d not worked so many hours yesterday. But I feel good about the things I prioritized yesterday.

But I am so fucking angry that I couldn’t have been given a little bit more notice as I would have found a way to make it. Literally even one day would have been enough so I could prioritize sleep.

It’s obviously no one’s fault. I’m simply furious that in an effort to budget my energy and physical capacity for what was my priority yesterday, I couldn’t find any remaining capacity today.

I guess the lesson is that if you want me to show up please let me know at least twenty four hours in advance. Or even just the night before.