The Coming Lifestyle Revolution

It appears quite likely that the next 5 years will see the beginnings of a major lifestyle revolution in the developed world. The drivers are the usual ones: science, technology, and computing.

It is rapidly becoming feasible to measure biomarkers (which reflect physiological processes) in real time through noninvasive means similar to the wearing of a nicotine patch. The technology will be able to show blood sugar, heart rate, etc. From these and other markers much information can be inferred.

Many if not most of the early adopters of this technology will be tech-savvy Quantified Self practitioners — people who quantify certain aspects of their day-to-day functioning for self-improvement purposes. The technology will give them continual access to data they normally would receive only every few weeks or months through bloodwork, etc., allowing them to measure the physiological effects of specific actions and situations.

It will soon become apparent that many practices embedded by our modern lifestyle compromise our health and performance not just in the abstract "long term," but on an hour-to-hour timescale. Poor eating practicies, poor sleep, sitting and hunched-over poses, stresses from travel and other sources, etc. will prove to compromise optimal functioning in quantifiable ways.

Many people know these things already, but having numbers to look at in real time will vastly speed up the process of discovery and experimentation. Many of the numbers will confirm our intuitions, helping us to tune in more to our inner sensations. But there will also be many surprises, as is always the case.

Self-Quantifiers will generally be in a position to modify their lifestyles to optimize the signals they're receiving from the devices. A tweak here, a tweak there — and now you've got higher-quality sleep and the improved metabolic and hormonal function that comes with it. Some creative new poses and regimens for using the computer — and now you've gotten rid of 80% of its negative effects. Integrate walking and movement into normally stationary, sedentary activities — and now you're feeling measurably sharper throughout the day.

The numbers will provide the justification. People will grow bolder, even militant about optimizing their wellness in the face of societal pressures. It will start with the QS crowd and soon begin leaking into other segments of the population.

Software will be developed to integrate with the hardware and interpret and track the results for users. One day you may be sitting at the computer for a while, and your smartphone sends you an alert: "Your X has deteriorated Y%. Are you by chance doing ___ or ___?" You tap the screen to answer, and the software gives you some recommendations to alleviate the situation. Or, after you download the software, your smartphone may repeatedly ask how you're feeling in order to calibrate its calculations to your individual personality and physiology. The software will quickly learn what is your own personal optimum.

At first lifestyle optimization will be a hobby of the modern urban individualists — intelligent, fitness conscious, and tech-savvy young and middle-aged people. But it will inevitably bleed over into public life. First, elite schools will introduce radical changes in practices to keep kids functioning at the highest levels. Movement, standing, and walking will be integrated into learning activities, and sitting at desks will be reserved for writing tasks only. The kids' health and performance indicators will jump measurably, prompting other schools to follow suit.

Eventually changes will bleed over into healthcare, urban planning, commerce, and the workplace. The new health findings will be increasingly embraced by the wealthy, successful, and entrepreneurial, and markets will shift direction accordingly. Naturally, many backwaters will be slow to adopt the new practices, but eventually governments may begin to systematically extend the benefits to all communities as improved well-being comes to be seen as a kind of basic human right.

Health-tracking technology will affect human relationships as well. People will more clearly see the pros and cons of their various relationships and start optimizing them for improved well-being. This will likely hasten the ongoing breakdown of traditional relationship forms, which are ill-suited to the lifestyle of hyper-connected, individualistic urbanites. Partners and friends will focus more on doing things that improve their sense of well-being together in the moment. People will increasingly make relationship decisions based on concern for their health. The range of possibilities will be much wider than "to be together or not."

Again, the numbers will provide the justification. People will be looking for ways to improve their numbers, which are closely calibrated to their mood and sense of well-being. Relationships will become more flexible to allow people to take breaks from each other, share activities and experiences in new ways, and otherwise maximize relationship benefits while minimizing stress.

Not that long ago it seemed that technology was leading us towards a Matrix-esque future, where devitalized blobs of human bodies would sit motionless at their computers, immersed in a virtual reality more titillating than the real world. But surprisingly, technology will actually begin to enhance human physicality rather than suppress it. We will soon be well on our way towards an intermeshing of organic life and computation.

In as little as a decade, the image of a person hunched over in front of a computer screen into the wee hours of the morning may seem as archaic as images from the 1950s of young, radiant housewives in knee-length dresses and aprons exhuberantly washing the dishes.

Am I a Body or a Mind?

At the moment I'm experiencing a really satisfying and upbeat period in my life. I have a pretty clear idea about why I feel so good.

I am physically active and engage in some kind of group and individual sports on a daily basis, including table tennis, indoor rock climbing, ultimate frisbee, a brief set of high-intensity exercises, and frequent backpacking trips. As opposed to an individual fitness regimen, I do these activities with or around other people and can't wait for the next session. The social benefits and camaraderie are substantial and increasing as time goes on. I am in great shape, but it's really my body's functionality and health that I'm developing, not just my external physique. The better shape my body is in, the more I feel like using it whenever I have the chance. I look for opportunities to immerse myself in ice-cold mountain streams, something that would have made me cringe two years ago. I enjoy climbing over obstacles and hanging on tree branches. Not long ago, I went canyoning with a group of 10 people. The physical challenges and bonding made for a powerful experience, and I had that rare feeling: this is what we were made to do.

I have finally put in the critical mass of effort to turn cooking for myself into a stable, nearly automatic habit. For the most part, I know what to eat and why. The food I eat tends to be highly nutritious, and I rarely let myself get very hungry like I have been prone to do in the past. I am taking a supplement that is delivering some of the vitamins and nutrients I was low in, and my vitamin D levels are approaching optimal values. I can tell my stress hormones are down and my serotonin and confidence are way up. From the different blood tests I've taken in the past two years, it is safe to assume my vitamin and mineral levels are up and my endocrine system is in a lot better shape (I won't be able to test them for another few months). My levels of alertness are much better; my body feels rested and I no longer fret so much about getting enough sleep.

My mind is clear and sharp, and I once more feel like tackling hard work requiring extended focus and concentration. I love being able to fully concentrate on projects and skill acquisition once again. I feel like I'm finally moving forward in life rather than trying to catch up to where I once was. I've managed to finally set up a great living situation that I expect to maintain long-term. Crucially, instead of having Internet at home, I have 2 places within a 6 minute walk that I regularly visit for online work. One is a hostel with wi-fi that has allowed me to use their wi-fi for a reasonable by-the-hour price. Naturally, I'm writing this post at home where I can fully concentrate on my thoughts without distraction.

I went through some hard times in the past 3 years, including the end of a relationship, adjusting to life in a new country with a new culture and language and no friends, loneliness and loss of motivation, depressed immune function and frequent illness, passing out and narrowly escaping death from carbon monoxide poisoning, changing residence multiple times, living with transient foreigners while trying to establish myself long-term in a new country, banking on a big new project and seeing it fail completely before ever really starting, facing imminent financial problems, and waffling over important decisions. That is the period I came out of this summer.

There are other good things currently going on besides what I've mentioned, but I really feel the main story is about my body and the improvements in my physical life. I was reflecting about this today when I realized that back when I first began studying socionics deeply, I was in a very different state of mind. Whereas now I am very focused on my body, back then at age 23-26 I identified intensely with my mind. What was most important to my self-identity were functions and preferences embedded in my brain and discerning how they expressed themselves and interacted with those of other people.

Now I am firmly in a stage where I identify with my body. All those powers of observation and discernment that were once focused on mental functions and interaction patterns are now directed at physiology. I now study and internalize information about neurotransmitters, hormones, nutrients, and physical processes just like I once mulled over socionics. Well, maybe not quite as much.

When I let on to people the degree to which I've studied my own physical functioning, I find that some are turned off and think there's something unnatural or counterproductive about thinking so much about these things. This reminds me of people's reactions to socionics. People imagine themselves doing what I'm doing and thinking what I'm thinking and sense that it would throw things off balance in their lives. But I'm different from them and it's perfectly okay for me. Self-study for me is like watching a good movie for someone else. I derive great satisfaction and insight from my deep study and self-tracking practice and increasingly have that feeling of possessing a kind of secret esoteric weapon that I had during the period I was most focused on socionics.

I love knowing that I possess accurate, objective knowledge about the different components of my life and how I feel. I love being able to know that this month is objectively better than the previous one and in what ways, and that I have not felt this good this long for well over two years. And I know which areas contribute most to this feeling and which areas are deficient and can be corrected to further improve my life.

For now at least, I am definitely a body. I look forward to continuing to develop its potential and optimize for health and happiness.

Developing Physicality

Socionics suggests that some types are innately more "physical" than others and are more in tune with their bodily sensations and physical interaction with the outside world. Other types tend not to register these things consciously and tend to lack physicality, focusing attention instead on verbal, emotional, or mental interaction with the world.

This is how I saw things myself, until I gradually came to a recognition of the importance of physicality and vitality in my life and realized that I must take responsibility for these things myself. My personal experiments and research have convinced me that all [basically healthy] people are designed to be athletes — regardless of personality type — and to lead a life that is much more physical than that of most modern urban dwellers. 

This subject is very broad, so I will break the post into two parts: personal history that readers will no doubt find as interesting as the information in part two, which will be about developing physicality and vitality in general. 

Part 1: adventures in health and physicality

Despite my [presumably] personality type-related inclination to neglect my physical needs, I have always been mildly physically gifted, with naturally good coordination and endurance and a good degree of trainability. While most guys seem to begin their physical decline right out of college, I had kept in the same reasonably good shape by periodically starting and giving up exercise regimens, by frequently walking in the woods, playing frisbee, and by developing my hiking and biking hobbies, which provided me with the connection to nature that I craved. 

Over the years, my attempted exercise regimens gradually evolved to something more and more appropriate to my actual needs and abilities. Things like resolving to go to the gym X times a week and perform there a certain set of exercises tended not to work for long. Trying to do a set of exercises at home on a Total Trainer was only slightly better. Taking a one-minute detour on the way home to do pull-ups worked better, and I kept that up for some months, but that was just a single exercise. More successful still was combining enjoyable activities; leave the apartment in the morning, walk or jog in the woods, sometimes taking a quick dip in the lake afterwards, and finish up at the exercise bars at a nearby school to do a set of 5 exercises. This allowed me to ease into the exercise part by first doing something intrinsically enjoyable and getting my body warmed up. Note that this worked much better when I lived 2 minutes from the forest as opposed to 5 minutes, leading me to formulate some of the principles I wrote about in Willpower as a Limited Resource.

Around 2007-2009 I began to take much more interest in diet and health and finally began to understand something about nutrition, which until then had seemed like a contradictory and structureless field. I got into what you might call "lightweight speed backpacking" and long-distance backpacking, which are essentially athletic activities. Again, the reason I pursued this was not to improve my fitness, but to experience nature on a deeper level. Keeping fit came to be almost synonymous with experiencing nature. But, as far as upper body was concerned, all I did was occasionally do strength exercises. I didn't really have intrinsically rewarding activities for the arms and torso.  

Starting in 2009-2011, I began to be aware of mild, but nagging, health issues: problems getting enough sleep, digestive issues, frequent colds, and often struggling with the blues and compulsion-like behavior. These gradually increased or remained steady for several years, though I noted that they seemed to go away during backpacking trips, leading me to believe that they had to do with aspects of my city lifestyle. 

Then, in March 2012, I passed out and could have died of carbon monoxide poisoning after a long shower as a result of a faulty gas water heater installed in the kitchen of the apartment I was renting. I eventually came to, feeling absolutely horrible, and was barely able to crawl around to find my phone and call friends and ask them to bring an ambulance with them. I was lucky and did not develop any long-term neurophysiological sequelae, which often plague victims of acute CO poisoning. 

I was extremely alarmed by this incident and began recording all the physical and emotional complaints I had after that to better discern whether my quality of life was affected by the accident. I felt I had to take better care of myself and not let something like this happen again. The CO poisoning wasn't my fault, but on that day and the preceding one I had eaten very little and at first had thought my collapse was from low blood sugar. The symptoms and my subsequent research, however, confirmed it was indeed CO. A bit later, I found a house cleaner and cook who made my life a lot easier. Eventually I concluded that it wasn't healthy for me to be living alone (for the first time in many, many years), and I moved into a room in a shared apartment and immediately recognized the subtle emotional-physical benefits — as long as there is not too much tension among house residents. 

I found this exercise of writing down how I felt very useful for focusing my attention on this side of life, and developed it further during my next visit to Ukraine. First, for a month I wrote down everything I ate, my sleep times, and how I felt that day. Then I created a sleep spreadsheet where I applied a formula for calculating my sleep deficit. (I'm a real numbers geek, so I'll give it to you: 8.5 hrs. is my observed ideal sleep duration, and 0.8 is the coefficient by which I multiply yesterday's accumulated sleep deficit before adding to it today's deficit or proficit. This means that if I sleep on average 8 hrs. a night, then I will on average feel like I'm missing about 2.5 hrs. of sleep due to the accumulation of deficits. This is not always entirely true, but it's usually a good approximation). Along with sleep times I recorded my level of alertness on a scale of 1 to 5 to see how it correlated with my supposed sleep deficit.

I liked the idea of rating aspects of life, because it meant that I paid attention to them during the course of the day. I often translate quality of life questionnaires for use in healthcare in Ukraine, so I am used to the idea of rating these kinds of things. So I started adding other aspects of life that clearly contributed to my overall wellbeing, and had them average up to produce a quality of life index for each day. 

At first these were purely physiological indicators such as alertness and presence of physical complaints (illness, pain), but soon I added psychosocial indicators such as "speech apparatus" (ease of speech and communication; voice tembre), "acceptance" (how accepted by others and free to be myself I felt), and general emotional state. These were clearly very much intertwined with health and wellbeing. Later I also added a couple intellectual indicators: "flow state" (how much of the time I was in an engrossed, pleasurable flow state) and "breadth of awareness." I realized that neglecting my personal work activities (writing and site development) for weeks or months on end had been having a subtle harmful effect on my ego and self-confidence, so I added "professional development" to the mix of indicators. In the end, I've got a set of 12-13 indicators that approximate many areas of life that actually determine how I feel — about myself and life as well as physically. In addition, I began writing notes next to the number regarding significant factors that had influenced the individual ratings that day.

Turns out I am hardly unique in this sort of quantitative approach to improving well-being. There is a whole movement that espouses these methods, called "The Quantified Self." 

I found this practice to be a massive leap forward from typical records that people keep when they have some self-development goal, which usually involves contriving a goal that you think will make your life better and writing down your results for the day. 95% of the time, the results are not what you planned, and efforts are abandoned within weeks. I sigh when I see people start up a new "watch me lose weight" or "watch me get fit" self-delusion blog that will almost inevitably contain no more than 3-5 posts. This time, rather than deciding what should make my life better, my approach necessitated from the beginning that I observe my own body and see what was happening to it, with no implicit goal in mind. And yet each of us has the same organismic goal: to increase quality of life — happiness. Finding out more about what brings you happiness causes you to do better at seeking those things out and integrating them into your life. 

When I went to Crimea for over a month, I decided to finally get serious and see some doctors and take some tests to address "everything that had ever bothered me in the past 10+ years." A lot of online research was also involved. I read about nutrition, vitamins and minerals, psychosocial factors, mood, stress, and fitness. Before that, I had read the well-researched and fascinating book The Four-Hour Body and had read about the Mediterranean diet, the Paleo diet, and the benefits of sprinting-like exercise and "evolutionary fitness" (listen to interview here). After some research, I began to suspect my diet was deficient in some vitamins and minerals and began to correct those by adding a variety of nuts and different foods. Turns out deficiencies tend to cause apathy and depression in addition to physiological problems, but the symptoms are often vague and can easily be confused with other things. (My hunch about the deficiencies turned out to be correct). 

While in Crimea I would go to the beach every day with my friend, going down a 170 m. high cliffside via a cement staircase. Soon we started running down and walking back up the stairs as fast as possible. Needless to say, we also swam in the Black Sea, each of us developing his own kind of bathing routine that started with just going 5 meters out in the water, taking a dip and thinking, "what do I do now?" and eventually evolved into (in my case) a 15-30 minute swim up and down the beach using different swimming strokes and enjoying the views of the beach and cliffs and the increasingly cold early-autumn water. I also spent a lot of the time minimally dressed, my skin exposed to the fresh air and sun, both on the way to the beach and back and around the house and yard. A pull-up bar is welded into the balcony, so I also did chin-ups whenever passing by, inventing stranger and stranger ways of doing them to involve more muscles. After about a week of this, I experienced a new jolt of alertness that would override any sleep deficit I had, i.e. thanks to some kind of hormone injection I was now getting from my rigorous daily physical activity. 

Then, in the midst of this idyllia, I received a large translation assignment. Over the course of the week that I was preoccupied with it, I observed — through my rating system — how my quality of life plummeted in almost every way. I had no idea this type of stress could have such a powerful disruptive effect on everything. This led me to read and reflect about stress response and what kinds of stress the body is or is not designed to handle well, due to our evolutionary past. I realized I needed to watch out for and steer away from potential negative stressors. I also managed to work out a routine that helped me deal with potentially stressful computer assignments. The solution was to inject physical stimuli and pleasure by taking breaks and doing something physical every 20 minutes, which I'll talk about more in Part 2. 

I had to give up my intense beach-swim-sprint-shirtless living routine when I left again for Georgia, but after a week of chaos I've managed to settle into a new one that's just as good except for the shirtless part (Georgians are more conservative). On the weekends I'm usually backpacking, and during the weekdays I meet a good friend every evening to go bouldering at an indoor rock-climbing place, where there are also a few workout machines and bars. We often follow this with a visit to a restaurant or bar for relaxing conversation. I also have started playing ultimate frisbee twice a week with another group of people, and other physical, but non-strenuous activities are also part of the physicality menu. Key here is that all these activities are pleasurable, playful, require skill development, and involve other people and socializing. 

I can say that at age 35 I am the fittest I have ever been in terms of both strength and endurance, and that I see physical development as an essential part of life of the same degree of importance as intellectual and social development. 

In Part 2 I will write about why all this is necessary,
and what it does for you (cascading effects and so on).