Lights Out

Last month, I was gifted a book that has already made a sizeable impact on the way I live my life.


Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival

The cover of the book pretty much says it all. The author makes the case that the single most important thing you can do to improve your health is simply to get enough sleep.

The basic reasoning is this: for most of our existence, man experienced long days in the summer and short days in the winter. Yes, we've had fire for thousands of years, but gathering flammable stuff to burn takes energy, and firelight isn't really all that great to work by, so we still mostly went to bed when it got dark until we invented electric lighting about 100 years ago.

Our ancestors survived to pass their genes down to us because they learned to get fat (and, in the case of women, pregnant) by August so that fat pad would sustain them all winter (and babies would be born just in time for the summer of plenty). The genes we got from them still carry the instincts to do exactly that.

How does it all work? While the book is an easy read for someone without a science degree, it really gets down into the nitty-gritty of how your body works. I'll try to distill the big points:

1. Your brain makes melatonin when it gets dark out. It stops making melatonin when it detects light--even if your eyes are closed. It makes prolactin shortly after it detects melatonin, which then circulates around your system for several hours. Melatonin is not just something that makes you sleepy, and prolactin isn't just for lactating. They're your immune system's fuel: they makes white cells, T cells, and NK cells. They're the reason sleep helps you get over illness.
2. Prolactin also makes you crave carbohydrates (because it suppresses leptin, the hormone that tells your brain you're full). Long nights mean prolactin is low when you wake up. Short nights mean prolactin is high when you wake up, your sugar craving is turned on all day. Plus, you're autoimmune (asthma or allergies much?) from all those prolactin-fueled T and NK cells running around attacking everything inside you.
3. Cortisol is the hormone that helps you deal with stress. It's produced when you're running around, jumping, climbing, worrying, frustrated, and--you guessed it--bathed in the light of long days, which long ago signaled mating season--stressful for the men competing over the women, and stressful for the women being pursued by horny men.
4. Your body makes insulin when blood sugar goes up. Blood sugar goes up when you eat carbohydrates, and when your cortisol levels are high. Insulin is the storage hormone. It lets your body convert carbohydrates into stored body fat and cholesterol.

Here's the crux of the matter: staying up all night means you spend your days pumped full of prolactin that makes you crave carbohydrates and the insulin to help you store them as fat. Try to exercise those carbs off? You'll just produce even more cortisol, and even more insulin as a result. This would be fine for 3-4 months a year, as was the case for thousands of years. Doing this 12 months a year is a recipe for diabetes, heart disease, obesity, depression, and a whole litany of other modern ills that have surged in the last 100 years.

There are whole chapters devoted to other biological processes, like the relationship between melatonin/insulin and dopamine/serotonin, or how your body digests and makes use of all the different types of food you eat, or the fact that numerous scientific studies point to high levels of melatonin as protective against cancer and low levels of melatonin as cancer-causing.

I really enjoyed this book and can't summarize here all the details or even all the highlights, but I love that I now understand the way my body works. When I talk to doctors at work now, I speak their language because I understand the complex relationships between environmental cues, diet, and all the various endogenous hormones and symbiotic bacteria swimming around inside me.

As for the way the book has impacted my life aside from increasing my knowledge base, I've begun turning off the lights and going to bed earlier. And without even trying that's led to the following outcomes:

I wake up without an alarm clock.
I don't crave carbohydrates, and have all but eliminated bread and pasta from my diet with very little effort.
My mood is stable throughout the day and throughout the week.
I have stable, non-jittery energy all day long, without needing a nap around 4pm.
I have mental clarity and focus all day.

All in all, some pretty awesome dividends from reading this book. It was a pleasurable read, sprinkled with research, metaphor, and even a couple jokes here and there.

"Won't going to bed at 9pm affect your social life? Sure, but so will diabetes and cancer."

On love

As I recently stated, there are two things that make life worth living: passion, and love.

Some people say that love is something that happens to you. You fall into it. You surrender to it. Some people say that love is a series of chemical reactions in the brain. They say that it's "nothing more than a feeling".

Those people are wrong, at least partly.

Some people say you should be careful with whom and how you fall in love. These people differentiate between "true love" and that which is not true. They say love is rare. They say you can't love what you don't know. They say you must guard your heart against making the mistake of loving the wrong person.

Those people are wrong, too.

Let's consider first the argument that love is a feeling. This is perhaps the fault of our language which is, to paraphrase William Golding, the straight-jacket of our experience. We say that we "feel love." In this way, we equate love with other feelings - other chemical reactions - like euphoria, sadness, excitement. In truth, these are not good comparisons. These feelings are all simply states of being. We don't feel love the way we feel happiness or sadness. The feeling we call love is a feeling of perception, not merely a state of being. We say that we *are* sad, but we say that we are *in* love. With these word choices we reveal that we perceive sadness as a state of being that defines us, but love as something that we feel when it envelops us, just as we feel the sun when its warmth envelops us.

Love, unlike sadness or happiness, is also uniquely a feeling that is also a verb. You can't sad, you can't hungry. You can only *be* these things. But look at how we use the word love: we love our family, we love our friends, we love the city, we love the mountains. Love is an action. We are the doers and receivers of an action called love. We love and are loved. Although the feeling of love originates within us, unlike other feelings, it always and necessarily involves both a subject and an object. We cannot feel love unless someone is engaged in the act of loving, whether it is our own act of love towards others that we feel, or others' acts of love towards us.

If love is an action, does that then mean that it's a choice? Absolutely. Love is not just something we fall into, surrender to, or something that happens to us (although it does indeed often have its way with us). We can choose to love as easily as we can choose to climb mountains, which is to say: with purpose and intention. We don't (usually) find ourselves suddenly at the top of the mountain without having chosen to get there, but if we make up our minds and set out for the summit with purpose, we will eventually arrive.

The trickier question is whether we can choose not to love. We can certainly harden our hearts and close ourselves to the possibility of love for people and things. Perhaps because someone has the wrong religion, the wrong politics, or the wrong ideas, we close ourselves from the potential to love them. We find it much more difficult to choose to stop loving, which is perhaps why we begin to speak of love as something uncontrollable that happens to us. Once we've begun to love someone, whether absent-mindedly or with fullness of purpose, we have a hard time stopping. Love is addictive. We are truly "hooked on a feeling." Love is addictive because, like anything else addictive, it feels good when we're doing it. The cynics who talk about love being a series of chemical reactions aren't wrong (they're just not seeing the whole picture).

Those of you familiar with my stance on addiction will know that I don't consider addiction per se to be a negative thing. It is addiction to harmful and damaging things which is negative. Indeed, could there be anything better than addiction to something which is only beneficial? Love, like anything else addictive, is addictive even when it hurts. And like most things that are addictive, it's the sudden absence of our drug of choice that makes us hurt.

The good news is, there's no permanent damage done. We've all been hurt. Many of us have fallen in love and had our hearts broken. Or maybe we've lost a loved one to illness and death. Yet here we stand today…and we're all just fine. Most of us, in fact, are better than fine. We have wonderful memories that remind us what the great possibilities for our lives are. We often retain deep bonds with our former lovers that, despite all the difficulties and the heartache, remain much stronger than our other human connections.

Some people, recoiling from the pain of heartbreak, are like the addict going clean: they steel their hearts and determine never to love again. I'd like to suggest a second option: soften your heart and determine to love more. (We could call it the ibogaine option.) If it's the absence of love that is causing you pain, then go get more love. It's inexpensive, can be found anywhere, it's infinitely reproducible, and a steady supply has no known negative side effects.

The only reason we think we can't just go out and get more love is because we insist upon creating an artificial shortage. We create a false economy of love with all our admonishments to be careful with whom and how we fall in love, with our hesitancy and our guarded hearts, with our insistence that true love is rare and everything else we might think is love is false. It seems that we are afraid that if love is common, it won't be valuable. That if we love everyone, then our love for our chosen life partner is less significant. This couldn't be further from the truth. Is air less valuable because it is abundant? Is water? Love is as critical to our health and well-being as air and water, so let's sow it as common as dandelions and know that that makes it no less special or important.

Let's choose love. Let's create love. Let's be love.

On passion

The two things that I believe make life worth living, and give humanity any hope of surviving, are love and passion.

Passion seems to be the easy one. Passion is what invigorates you, what you do for the pure experience of doing it, what makes you wake up in the morning happy to be what you are.

It's cliché to say, but Burning Man changed my life. I had heard of the giant party that was Burning Man, and that was true. I had heard of the freedom and self-expression that was Burning Man, and that was true, too. What I wasn't prepared for was the way Burning Man would shake my emotional foundations. A campmate said to me, "We all bring our own baggage to Burning Man." Even as I tried to treat Burning Man as a vacation to get away from it all, it all weighed on me and made itself known.

Everything I tried not to think about and tried not to acknowledge, everything I buried so deep inside of me came bubbling to the surface in that desert. The lies I told myself to get by in the real world became transparent on the playa, prompted by nothing in particular except the radical honesty of the culture I was temporarily inhabiting. It was contagious, this honesty. I wrote letters to friends from the depths of myself, expressing my true feelings without fear of misunderstanding or poor reception. Most importantly, I was honest with myself for the first time in a long time. I confronted my fears, I admitted my desires, I reveled in my inherent self.

And on the night of the temple burn, just when I was thinking I'd figured this whole thing out, I cried. I cried without knowing why I was crying, only that there was a deep and aching sadness inside of me. I cried because I felt alone in a crowd of 50,000 friendly strangers and a dozen close friends. I cried because I felt that I wasn't supposed to cry and because I wanted nothing more than to cry. I cried for every vague moment of sadness that year that I had ignored and pushed down into a tiny little ball inside of me.

Later, after the burn, I sat and talked with two campmates who were also struggling. In a moment of clarity, after lamenting the conditions of my off-playa life, I said, "It's just that I have nothing in my life that I'm truly passionate about."

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew how true they were, and was amazed that I had ignored such a simple fact for so long. I was stuck in a rut of work and mundane socializing, with no connection to a larger picture, no impact on the world, no projects I was completing--nothing that I could say I was truly passionate about. Of course I was unhappy. I resolved then and there that when I returned to Camp Reality, I would make passion a priority and not an afterthought.

Upon returning, some of the first things I did were: to re-enroll in belly dance courses to remain passionately connected with my body. To resume my volunteer activities with the local animal shelter, to remain passionately connected with my community. To honestly address my relationships with the people closest to me, to remain passionately connected to my loved ones. And, to get a tattoo that would forever remind me that passion should be a priority, and not a last resort:



I will never again forget the importance of passion in my life. My commitment to myself is to live my life, always, with passion.

I'm very much looking forward to Burning Man 2011.

As for love, that'll have to wait for another blog post that I promise will be coming soon.

All I Need to Know About Relationships I Learned from My Cats

At the risk of sounding like a "crazy cat lady", I think that maybe it's my cats that have ruined me for relationships. I was laying in bed when Mouse jumped up and settled down next to me. I petted him, and he began to purr. I told him I loved him very much, and though he didn't answer, I know he loves me.

He's not what you think of when you imagine the perfect roommate. I have to clean up after his poo, he makes a mess whenever he eats, he gets his hair all over everything I own, and he's quite fond of trying to see how much noise he can get a plastic bag to make at 5am when I'm trying to stay asleep for one more hour. He's a mooch, of course, eating food that I buy and visiting the vet annually at my expense, and contributing no income to the house.

I'm no perfect host, either. My travels take me away from him for days at a time occasionally, he's left alone for large swaths of each day while I'm at work, and I make him eat the same thing day in and day out ad infinitum. I've even stumbled over and sometimes stepped on him a few times.

Yet we love each other. For all our flaws and inadequacies, we have a bond that can't be broken. He doesn't judge me when I spend an entire day in my pajamas watching Sex and the City. When I have a bad day and finally get home to cry, he's there in an instant to nuzzle my cheeks and groom my bangs. And all he wants in return is for me to sit next to him and stroke his fur until he falls asleep.

Isn't that what we are all looking for in a life partner? Someone who, whatever their flaws and whatever our flaws, will curl up next to us at the end of the night and just be in love with us?

Living Alone

Here's the thing about living alone. Whatever it is you love to do, you kinda just start doing, no matter how ridiculous or potentially embarrassing it might be. It makes me dread the day I con some lady/fella into cohabiting with me again and they get to be introduced to my bizarre..."home habits", let's call them.

One of my home habits is talking to my cats.

Okay, and sometimes I sing to them.

...and sometimes I sing songs about them, to them.

Here is a song I just composed for my elder cat, Mouse. I had just let him into the utility closet where the water boiler is, so he can make sure it is free of mice and other vermin.

Mouse the mouser
Hunting mice!
He's gonna put them all on ice!
Hunting them down!
Making them pay!
He's gonna keep all the mice far away!

If possible, try to imagine it sung to a corrupted version of the tune to the Speed Racer theme song.