I think an organism seeks to ease stress,
meaning really distress, to the extent that it has functional alternatives,
i.e. it “knows” what to do. Not all
organisms may have a developed will, but all have functional capacities to do
or not to do according to their structure, what they can reach, touch, convey,
push, pull, consume, digest, or otherwise move about. We as individuals would mitigate stress, too, if
we knew how. Most people are convinced that this is not possible, and if possible then it can't be easy.
If someone showed us what we can ourselves do, we
might manage our life, intelligence, and imagination with less tension,
muscular and social. We could feel at
home in the world. I am interested in
whether or not Ray Peat’s ideas and those ideas he refers to about metabolic structure
generating function and vice versa seem true to me. I’m not a metabolic theorist, but I can see
whether or not salt, sugar, progesterone, thyroid and some others, as I have
used them, improve my experience of my health and well being enough to change
my mind. Because if food and supplements could improve
your mental as well as your physical health, then this would be good news in an
unusual way. There is also a summary of
work on the extracellular matrix by Marco Bischof in Integrative Biophysics, which I’m thinking about here. Conceptually, it doesn’t seem difficult to
grasp that the human body is more like a gel-like crystal with phasing motions,
than a car with a combustion engine. In
fact, the basic integrative biophysics view is so straightforward that when I
had my “aha moment” I had the same sensation you have when you first discover
some danger in seeing the truth. It was too easy.
To mitigate winter stress the mind would have to
be arranged enough to take responsibility for experimenting with simple
substances that are known to ameliorate stress, at least roughly chart
progress, and adapt to the results.
Timing matters. A mind that is completely
consumed with managing anxiety, insomnia, pain, overwhelming emotion, or fear,
may not be able to rehabilitate itself or have the energy to do so. It won’t know where to start and it won’t
have the energy to get started. It seeks
help. The usual motion is to seek an
expert. But an expert’s advice is a
tradeoff of one kind of distress for another.
If I sought help for the purposes of doing away with that help, then my
vulnerability could be relatively short-lived and purposeful. Even ship captains use tugboats but only at
the beginning and end where there is no need for real navigation.
Self-experimentation takes energy reserve and
self-reliance. Securing supplements,
doing homework, charting results, and reformulating experiments is energy- and
time-consuming and requires enormous patience.
You will have to be your own theorist, lawgiver, and citizen. Building a foundation creates the framework
for future health gains. It’s hard to
turn a downward spiral into an upward spiral, but going in the direction of
improvement is exponential. If you are
the one deciding what should be done, then, bonus: you are also becoming a better human being as
you are becoming a better body and mind.
Metabolic integrity can yield a capacity to
think well, to work meaningfully, and to recover with almost no trace of injury. It also exercises the mind and body to the
motions necessary for seeking and finding self-knowledge such as challenging
reading and writing, responsibility, self-sufficiency outside the usual regulatory
systems of education, law, medicine, and enhancing social and physical value in
the environment. You come to know how to
live better than you used to and how to teach others to do so, too, though
there is really no such thing as teaching.
It’s an old story with an enlightenment capacity and sometimes an
apparent political bad end.
The independent, self-directing organism seeks
not only feedback, but through feedback it gets a deeper understanding of its
function in and movement through its environment the same way plants seek
sunlight, and bees seek pollen. They
don’t spend time trying to understand plantness or beeness or predicting their
likely way of dying. They do know how to
move toward light or pollen. By ignoring
our capacities for reflection—often people report simply being too tired for a
meaningful conversation—we do not become a better functioning human being. We cannot choose to become like bees by
letting our faculties atrophy. Direct
experience enlightenment, such as satori, is not to have a mind like a bee in
the body of a human. But you wouldn't want to be hyper-analytical either.
I have heard people say many times, “just tell
me what to do.” It’s particularly
disturbing when students say this. Whatever
answer one might give as a prescription in the form of, “do ______,” is a little
bit immoral because it makes the listener more dependent and the speaker more
prone to expertism. In a complex world
specialization is a means to a surface culture that looks like metabolic,
psychological, social, and political stability.
But it isn’t. It covers deep
distrust of one’s self as well as the political, educational, and medical
authorities without any avenue for cultivating one’s own competencies. As long as you don’t trust yourself, others
can make use of you. It’s exactly a
suspended animation. And I don’t mean
this as a metaphor when an organism is paralyzed by a sense of being an alien
it his own environment.
I suspect, in general, people experience anxiety
because they have been convinced that they can’t interpret themselves as an
organism at home in their environment. They
are disoriented and don’t understand who or what they are. Students tell me they have, “test
anxiety.” I tell them to breathe in a
paper bag and read good books. They are
unlikely to do the first because it seems too easy. They are unlikely to do the second because it
seems too hard. It’s not their youth
that gets in their way but distrust of their environment, internal and
external. They seem to feel always on the verge
of disintegration.
Generalized anxiety is often characterized by
those who have it as a sensation that something terrible is about to happen but
they don’t know what. I think something
terrible is happening when living in
a system drives people to chronic anxiety, but instead of taking that fact seriously
we treat the symptom as the terrible thing, not the conditions which drive it,
such as task-defined overwork, competitive, repetitive performance, or utterly
dull environments like office cubicles or classrooms, or stultifying music. There is great advantage to keeping people
anxious and high-strung for work based on chains-of-command, states of
emergency, shared-governance, debt. Relieving
the symptom is just a prelude toward independent thinking and being. Then treat the cause, too. The prospect of self-understanding is at odds
with the energy needed simply to stay in place without it. What if when Socrates says, “know thyself,”
the first step is to eat lunch with a good friend?
You meet people sometimes who are clearly in a
state of distress, pain. They sound desperate,
really. They clearly don’t feel well,
but equally clearly they are ill at ease with the motions of doing what their
teachers, priests, doctors, lawyers, and psychologists tell them to do. They are additionally horrified at the
prospect of doing something simple themselves to relieve their pain. They have no capacity to identify what is genuinely
threatening and what isn’t. Plato calls
this capacity courage. They are trapped
and they know it without being able to name it because there is no clear
alternative in their view. If they come
to feel better it is a relief. It may
usually be a coincidence. Some people,
some times, can report nothing of themselves in pleasant conversation if not in
terms of, “I have a disease, it has a name ________, and I am prescribed
medication for this, my doctor says I must/must not ________.” They almost never report feeling good, but
they have a meager psychological satisfaction in this medical attention in a
world where they are otherwise a means of wealth transfer. We are referred to as “bellybuttons” in the
health insurance industry. A suffering
person’s world still has some order if an expert tells them it does. That must be an overwhelming psychological
responsibility for a physician, to give patients’ lives meaning.
Ivan Illich calls out the critics of established
medicine when they criticize the profit motive of pharmaceutical and biotech
giants. He says it is less important to
notice that the medical establishment is ineffective at easing degenerative
disease while it makes huge profits, than it is to notice its success in making
people well enough to perpetuate their work in the postindustrial megamachine
that makes people sick as workers, consumers, friends, colleagues. The statesmanlike Aesclepian medicine. It also makes the real art of suffering impossible.
Mitigating winter stress is a real-time unfolding of an organism’s
life in its environment. It’s inherently
exciting because it is radically genuine.
As we become adults we lose the immediateness of the connection between
our crankiness, fatigue, confused mind and the need for sugar by the body to
simply move, think, and decide and continue for itself in real-time. The carefree time when we were children and
slammed the screen door running to the fridge in the summer to gulp down some
orange juice just in order to run back outside again so we could be “it.” This is the young, metabolically sound body
at play, which is the only work of the young body. Homo
ludens, maybe, but the Latin marks it off as proprietary territory. Which is funny because academics are not
known for how much fun they are having.
This is where a Gestalt shift is most needed in
nutrition, stress, and making a meaningful life, I think. Adults act like, and eat like, the metabolism
is a remote black box into which food is introduced, from which we expect our
vital energy for thinking, moving, and judging, but between these two motions there
is no seamless, immediate flow, but only a vague legacy that develops over
years and is then said by experts to be greatly a matter of genetics and chance. Meaning, it’s programmed, but not really. Moreover, it’s easy to market a degraded food
supply to a population that has no confidence in their capacity to judge what
is good for them. The problem is they
don’t have the energy to feel much at all.
Either we see only a remote connection between
eating and energy, or we see eating as only a purely impulse-satisfying
activity in which there is no connection at all among hunger, eating, and
metabolizing. We are convinced that
hunger is our flaw. The darker choices
are the eating disorders in which eating becomes an expression of virtue or
vice in a world where overwork and overstimulation leave no energy for
reflection on the tragedy of wasting one’s energy in motions disconnected from
any ultimate outcome, good or not. At
least one can be redeemed by excellent food choices. I saw a cartoon yesterday. In it a young man is talking to his parents
as if to disclose that he’s come out of the closet. The caption read, “Mom, Dad. . .I’m a
gatherer.”
Interestingly, the Waldorf Schools’ child developmental
theory is partly based on tissue replacement, or at least the loss of the first
teeth, signaling the biological capacity for cell replacement. An old-growth-forest view of the young
body. In this view the child around age
7 reaches a physical competency to have grown a whole new cellular and
tissue-body, which signals the beginning of independent identity in space and
time; a readiness to become an individual imagination with direction and
capacity for making a distinctive home in the environment. While Waldorf teachers and parents introduce
the students to gardening, eating, and food preparation, the nutritional
biology stops there. Often Waldorf
communities are vegetarian, though this seems to undercut the otherwise
imaginative expansion and integration that these curricula are so good at. And otherwise, you’d have to field-dress a
deer instead of chopping carrots.
The stereotype of the emotionally distraught
person sitting in her car eating out of a pint of ice cream is touching because
it is instructive: an organism’s instability
[fatigue, illness, grief] is somewhat relieved immediately by eating sugar, not
by burning fat. Anyone who has ever had
a craving for sugar knows this. We
resist this true thing because it cuts away a lot of complicated needs for
guidance and today, guidance sells. If
we eat for the long-term benefits such as a particular notion of health—low
total cholesterol, say—and a Vitruvian model of shape and proportion, then
there is no real connection left between what we put in our mouths and how we
meet the world as we eat right now.
There are only food rules and remote outcomes. And we are happy if the doctor says our
cholesterol is down, where only “down” matters.
It’s much easier to use food as a virtue project
than to figure out how much improving your metabolism can improve the interface
between your inner and outer environments. The bonus is that food virtue
challenges fewer policy institutions. We
have a food pyramid, a food plate, food labels that obscure nearly as much as
they inform, agricultural subsidies, medicine, pharma, intellectual property, and
biotechnology. We have a lot riding on
not being the agents of what we chew because our choices are attached to a name
that is more or less the darling of lifestyle news, health curricula,
lobbyists, “public health,” a political regime type. “Peatarians?”
Maybe, but best if not for long.
Consumer culture kidnaps our attunement and
discernment and uses it for transfer of wealth that clouds our vision and makes
it hard to see what we are doing and where we are going. Taking initiative to make ourselves well supports
a better, more stable metabolism. It may
start with salting your food and taking some aspirin. And a better, more stable metabolism supports
taking more initiative, ultimately insight.
It’s subversive really, how much the thoughtful use of sugar [the
metabolism’s preferred energy nutrient], salt, thyroid support, progesterone, aspirin,
mineral repletion, light, and some antihistamines, among other things, can do. If Ray Peat is right about these substances
that he calls “protective against” stress, then it isn’t the nutrition or
supplements that are so remarkable. It’s
what happens as a result of experimenting with them that is unusual.
Who would believe you if you said, “I added
sugar and salt to my diet, took some thyroid, got some sun, lowered my
serotonin, and I got some kind of weird enlightenment in return”? That’s why only you can do such a human
potential experiment for yourself. Make
sure you have some coconut oil on hand.
The stunner is that it is so easy to begin to
pull the curtain away on our enculturated assumptions. You start with food and you end with
existential liberty. If you get some genuine
insight about your incredible autonomy and essential unity, and your former
ignorance, then no one could blame you for being a little paranoid about
possessing the knowledge you find out as a result. I mean mainly that it feels a lot like what I
imagine profound unity with one’s environment must feel like. Do you have to die to get that? Take LSD?
Meditate until your limbs are numb?
What if you only had to nourish yourself to maximize energy, support
your thyroid, and read some integrative biophysics theory? Now that would be subversive. Somehow I'm not convinced it matters which way you cut the carrot.
Mitigating winter stress is to recognize our
utterly physical existence in a world where we are charged with denying what
real bodies do, look like, and are capable of. Lowering stress hormones so that your body can
do nervous signaling, feed itself, grow, repair, exchange information, enjoy
sex, sleep, and judge accurately is a deep relief after years of overwork,
caregiving, accomplishing, and pretending like our physical environment is just
a matter of what “happens to you.”
Metabolic robustness has functional benefits, better stamina, no depression
or anxiety. But it also yields deeply
mental, psychological, and social goods.
Anyone who doesn’t do this can’t be expected to understand what this is until
they try it for themselves. You can’t
proselytize a physical state that simply is. "The beginning is near." You can’t convince people that air is
good.
If suicides spike in spring because stress
accumulates over the winter, and if one is not alert to over-stress, or capable
with mitigating it, then spring may be a challenge that a good body that is too
energy-poor, where nervous health has been neglected, cannot at some point
overcome and continue with. The use of
sugar, salt, protein, thyroid, progesterone, pregnenolone, light in the red
spectrum, cyproheptadine are simple, incremental ways to mitigate stress while
planning a new relationship with your environment. I started with walks in the woods and better
attention to socializing and fun. Keeping
a journal of things like temperature, BP, weather, food, supps, and mood is
needed to look back, and then to make a plan to mitigate stress for next
winter.
My friend committed suicide. Could I go to my friend’s family and say, “If
only I had had a pint of ice cream to share with him, he may not have decided
in that moment to kill himself”? I think
this sounds like trivializing a tragedy.
But what if it is just to ennoble what it means to eat together and to offer
food in a critical moment in order to support a very distressed mind with a very
stressed metabolism, and to mitigate that distress with high-energy food? This is where a here-and-now approach to
stress in spring is going. How human and
unifying.
©Celise Schneider 2016
Image: Francisco Leão, https://pixabay.com/photos/ruins-clouds-old-uninhabited-122932/
©Celise Schneider 2016
Image: Francisco Leão, https://pixabay.com/photos/ruins-clouds-old-uninhabited-122932/
Some notes:
Bridges, et al. Percept Mot Skills (2005). Seasonal Changes in Suicide in the United
States, 1971 to 2000.
Woo, et al.
Ent J Environ Res Public Health (2012) Summarizes the data from 1979 –
2012. Spring suicide peak is generally
recognized but the causes are not understood.
Qin, et al.
BMJOpen (2013) Quin, et al.
Demonstrates a correlation between tree pollen and suicide in Denmark.
I have read about a third of the articles,
interviews, Townshend Letters that I know of. The articles explain aspects of the stressed
versus the relaxed metabolism, and the contribution that profit motives,
marketing, and authoritative culture make to degrading the food supply, dependence,
and medical advice. There are around 95
articles on the website.
Ivan Illich.
Medical Nemesis (1976, reprint
2010). Illich explains how the medical
establishment effects the individual capacity to suffer, to make medical judgments,
to live as part of the megamachine. See
especially the section on hospitals as cathedrals of disease in Part II, “Social
Iatrogenesis.”