Slept well last night

Took 9mg melatonin last night about 2hrs before bed, felt drowsy within about 30 minutes then couldn't stay awake at 2hr mark. Had good deep sleep. I have noticed that I feel most refreshed when I get quality REM sleep, that is, that period near the end of sleep where your half-awake, half asleep, and also dreaming. If this final phase of sleep goes well, I just feel amazing, I get up feeling full of energy and brain works exceptionally well.

Felt a bit groggy in the morning which I know was due to the melatonin dose, but it wore off within 2 hrs. I had to take the melatonin because the Cabergoline was giving me insomnia. 2 things I have noticed about Cabergoline is that, I get severe anxiety on it, but also libido is massively increased!

Im struggling a bit with this blog at the moment, its getting harder and harder to find stuff to blog on because there are TONS of health/nutrition blogs out there. Competition for novel information is fierce. Although im not trying to turn this blog into some public guru know it all website. This place is for me to document my personal thoughts/theories aswell as information that I find valuable. Dont get me wrong, I appreciate feedback ALOT, but I want to avoid falling into the mindset of blogging to appease an audience, but instead I want to blog for myself. Then again, I dont want to blog on things that others have blogged on elsewhere, and so this further makes new content very difficult to come up with, also my occupation is not the field of nutrition/medicine so im not "in the loop".


I want to throw up some info from Dan's video here.....


22:00 minute mark

• How do we avoid making the same mistakes over and over and over again?

The idea is, that we have a natural way of looking at the information that comes at us. And when we rely on this natural way of looking at this information, there's a good chance we'll get it wrong, because our natural ways of dealing with the information can be biased. However, the question is can we get over these natural tendencies and under what conditions can we?

This reminds of the problem in Metabolic Syndrome and biased obesity research. Basically  alot of health issues are "mistakenly" attributed to as being "caused" by obesity, and I think this is happening because of how we are being fed information. Humans are massively biased towards visual information, seeing is believing.  For example, when we see an obese person, we automatically attribute all health problems that person has to their weight, because the weight is the thing we "see" has changed so dramatically from a healthy normal lean person. 

We dont "see" all the little things going on inside an obese person with metabolic syndrome, like hepatic IR, insulin hyper-secretion  + all the other biochemical changes going on. In this case it is thus very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that obesity "causes" all these health problems because the increase in bodyweight is so glaringly obvious meanwhile the biochemical changes are massively obscure and difficult to measure. 

31:00

• Should we trust our intuitions?

Our intuitions are often wrong, but also, we often dont recognize our faults. The only way to get reliable information to get the correct answer to a problem is through experimentation, measurement etc. If you want the right answer, it is best to remove all human intuition, remove all human judgement, and bias, and just follow the dots. 

For example the other day I was texting a lady friend, and I didnt get a reply. My intuition was to think, she was ignoring me, she didnt like me. Or something. Turns out that she was replying to my texts, but they got stuck in the network, and several days later I got her texts all together simultaneously ( the delayed text problem ). My intuition was wrong you see, she was not ignoring me, it was a stupid mobile phone network error that was the issue. 

I want to take this opportunity to link to another example of this. This little post by Armstrong is so true. Peoples "intuition" was wrong about 

Chernobyl. 

You have to just follow the breadcrumbs and stop trying to further theories that support what someone wants to happen. 

Also in 31:00 segment of the video Dan also talks about the best way to learn, ( which can also be ascribed to "the best way to get the right answer" )  The best way is to try lots of times, with changing different variables, and to have immediate feedback, and for that feedback to be precise.

This is a good explanation for why obesity research is a mess, and why figuring out sleep is difficult. Lots of variables, some randomness due to genetics etc. 

43:22

• Can we avoid emotional interference's in our daily decision making?

Emotions are designed to take over cognition, override "free will" in a sense. Dan says emotions are designed to aggressively take over and execute a specific sequence of events. But most importantly, he says emotions are "hard to fight"

Infact Dan then argues that trying to fight your emotions is kind of pointless. The best you can do is instead modify your situation so that you will not be put in a place where those emotions are invoked and so you do not have to fight them.

I think this bears significance for LC and dieting. If you want to avoid falling off the LC bandwagon, the best you can do is avoid situations where carby food is going to be available. I notice people often report succumbing to carbs during holidays. In these situations I dont think you should blame yourself.