Stress, Sleep, and Asceticism

I really hope I do this subject justice.

It’s important for all manner of reasons. To me personally, yes; but also for life in general.

In my personal life I’ve dealt with a great deal of stress over the years. The life of an entrepreneur is never dull, that’s for sure; but combine that with someone who’s a perfectionist with a decent sized ego (I know I know, working on it) and you’ve got a recipe for unrealistic expectations and the ensuing stress/anxiety bomb that follows.

But these things have serious implications across nearly every aspect of health, productivity, and overall life happiness. For a while I hosted The Deskbound Podcast and interviewed experts in all different areas of health from chronic pain, to sleep, to strength training, to diet, and beyond. I wanted to get a broad view of why, despite there being more options available than ever in the fields of diet/exercise/medical care that so many people are still overweight, sick, and unhealthy?

It was a fascinating journey where I learned a great deal. I read more books than I can count, sifted through research papers with no end in sight, consumed hundreds of hours of talks, podcasts, and more; and I’ve got to be honest with you…I feel weird talking about it the way I am right now.

It might sound strange that, despite what I said above about ego, I generally don’t like bragging or talking about my own work or accomplishments. It always seemed annoyingly needy, as if the approval of others was necessary in order to be happy in doing good work and expanding your knowledge. Yet somehow it also comes across as arrogant, as if the other person hasn’t had their own difficult journey to get where they are in their current level of understanding.

With that said I still felt the need to point it out; because health and wellness is quite possibly the strangest topic in the modern world and public discourse in terms of how we think about our own understanding of it.

Let me explain.

In my time interviewing guests for the podcast I learned the underlying framework of their given areas of expertise. I didn’t want to run another podcast where the host just asks questions and sits there while the person who actually knows stuff teaches for 90% of every episode, and I just sat there listening like a good school boy.

That’s not why people like podcasts. People like them because they can hear great conversations, and in order to provide that I needed to be able speak about their given area with some level of knowledge, then connect that to how it impacts people in their daily lives.

After all, that’s what we all really want to know about pretty much any area to improve in our lives, right?

-What the problem?

-What’s causing it?

-What can I do differently to fix it?

I looked at the broad picture, analyzed every portion of that picture in depth, and learned how they fit into the whole. For example: many of us know that a poor night of sleep or a long night of drinking often leads to skipping the gym, or eating garbage food. I wanted to learn the mechanisms and pathways that cause this to happen.

As a result of this approach I can discuss most areas of health and actually know what I’m talking about instead of regurgitating memorized statistics and “studies”. I can confidently say I know more about this subject than 95% of people, probably closer to 98 or 99%.

DESPITE THAT, when some area of health comes up in conversation half the time the person I’m speaking with implies that they’ve got it all figured out, and they they know more about it than I do. I’m sure that, if I hadn’t told you all this, many of the people reading it would have had similar thoughts regarding their level of knowledge compared to mine.

Hell, I’m sure some of you DO still think that! (and yes, in a few cases it’s true)

But this is what I mean when I say that health and wellness is one of the strangest topics today. We all know so little, but we think we’ve got it all figured out. Even the experts (the REAL ones, not the Instagram model who wants to sell you their special brand of “tummy tea”) are aware of how many aspects of biology that we simply can’t explain. We know more now than ever, but it’s also never been clearer how much we still don’t know.

Now, when people approach this subject with that type of humility, combined with the curiosity to keep learning more and expanding human understanding? That is the essence of what makes science great. To me it’s laudable, and one of the best things a person can contribute in this life.

But for most people who enter into the health and wellness industry professionally, that’s not how they approach it.

It’s all about creating a living that can sustain them, and in the modern attention economy of social media the techniques through which people accomplish that run the gamut from clever and funny, to fairly innocuous, to downright repulsive.

If you’ve never worked in marketing and aren’t well-versed in it, I could take you on a crash course and show you the amount of data people have access to when advertising to you on Facebook. Combine that with a rundown of modern copywriting techniques and the underlying psychology marketers think about when writing it, and you’d leave that conversation feeling downright traumatized. I touched on this subject in the piece I wrote about making social media work for you instead of against you, but I feel it bears repeating.

Here’s the issue: competition between different players in a market forces those players to improve at that competition to survive and thrive. When success in that competition is determined by capturing someones attention and convincing them to do something they don’t want to do (at it’s most basic, give you their money) then you’ve created a situation where people are getting really good at what seems more and more like subtle mind control at times.

And what you have to realize is that people aren’t just using these techniques when they’re trying to sell you something. It’s the modern attention economy. Sometimes they just need to get your attention with the article they’ve written and that’s the first step of many they have in place to movie you towards buying something; so the science of writing compelling headlines, or framing an entire article in a way to touch on various “emotional triggers” has evolved rapidly as well.

Yes the goal might be to inform, but on the way to that end they might frame the material to disparage people who hold the opposing view to engender an “us versus them” mentality. Or they jump on the latest health trend and frame it as this deep dark secret that people have been keeping from you, as if they have access to some hidden wellspring of knowledge that they can share, which leads to us (the reader) having all sorts of inflated perceptions about what we think we know versus what we actually know.

All for the sake of getting you to listen to them and potentially buy their stuff. Hell of a way to get an education in biology, eh?

So with all that in mind and having spent as much time on this subject as I have, I’m going to break it down for you.

Here’s what we know for a fact about diet and exercise:

ANY amount of (almost) ANY type is better than none.

(I say almost because there are a few bad actors in the mix, but usually those are easy to spot(I’m looking at you, Alkaline diet!).)

Sure, there are varying levels of effectiveness for different exercises, diets, genetic components and limitations stemming from where your ancestors evolved over the millennia and the food they had access to, blah blah blah…

If you don’t do exercise, do some. Whichever type you like doing enough to stick with.

If you don’t eat according to a diet, pick the one that works for you. Again, whichever you stick with and gets the results you want. The ONLY other thing I might add as a universal truth in health is that it’s best to eat less processed food. But that’s about it.

I’ve said before that healthy lifestyle is a marathon, not a sprint. Whichever approach leads to the highest level of adherence over the long term is the best one for you. Full stop.

But this piece isn’t about diet and exercise. Instead, I wanted to shine a light on an area of health and wellness that gets far less attention. One that, after everything I learned over the years and in my time hosting the podcast, I personally think is THE most important when it comes to long-term adherence to healthy life choices, and that’s stress.

Most of what follows is taken from a talk I gave at the WDS conference in Portland in the summer of ’18, edited for a more readable format and updated with what I’ve learned since then. So again, without further ado:

Stress and Evolution

In the study of evolutionary biology, it’s said that there are four primal instincts that drive most of human behavior (the four Fs of behavior): fighting, fleeing, feeding…and sex.

The presence of these (or anticipation of them) creates a series of chemical reactions that can change us down to our very DNA. On the fighting and fleeing side of things, all creatures (including humans) have a built in “biological trump card” to help cope with events of extreme danger. Many of us have heard of what we call “hysterical strength”, people being able to accomplish incredible physical feats when the chips are down, like a mother lifting a car when their kids were trapped under it during an accident.

Now whether events of this nature happened exactly as reported is questionable, but the fact of the matter is that during events of extreme danger to us or a loved one, physical capacity is pushed beyond our normal limits. This is the mechanism I’m interested in, and here’s a sampling of how it works:

• Heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate increase
• Reserves of energy in our muscles are freed up for immediate use
• Blood vessels on muscles are dilated so they can absorb more energy
• Tunnel vision occurs so the focus is on the threatening thing
• Slowing or stopping of digestive processes

This is all for the purpose of increasing chances of survival. In the medical world this is referred to as “the fight or flight response”, and it goes by another name that most of us are more familiar with…

Stress: Our Biological Trump Card

In the medical community stress is referred to as “the fight or flight response”.

This function of biology that’s designed to help improve our odds of survival in an environment that’s hell bent on killing us can wreak some serious havoc when it’s misapplied in the modern world, and that happens all the damn time:

• An argument with the spouse or kids
• An important work meeting
• The barista who screwed up your order at Starbucks
• The idiot in front of you on your commute to work
• An annoyingly slow or spotty internet connection
• The nonsense said or done by the politician from the opposing party which is littered all over your social media newsfeed

This causes many problems, but one particular area of concern is…

The Nervous System…and You!

The autonomic nervous system has two main branches. The Sympathetic Nervous System (aka the fight or flight side) is more active during daylight hours, and highly active during the fight or flight response. The Parasympathetic Nervous System (aka the rest and digest side) is responsible for stimulating activities that occur when the body is at rest: sexual arousal, salivation, urination, digestion, sleep, etc.

These work together to ensure adequate resources are being gathered to survive on, while also having enough time for the body to heal itself. When they are in balance, everything is fine and dandy.

The problem is, in the modern world they are not balanced!

In the primitive world, they oscillated like sound waves. Activity in the rest and digest side would before wake up and as the day progresses, while activity in the fight or flight side would increase as the work of the day was done. This wasn’t just in dangerous situations, the fight or flight side is more activity during general physical labor as well. This would peak sometime ain the afternoon, then reverse course and gradually prepare people for rest and sleep.

But in the modern world having an over-active fight or flight side and an under-active rest and digest side fairly normal. A study from 2007 found that 1/3 of Americans were dealing with extreme stress, and about half said that their stress had increased over the last five years. Does anyone think that, 12 years later, these numbers have gone down?

I doubt it.

In fact, an article from two years ago even went so far as to refer millenials and generation x as “generation stress”, that’s how bad it is. This causes a number of issues, but one of the biggest ones has to do with sleep.

You see, the body perceives this imbalance between fight-or-flight and rest-and-digest activity as constant threats to it’s safety, which were much rarer in our hunter-gatherer days than you might think. To deal with these threats the body makes sure “all hands are on deck”(biologically speaking) to ensure survival. Sleeping has become a luxury the body can’t afford, so no matter how tired we are sleep will not come easily.

I think this phenomena is best described by the title of a book written by one guest I had on the podcast, Dr. Nerina Ramlakhan:

And we don’t do our bodies any favors when it comes to this problem.

After all, the mechanisms at play here don’t sit still. They are flipped on and off in response to our actions, which we engage in blissfully unaware of the damage that’s being done.

Things that elevate fight-or-flight activity:

• Stress and anger
• Caffeine
• Light levels (both UV and non)
• Physical activity

Things that elevate rest-and-digest activity:

• Eating
• Deep breathing
• Low levels of light
• Meditation

There are MANY more things that impact than what I’ve listed here, but these are the most relevant for this discussion. That said, there’s one more issue that has a massive impact on sleep problems that needs addressing before we move further:

Information Overwhelm

In the modern world we spend too much time consuming information, and not enough time processing it. Some examples that may apply in an average day:

• Wake up: check social media feeds
• Listen to a podcast or audio-book on the commute
• Check email, meeting about new initiative, stressful sales call
• Reading a book while eating lunch to improve your skill-set, or scrolling through your social media news feed on your phone
• After work we talk with our friends or family about that thing we saw online, the latest news and gossip from our friends, or that dinner tomorrow with the Smith’s we stupidly agreed to

We overload our short term memory without ever taking the time to process the information and move it to our long term memory. This has particularly dangerous consequences when it comes to sleep.

Many people are familiar with the circadian rhythm, the 24 hour clock that the body operates on which gets all mucked up when you travel to a different time zone. But there’s another system at play here, known as the Ultradian Rhythm. This refers to the 90-120 minute cycles that occur during sleep, what many people refer to as our REM cycles.

There are many phases of sleep occur within each cycle, REM sleep is just one of them. However, a crucial function occurs during REM sleep: the processing of information gathered throughout the day. And when there’s too much information to process, the REM sleep cycle gets greedy and begins occupying a larger and larger slice of each cycle. This can cause it use time that would have been spent on the other sleep cycles, making the time you spend sleeping less effective in the process.

Having too much information to process at the end of the day does two things: 1) it makes falling asleep more difficult because your mind is racing, and 2) it reduces the quality of your sleep, making you feel less rested even if you get a full 8 hours.

Ok…But What do I DO About This?

There are a few things that can be done to combat this. I do a number of these myself every day, others as the need arises:

• Process information throughout the day
  • Take information breaks every few hours. I personally like going for walks outside and listening to instrumental (no vocals!) music
• Cut the flow of information off (create a “digital sundown”)
  • Turn off ALL digital devices AT LEAST one hour before bed, AND put them in another room
• Heavy duty pre-bed processing of information
  • Journaling, meditation
• Dim the lights
  • Turn off overhead lights and turn on dimmer table lamps to allow the rest-and-digest side to be more active
  • *I personally think lights are THE most underappreciated environment factor in sleep. The image below helps explain why.*
• Only engage in low stress, rest-and-digest activating activities during digital sundown
  • Fiction reading, listening to music, talking with significant other, the fourth F of behavior…

Now that we’re all sufficiently freaked out, let’s apply some stress lowering techniques and take a deep breath…

After reading the above most people will have identified more than a few ways in which their daily habits contribute to elevated stress. This frequently elevated state of stress causes all manner of issues which is a topic worthy of it’s own separate post. It’s well documented in the book Adrenal Fatigue by James Wilson. However James’ prescription of what to do about this involves taking a number of remedies and supplements (which his company can conveniently sell you), and that’s a point upon which he and I disagree.

In my opinion, whenever lifestyle habits can be altered in a minor way to produce a desired outcome that’s preferable to consuming an external thing which you can then become dependent on. The techniques mentioned above in the sleep hygiene checklist are all useful tools that I recommend, and I’ll lay out some more shortly.

Another excellent book on the subject is Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky. While it’s a very informative (and at times, very funny) book, it’s INCREDIBLY dense, so I only recommend it if you really want to dig into this stuff.

Here are a few other points I’d like to highlight, in no particular order:

Get Your 7-8 Hours

As someone else has said before, “there’s no biological free lunch”. No amount of supplements or health hacks can change this fact. You need 7 hours of sleep MINIMUM, ideally 8 or 9.

Insufficient sleep elevates stress and fight or flight activity. Elevated fight or flight activity makes it harder to fall asleep, AND makes your sleep less effective. Round and round it goes until you’re completely miserable. Just get enough sleep, damnit.

High Stress and Poor Sleep Cripple Diet and Exercise

Remember at the start how I said the best approach to diet and exercise is the one that leads to the highest level of adherence over the long term? Well, a meta-analysis of 168 different studies on the subject found that 72.8% of them support the idea that higher stress is associated with lesser amounts of physical activity and exercise.

This shouldn’t be news. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t given the gym a big middle finger and picked up a pizza on the way home from an overwhelmingly stressful work day at least ONCE in their lives.

Put the Damn Phone Down!

As I discussed in earlier in this piece as well as the one I wrote on saving your attention from the social media vampire, our phones and the apps on them are designed to capture our attention by any means necessary. Social media is the biggest contributor, and it’s only going to get worse over the next year as the American presidential election season ramps up. My recommendation for this is the same as before:

• Delete Facebook and Twitter from your phone
• Optimize your Instagram by unfollowing accounts who tend to induce a stress or anger response from you

Do the same with Reddit or any other apps you use regularly. If you can’t bring yourself to delete Facebook and Twitter(which should be alarming in and of itself), at least try to optimize who you follow so your feed doesn’t exacerbate the problem.

This is an area of interest for me that I think will only get more and more important as technology becomes more and more entrenched in our lives. Much like how someone needs to be vigilant about what foods they consume to have a strong and healthy body, as technology advances people will need to become more vigilant about what information they consume to have a strong and healthy mind.

This is where the ideas of digital minimalism/digital asceticism come into play, which I think more people need to embrace.

Analyze Every Area of Life

The last thing I want to recommend is a sort of a broad self-analysis of your daily life, seeing what you can change to lower stress/increase happiness. This is something I tend to do regularly throughout life, and it’s part of the reason I’ve decided to quit living as a digital nomad and return to the US.

Here are some examples of problems I’ve identified in my life and subsequent changes I’ve made:

• Problem: I hate commuting to work by car, particularly during rush hour. I’ve only been in one (very minor) car accident in my life, but it was enough to realize how dangerous it is, and how little most people appreciate that fact. Plus, commuting by car during rush hour is incredibly rage-inducing.
• Solution: I’ll never again live in a city where it’s not at least somewhat feasible to get around by bicycle(I decided on Denver as my destination when I go back). Physical activity helps burn off that flood of chemicals and hormones we get during the stress response, and with instrumental music it’s a great way to do some information processing at the end of a long day.
• Problem: Every thing I’ve done as my vocation over the past few years (teaching, entrepreneurship, and now coding) requires a great deal of mental energy and focus to do to the best of my ability. This can get very draining and stressful when additional responsibilities stack up with no end in sight.
• Solution: To that end, I try automate or complete ahead of time as much of my decision making as possible, such as:
  • Developing morning and evening routines, and having them easily accessible from my phone’s home screen if I need a reminder
    • This is a way of saying “Break glass in case of emergency: tired, stressed-out, short-sighted Brandon can’t figure out what the hell to do right now! That’s why calm collected Brandon planned ahead, just follow these instructions.”
  • Cooking my meals for the week ahead of time on Sunday
    • This addresses the questions of: “What should I eat?” and “Should I eat something healthy?”at the same time
  • Choosing the clothes I’ll wear for the day the evening before
    • It’s a small thing, but I’ve found that every decision in life becomes much easier to make as you increase the time between when you make a decision and when you do the thing you’ve decided on(as long as the thing in question is actually reasonable). I’m sure there’s some interesting psychology about why that is, but for now I’m happy just understanding and applying it to my life.
• Solution(cont): Generally speaking, having a fixed weekly routine helps a great deal here as well, such as:
  • Going to the gym X days, and doing Y exercises on those days
  • Assigning certain chores/activities to certain days, like doing laundry, cleaning, going to the gym, etc.

Optimizing your life to automate or routinize as many things as possible let’s your subconscious mind take over more frequently. And letting your subconscious mind take over is putting it in a state where it can do some heavy-duty information processing, which by now you’ve (hopefully) realized the importance of!

Final Thoughts

I could keep writing about this til the cows come home. But much like with the social media piece I wrote a ways back, I’m 5 hours in, approaching 4000 words, and my back and legs are starting to protest after sitting for so long; so I think this is a good place to wrap up.

I plan to dive deeper into a bunch of these issues later, but I think I managed to accomplish what I set out to when I sat down to right this thing. Let me know if anything I said above is unclear, or if there are particular aspects you find interesting that you’d like me to elaborate on.

Til next time!

Brandon