Optimizing your biology: the overview
Laying out the necessary game pieces
In our last post, we discussed one of the most important (but overlooked) aspects of living a better life: energy management.
To summarize the key piece of actionable advice:
Become aware of your natural energy cycles
Schedule the things most important to you for your energy peaks
The problem
This strategy will reap immediate gains. However, there’s a major problem here that is a direct consequence of the dopamine-saturated environment we live in: our energy peaks are shorter than they should be - vice versa for our energy valleys. We have less energy for the stuff that’s truly important to us and this makes forward momentum very difficult to create. We compensate by consuming an unhealthy amount of caffeine, and fueling our bodies with the short-term in mind, long-term impact be damned.
The antidote
Everyone here is smart enough to know that we need to stop masking the symptoms and start addressing the root cause. But what’s the solution? The capitalistic-driven attention economy machine is simply not just going to stop; and we can’t just live out our wildest Bear Grylls fantasy and go full-natural living when there are bills to pay and dreams to chase.
The antidote to this is to optimize our biology. This will lead to so many beneficial things in your life, but perhaps the most important is that it will allow you to live life as you were intended to: an absolutely force of a human being. Full of energy, accomplishments, realized potential, and the broad, immeasurable satisfaction that you gain when you recognize you’ve self-actualized. Calibrating ourselves is a choice, but it really shouldn’t be. This is something you have to do because you deserve a fulfilling life and the world needs more complete human beings. It’s a species imperative.
The audacious goal of having our bodies function to their potential may seem like an insurmountable task at first. However, I’m here to tell you that most things in life can be solved with a framework, a strategy, and action.
The framework
The general framework I’ve found best to solve any problem can be broken down as follows:
Break the complex problem down into smaller, easier-to-solve problems
Of that subset, solve the highest value problems first
This framework will lead to asymmetric gains. We put in the same amount of effort, but we reap much more effective results. We often trick ourselves into thinking we’re being productive by solving the easiest problems first. This couldn’t be further from the truth. At best, you’re creating a bit of forward momentum for subsequent action; at worst, you’re wasting your energy potential on something that just doesn’t matter.
It’s hard to become fit when you spend your morning energy making and eating breakfast.
It’s hard to form meaningful relationships when you spend your social energy online in social media.
It’s hard to become financially free when you spend your brightest moments clearing your inbox.
Every single day, you have these pockets of time where your genius craves release. The bait is a challenging problem that matters to you. The vessel is a high energy state. Don’t waste it.
The strategy
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
- Sun Tzu
We have our motivation and we have our problem-solving framework. Using both of these, let’s break down this goal into the most important pieces.
We know that our body is a system and we understand that a system operates as a function of its inputs and gives us a determined output. Furthermore, an optimized output requires optimal inputs. The key insight here is that the inputs we feed into our system are (mostly) under our control.
What are these critical inputs?
Sleep
Exercise
Nutrition
Attention / Dopamine control
That’s it. That’s the entire list of things that we need in order to optimize our energy. The beautiful thing about these inputs is that they’re synergistic (i.e. optimizing one helps you optimize the others). Our bodies are incredibly elegant, as long as you give it what it craves. It’s almost like leveling up in a way; the tasks stay the same, but they’re getting easier because you’re getting stronger.
Additionally, these inputs are completely within our control and don’t require you to purchase anything, outside of basic living necessities. The wellness industry generated $600 billion of revenue in 2020, and you don’t need to contribute a single penny to its cause. 4 problems to solve and you change how you feel forever.
We now have the subset of slightly easier problems to solve. Of these, what is the problem with the highest return on value? Point blank, it’s sleep. Fixing your sleep will change everything. Read that line again. I cannot stress this enough; everything you’ve read on sleep, all of the articles, all of the forum posts, all of the books, all of it is true and STILL somehow understated.
If there’s one problem on your list that you must solve, it’s sleep. The other inputs on the list exist simply to help you sleep better. You get such a high return on value when you consistently sleep good, nothing even compares.
You learn easier and retain more knowledge
You maintain higher energy peaks (our original goal)
You have improved mental and physical health
You perform stronger
You think smarter
You feel better
The results from all of the above are exponential in nature when combined together. How much further in your career could you be if you learned efficiently, communicated effortlessly, and were able to push harder than everyone else? How much easier are social interactions when you feel good? How much stronger are your workouts when you’re properly rested? Sleep is the great force multiplier.
And since the motivation to sleep better has been shoved down your throat sufficiently enough, we can move onto the burning question in everyone’s mind: how the fuck do I sleep better?
The secret
It all boils down to fixing your Circadian rhythm. If you fix your internal clock, you fix your life. Why is this so difficult to do? It boils down to 3 things:
We don’t know how to (lack of knowledge)
We don’t realize how absolutely crucial it is to fix (lack of proper motivation)
Trying to fix your Circadian rhythm in the modern world is like trying to have a peaceful morning after a Taco Bell bender the night before: messy and unrealistic (lack of a proper environment)
We will do a deeper dive on this topic in the next post, but instead let’s focus on the highest value action we can take to fix our internal clocks, which is controlling our light intake. If there’s only one thing you take away from this article, it’s this: light intake has an incredibly significant effect on the quality of your sleep. If you can effectively modulate your light intake, you conquer this entire puzzle. The science backs this, the experts back this, but because of the nature of our world and our reliance on pocket-sized light-emitting devices, we can never seem to master this one simple aspect of our lives.
This is to be expected though. We are diurnal animals - designed to be active during the day and asleep by night - and we always have been and likely always will be. But the advancement of technology will always outpace our own evolution. The lights, the phones, the computer-centric work we do is something we have to work around. We can’t change the rules of the game, but we can play smarter.
There is a scientific paper which studied the effects of natural sun exposure on regulating your Circadian rhythm and sleep quality, by measuring these timings before and after a simple weekend camping trip. The camping trip had a significantly positive effect on the body’s ability to regulate its Circadian rhythm due to the exposure to natural light and the avoidance of artificial light. The insight from this is that the effects of proper light modulation are observed shockingly quickly after making the appropriate changes.
This should be incredibly motivating. Not only does proper light intake dramatically increase the quality of your sleep, but it also does so in a remarkably short timeframe. It’s one of those actions that takes a moderate amount of effort to do, but the results are absolutely asymmetric in nature. Remember to always chase the actions with asymmetric return.
Actionable take-home work
TLDR: Get outdoor sunlight immediately upon waking, view the evening sunset, and avoid bright lights at night by viewing dim lights at a lower height
In detail:
Each step is equally important. So without doing all 3, the benefits drop off pretty fast
First, get outdoor sunlight upon waking.
The key here is OUTDOOR sunlight. Window-filtered light and sunlamps are not going to cut it, unless you’re living in a part of the world where outdoor sunlight in the morning is impossible to get.
This step is best paired with exercise (helps with the mechanism of pegging your internal clock to a particular time).
What’s most natural habit that comes to mind? Take a morning walk.
Second, watch the evening sunset
There is a mechanism where the particular hues of the evening sunset also help to regulate your Circadian rhythm. Ultimately, you want to give your body as much light information as possible, and this information is almost exclusively received through the eyes.
What’s most natural habit that comes to mind? Take an evening walk.
Third, avoid bright lights at night
Bright lights at night will absolutely destroy your sleep quality. It’s an unfortunate fact that we just have to accept and work around.
One thing we can do to somewhat mitigate this is to work around our biology. The cells (Melanopsin) in our eyes that are responsible for transmitting light information to the rest of the body are located in the bottom half of our eyes. So they receive information best from overhead lights. This is why viewing the sun is so critical in the morning (overhead light information). And why viewing overhead bright lights (i.e. florescent) is so bad for you. In order to work around this biology, we can design our homes to emit dimmer lights in the evening and keep them at a lower relative height to your eyes in order to avoid any Circadian disruptions at night.
We’re starting with the sleep route first because it streamlines the rest of our journey for optimizing our biology, and it has the most positive immediate effect in the present. We’ll take an even deeper dive into sleep in the next post; there’s a lot of literature written about the topic, so I’ll stick to the useful, actionable bits that can help you today.
It’s a great day to conquer old demons. Until next time, friend.