Category Archives: medical

Exercise and heart rhythm

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If you want your heart to flutter, there are probably other things you would do than elite endurance sports. Surprisingly, however…

Generally exercise is good for your heart, except in some cases of acute heart trouble. But things are not quite as simple as they sound, Scandinavian scientists have found out.

Studies of runners over 40 in the Norwegian “Birkebeiner” race and the Swedish “Vasalopp” race show that the top runners were far more likely to experience disturbances in their heart rhythm than the less “elite” participants. Both those who ran the fastest and those who ran most frequently had dramatically more cases of arrhythmia. In the Vasalopp, those who had participated at least 7 times had 29% more risk compared to those who had participated only once. And those who had run at less than 1.6 times the winning time had 37% more than those who ran at more than 2.4 times the winning time.

The most common disturbance is extra beats, which are considered harmless but tend to be disturbing. However, these people are also more at risk for oscillations, which can be life threatening. This risk is far lower, but even those who survive will usually have to step down from elite competition.

There is as of yet no official explanation for the findings, but the hypothesis that has been mentioned is a larger heart in top-trained individuals.

Source: Dagens Næringliv (in Norwegian), specifically “Vasalopp-toppene mest utsatt for hjertetrøbbel” and “Trener knallhardt – sliter med hjerterytmen“.

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Regular readers will guess why I noticed these articles: Both this year and in 2005, I developed heart rhythm disturbances after a few months of regular exercise. Not exactly a great incentive to continue exercising, although the doctors and available literature assure me it is not life threatening at the current level.

There is a big difference however between me and the elite runners: I don’t run at all, I just walk (although in some cases I walk up long hills, which is an equivalent load to running on flat terrain, but uses the muscles differently.) There is nothing elite about my physical exertions at all. There are two other similarities, though.

Most notably, I have a remarkably low heart rate. Usually my resting pulse is in the interval 55-60, which is on the low end of normal. But late this summer it fell to 50, which is only normal for those who are active in endurance sports: Runners, bikers, swimmers etc on at least local competition level.

In addition, I am not visibly fat. It is kind of weird to even have to mention this, but these days it is normal to be fat if you are not an athlete.

I am pretty sure it is the first of these that is the key here. I believe the extra beats arise as a result of the slow heart rate. In the pause between beats, the heart is probably in some way more susceptible to false clues to start another beat. For most people, that pause is simply too short to trigger extra beats often (without the help of caffeine or romance, at least). As the beat gets slower, the opportunity for false starts increases. That is how I imagine it. I don’t have any medical education whatsoever, but it seems logical and it fits the fact.

So basically I consider myself a control group. If it was just the exercise that caused the change, then it would not affect me, since I exercise much less. But if the exercise causes this by lowering the heart rate below a certain threshold, then it would work for both of us.

Of course, there are (as implied from the start) many other things that can cause the heart rhythm to get unstable. But those are not things that change with the amount of exercise. If anything, exercising more means less time to drink coffee, and surprisingly also less nervousness. Whether it also causes less romance, I won’t have an opinion on. ^_^

***

Note that for most people these days, their pulse is on the high side rather than the low. This has its own problems. If your pulse is above 80, you should have a talk with your doctor about finding ways to exercise in a gradual way so as to build up your heart, and get the heart rate down. Obviously most people in the western world face very different health challenges from what I and the top athletes do! How did I end up in the wrong bin anyway?

 

The body’s dual fuel economy

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For the duration of this essay, we shall assume that eating and exercising are separate activities. If you run a marathon, adding carbohydrates may be a good idea; if you run for the bus, probably not so much.

Since understanding these things is becoming a matter of life or death, I tend to pick it up wherever I find it. And since it affects millions and millions of fellow earthlings, I should probably share it. Let us talk about exercise and body fat.

I read an article in the Norwegian business daily DN. They have a popular section on health and fitness. Businesspeople need to stay in shape, they don’t get it as part of their job. This article said to forget pulse watches and such, and talk instead. If you could (just barely) lead a normal conversation or recite a familiar text, you had the ideal speed for burning fat. Faster than that, and the body switches to burning carbs instead.

This is correct, in the sense that fat is a much more complex form of molecule and takes longer time and more oxygen to burn. Therefore when you exert yourself, your body resorts to sugar, which is what all carbs come down to eventually. Sugar is simpler and burns faster and easier. And unlike fat, you can get energy from glucose without enough oxygen. There is an enzyme that can split glucose and release part of the energy directly. The result is lactic acid, which is then burned later when you get enough oxygen.

(Until recently it was believed that lactic acid built up in the muscles and was the reason why people got stiff and sore after exercise. This is no longer considered a fact. It seems lactic acid is harmless in the levels found during and after exercise. It also leaks easily into the blood and is greedily accepted by other cells who burn it for food or restore it to glucose for later use.)

So it is true that you burn the most fat while you are still breathing freely enough to talk.  But there is a difference between “nothing but the truth” and “the whole truth”. Other authorities urge you to press yourself harder. After all, this carb burning may be faster, but it is less efficient. When you run, you spend a lot more energy than when you walk: Not just per minute, but also per mile. Running is not energy-efficient. And fat is stored energy. If you spend more energy than you eat, no matter how, you will lose weight.

To explain this, we have to look at the body’s use of energy. It actually has two separate but overlapping “economies”. Carbs are fast energy and can be compared to cash, while fat is slower and can be compared to putting money in the bank. Just like most of us carry a little cash on us, the body stores enough carbs for about a day of normal activity without eating. So in theory you only need to eat every other day! But your stomach probably disagrees with this; mine certainly does. Still, there are people who live this way. They are generally in good health and tend to age more slowly, or so they say. (Controlled studies show more varied results.) Whether they are able to concentrate on their work while their stomach is busy faking its own death, I do not know. You may want to ask them.

Since most of us eat every day, many times a day, it is common that our carbohydrate storage fills up and actually overflows. In this case, the body burns carbs first and the fat you eat goes straight at your belly for use in the next famine. If there are still leftover carbs, fat cells try to convert it into fat. However, humans suck at this, and much of the energy is lost in the process. (Well, technically energy cannot be lost. It is spread in your body as heat. So you may want to try a sugar rush during the arctic winter.)

One exception is fructose, a sugar that can be converted to fat in the liver with very little loss. It is a common ingredient in sweets and soft drinks in the USA, but in the rest of the world it is rarely found except in honey, which we probably get less of than we should. In the USA, negative publicity has caused many suppliers to illegally rename their product “corn sugar”. So if you buy something that contains “corn sugar”, you can assume that 1) it will end up as fat if you eat it, and 2) it comes from liars with a bad conscience.  However, if you swear to a high-fat diet, fructose is probably the closest you come to fat while still tasting sweet.

Now instead of fasting every other day, you may decide to work out instead. Let’s say you are not an athlete and so you just go for a brisk walk. In the beginning, your body will mostly burn sugar, because there is already too much of it. During the first part of your walk, your pulse will probably be lower. But after a while your blood sugar will fall slightly, and your pancreas will make glucagon,  the “anti-insulin”. Just as insulin told your body to stow away sugar from the blood and store it first in your muscles and then as fat, it now says the opposite: The liver puts more sugar into the bloodstream, and muscles burn fat in addition to spending their own carbs storage (glycogen – why do they make the names so similar?).

Now while merrily you stroll along, your body is burning both sugar and fat. (Actually it always does, but the fat is only a small part if there is plenty of sugar.)  Now you can either keep walking, or start running.

If you have limited time, running is the obvious answer. You spend a lot more energy that way in the same time. So what if most of it is carbohydrate? That just means your muscles and liver will be reasonably empty even if you have not fasted for a day. So the next time you eat carbs (bread, pasta, rice, cane sugar etc) your body will be busy restocking its glycogen reserves, while using fat as fuel. Instead of the other way around, as it used to be. You still lose weight in the long run, and this probably makes you happy if you have read this far. (There are people who don’t need to lose weight. They are probably doing something else by now.)

But if you have plenty of time, continuing to walk may be more pleasant, and therefore you are more likely to do it again. People, like amoebas, tend to withdraw from what causes pain and stretch toward what gives pleasure. And usually – unless you are really dedicated to your food – you are at least not eating while you walk. So that’s something. ^_^

The thing is, you can keep going much longer when you pace yourself. Muscles can only store so much glycogen (although it improves with regular training). When they begin to run out, you “hit the wall”. Think of it as suddenly having just one engine instead of two. You used to have sugar and fat to fuel your muscles, but suddenly there is only the fat engine running, and that is the slow one. You won’t die (unless you have some preexisting condition) but your body will no longer be able to respond to your will. Even if you tell it to run, it will at best be able to walk, and even that reluctantly. This is a quite unpleasant experience, apart from the stiffness and soreness that you anyway get after pressing yourself. So not motivating.

Therefore, I recommend pacing yourself if you have plenty of time, but racing yourself if you have little time and no heart or lung problems.

I hope you now see how people can have two opposite opinions on this matter and both be right! This is actually something that happens often in this world, and causes conflict or at least discord. By knowing more, understanding more and seeing the whole from a higher perspective, you can overcome this source of conflict and experience harmony and happiness.  ^_^

 

 

The perfect diet

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There is a lot of research about the effects of what goes into our mouth. Today I’ll write about that.

Hopefully you are at least as fed up as I am with minutiae of my calories, so let’s talk about humans in general. This week a new study from NTNU, a Norwegian university, finally revealed what food is best for humans. Well, the moderate number of humans who were tested, at least. And rather than asking the test subjects, these researchers asked the genes: They checked the gene expressions after various types of diets, on the same people as they gradually changed their eating habits.  This way, the test subjects were their own control group.

This test was of the macronutrition, that is to say the main food groups, rather than vitamins, minerals etc. And the genes’ favorite diet turned out to be none of the current big names.

For a couple decades, the low-fat diet got the support of most of the scientific community. After all, the main cause of death was cardiovascular, and there was no doubt that the plaques on the arteries were made up largely from fat. Also the patients with these problems tended to have more cholesterol and triglycerids in their blood, both of these are fats. For good measure, fat people were far more likely to suffer from not only circulatory diseases but also diabetes and even some cancers. The obvious answer was to remove fat from the food. And this also worked, when you took it to the extreme, as with the Ornish diet and lifestyle change, which can actually remove plaque from the arteries and reverse pretty much all the so-called lifestyle diseases.

There is one small problem with this extreme low-fat diet, though: Few people manage to stay on it. The number is said to be less than 5%. You’d think people would do everything in their power to save their life and limb, but that is simply not true. Humans have a hard time resisting their instincts, and the instincts were not amused with eating beans and cauliflower.

Lately the low-carb diet has come into focus instead. It is easier to stick to, since fat really satisfies. It carries most of the flavor, the food stays longer in the stomach, and the brain also feels more fed. Protein is also more satisfying than carbs. And if you eat very little carbs, the body will switch to burning fat instead. Anyway, low-carb and no-carb diets have become gradually more accepted over the last few years.

So what was the message from the genes? None of the above. Of the combinations that were tested, they preferred to get about one third of the calories from each of the three main food groups: Carbohydrates, fat and protein.  (Since fat is twice as energy-dense as the other two, you would need half as much of it in weight to get the same calories.) But in the typical Norwegian diet, some 65% of the energy comes from carbs, in the form of bread, potatoes, pasta and cooked vegetables, sometimes rice.  This caused a mild inflammation-like state in the entire body, as if it was at the beginning of a flu or something. They called it “metabolic inflammation”. In addition, high-carb diet activated genes for cancer, heart disease, dementia and diabetes II. Or so they say.

Another discovery was that many small meals were better than few large, again if you wanted to keep this body-wide inflammation at a minimum. They recommend as much as 6 meals a day,  three main meals and two or three smaller. All of them with the mix of fat, protein and carbs.

***

Of course, there shouldn’t go too many days before some highly qualified experts find out that a completely different diet is even better for your genes. Or perhaps some other part of you.

If only there was this much research into the diet of the soul!

Car tyres vs strolling: Fight!

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If you have hip pillows instead of gut tires, there is no pressing health reason to lose weight. You may still enjoy a stroll in the park though. And so may the people who see you.

“You don’t get rid of the car tires [around your guts] by strolling” wrote a supposed expert at DN.no, the website of the Norwegian business daily that I have followed for many years. The business site has its own health and fitness section, as is good and proper these days.

In Norwegian, we use the word “bilringer” (car tires)  to describe the rings of fat that surround the gut, especially on men. (I believe the phrase “spare tire” is used in English?) It has dawned on people that these adornments of easy life are not good for our health, but what to do?  Strolling in the park is not the answer, says the expert.

I think the expert is mistaken, and probably dangerously mistaken.  Strolling in the park is not only an answer, it may be the best possible answer. If you wake up with spare tires, going on a power exercise spree is potentially dangerous (even life-threatening) without medical supervision. Even if you survive unharmed, you are unlikely to continue for long, due to the unpleasant side effects.  In contrast, taking a walk for half an hour is unlikely to cause more than a mild tiredness and stiffness even for an untrained person, and even that will fade over a few days as the body gets used to being more active.

Now, I don’t have car tires around my midsection myself. In a sense, it would be more motivating if my fat was on the outside instead of around the kidneys, but I assume those with spare tires have those in addition to the kidney fat. Anyway, when I started walking an hour a day (most days) this spring, I burned like 550 calories in an hour. It is safe to say that if I had a couple car tires in addition, I would have burned quite a bit more, since I had to move that extra weight around. So I would probably have started with half an hour, as recommended for Americans, and gradually expanded over the course of the first month.

Of course, the spare tires won’t magically disappear. They will just stop growing, and then very slowly shrink as the months turn into years. But that was how they appeared in the first place, wasn’t it? And anyway, once you get used to strolling, you may want to speed it up a bit, or go a bit longer, depending on how much time you have. Walking is a great way to unwind, after all. If the voices in your head are not friendly, you may want to drown them out with music, which can also be very motivating to move your body (thus the invention of “dance” by our ancestors). Anyway, the point is to keep it enjoyable, or at least not make yourself suffer. If you’re a masochist, save it for the bedroom. Your physical exercise should be pleasant, something you’d miss if you skipped it.

Like a stroll in the park. A long, fast stroll eventually, but still. If you have car tires around your middle, strolling is exactly where you should begin.

 

Recharging muscles?

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Still not sure about the muscles and energy thing. After I came home on Saturday, my pulse remained 10-15 beats above normal for at least a couple hours. I was also warmer than normal. According to the “muscles store energy” theory, this probably came from my leg muscles recharging, drawing energy from elsewhere in the body. But as I said, Wikipedia and a couple more pages of highly respected websites don’t believe that muscles can store energy like a battery, just a substance known as glycogen, basically very densely packed glucose (the simplest form of sugar).

If that is the case, then presumably my leg muscles were storing up glycogen by drawing glucose from the blood (where there seems to be no shortage of it, based on recent blood tests – I am not diabetic, but the blood sugar is at or just over the upper boundary of normal). There must have been rather a shortage of glycogen if the mucles had to increase the flow of blood to get enough sugar. You’d think since the heart is beating anyway, the muscles could just pick up sugar as it passed.

Yesterday it rained like a bathroom shower, and my jogging shoes soon became soaked all the way through. They are not going to last long if I use them for wading, so I returned home after only about half an hour. That put an end to my plan to check whether the energy reserves had regenerated fully.

Today I took a 1.25 hour walk. I carried my umbrella, even though I only needed it for a short while. I am not sure if carrying something had an effect, but my heart rate was somewhat higher and I burned more calories than on the first trip Saturday, although less than the second. I guess it may count that I also jogged down the other side of the hill and a few other places where my pulse started getting too low to count as training. Burned about 800 calories (kcal), which is pretty decent for that length.

However, I did not trigger a forced recharge this time. There must have been some reserves left, because my pulse almost immediately fell back to normal range. So evidently if I don’t discharge past a certain point, recharge will happen entirely in the background. That is what I thought, since I normally don’t experience any disruption of heart rate or breathing after I took up the habit of walking briskly for an hour.

Then again, according to what I learned before, the body should be burning mostly fat during so moderate exercise. OK, I guess climbing those hills might need some faster energy, but still. In theory the body should use mostly fat, and I have enough of that to walk for weeks.

I wish I had meters in my body so I can see what it is doing. It would be cool to be able to monitor my blood sugar, blood fat, remaining sugar storage and fat storage. Clearly the body does know these things, because it adjusts to them on the fly. But unless I take things to extremes, I cannot actually feel the variations. Then again, thanks to the glucose syrup tests, I seem to have achieved the ability to feel my blood sugar being higher than necessary. It is a kind of acute “fed” feeling, if that makes sense. It is different from the long-term “fed” feeling that comes from having my fat stores reasonably filled. (I am still not fat, thanks for asking, but I have more than I realistically need in peacetime.) So perhaps with the right experience, I may become able to feel other statuses in my body too. If I live that long… Just to be safe, I don’t think I will be running any marathons anytime soon!

***

Edit to add: Found it! The answer from nycgirl here is loaded with useful facts about glycogen.  Evidently even a walker like me has several hundred grams of the stuff, and it is always used in the beginning of any exercise (thus the low pulse during the first quarter, I guess). With slow and steady exercise, fat is burned but together with glycogen. This is probably which happens after I am fully warmed up.  I still don’t know what the trigger threshold is that causes my pulse to rise to the next level (after an hour or so, in my case). I also don’t know where the trigger is for the forced “recharge” after exercise.  Saturday I spent 1300 calories, and did get the recharge effect. Today 800 and nothing.  So more studies are in order.

 

Muscles store energy now?

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“I wanted to talk on the subject of science with you.”

OK, this is kind of weird. I just took a walk and this time walked up two long, steep hills, one atop the other. My pulse stayed around 120 for much of it and only reached 130 near the top of each hill.

I know this is not really international news, but there are reasons for my surprise. Only a couple weeks ago I crossed the first of these hills and slowed down to an amble because my pulse reached 135. That is around the upper limit before I trigger my lifelong exercise asthma. Also because of that asthma, I never did sports as a kid, and my lung capacity never developed fully. A couple years ago it was around 2/3 of normal for a man my age (50 years old at that time). And back in 2005, before the illness that changed me, I would stop twice in a hill shorter and less steep than this. I felt like my heart just couldn’t take the strain of climbing it all in one go.

I am so old that I have to warm up before my warm-ups. And yet for each passing month – if not week – my pulse seems to get lower and lower. That is a bit bizarre, I think.

***

Or perhaps not. After an hour’s walk, I came home and wrote the previous part, then set off again. This time my pulse was normal, and went all the way to 135 before I rounded the first hill. So it is not my heart. Somehow my muscles seem to store energy for the expected challenge, but when I then throw an unexpected challenge at them, they need the help of the rest of the body.

I wonder how the muscles can store up energy like that. There are probably books about it, but I don’t even know what to look for. I know all energy in the human body comes from burning the four food groups: Sugar, fat, protein and alcohol. But I was under the impression that they have to be burned within seconds of the actual energy use, not used to “charge up” muscles in advance.

I guess this explains why I have to walk longer and longer to burn the same number of calories. My body charges up the muscles beforehand (perhaps while I sleep?) and then releases this energy during the first hour of walking. I wonder how they do that. Actually, I wondered so much that I asked Google: How do muscles store energy? It provided links to sites about ATP and glycogen, but they were pretty random. I don’t think Google really understood the question…

My best guess would be glycogen, since ATP only lasts for a few seconds at best. I know glycogen (“animal starch”) is stored in muscles and broken down to glucose during exercise. But that does not really explain it to me: Glucose still needs oxygen to burn, and that oxygen must come through the blood. But the blood already contains glucose. That is what my doctor is worried about, the 6.1 mmol of glucose that is always in my blood, even 12 hours after eating.  Why then would the muscles need to store energy in the form of something that becomes glucose?

I mean, if glucose is a scarce resource in muscles,  if it is the bottleneck and not oxygen, then diabetics should be world champions in sports. There is no sign of that, to put it mildly.

I suppose it would make sense if muscles have some bottleneck in how fast they can absorb glucose from outside. Sugar molecules are not all that big, but they are a lot bigger than oxygen, so it may be that absorbing glucose is slower. So while the supply of glycogen lasts, the muscles need only import oxygen, but afterwards they need to import both oxygen (fast) and glucose (slow). But there is no mention of that in any of the articles I have read, this time or before when I read about physiology. It is as if no one has ever asked themselves why the pulse is low during the first part of exercise. That just cannot be: Humans are too curious for their own good, much of the time. So that leaves me with the notion that the answer is totally obvious to anyone except me.

Please tell me, since Google won’t.

Opposite of starvation

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Which of these represent the opposite of starvation? Sim-Magnus or the imaginary sim-Tuva? The answer may surprise you.

I first wanted to call this entry “anti-starvation”, but that sounds like a humanitarian organization.

I have a few times mentioned my own brush with starvation in 2005. It was certainly not in the developing country manner, but rather a medical situation that led me to steadily lose weight until my body started to adapt to the lack of food in several ways. The most obvious was perhaps the way it influenced my mind, with a kind of chronic hunger, which continued even after eating. There were other changes as well, and one of them may ironically have resulted in its opposite, which is the topic of today.

The opposite of starvation is probably the complex state of health often called “metabolic syndrome”. Actually the professional usage of this phrase may be a bit more precise. But as I am now in a state of pre-diabetes, a still mostly harmless form of the syndrome, I cannot help but notice the parallels.

When starving, my brain stem was hungry even when my stomach was full. I wanted to just keep eating, even though reason convinced me that I would just get sick. Now, it is the other way around: My stomach is bullying me to eat by the unpleasant gnawing feeling, but my brain stem would rather that I didn’t. I feel fed even when I wake up in the morning.  And rightly so.

***

Yesterday a couple hours after lunch I took a fairly long walk that burned 800 calories.  OK, I would probably have burned 100 of them even if I stayed at home, but anyway. I didn’t eat anything when I came home, because I had a doctor appointment next day and was told to fast the night before. So I went to bed, and woke up the next morning feeling completely restored. I could have taken another walk till my legs grew stiff, and probably another and another if I rested a while in between. I was not hungry at all, until my stomach began gnawing.  And my brain stem was right, while my stomach was wrong: My fasting blood sugar was 6.1 mmol. Not sure what that is in American measures, but the recommended upper limit is 6 mmol, and in some publications 5.8. So despite being physically active, I am still pre-diabetic. In fact, it seems that my body has decided 6.1 is the new standard (it was the same last time too), which it returns to after exercise.

This is in theory good news.  Not having to eat is money saved, right? Unfortunately the stomach disagrees. I am still experimenting to find ways to keep it from pestering me. I guess the best I can do is to just keep stopping before I am full, and hope that it will gradually learn to expect smaller and smaller portions.

Feeling over-fed by a small meal is certainly less unplesant than feeling hungry after a big one, so I can see why people just keep forging ahead until they get diabetes, hypertension and atherosclerosis. After all, we are programmed by our instincts to avoid starvation if possible. The safeguards on the opposite side are not nearly as formidable. But they are there, if you pay attention. And if you have tried both, you may recognize the opposite of starvation simply by listening to your own body, even before you hear it from your doctor.

***

I mentioned that the near-starvation may have somehow triggered its opposite. The body is known to do unusual things when facing unusual situations. And this is unusual indeed: Before the illness began at Easter 2005, I used to weigh close to 95 kg. (One kg is roughly 2 pounds, but not exactly.) This seemed to be a practical upper limit, as I stayed close to it for a decade or more perhaps. Occasionally I would dip down to 93, but usually I was in the 94-95 interval.

Now the limit seems to be at 88. That is good, right? No, actually, it is not that simple. When I was 95, the fat was distributed differently. I had a larger paunch (gut bulge), true, but I also had permanent fat deposits on my backside and thighs. Not enough to compete with your average housewife, of course, but plenty for a man and pretty obvious when looking back at some of the pictures from around the turn of the century. This kind of fat is harmless, possibly even healthy. It is only released in case of starvation.

And of course that was what happened, even if it went no further than that. No matchstick arms and protruding ribs and all that. But my body fat was gone. And when it returned, it did not return to where it had been. Now it is almost completely concentrated around my kidneys and thereabout. This type of fat, which is more common in men than in women, can be released very quickly to the bloodstream. It does not even take hunger, just stress.  Get angry or afraid, and delicious fat pours into the blood, ready to fuel your battle.

I consider this a poor exchange for my built-in sitting pillow. But this is the kind of thing that could happen if you are successful with your dieting. Luckily, most people give up after losing about 5% of their body mass in fat, so the effect on their body is quite limited. I will probably be one of them if I decide to lose weight at all. The doctor recommends it, although he is satisfied as long as I don’t gain weight, and stay physically active.  The irony is that I am not visibly “fat” at all. I don’t have the other symptoms of metabolic syndrome either, but if I had not convinced my body that it was starving, I might have been fatter and still healthier.

 

Sleep or meditation

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“As a result, the treated subject appeared to lose its sanity and disappeared.” Unfortunately, this also seems to happen to blogs where the owner takes up a practice of meditating for hours a day. It seems to work fine in moderation though. Well, at least for the not disappearing part, so far. For the rest, judge for yourself.

We humans, and most animals, seem to have been made to sleep. Nocturnal animals sleep during the day, diurnal animals sleep during the night. Humans seem to naturally sleep some 9 hours a night, although most of us can get by just fine on 8, 7.5 or even 7. Much less than that and the majority will start to experience negative side effects.  Some have trouble even on less than 8.

Since our furry friends also need sleep (and feathered and scaled ones too), it seems pretty obvious that this need is biological rather than psychological. I mean, you could tell someone that hunger is just a feeling, and he may believe you strongly enough to go on without eating for quite some while, but he would invariably fall ill after a while. It is the same with sleep, if not more so. Pretty much any healthy person can go a week without food (as long as they have water, at least!) but a week without sleep is virtually impossible to arrange, no matter how much you engage the person to keep them awake. And even should you succeed, most will turn clinically insane before the week is over.

So why then is it a scientific fact that some meditation gurus can get by on half as much sleep, or in extreme cases even less?  And that even while they sleep, they still remain self-aware at the very least? Is it a miracle, a divine intervention overruling the usual laws of nature?

Actually there is a more this-worldly explanation, not that this world is not a miracle if you look at it in a certain way. But anyway! When you meditate, your brain waves gradually become synchronized across most of your brain. This also happens during sleep (except for the intense dream sleep, also called REM sleep). We spend some time early in the night in such REM sleep, especially as children and then gradually less over the years. Likewise we also spend some time, especially at the start of the night, in deep slow-wave (“delta”) sleep.  But most of the night is taken up by theta and very low alpha sleep. And this is brainwaves we can also have while meditating.

Usually people spend their meditation time generating alpha waves. This corresponds to a state of quiet and relaxed awareness. The same frequencies appear naturally when we lie down and begin to relax toward sleep, if we don’t have insomnia. Actually, people who start meditating will have a tendency to fall asleep if they get too comfortable.  But for an experienced meditator it becomes easier to stay awake and aware during meditation, and eventually more aware throughout the day… and finally throughout the night, for a few. Those who are able to reliably meditate even during the deeper theta waves, will basically get much of their “sleep” while meditating. The body and the brain both relax, but they remain aware instead of their mind drifting through fragmentary dreams.

So you may say the distracting functions of the brain are asleep, but the awareness is not. This, I believe, is how it works. But anyway, it works, but you are unlikely to see much of it if you start meditating during your midlife crisis. It tends to take a couple decades to get that far even if you start while you are young.

***

What else appeared to me in this context was acceptance. I had this idea that a lot of our sleeping brain activity is about problems, things we struggle with, things we fear or hope for, things we can’t let go of. I know that my own dreams at the beginning of the night tends toward the nightmarish – criminals, accidents, huge spiders –  while late in morning the dreams are often erotic or social, or occasionally religious. So it is a subconscious – or at least unconscious – form of thinking that is more involved than thinking in words. A form of processing. Working through our fears and worries toward what we really wish for.

What if we become more accepting of reality? What if we pare down our worldly desires and our attachment, and thereby eventually our fears? Then the brain would simply not have the need to do a lot of processing of that kind, right? So that may also be another mechanism by which meditation and similar spiritual practices reduced the need for sleep. It may be a two-pronged attack, both psychological and biological.

***

Unfortunately for the topic, I cannot explore this in my personal life. I am not a guru or anything. I began meditating when I was fairly young – in my late teens if memory serves – and did so actively for a while. But I had some experiences that seemed supernatural, and decided to cut down on meditation to avoid this. So after that I meditated only when I felt an intense need for it, for the most part, until now in my middle age where I have experimented more systematically with meditation and brainwave entrainment. (They are not the same thing.)

It does seem from my experience that using deep brainwave entrainment (delta frequencies) does reduce the need for sleep a bit and generally makes me less sleepy during the daytime. But I have not tested using theta brainwave entrainment for several hours a day, to emulate the hours spent in theta each night. I am not sure I am motivated for it even now, even for the sake of science.  Perhaps you or I will come across the writings of some actual guru who can tell us from firsthand experience. I am perfectly happy to take this second- or even third-hand. At least for now. You never know who I will be in the future, if any.

 

 

Happy Science on health

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People suffer in times of illness. But don’t worry, Happy Science is here to rescue you from 70% of it! And they actually have a point.

One thing I am not too fond of about the Japanese religious movement Happy Science, is that only a tiny fraction of their books are translated from Japanese, and of these many are only available at their temples, which presumably means only to members. Being secretive is how you get a reputation for being a dangerous cult, after all.

On the other hand, I can understand them sometimes. One of the restricted books is about health and healing, for instance. Now, even in their official literature, Ryoho Okawa (their authority on absolutely everything) claims that 70% of physical illness originates in the mind. As such, he recommends self-reflection to cure most illnesses, including cancer, since this (properly done) will remove the psychological factors that lead to illness.

You can imagine what would happen if someone in America actually skipped cancer treatment and decided to heal herself purely with self-reflection… and died anyway.  Unbelieving relatives would sue for tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars. That’s just the way American society works: Americans are the world champions of litigation, after all. So I can understand their caution.

Nevertheless, I think even contemporary science will agree with Mr Okawa in general. He specifically includes such factors as smoking and alcohol, but also overworking, lack of sleep and other stress-related triggers. If we add all those up, not just the actual placebo / nocebo effect, 70% seems a pretty conservative number. Of course, even the most mentally healthy person will die eventually, and there are various genetic diseases that need no trigger but will manifest automatically. So unlike some religious sects in the west, Happy Science does not promise physical immortality to the faithful. Nor do they condemn the sick as evil – in fact, Mr Okawa says right out that good people are more disposed for certain illnesses.

Also unlike many western sects, faith as such has only a limited role here. What counts is to look objectively at our life (this is what self-reflection is about, it is not about blaming ourselves as I thought when I was younger). And then correct the mind, straighten out the mistakes and begin to think in a better way. Of course, this is not something that is done in five minutes. It is a lifelong project in one sense. But it will never start at all if we spend our life blaming others or fate or God or the Devil.

If you have faith in God or Buddha or Jesus Christ, then you should do what they tell you, right? To say “I have so much faith” and not really care what Jesus actually tried to tell people, that is not faith. Jesus said that he did not know where these people came from, who didn’t actually do as he said. So faith in our faith is of limited value, it would seem.

(As for relevant teachings from Jesus Christ on the topic of stress, how about “worry not about the day tomorrow”, or “[forgive your brother] not seven times, but seventy times seven”? I am sure these could cut down a lot on people’s stress levels. Jesus even seems to have taught meditation, since he specifically tells his disciples to “not let your thoughts wander here and there” (or “back and forth”). Well, enough about that for now. Jesus’ immediate followers tended to die by persecution anyway, so it was unlikely they would hand down an extensive lore on healthy living!)

Back to Happy Science. In their monthly magazine issue 207, there is a story about a woman who decided to forgo chemotherapy for her breast cancer, and instead heal herself. This was successful, which is probably why it appeared in the magazine. Somehow I suspect they would have been far less inclined to publish a story in which the protagonist died. Anyway, her cancer gradually disappeared, to the amazement of the doctors. Good on her!

But if you are a member of Happy Science and you read that story and what you take away is “Master does not want us to go to hospitals for treatment”, then you have not understood – in fact, you will in a sense have less understanding than you started with! If you want to follow a religion in a way that actually impacts your life, then you must study it in more detail, and if you do not understand it, you must ask those who have a greater understanding of the Truth, people who for some reason are more spiritually advanced than yourself. Don’t just think whatever idea pops into your head is the right one.

It could be worse. If you read a story like this and think “I also want to become famous”, or “I want everyone to see how good a believer I am”, then you are actually hurting yourself. This is not hard to understand. When you try to put yourself up above other people, this is the kind of thinking that demons have. The story of Satan tells how he could not bear being less than number one, and this was his downfall. Whether you take that literally or not, it is certainly a word of caution. Don’t use your religion to play cool. Or your health, for that matter. Let us treat it as a gift and a way to be useful to others.

Now, the woman in that story did not just reflect on herself. She changed her life. She began to eat healthy food and exercise vigorously. I am not sure how this affects breast cancer, but I know that in men, vigorous exercise for more than three hours a week can stop or slow down about half of prostate cancers, apart from any other intervention.  So we are not talking about some kind of “Harry Potter magic” here, but about living life in the way we humans were created to live.

And that’s the thing, is it not? You don’t need to be God to have an idea about how humans should live, although I suppose it wouldn’t hurt… Anyway, I’m not telling you to fall down and worship Ryuho Okawa. I personally don’t. But I think Happy Science’s public teachings on health could have a natural place in school textbooks and popular science and lifestyle magazines. The world would almost certainly be better for it.

 

…or your time back!

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In Japanese thought, it is not uncommon that the flow of time can stop. Perhaps there is more to that than we have known, in a manner of speaking.

I wish I could guarantee my readers full satisfaction or their time back, but that may be a bit over the top even for me. There are others who can actually give you time back, though. Jesus, Morpheus and your local training studio come to mind. What?

Well, it all began when the Norwegian National Broadcasting told about a Danish study. It looked at elderly people who habitually either went to church or listened to the church service on broadcasting. The women who did this lived on average 2.6 years longer than the control group who did not. For men the profit was slimmer, only 1.6 years.

It is worth noting that Denmark, like my native Norway, is a post-Christian country. For the last couple generations at least (which I remember) the norm has been to not be Christian, except for certain ritual like church weddings and funerals. So this is not a case of the poor unbelievers being harassed and stressed to death. On the contrary, at least in youth it is pretty common for Christians to be harassed. I bet it is no better for other religious minorities, but evidently this study was of Christians.

What struck me as I reflected on this, was that these 2 years of extra life may have been similar to the time they had spent over the decades listening to sermons and singing hymns etc each Sunday. How about that?

It is not like it would be completely unique. Many years ago I read a theme issue of Scientific American about aging. One point was exercise. The article said that if you start exercising at 40, the extra hours you add to your life are about the same as the hours you spend exercising. So for those of you who think exercise is hell on earth, you may as well cut it out unless you expect a worse hell after life.

But even this is not unique. Another study a few years ago showed that sleeping an extra hour adds an extra hour to your life. This only works up to about 9 hours a night (it varies a bit from person to person). After that, sleeping more correlates with shorter life. That may be because only a sick person could sleep that long, perhaps. But what is certain is that most of us sleep less than what would be good for our health. This has various side effects, like inactivity, overweight, diabetes and hypertension, and eventually an earlier grave.

On the other hand, we pay bills for every month, so if we could be awake the same number of hours in a shorter time, we might come out ahead financially. That is certainly possible, but I think I am curious enough about the future that I want to live a bit longer if I can. Even if it means sleeping a little longer, taking a long walk each day and perhaps even spend some time (or timelessness) in spiritual practice now and then.