Posts made by Insr

I love sheep and goats.

@Caray said in Weight gaining:

@cris how is your appetite ? Your stress levels ?

Off the top of my head and expanding on some useful answers already posted...

Carve some "vital space" for yourself. Dedicate some time each day to do what you feel like doing. Be a little bit egoistic.

Get a girlfriend if you don't have one. If you have one, terminate your relationship if you feel/know it's not right for you.
Speak with sincerity. Don't bottle things up in your day to day.
Put yourself in situations where it's easy for you to belly laugh, be it with friends, family, toddlers...
Strike up casual conversations in your neighborhood/classes/general vicinity.
Make someone a little present, no matter how trifle.

The gist is to lean into a feeling of security that brings about self-expression. Or the other way round.

Think of a (good) king of old in his throne: benevolent, regal, prolific and round. A lover of the arts but also a protector of the people. Self-assured.

Maybe you tap into this energy as inspiration, you just have to recognise it in your daily life. Hope it helps.

I like this post!

@Milk-Destroyer said in Does too much internet/screen time cause high serotonin/dopamine?:

@insufferable Yes, real life socialising is probably one of the best things when people aren't using their phones. I don't attend bars or clubs so I can't speak for those who do but finding new friends outside of school/work can be very daunting for most I think.

Last year I had the chance to go wild camping for a week with 4 friends from highschool and it was very fun, even just sitting at a campfire and talking is incredibly stimulating in a positive way I think.

That sounds like a great time.

It's daunting now but it used to be easy. It's easy in a healthy society. There's stats showing americans used to have double or more as many close friends 30 years ago compared to recently.

It's a vicious cycle, less friends and more screen time = sad brain. Sad brain = harder to spend time with friends and more time coping on the screen. And then if everyone around you has the sad brain too, the problem compounds. Very bad Thank you to all the epic big thinkers who destroyed society.

@Milk-Destroyer That's good advice that you have to replace it. I bet socializing is the replacement the brain craves. That and general outside exploratory stimulation, even just taking a drive in the car.

Yes absolutely, I've been there.

I wrote a big post about it here: https://bioenergetic.forum/topic/925/defanging-your-computer

@Comstock said in Metabolism: sloth to a dopaminergic child:

@insufferable Nice!

Love your testosterone charts btw.

Thanks!

@insufferable said in Metabolism: sloth to a dopaminergic child:

@Creuset said in Metabolism: sloth to a dopaminergic child:

@insufferable said in Metabolism: sloth to a dopaminergic child:

I agree that internet distraction is bad but I've done long days on my LCD working with text only (almost all black and white) with very little distracting internet browsing, and still felt super drained at the end. But on my E-Ink device, I can even watch videos and click around, and still feel very good at the end of the day.

Have you ever tried used an app like f.lux to reduce the blue light emitted by your screen? Would be interested to know if you would feel the same as when using your E-ink screen.

That would be a good experiment. I've never tried leaving flux on all day. I used to have it set on max in the evenings and it certainly works very well for allowing sleepiness to occur at the appropriate time. I'll try a full day on LCD but with maxxed flux the whole time and report back.

I was on my LCD all morning (about 5 hours) with flux at 1200K (so red that blues don't really display) Throughout I was sitting by my window and periodically looking at the daylight, as usual. So the screen was the only difference.

• I noticed my eyes feeling not too great after about 15 minutes
• To think about something, I had to kind of take a moment to bring it into my brain, especially true while i was looking at the screen. I would say i had and have some mild brain fog.
• I was more lazy and found myself having kind of browsed through text documents for an hour instead of truly being productive and just doing the stuff to be done.
• I do feel tired and a bit burnt out.
• My eyesight is now a bit blurrier
• Even an hour afterwards, including with time spent outside, I was a bit forgetful and made some cognitive errors (walking to the wrong place to get something)
• However, though I do feel brain fog, I would say i feel less brain fog than i did back when i used to look at the non-flux LCD screen. So either flux does help somewhat or I'm kind of "stocked up" on dopamine from all my e-ink usage.
• Also with flux I don't feel immediately visually "assaulted" by the screen's light the way i do when i look into a non-flux screen blasting light at me.

So an LCD with flux on and maxed out feels better than an LCD without flux, but not as good as E-Ink.

@Comstock Yeah! My paperlike 3 is good enough for any video I've watched. I don't really notice the lower frame rate. Displaying videos wears it out faster apparently, but I think that's over the course of years.

@TexugoDoMel Great response, thank you!

It does mean that you're not getting away without forming eicosanoids though! Which is a good thing cause I guess you'd die without them, without inflammation.

All in all I don't agree with a very low PUFA diet. If your body just forms its own PUFA (mead acid) when dietary PUFA isn't present, then what's the point of fighting it?

I think all the benefits are from avoiding the consumption of PUFA that's already oxidized when you eat it, and that has broken down into aldehydes, which are super toxic to consume. I think the benefits of avoiding seed oil are just the benefits of avoiding aldehydes. by far the most prevalent in deep fried food, and i dont know how prevalent they actually are in unheated seed oil, or even in a fresh walnut, for example. Perhaps drizzling fresh squeezed canola oil (unheated) on your food would be fine (though unpleasant and pointless).

I ask because if the body's innate enzymes that make eicosanoids from PUFA would only work with the EFAs and not with Mead Acid, that would be proof that the "zero dietary PUFA theory" goes against the body's intended design. But it looks like that's not the case.

Are eicosanoids (such as prostaglandins) formed from mead acid? In other words, when you're "EFA deficient" and thus high in mead acid, are the eicosanoids formed from mead acid, or are they simply not formed at all, cause they require EFA for their formation? (cause i think that would cause you to die)

I skimmed this and I may be misunderstanding but it looks like the answer is yes, mead acid forms all the same stuff as EFA, just its own versions of those things.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10576882/

@Creuset said in Metabolism: sloth to a dopaminergic child:

@insufferable said in Metabolism: sloth to a dopaminergic child:

I agree that internet distraction is bad but I've done long days on my LCD working with text only (almost all black and white) with very little distracting internet browsing, and still felt super drained at the end. But on my E-Ink device, I can even watch videos and click around, and still feel very good at the end of the day.

Have you ever tried used an app like f.lux to reduce the blue light emitted by your screen? Would be interested to know if you would feel the same as when using your E-ink screen.

That would be a good experiment. I've never tried leaving flux on all day. I used to have it set on max in the evenings and it certainly works very well for allowing sleepiness to occur at the appropriate time. I'll try a full day on LCD but with maxxed flux the whole time and report back.

what are you doing during those awake hours? Computer?

Have you thought about the light? If you spend all day outside in the daylight, and then in the evening you light only with a candle and use zero screens - i cant imagine that wouldn't work eventually.

@pittybitty said in Metabolism: sloth to a dopaminergic child:

@insufferable The blue light thing is really not that complicated. Darkness induces stress, both red and blue light are protective against this stress. Red light causes Triptophan be converted to Melatonin, blue light does the opposite. Melatonin controls the "phase" of your day/night cycle, the further along the night you are the higher your melatonin. It's not that blue light is "bad", it's just that red light is the only way to have the protective effects of light while still maintaining a natural melatonin progression and thus day/night cycle.

Regarding e-ink I think what you are mostly noticing (aside from maybe better sleep) is the psychological, rather than metabolical effects of color. Internet constantly demands your attention, in part through the use of color and movement, if more of those elements get eliminated you will be less distracted by it.

That's interesting about blue vs red light effects, thanks.

I want to stay firmly in the holistic with the screen thing though. Looking into a lit up computer screen is just a totally different thing than looking at physical ink on paper or looking at the sky or trees or whatever. For example, you could switch your screen's LED backlight with a red light panel and stare into your bright red screen all day, and I think you would feel almost as bad as the normal screen makes you feel.

I agree that internet distraction is bad but I've done long days on my LCD working with text only (almost all black and white) with very little distracting internet browsing, and still felt super drained at the end. But on my E-Ink device, I can even watch videos and click around, and still feel very good at the end of the day.

So I feel something like this:

dopamine depletion levels:
level 10 - aimless clicking around on an LCD
level 8 - reading a book offline on an LCD
level 1 - aimless clicking around on E-Ink
level 0 - reading a book on E-Ink

I looked into making a new sunscreen product and found (as far as I can tell) the FDA forces sunscreens to be one of the current harmful chemical ones, or one of the two approved physical blockers - zinc or titanium. Literally no other options are allowed in the US if it's marketed as a sunscreen, so there's no point searching as a consumer.

Here is the list if you're interested: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/omuf/OTCMonograph_M020-SunscreenDrugProductsforOTCHumanUse09242021.pdf

There's a few studies on using plant ingredients like quercetin as sunscreen. Quercetin sounds like it might really work - with the downside of being bright yellow. I don't know if that yellow would be invisible once it absorbed? I'll have to try it.

From what I've read, the "just use olive oil it has natural SPF!" stuff is a meme. It's like SPF 2 in reality.

The obvious answer is to just cover up with clothes once you've had enough sun during tanning hours (11am-5pm DST), but I do wish there was a safe, sheer sunscreen.

@zaaku Good points. I like the idea that computer use is super energy intensive and if you don't nutritionally support yourself, you'll do poorly. That makes sense to me. From my e-ink experience, I do believe it's the LCD screen that's burning through your brain energy like that. I don't feel tired at all after a full day on E-Ink. I definitely felt tired and frazzled after a full day on my LCD.

It reminds me of how people with concussions sometimes become unable to use LCD screens due to instantly getting migraines from them. Implies that a non-concussed person's brain is constantly doing Something when looking at a screen, and when that unknown Something isn't being done due to a damaged brain, you instantly get a migraine. Whatever that thing is, it's going to take energy.

Maybe it's like looking at a paper through intentionally cross-eyed lenses so your eyes are always working to resolve the image - wouldn't you get a headache after 20 minutes of that? And someone with damage to the eye controlling region of the brain might be unable to resolve the image and might get a headache in seconds.

I think the pesticide Atrazine specifically is probably a huge offender. The Midwest (full of huge cornfields) went from the highest testosterone in the US in 1990 to the lowest, currently. Atrazine is known to be a super potent endocrine disruptor, and it's used widely on cornfields. (and others?)

I think atrazine is responsible for a 250 ng/dl testosterone drop.

What about glyphosate? I'm not sure but I bet it's less impactful.

What are the main routes of atrazine exposure? Living next to a cornfield, having a water source that goes through atrazine country, or eating non-organic corn products? I believe the first two are probably worse than the last. During the time of year that they spray it, in corn farming parts of the midwest. Atrazine enters water and spikes to levels well above the max.

My understanding is that the primary route of MICROPLASTICS exposure is household dust from synthetic fabrics in your house getting dustified over time.

So the main reason there's microplastics in your blood is

• your polyester carpets,
• your polyester fabric couch,
• and your polyester fabric pants getting abraded in the washer.

So I imagine the quickest impact you can make on microplastic exposure is to remove dust frequently, and to get a 100% cotton couch cover. Biggest impact would be to replace the polyester carpet. Then replace polyester clothes with cotton, etc.

But much less impactful would be a heavy focus on microplastic content of food from the grocery store. That's because this isn't the main route of microplastic exposure.

I'd like to determine this sort of thing for all the endocrine disruptors! For example, which is more important: pesticide in food, pesticide in water, or airborne environmental pesticide entering your household dust?

I've always wanted to quantify this, like

pre-1900's guys had 900 ng/dl testosterone
today they have 450 ng/dl

so we have a decline of 450 ng/dl to account for:
-200 ng/dl from prenatal damage from maternal pharma use
-150 from sleeping too little
-75 from pesticide dust in the air
-25 from pesticide in the food
-0.1 from not consuming enough vitamin 521

Obviously something bad is going on these days with a decline in thyroid function, hormone function, mental health, metabolism - but I want to be more specific so we know what to focus on first.

Will switching your polyester shorts for the twitter shorts (100% cotton!) be the most important thing for restoring perfect HUNTER GATHERER health? Will EMF mitigation fix everything, or should you have first put that focus into something else that helps more?

I imagine the biggest impacts are:

• pharma (especially prenatal)
• personal care products (especially prenatal)
• deep fried sneed oils (im not convinced unheated pufa is bad. Fake peater alert)
• emulsifiers
• TV, computers, smartphones - both psychologically and also because of the artificial light emitted

While Red 40 food coloring, plastic water bottles, and escaping all wifi are probably lower priority.

It's a question of what would you recommend to a tired person down in the vicious cycle of bad health? Remove the SSRI or remove all the food in the pantry cause it has food coloring in it? Surely you start with the SSRI. The food coloring comes later.

What do you think?