Tag: Rhythm

Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 1645 and A Sleep of Prisoners

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.

A screenshot of my Whoop’s recovery page

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

The 4th of July is now my independence from a month of poor biometrics

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.

Mixing more strain than recovery into my Whoop cocktail for maximum life

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!

–Christopher Fry

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.

Categories
Travel

Day 1644 and Problems Behind Me Sleep Ahead?

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.


Airplane sleep doesn’t lend itself to dreams

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.

Leaving Montana
Categories
Travel

Day 1643 and Like A Shark

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.

Categories
Travel

Day 1637 and Day Tripping

It’s positively verdant in the Rocky Mountain west. This far into June it doesn’t seem as if it should be Irish countryside green heading into Wyoming.

Both because I was driving, and an iPhone picture can’t ever do a landscape of such texture and vastness any amount of justice, I have few pictures.

Some portion of I-90 in Montana

We’ve got a little camp out with some of our oddest friends. As befits the oddity of the open road we made a pit stop on our day trip at one of the centers of interstate commerce Loves.

The various locations of Loves in America

If you’ve not encountered a Loves, I don’t quite know what America you live in but it’s quite the experience. It ain’t no Bucc-ees but it’s a vibe. The smooth loyalty driven core business of truckers bumps up against the families headed to parts elsewhere. And its merchandise reflects this intersection of oddities.

Keep on rolling with two or we upcharge a whole buck for these meat sticks
Cover those meats with a push of a button.

All I acquired was a half tank of gas, a king size Starbursts for Alex, and a Pina Colda Bai. I made it about a third of the way through the drink before calling uncle.

There was other similarly faux foods we encountered on the road. An equally loyalty driven chain whose signature simulacrum only exists because of a Ray Dalio arbitrage. I wonder what Baudrillard would make of American food in 2025.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 1621 and My Hyperstimulation Fixes

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.

Categories
Emotional Work Uncategorized

Day 1603 and Seasonal Ambitions

In a past life I worked in marketing for the luxury gym Equinox I could go on about the fascinating complexities involved in selling a future that actually requires you to do more work than most just buying it. But I digress.

Some businesses are seasonal and fitness an easy example of this phenomena with its January resolution sales.

The lesser appreciated but no less important bump was always May. People believe this is the summer where they really get into their bodies.

You’d think people would join gyms at non prime-times but they don’t. Humans like that change is possible at every seasonal juncture.

And we are not wrong to have those aspirations. It’s beautiful to think this is the time I’ll really do it. This turn of the wheel will be the one.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 1585 and May Flurries

Colorado gardening lore says you should never move seedlings out before Mother’s Day. In Montana similar wisdom suggests keeping the less hardy planting till after Father’s Day.

You think this is a bit excessive till you experience a May snowstorm and you will no longer scoff at the farmer’s almanac types. Just this weekend we were doing spring cleaning chores.

Alex discovered a tire blowout on our Deere mower. Given the state of imports getting an order in to Deere for a replacement was the first thing we did. We’d had enough growth in the back yard that it looked about ready for a cut. The back pastures get hayed later but we now some areas and the verdant green grass needing cutting.

Now, of course, this means it is snowing to beat the band today. We’ve got a couple inching blanketing everything from front porch to back patio. Underneath one of the big fires there is a patch of green new spring grass. A reminder that false spring is tricky in the Rockies.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 1579 and Marking The Days

Everyone has their own zero day for something. I’ve been writing for one thousand five hundred and seventy nine days in a row. It is 2025 Anno Domini aka the year of our Lord. It has been 100 days since Trump was sworn back into office as President.

I’m sure someone is celebrating 100 days of sobriety. I’m sure there is a couple celebrating 10 years of marriage today. A totally ordinary day in the spring likely had any number of events big and small being noted today.

We seem to like marking the passage of time quite a bit. For Aristotle fans memory is key to the cultivation of techne. We mark events in order to remember them so that they may be handed down to the next generation. We repeat so we remember.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1554 and Complex Coordination

I’ve never been much for listening to music while I do work. I’ve always found it distracting if not downright annoying. I don’t really believe I’m capable of multitasking. If a task requires my focus and coordination it will get the sum of it.

I’m not convinced anyone is particularly good at it if the studies on focus and multitasking are to be believed. Task switching costs, reduced cognitive efficiency and mental fatigue are typical indicators of the distraction of multitasking.

I was given a reminder of the strain of complex coordination as I was relaxing last night. I enjoy Star Trek: The Next Generation and found myself rewatching Data’s Day,” Season 4, Episode 11 in which Dr Crusher teaches Commander Data how to dance before a wedding.

Being an android, Data is able to easily mimic the doctor’s movement after being shown them. But as he learns to the nuances involved in waltzing with the partner he tells doctor (paraphrasing)

“This is complex set of variables to coordinate”

“Try to act like you are enjoying it!”

As Data tries to integrate the dance moves, their joint body language, the changing direction, and variable speeds you get a visceral sense of why embodied compute requires more processing than intelligence tasks. The final challenge? Smiling while coordinating it all.

Resting Android face? Data tries to smile while waltzing via Memory Alpha
Categories
Culture Startups

Day 1522 and Rollercoasters

Startups are such rollercoasters. It’s always been cliche but starting something from nothing really is a wild ride. You can experience the lowest of lows and the highest of highs in the space of a day.

If you enjoy adrenaline being a part of a startup is fun as it is equal parts terror and exhilaration. There are presumably other careers where this is also true. I imagine mothers and marines can tell you a lot about dealing with intensity.

I have had to remind myself quite a bit lately that nothing is permanent. As we push against a higher and higher variance future I feel equal parts exhilaration and dread. I don’t feel as safe as I’d like. But I doubt I could be more prepared.

The stress of a startup can kill you if you let the stress of the wider world weigh too heavily on you. We can enjoy the fun of the ride. The safety is an illusion anyway. Well maybe not on the rollercoaster. Those have seatbelts.