Tag: Sleep

Categories
Biohacking Medical

Day 522 and Tracker Jacker

I started an experiment with one of my tracking apps called Gyroscope at the beginning of the year. I took pictures of every single meal. For $150 they analyzed all of my meals assigned me a virtual coach to help me improve my total health scores across all categories including food, exercise, sleep and mood. A few days ago my husband physically took my phone away from me and canceled it. The experiment was a failure and it was it Gyroscope’s fault.

Personalized healthcare is a bit of a noble lie. They do give you advice that is somewhat personalized to you as long as your body is within the baseline of what we recognize as healthy. If you are within one standard deviation of the mean then it works great. These tools improve your health. Just remember most of our baseline data is from healthy, young, white, men. This isn’t a woke thing. That’s just the population with the most data.

It’s hard to give someone like me health advice. The basics are designed for otherwise healthy people that need to improve their activity, weight, sleep, and basic nutrition so they don’t become sick in the future. Maybe their biggest issue is being a bit overweight and sedentary. Most people do in fact need to move more and eat less and go to sleep on time. Chronically ill people, or those coping with an acute viral infection, still need to eat good nutrition but beyond the basics it gets more complex what we should recommend.

The coaches at any health app I’ve ever used have kept trying to give perfectly sensible guidance about activity and nutrition quality and lowering stress levels. I am sadly an extremely weird edge case so shit like walk more can actually be bad for me sometimes. Sometimes doing absolutely nothing is actually what someone with my medical history needs. And tracker apps have a tendency to go berserk when I need two or three weeks of bed rest. They go full red alert trying to make me get some exercise when my doctors are tell me any exertion is bad.

The straw that broke the camels back on the $150 a month experiment was getting influenza in May. It completely imploded all of my metrics. As a serious viral infection tends to do. I couldn’t get in any steps as I was basically bedridden. My food intake got weird as I was in Montana with friends and house hunting when I got sick. I had one perfect week of high protein and vegetables and then as I got sicker and sicker it was anything I could be coaxed into eating. There were two meals of milkshakes from Five Guys and that was considered a lucky break. Coughing and exhaustion sometimes means sipping a high calorie frozen dairy product through a straw is as good as it’s going to get.

As my metrics got worse from the flu and tracking food become a pointless exercise, I gave up on even trying to walk my very nice coach through it. There was nothing to be done on assigning me any health activities for weeks. I couldn’t exercise. Meditation did nothing to improve core metrics because I was fighting a massive infection. My sleep was shit because again fighting an infection. My nutrition was hit or miss as my throat hurt and my stomach struggled with new medications.

The renewal snuck up on me. I had wanted to say good bye to the coach. To let her know she tried. To reassure the Gyroscope teammates that my failures didn’t say much about them and how they coached people into healthier behaviors.

I’m a woman with overlapping chronic conditions that got an acute infection and there was no real way to come back from it in a short period of time. But I was still so exhausted and couldn’t bring asking Gyroscope for a pause (a sick break for fitness apps would be a killer functionality though). But my husband remembered the auto-renew date. So he just canceled the entire thing. Boom gone. Fuck off.

I opened the app for the first time in weeks today to at least turn back on the basic tracking so I didn’t lose any data history.

I like how the app does data visualization. I have no clue if I can track nutrition on the base level of product on Gyroscope. Whoever does their pricing tiers has changed it so much I’ve lost track. In the past I found it impossible to input nutrition into their tracker. It was amazing to have the app do it automatically. I relied on their team doing the macros not because I can’t do it myself but because I couldn’t figure out how to physically input it into the app. So I’m a little sad about that. But not sad enough to pay $150.

Categories
Medical

Day 489 and Day Dreams

I had a dream during the day today. I mean the rapid eye movement kind not the fantasyland imagination. I had laid down to rest my eyes while my migraine medication worked it’s way into my system.

Generally I don’t fall asleep in the middle of the day. This is doubly true if I’m beating back a migraine. Triply so if it’s a particularly bad one. This migraine was so bad I needed nausea medication as well. I frantically texted my husband in the other room to help me look as I couldn’t locate my medications as keeping my eyes open triggered cascades of lightning flashes behind my eyes and nausea so bad I was afraid I’d lose the contents of my stomach.

I put on noise canceling headphones and a face mask and passed out. I woke into a dreamscape city that resembles the west village in New York. I was being instructed by a coach of some sort to forgive someone. Maybe it was myself. Maybe it was a cofounder of a past startup. The texture of the city was busy. Tourists were everywhere blocking the sidewalks. I recall a conversation about the end of the pandemic. Perhaps everyone was out celebrating. There were posters for movies or shows on every available service. I distinctly remember one in front of a fry shop that had media quotes promoting Billy on the Street combined with Family Guy characters. I’ve never seen Billy Eichner’s television show.

I woke back up nearly four hours after having originally gone to lay down. I felt dazed. I had the slightly unsettled feeling one gets upon waking in a bed that is not one’s own. I was disoriented and dizzy even laying down flat. My nausea still has not disappeared entirely. But the migraine had mostly passed.

Categories
Biohacking Travel

Day 455 and Jet Lag

I rolled into Denver around 420pm yesterday and I felt excellent about my timing. My ten hour flight from Frankfurt was quite pleasurable. There is something about long haul flights that are existentially quite satisfying, especially if the onboard wifi isn’t working, as one feels free from the outside world for the duration.

It was midnight in Germany when I landed so I made sure to have a coffee an hour or so before touchdown to keep me up for my time zone adjustment. My goal was to make it to 9pm Mountain Time so I could immediately adjust to my new time zone.

A slightly silly goal as I’ll be moving back two time zones in just a couple days as I’m headed to Miami. But I’m a day bird not a lark or an owl so I need my days to be productive. So staying up “all night” was on the agenda.

I managed to stay awake till about 845pm by keeping busy with unpacking and dinner and catching up on all the “couples shows” that I can only watch with Alex. Ironically about half of what I unpacked is going to get repacked shortly but I needed to do some sorting and replenishment. So I did my best to keep the adrenaline pushing me to activity. And it seems to have worked.

I was up this morning at 5:30am feeling rested and basically functional. The only issue I noticed was hunger. I was starving. I immediately got in the car and went to the good bagel place. I got a second bagel with plans to eat it tomorrow and then ended up having a second breakfast around 10am. And yes I still ate lunch at 1pm. And I’m starving now. Just absolutely ravenous all day.

My tracking apps seem to think my body is experiencing jet lag. Gyroscope said it was contributing to a lower health score and “shortening my lifespan” so that was anxiety inducing. I went for an hour long walk and my Whoop buzzed twenty minutes in. Apparently to indicate I’d hit my target strain. A leisurely stroll netted new a 8.8 score when I typically barely break a 4. Their system maxes out at 20 I think but I rarely get higher than a 10-12. And then Welltory gave me reds across stress, health and energy.

I suspect some of this is due to being back at altitude as a month is long enough to lose your acclimation. But in general I seem to be perfectly fine on my time zone and I felt mostly functional all day. I kept it light. Tomorrow when I plan to work longer hours will be the rest test.

Categories
Chronicle

Day 449 and Lost Time

I lost some time this week. I was living on someone else’s schedule and it cascaded into a wash of hours where I felt like I was completely out of sync with the wider world as I struggled to get back in my own time.

I’m not at my best when I have to push myself to live on other people’s time. Everything shrunk down to my bedroom and my body and my own myopia about righting my sense of reality. I was in a lot of physical pain which pushed me mentally as well.

I started to feel genuinely better and on track around 5pm in Frankfurt. Technically that meant I still had a half day in California to work. But I’d lost the will to push. I needed to regroup. I am telling myself that it’s ok because it’s not as if I work a standard 9-5 job. I can take the weekend to find my way back to the timeline. And if I’m honest some of my best work gets done on Saturday night.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 448 and Disappointment

I’m feeling disappointed in myself. I want to shake the feeling as I’ve done nothing wrong that warrants punishment. But the feeling of disappointment is lingering which is a double cruelty I’m perpetuating on myself.

I have been pushing myself physically. I know this has consequences. And yet I’m frustrated by my body reacting exactly as I know it will when I run myself down. And worse than that, I find myself negotiating with my body to justify pushing just a little bit more. What if I take this medicine? Will that buy me more time? How dangerous will it be if I just keep ignoring how I feel so I can push a little bit more for a little bit longer? I’m rationalizing what amounts to self harm all because I want my body to be something it cannot be.

I feel like I should know better than to be so cruel to myself. I should let it go of the foolish need to push. What I need is sleep and my routine. I should take my medicine and instead of using the feeling of relief it brings to push, I should use the relief to rest in comfort so I heal and recover.

I hate that I keep relearning the same basic lessons of chronic disease over and over again. But hating myself for being disappointing is of course the pattern I need to break. It defeats the point. The self is not an attack surface. Being disappointed serves no purpose in this moment. It’s not driving me to be better. It’s driving me to be worse. So I’m letting it go. And I’m hoping tomorrow I’ll go a little easier on myself.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 441 and Circadian Nightmare

I am all for remote work and distributed teams. My husband has been working with distributed teams long before the pandemic hit as Stack Overflow was an early adopter of the “hire the best talent no matter where” trend.

But it does come with challenges. He contends that it’s helpful to have no more than six hours of time zones between core teams. And I’m really starting to see why. I’m really struggling to keep a decent sleep pattern and collaborate with Californians. So I’ve tried to stay up later so I’d have more working hours on American time zones. Plus I have a regular time with my therapist and for group therapy on Mondays that is 10pm and midnight in GMT+1. So I’ve got to stay up a bit later for that too.

I figured if I could wake up at 10am and go to sleep at 1am that would work great. I got myself a nice eye mask. I close the blinds. But hot damn if my body cannot tell that this is not when I should be sleeping. I can manage to stay up later but I’m still waking up with the sun. I cannot seem to sleep in past 8am.

So I think I’m going to give up this Circadian nightmare as I’m going to rack up a huge deficit. I’m just not a night owl. I’m a day person.

Categories
Chronic Disease Travel

Day 440 and Twitchy

Last night I had a poor night of sleep. My body was just all kinds of weird. A muscle spasm thing kept me awake. I tried magnesium (it’s a natural muscle relaxant), several rounds of Theragun routines, a few stretches, and finally actual muscle relaxers.

Nothing stopped the weird twitching. It was 2am in Germany so I was resigned to a bad night of sleep. I just laid in bed waking myself up every couple of minutes. It was exhausting.

Eventually I got to sleep and seemed to wake up in the morning no worse for wear. I wasn’t especially alarmed, as my body has a tendency to just go off on weird physical tangents for no reason. Whatever the fuck happened it seemed to have passed so I went about my work day.

I broke for dinner around 6pm or so. I ordered Ethiopian and chowed down hard. I was feeling full and sleepy and I figured I’d lay down to digest a bit. I put on some television and was promptly out like a light. I woke up two and an hours half later and realized it was probably time for me to call it a day.

I swear the only thing that woke me up was the knowledge that I had to write my blog post for the day. I’m mostly kidding. The heater turned on and roasted the room so I needed to open the window. But now I’m absolutely going back to sleep now.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 431 and 9 Lonely Hours

I was excited for the time difference working in Frankfurt. It’s GMT + 1 which makes it six hours ahead of New York and a whooping nine hours ahead of San Francisco. I had this idea that I would enjoy getting in a full day before any of my American collaborators. Imagine the productivity gains!

But I’ve actually found it lonely. The silence of my social media has felt anything but, well, social. I adjusted immediately to the time difference without any jet lag. I woke up at 7am with the sun on my first day. And then I realized my California compatriots wouldn’t be awake till 4pm my time. Shit.

It’s not as if I have no one to talk to during these hours. I have founders in Europe and collaborators that are in these central time zones. But Twitter and my media news diet is strangely quiet in the early hours. It’s almost eerie. There is something disquieting about waking up before the news roundups hit my inbox. Like the world isn’t awake yet. Except obviously in Europe everything has stashed already.

I had no idea just how much my information environment depended on American filtering. It’s not that I was unaware that I was consuming a heavy diet of American media, but most of my news diet enters my feed through the East Coast media centers and is propagated through the lens of Silicon Valley. The Twitter friends I spent the most time with were clearly mostly American.

This is clearly an opportunity for me to branch out my information diet and my social circle. I’m grateful for the reminder. But I can’t help being a little sad that for a month I’ll be so offset from what I know and love. But it’s also exciting.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 394 and Antiwork

There is a Reddit sub that is imploding at the moment called Antiwork. I didn’t really follow it before the extremely online moment where one of their mods demonstrated that internet people don’t generally have media training. But one of the amusing bits of antiwork culture got into my feed because someone had an awkwardly worded tweet about young people demanding at least two days off of work in a week.

Before I became a member of the capital class I wasn’t really much of a weekend person. Or even a time off person. I was in a constant battle to get over the line of survivable earnings in America.

But then the magic of Silicon Valley shined on me a few times and I’m suddenly no longer desperate about medical bills or having enough savings for an emergency. This has had the dramatic effect of completely reordering my priorities. Now I take restorative rest time seriously. Knowledge work and good judgement rely pretty heavily on be clear headed. There is no premium afforded for being exhausted. If anything it will lose you money.

So the antiwork folks might have a point. If so much of your life is spent in survival you never have a chance to really be human. And being human is oddly more lucrative. I stand a better chance of doing even better because I can orient my life around bigger outcomes. That attracts more people and more money and improved my chances. And yeah success compounds if you are lucky. If you can get out from under survival. Which is I suppose the hard part.

Categories
Chronic Disease

Day 384 and Power Save Mode

I was convinced today was Thursday. I sent an email to my doctor confirming the appointment I was sure I had. She sent back a confused but it’s Wednesday response. That’s how I knew I went into power save mode.

I do my best to carefully cultivate reserves of energy. I used to have an attitude of “don’t save any for the swim back” as now I know I need to balance expenditure and recovery. I’ve been stopping when my battery is partially drained. So I wasn’t entirely sure I had over done as it’s been a while since I overshot my energy. That’s progress for me.

Yesterday I missed the signs for a migraine coming on. I was focused on something else and found myself surprised when I was vomiting and needed the lights off. Today I was so drained I went to lay down for a minute and found myself taking a three hour nap. Even though I had a good night of sleep. I wasn’t in a sleep deficient.

I was just in power save mode. I’d gone below the reserves I’ve have so carefully cultivated for the last year. Knowing that I’ll keep working on my reserves. I’ve got big plans coming up and I need to be operating on full capacity. So that means respecting I need to recharge now.