A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

[Biscuits and Gravy]

Tao te ching is the outdated Wade-Giles romanization of 道德经; the modern pinyin romanization is Dao De Jing. I took a whole course about it in college, and the professor (who was well versed in classical Chinese) preferred to use this English translation. My takeaway was that it was an instruction manual for governors so that they didn’t lose the mandate of Heaven to govern. It was also a critique of other schools of thought at the time. The text’s vagueness, ambiguity, and poetry has won it a lot of admirers.

@7 That whole “relaxing in your feminine energy” is some heady stuff. I think I’ve finally found my religion. In the Dao De Jing it’s called 无为 (wuwei, “do nothing”). Thanks for all of your pointers over the years.

[IlliniDave]

... the professor (who was well versed in classical Chinese) preferred to use this English translation. ...

Thanks, B&G, I'll check that one out.

And more generally, I appreciate all the suggestions for resources above although it's unlikely I'll act on many of them until autumn rolls around. Ertyu mentioned something above that hadn't made it to my conscious thoughts until he said it. Basically, the fuzzy vision that's coming together for my summer 2025 dalliance is more one an internal one I'd characterize as experiential/exploratory. I get the sense that delving to aggressively into a broad survey of different philosophies (I'll call them that for lack of a better term) will tend to keep me too locked into the thinky, shallow part of my brain. That I'll not respond to them all immediately isn't due to disregard.

Despite the breadth of the various subjects that get included, gnawing on the bone of healthspan is still my guiding light. I feel like I've got a modest competence with how to keep the meat machine running better than average for my demographic cohort. There's still a good bit of refinement and tailoring to do there, but I've been neglecting the software/firmware side of the equation. Very deliberately I realize, though I can't say why. The thing I've been confronted with as I've opened my noggin up a bit more is that my past dualistic thinking about mind versus body breaks down rapidly as I work past prior prejudices. I probably always had an underlying sense that healthspan and qualitatively optimizing what I suppose I could call "life experience" where interrelated, but getting to the point I'm able to state it plainly has shoved me into quite the rabbit hole. My prior attitude was, "I'll get myself healthy then see about exploiting that health." Maybe exploiting what health I have is essentially the same thing as getting myself healthy. Assuming for the sake of argument that is true, the question before me now is what exactly does exploiting health mean, and therefore what does getting healthy mean.

[7Wannabe5]

@B&G:

I think "relaxing in feminine energy" is particularly difficult for all of us who grew up centered in or pointed towards the extreme masculine energy of Modernity. I haven't read a lot of ancient Chinese poetry, but I know that some of it was focused on the extreme gender dichotomy in the society. The beautiful young upper-class foot-bound bride having no more agency than a peony rooted in the soil; the groom's sense of his own masculinity as he journeys away from her therefore intermingled with the pathos of loving one who is so vulnerable, dependent, different from him. Luckily, in the 21st century U.S., we can just play at Shibari on an extended lunch break and then put our padded-shoulder-pants-suit or sturdy hiking boots or thinking cap back on. Or we can spend X years primarily in our masculine energy, invest our excess at Y% interest, and then thoroughly relax in our feminine energy through Nature immersion.

[bookworm]

@B&G I don't think the Dao De Jing makes a hard distinction among the political, religious, and philosophical (not saying that's what you're saying). And thanks for the link. The translation does seem more literal than the one I'm using (Stephen Mitchell), but at least some of the underlying meaning (if not entirely fabricated by my own lens) appears to match for me.

@iDave +1 to what erytu said which gets right down to it. I think that with your commitment to body health, focusing on the sensory/experiential makes a lot of sense. Why not start where you are strongest/most motivated and go from there in your explorations.

[Biscuits and Gravy]

Thanks for bringing up the Dao De Jing. Rereading it, it strikes me as very ERE, and then ERE strikes me as very feminine, in the @7 sense. Take this line: “It is precisely because he does not compete that the world cannot compete with him.” In ERE, we remove ourselves from the competition of the workforce, the competition for limitless goods and services and wants and money, and in this way we can practice stillness and remain whole. @bookworm I agree the Dao De Jing doesn’t make hard distinctions, but the original intended audience was a ruler (flatteringly dubbed a “sage” in the text). There was a culture of “sages” roaming from city state to city state peddling their philosophies so they could get a cush job and be worshipped for their wisdom. That doesn’t discredit the eternal wisdom we all find in the text and it’s certainly worth a few reads, but, as always, the historical context is interesting and illuminating.

[jacob]

There was a culture of “sages” roaming from city state to city state peddling their philosophies so they could get a cush job and be worshipped for their wisdom.

Ahhh... the life of a scientist

[IlliniDave]

@iDave ... Why not start where you are strongest/most motivated and go from there in your explorations.

That sort of me on a macro level, what I want to do most is to do what I want to do. Of course that get's tempered quite a bit by all the have-tos and responsibilities that come with life.

The thing that's stuck in my craw is whether there is more to the so-called placebo effect than we think. In other words, can it be biohacked? And if it can, than maybe it's just a case of something getting misnamed because the first observers of it didn't understand what they were observing. There is a community out there who would say yes, absolutely biohacking the brain and nervous system is possible and has benefits that extend well into what he conventionally think of as non-neural biological subsystems. Some of that gets woo-ish, some get what feels like a speculative of what I think of as metaphysics with advancing medical science, and some leads back to understandings of health and well being that go back several millennia rather than a couple centuries. That's quite a treasure hunt to undertake, maybe impossible to complete. I'll just mix some hacks with a conscious effort towards more openness and observe what happens. When I'm not hunting walleyes.

[IlliniDave]

... “It is precisely because he does not compete that the world cannot compete with him.” In ERE, we remove ourselves from the competition of the workforce, the competition for limitless goods and services and wants and money, and in this way we can practice stillness and remain whole...

I always get the sense that we sometimes compete at not-competing. (But I agree with your overall point with the caveat that I'm not read up on the notions of feminine energy being discussed).

[7Wannabe5]

Well, simplest test is whether you would feel more hurt if your lover declared you useless or ugly. I somewhat disagree with B&G's take, because no longer caring or differently caring about whether you are regarded as "useful" does not necessarily imply caring more about whether others regard you as "pretty." Although, the focus on fitness many undertake when freed up from work-for-money might suggest this is true. Also, I think "Beautiful Losers" might encapsulate the group at Level Green towards Level Yellow which Hanzi describes as consisting of Hippies, Hipsters, and Hackers. More externalized, it might manifest as caring more about being insulted in terms of your aesthetic than your skill or vice-versa.

ERE is at Level Yellow, and Level Yellow requires self-aware integration of both masculine and feminine energy. So, for somebody like me, it seems more like an Adult Masculine energy exercise. More like a bit of a Level Orange/Modern revival than a Level Green/Post-Modern relaxation, because I am one of the few forum members who has more difficulty with increasing earning level to the median than decreasing spending level to an extreme minimum. IOW, I zero-percent self-identify in my masculine energy as a successful earner at Level Orange/Modern.

[IlliniDave]

I need to buy a code-talk to English, English to code-talk dictionary one of these days.

I suppose being deemed worthless would be the less desirable fate even though waning utility to others goes hand-in-hand with advancing age, and often goes negative towards the end.

For some reason I had what was for me a roughly a 99th percentile sleep night last night. I wish I could crack the code for that. There was nothing remarkable or out of the ordinary about the day, or the prior several days. I think I'm far more consistent in my routines than the average bear.

I still don't have all my results from Function Health but have my results back from the Medicine 2.0 panel from my primary doc. My lipids were pretty high--higher than when I'm inferring from the partial data from Function. Apparently I'm prone to pretty wide swings in LDL in time frames as short as 3 weeks. This is the second time I've had measurements at 3 week intervals, and once long ago I had them at a 4-week interval, and each time LDL changed quite a bit.

But the Medicine 3.0-emphasized ratios I look at told a story I'm happy with.

TGL/HDL (the main one I look at) put me solidly in the "Low Risk" category
LDL/HDL put me in the "Optimal" category
TC/HDL put me in the "Below Average Risk" category.

What "saves" me in those ratios is a relatively high HDL (over 60 this time, a PB) and relatively low TGL (under 100 this time). Both of those have been trending in a positive direction over the last couple years.

Combined with relatively non-existent family history of heart disease, likely a moderately above average VO2max for my cohort, a recent average BP of 110/69, good pulse pressure, generally low systemic inflammation markers, I'm feeling pretty good about things in the CVD realm. I say all that to practice my opposing argument to my doc next week should she recommend a statin. To her credit she seems more willing to let me chart my own course than I've experienced with other primary care docs I've had. I realize that internally I still wrestle with all the programming I picked up passively in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s about the "necessity" of statins to survive ones 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Another thing I am happy about is for reasons unknown my doc ordered a Vit D test this time. I have to veer off on a bit of a tangent here. After having made an attempt to assiduously avoid seed oils during 2025 I noticed on the expanded nutrient tests I get from function there was some indication that I was getting seed oil in my diet. That perplexed me and long story short, I determined that my vitamin D3 supplement contained soybean oil. I was taking a pretty good dose, 10-15k iu/day. So I stopped taking it while I ordered one that uses EVOO in the capsule instead. My more recent vit D test showed a level that was ~30% higher than 3 weeks prior. The changes were two: temporarily dropping the supplement and the arrival of weather warm enough to be out in the sun in just a t-shirt and even short pants on a couple occasions. I take that as an indication my body still has pretty good vitamin D making capacity. I typically lower or suspend the D3 supplement during the summer, assuming sun exposure would keep my levels up, but like many things the ability to do that can wane drastically with age. My levels aren't Medicine 3.0 optimal yet, but they've finally crept into the upper half of the generic Medicine 2.0 reference ranges, initially in April, and more solidly in May.

[7Wannabe5]

I suppose being deemed worthless would be the less desirable fate even though waning utility to others goes hand-in-hand with advancing age, and often goes negative towards the end.

Yes, and the same is true for the waning of physical beauty. I was struck by Henry's choice of Barbara Bush as stereotype of this, because I have had two lifetime memorable discussions with two different lovers in which they made use of poor Barbara Bush in the same manner, both referring to the sort of older women they didn't prefer compared to somewhat younger me, as if I was somebody more innately "catty" than feminist/rational. One of my heroines is Jane Juska, the author of "Adventures of a Round-Heeled Woman" whose adventures took place starting when she was 67 year old. In the 2003 Charlie Rose book interview I've linked below, she is 70/71.

https://charlierose.com/videos/20611

OTOH, I believe you and I once discussed Barbara Sher's premise that it is best to turn away from sexual and/or romantic motivation/goals at mid-life and focus more on what you loved to do when you were 10 years old. My point here being that maybe you are veering/growing a bit more towards Door 3 currently? IOW, you don't seem to be engaged in re-enactment/re-vitalization of the sexual and romantic adventures and drama of young adulthood, but I also highly doubt that 10 year old you was super into tracking health metrics. Maybe you just want to feel more physiologically like 10 year old you in order to best manifest adult version of idealized authentic core at age 10 lifestyle? Or do you think that something else is going on?

Anyways, my FitBit is currently giving me entirely inaccurate sleep tracking results for unknown reason. For example, it indicates that I only slept for 3 hours when I fell asleep pretty hard while reading a light novel at around 9:30 PM and didn't wake up until around 6 AM, although with at least 1, maybe 2, middle of the night bathroom trips. The only thing I might be doing that is throwing it off is putting my hands underneath my head to prop it up more while I am sleeping, because my pillow is kind of flat. My point here being that if these devices can fail large, they could also fail small, so might not be great idea to become too reliant on their data.

[Scott 2]

Good news on the labs. Have any of your tests included a scan for calcium artery scoring? That's something my wife's concierge doctor likes for assessing cardiovascular health.


I'm finding it's easier to tease out causes for bad sleep, then know what will ensure optimal sleep. Outside of obvious stuff like shorting duration or being anxious or heavy night time food, shifting the schedule later is most insidious. Even if I keep time in bed long enough, sleep cycle count drops. That kills REM duration. Late enough and I might miss my deep sleep window (earlier in the night) too.

The best understanding I have, missing bedtime misaligns my body's sleep pressure signals with its circadian rhythm. Currently I don't worry about a couple hour shift. But throwing the sleep mask on and ignoring the sun, hits different. Data supported as inferior. It's becoming undeniable.


Physical activity seems to promote my deep sleep, which makes sense. It's not uncommon for me to break the 1h threshold. Drugs too, though they aren't a nightly long term solution.


I wonder if you'd find any correlation in sleep quality with HIT or lifting? Or maybe the Kava usage?

[IlliniDave]

Anyways, my FitBit is currently giving me entirely inaccurate sleep tracking results for unknown reason. For example, it indicates that I only slept for 3 hours when I fell asleep pretty hard while reading a light novel at around 9:30 PM and didn't wake up until around 6 AM, although with at least 1, maybe 2, middle of the night bathroom trips. The only thing I might be doing that is throwing it off is putting my hands underneath my head to prop it up more while I am sleeping, because my pillow is kind of flat. My point here being that if these devices can fail large, they could also fail small, so might not be great idea to become too reliant on their data.

Sort of tangential, but I heard a suggestion to prop the head of one's bed up 6" higher than the foot. Apparently the brain relies heavily on the glymphatic system during sleep for cleanup and repair, which in turn relies at least in part on gravity to clear the central nervous system of waste products. Once I grokked what's going on there, I always sleep on two pillows. Not sure if it's supposed to directly boost sleep quality or not.

The gold standard is expert human somnologists reading polysomnography/hypnographs. Expert-to-expert they are roughly 80% consistent in their interpretations. I don't know much about FitBits, but somewhere above I linked a study that compared Oura, Garmin, and Apple devices to human somnologists. The devices tracked the human interpretation roughly 70-80%, iirc. Oura seemed to come out a tiny bit ahead, although when reading the paper it seemd like it depended on what metric you were most interested in which came closest to the human interpreters. Ego mentioned one, maybe in his journal, that in a different study tested a little better than the usual subjects (maybe it was a newer iteration of an Apple device, or a newer Google version of FitBit, I don't recall).

Seems like no matter how you slice it, there's uncertainty in the data. I've identified a few times Oura was plainly wrong in the asleep versus awake differentiation, but not many. No way for me to judge light versus deep versus REM sleep stages. What I do think with the Oura is that it's pretty consistent, and that it does have relative value. In other words, if it gives me a sleep score in it's Optimal range (> 85) one night, then the next night I get a Pay Attention (< 70, two grades lower on their scale), I'm pretty confident I slept better (i.e., closer to what science/medicine has deemed optimal) on the Optimal score night than I did on the Pay Attention score night. If I get a 77 (Good) one night and a 74 (Good) on the next night, I wouldn't have a high confidence the first night's sleep was better. The same would hold true for the various parameters that feel into the sleep score, total sleep time, deep sleep time, etc. The numbers might not be extremely precise, but trends are probably reliable.

Part of that take is probably once being an engineer. When I was studying adaptive control in graduate school one of the textbooks stated what the authors (two [edit: Swedish] guys I think, Astrom and Wittenmark) called the "certainty equivalence principal". The idea was when you're putting together a control system, the only way to keep the problem from growing so complex as to be unwieldy*, is to assume your feedback sensors are accurate and base your design/control actions on what they tell you**. To an engineer, that compromise beats leaving the system you want to control running uncontrolled.

*The edition of the book I used was written in the early 90s when computing power was much more "expensive" than it is now, and learning neural networks and such were still just math problems in dissertations. The mentioned principle may well be OBE now.

**if you have an array of sensors you can use the suite to calibrate/remove some of the errors, but beyond what you can achieve there, you believe the feedback you are getting.

[IlliniDave]

Good news on the labs. Have any of your tests included a scan for calcium artery scoring? That's something my wife's concierge doctor likes for assessing cardiovascular health...

I wonder if you'd find any correlation in sleep quality with HIT or lifting? Or maybe the Kava usage?

Nope I haven't had a CAC scan. Part of me doesn't want to know. I could foresee knowing a number increasing my baseline stress a lot. That would exacerbate IR and inflammation and possibly just accelerate the process of any problem that's started, lol. I do believe a CAC scan is probably the best way to identify problems. Likely as soon as I get to a point where I'm no longer improving with the other relevant measures and possibly getting worse, I'd talk to my primary doc about that. Despite what we've all had drilled into us, IR seems to be the biggest driver of CAD. So I want to keep pushing that down. Most recently my HOMA-IR was 1.5. How to interpret the score seems to vary by source, but based on my distillation, I'll call that less than fully insulin sensitive (i.e. 1.0 or less) but not full-blown insulin resistant (>2.5). I'm going to keep on it until I get to 1.0 or below.

I've picked up the understanding that the best way get on a good sleep schedule is to wake up at a consistent time and let your body tell when it's time to go to sleep. So far that's impossible for me because the manifestation of too little sleep to me is waking up insanely early and just plain being awake. Oura seems to emphasize consistent bed time, and that's a thing I've been pretty good about. Your observation is interesting--I haven't tried correlating what time I actually get to sleep with cycle characteristics. I usually don't have much trouble getting an amount of deep sleep that Oura is happy with (though well below what the hardcore healthspan/longevity hackers seem to target/achieve. I've averaged 1h 6m this year so far. REM is another matter, lol. It's not uncommon at all for me to get 20m or less. I don't see too much immediate correlation with deep sleep and activity level--If I have an significantly above average physical demand day I don't necessarily get more deep sleep that night. But there is a cumulative effect. If I string together high activity days, within 2-3 days I'll see an uptick in deep sleep.

It seems like I averaged a bit more REM for the first 5 months of last year, and at that time I was doing HIIT 2x/wk religiously. It will be interesting to see in June when I change up my routine to include some HIIT principles if REM changes. When I started in with the heavier resistance training last June, but my REM and deep sleep crashed (but that also coincided with arriving at the hideout for the summer). Through the later part of the fall and the early part of this year my Deep sleep recovered to generally higher levels than I had in the first 10 months of 2024. My REM recovered too, but is still below Jan-May of last year. There are tons of other potential conflating factors, but it seems like HIIT might boost REM and straight resistance work doesn't have much effect, maybe a very slight increase in deep over time.

An interesting factoid I picked up today is deep sleep is supposedly the only time your body can do DNA repair. Makes me wish I could regularly ~ 2hr or more the hackers talk about.

[Ego]

Ego mentioned one, maybe in his journal, that in a different study tested a little better than the usual subjects (maybe it was a newer iteration of an Apple device, or a newer Google version of FitBit, I don't recall).

It was the newest Apple watch.

Seems like no matter how you slice it, there's uncertainty in the data.

Yeah, this is where the citizen journalist-influencers come in handy. The Quantified Scientist guy on youtube wears multiple devices most nights. The fact that he gets widely varying results from different devices from the same night's sleep does not instill confidence.

Whoop just released a new strap with an annual fee of $359 that includes an ECG / AFIB screener as well as a daily blood pressure reading right from the strap. The newest Apple watch can also do an ECG. Things are progressing fast. Some day soon we will be able to wear a microneedle patch and get continuous readings on all of the blood tests you are waiting for from your doctor.

[IlliniDave]

It was the newest Apple watch...

Thanks, I remember it more clearly now. The gadget guy in me was instantly drawn to a moar betterer device, but for better or worse, I'm invested in the Android ecosystem presently,

I'll have to check that Quantified Scientist guy out. I do sometimes wonder why, given the numbers I get over the long term with Oura, I don't have "symptoms" of sleep problems that manifest during waking hours. It could be that I'm just so used to substandard quality sleep that I interpret my current state as "normal" or "fine". It could also be that my individual characteristics/variation spoof Oura's algorithms, which obviously are tuned to work across the general population. Specifically, I'm wondering if REM for me is a little skewed from norms and sometimes looks like either light sleep or even brief periods of being awake. There's reasons I ponder that which I'll spare everyone the details of.

It does seem like we're on the cusp of a new paradigm in health monitoring/maintenance. Multi-function wearable devices with 24/7 monitoring combined with AI will allow a motivated person to have a more comprehensive picture of their overall health status then they could ever hope for short of being an in-patient at a leading contemporary research hospital with a team of specialists hovering around. There are downsides to that, of course, but I tend to err on the side of empowering individuals versus abdicating to the expert class because I believe the individuals' day-to-day choices and actions very often have a much greater influence on the arc of their health than periodic medical intervention.

[suomalainen]

Yeah, this is where the citizen journalist-influencers come in handy.

Also check out https://www.dcrainmaker.com/ who is a tech nerd and a fitness nerd and does in-depth reviews on watches and other devices. I haven't kept up with him, so not sure if there will be content related to sleep stuff.

[IlliniDave]

... Or maybe the Kava usage?

I had to go check this one. Over the 5+ months I've been drinking kava on a somewhat regular basis, but my deep and REM sleep are running higher than they were during the prior 5 months. The wrinkle is the long-term trends I've seen. Last year from Jan-May I was sleeping pretty well on balance. Then starting in June my sleep fell off in about every way possible, and that continued through October with the bottom being in August. During Sept and Oct I was trending back up. I first tried kava around Thanksgiving IIRC, and regularly during December. The upward trend that started in Sept/Oct picked up steam in December and I've more or less been on a plateau since then. Comparing this relative maxima to Jan-May 2024, my REM is down slightly now, and deep sleep is up slightly now compared to the first months of '24. By slight I mean my deep sleep is a handful of minutes higher now, and REM is roughly 10 minutes below the '24 high point. My conclusion is that kava probably isn't helping or hurting in a substantial way. The reason I've continued to drink it is because I enjoy it. I guess I had a subconscious sense it wasn't a game-changer for sleep despite some early results that seemed very promising.

[IlliniDave]

Also check out https://www.dcrainmaker.com/ who is a tech nerd and a fitness nerd and does in-depth reviews on watches and other devices. I haven't kept up with him, so not sure if there will be content related to sleep stuff.

I checked out his site and it does seem like he's much more focused on sports/fitness gadgets, but they interest me too so at some later point I plan to check out some of the things he has reviewed.

[frugaldoc]

An interesting factoid I picked up today is deep sleep is supposedly the only time your body can do DNA repair. Makes me wish I could regularly ~ 2hr or more the hackers talk about.

I am curious as to where you picked up this factoid. It does not correspond to any cellular biology I learned although I will grant that my knowledge may be a bit out of date. With DNA dividing throughout the day, being able to repair DNA damage only two hours per day seems quite risky. I feel that an organism that could repair over a greater span of time would have a selection advantage. Unless the results of this damage only manifested themselves after the reproductive years.