Fifteen hours of sleep and a spa day does fix a week of disrupted sleep. I may need some more downtime of resting and recovery and maybe more water drinking before I have a cogent thought.
I’ve had several day’s worth of poor sleep. My sleep debt had reached a good full night’s of rest at over 9 hours. And boy did I make it up and then some last night.
I wasn’t asleep all of those 15 hours according to both Whoop and Apple but it sure felt like I was in deep slumber.
With earplugs and an eye mask in, I felt dead to the world. And what’s worse is I’ve had an entire month of pooor recovery and sleep
Now on July 4th I have been liberated from a long month of poor biometrics and awful recovery scores. And it only took 15 hours of being in a dark cold hotel room and a build up stress, exhaustion, mistreatment and other sundry social frustrations.
Today really does feel like Independence Day for me. I’ve been freed from a body weighed down by physical realities and I am now free from it.
There is a poem that comes to mind anytime freedom and sleep arise to my conscience thought. A Sleep of Prisoners is a 1951 verse play by Christopher Fry
A SLEEP OF PRISONERS
Dark and cold we may be, but this
Is no winter now. The frozen misery
Of centuries breaks, cracks, begins to move;
The thunder is the thunder of the floes,
The thaw, the flood, the upstart Spring.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul we ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise
Is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity’s sake!
His writing captures something in my imagination with turns of phrase like “the longest stride of soul we ever took” evoking a crossing to the harsh wakefulness of reality. And as he says “it takes so many years to wake, but will you wake for pity’s sake?”
I have been slumbering in both reality and in the metaphorical ties that bound me to others. And today is the day where all Americans ponder how our founding fathers contemplated the reality of waking to the dawn of a new experiment. The American experiment continues and we must remain awake to our role within it. I have many thoughts on this which may now soon flow having awoken from quite a sleep indeed.
I’ve got a comically large sleep debt to work off. My Whoop is screaming at me as it’s been 3 days of not quite getting in an adequate of sleep.
And it’s not as if I was enjoying great sleep for June. It’s possible my new Whoop hardware just has bee algorithm and set of standards as June was mostly dead.
First it was emotional “really in it feelings” that gave me a half night as I woke early as the upset remained.
Then the anxiety of preparing for a long trip while the aforementioned emotional impact hung unresolved (though I had cried it out) which made deep rest out of reach. Four hours is half of my usual needs.
The middle night between issues and my packing day didn’t get me much better sleep. It was a long day of logistics and I never quite came down.
And then I was on an airplane and trying to catch some Zzzzzs but barely managed under three hours. I feel great as I’ve just kept on swimming great white shark style, but I know I’ve got almost a full night of sleep dent built up.
Still it’s hard to feel too badly about things when you look down on the beauty of the world below.
The travel is the kind of stint that requires the logistics of being in perpetual movement across climates and time zones.
I’ve been moving for what feels like 24 hours straight as I did the dance of managing feelings, working to get across to other people, unloading and unpacking and then promptly repacking again as I’ll be on the road for a stint.
I had a shark phase as a child and the lore says the perpetual movement of this ancient predator is required lest it perish. I’d love to know how rest and sleep works in that sort of murky depth as I’d loved to know how we might incorporate it.
As it turns out of the 540 species of sharks only a handful have what’s called Obligate Ram Ventilation which means the faster they swim the more oxygen flows through their gills. If the strop meaning the oxygen drops and they literally die. Great white sharks are the canonical example.
When I am angry I consider the question of whether humans are indeed the apex predators of our environment and if it is in my nature to flow the oxygen and predate upon the wide world who crosses my hungry wrath. My own Christian faith asks for a very different answer and I obey. But the hunger is in all of us.
I went to bed yesterday around 3:30 or so. Oops. I could barely write a post as I was struggling to stay awake at all. I did three short paragraphs and tagged it and said good enough.
My sleep was not peaceful or restorative but at least it was long. The night before I was up late (ok 10:30pm or so) and I struggled to fall asleep.
Alex’s birthday party on Saturday was enough to wipe me out so badly that on Sunday I couldn’t stay up past mid-afternoon. Pathetic yes but not surprising.
I recently did a big round of bloodwork and was thrilled to see my inflammation is down significantly but I have something called inflammatory anemia. So maybe a contributing factor to my exhaustion. There are a number of odd areas that need some attention especially in my endocrine system.
The Bimzelx switch is in its 4th month so almost through the loading dosing. I have had awful side effects but the code biomarkers of CRP and Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate (ESR) are significantly improved.
I still have all kinds of weird pains and compensatory biomechanical problems but I’m feeling moderately optimistic. The next steps are around the corner. And hopefully I get more deep sleep and REM sleep before I tackle it.
On a bit of a whim, Alex bought “on the go” PEMF Infrared Mat from HigherDOSE.
This is the year of acquiring mechanical intervention medical equipment for us.
Yes as biohackers we trial a lot and some of it is less woo-woo than others. Treatments like hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy have significantly more clinical data than say pulsed electromagnetic field treatments.
It seems easier to send electromagnetic waves at different frequencies than create a sealed oxygen chamber but consumer is weird and the military and elite athletics tested HBOT whereas mere hippies played around with PEMF.
So it’s qualia only here on the good vibrations but I am excited to try it out. I can’t exactly feel the vibrations unlike in other clinical settings where I’ve experienced much more intense (it’s measured in gauss or Tesla) but infrared warmth is a nice experience even if the vibrations don’t do much. But I will report on it.
Not so long ago the idea of dopamine fasts became quite the topic of discussion. A Twitter mutual of mine first brought it to my attention and it seems it is his coinage.
The concept originated with California psychologist Dr. Cameron Sepah as a cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) tool to help people cope with behavioral addictions and reset their relationship with instant gratification. Via perplexity
I won’t get into the details but the premise is to reduce stimulus so as to calm your dopaminergic responses.
As social media hyperstimulation rears its ugly head, I don’t think you need theory and angst or full cut off from stimulus. You ideally change a little at a time and sustain a practice.
Sure we are working against automated algorithms designed for maximum impact but we all still know how to be human. Breathe, feel your body, and relax into focus on whatever you see first.
I have a mix of high tech and simple body routines I rely on. I put on over the ear noise canceling headphones like Bose and I turn on my Endel app to play Solfreggio tones or let an autogenerated audio soundscape play. I dim the lights if it’s daytime. I love my ApolloNeuro for its vagus nerve tuning vibes as a supplement here.
I have also carried forward a nervous system regulation practice from Jonny Miller. Breathing techniques (especially box breathing), somatic feeling or interoception exercises, and non sleep deep relaxation all make up a part of my mindfulness practice.
At night I follow as best I can Bryan Johnson’s red lighting routine for circadian rhythm support though I remain a highly variable sleeper. I wear re-usable earplugs and an no pressure bubble eye mask.
If I need to come down from the day I’ll do a 3 in-5 out breath and settle into some fiction. I like to read on e-ink at night with either my Kindle or sometimes my Daylight though that is generally my reading instrument for the research. Once I start nodding off I’ll pull down my eye mask.
I would love to have something to say today. I have a migraine. My circulation seems odd. I’ve got on 2 pairs of wool socks on, two layers on top and I’m underneath two down blanks. And I’m still cold.
Complaining about one’s body is such an unappealing habit and yet when the pain comes for your attention it has the gravity of a black hole.
I don’t want to be a bore. I fear every time I am trapped in a bad bodily cycle I am boring myself and others. It’s been six years since I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and so much of it has been chronicled here.
And yet no matter how much I throw at health and wellness I still find myself cold, sad, hurting and without any kind of cure.
My husband’s expert testimony before Congress yesterday was a particularly exciting day even by my standards. I felt so drained today.
My bar for excitement was set pretty high this spring. It has so far included impromptu drives to Istanbul, seeing our right to compute bill get signed into law, watching a founder we backed unveil a nuclear reactor design and discussing futurism at my hometown’s university.
When I list it out I almost forget how much during this time I was battling side effects from a mold infestation and working through changing my medication for my autoimmune condition. I got my right eyelid slit open twice!
When Alex made it home to Montana after midnight I felt like I could finally sleep. I never sleep well alone and much as I tried to sleep as he was flying back I could not. I’m exhausted today and needed a nap to stave off a migraine.
As we get older I am sure we will continue to be called upon to show up. So much of my energy is drawn into improving my health so I can participate in civic and economic life.
I want to improve my health so I can continue to discuss, learn, advocate and invest for this very confusing transition to our future.
I can scoff at catchy neologisms like “wellderly” as marketing campaigns for famous doctors in an especially challenging era for medical trust. But I am also concerned about sleeping better, gaining muscle mass, and improving my meager health. A man has many concerns but a sick man has only one remains true.
I spent the night in a port city in Greece as I am making my way back to Western Europe. I’ll be crossing by airplane via polar routes on my way to Colorado next week for an academic conference at my home town university.
I feel like I’ve made it when I am invited to speak on topics like Renegade Futurism. I’m now old enough to have lived a couple rounds in the “dissident technology” discourse so I hope to have something of value to say to new generations.
“You can’t get the little pricks generation gap you.” Molly Millions Neuromancer
On the long drive back from Istanbul I am listening to William Gibson’s Neuromancer to set myself in the right mood after the mix of antiquity and modernity I encountered this week.
One doesn’t cross thousands of kilometers and centuries of empires without requiring a bit of an aesthetic change.
The weather is more sunny Mediterranean Easter weekend than the non-climate skies of a future Japan’s Chiba and Night City, but with really any port city at night I can’t help but think of the famous first line of cyperpunk’s foremost novel.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer
And so I tuned in to a story of oligarchy, artificial intelligence, dissident coders and cyborgs with mirror shades. In that near future the protagonists make a stopover in Istanbul too and it involves medically advanced nervous system treatments too. Gibson’s cyborg chop shops are almost as advanced as what I saw this week.
Gibson’s 1984 novel is as relevant in 2025 as it ever was. Our timeline has become his later work in uncanny ways but his cyperpunk aesthetic has become as timeless as the domes of Constantinople.
Whatever transition we are about to make as humans as our own Wintermute intelligences arrive will be rocky. I don’t know who will be the dissidents and how centralizing power may prove to be.
One can just start to see corporate post-nation states emerge. Maybe they will look like Tessier-Ashpool S.A. Maybe it will look like Elon Musk’s family office Excession. Of course, that’s an entirely different science fiction novel about artificial intelligence.
