Experiments: Food, Sleep, and Energy

A few months ago a new book in the Wisdom of Yogananda series was published: How to Achieve Glowing Health and Vitality. It’s packed with useful tips and ideas, enough to seem overwhelming until you remember to just relax, find the ones that seem relevant to what you need right now, and focus on those. I’m not often one to drastically tweak my daily habits, but this book got me inspired into a few interesting experiments.

In the food department, the idea that most intrigued me was that of eating monomeals. In spite of my spell-checker’s insistence, these are not one-term algebraic expressions, but rather meals in which you eat only a single (raw, natural) food, and as much of it as you like until you feel satiated. It’s actually much easier for your digestive system to handle a consistent batch of a single food than to deal with a mix of many different ingredients that digest at different rates and in different ways. It takes less energy for your body to process the food, and you’re also better able to tell when you’ve actually eaten an appropriate amount.

I’ve always liked the idea of fasting as a cleansing “vacation” for the digestive system, but I really don’t like fasting itself at all. Monomeals seem like a good compromise to me. I’m currently doing one or two a day, most often with apples, bananas, melons, or other fruit. I’ll usually throw in a “monosnack” of almonds or something similar in between, too. If I save a full “regular” meal for the evening, I manage to skip most of the afternoon energy slump.

Also in support of the energy levels, I’ve been increasing my the Energization Exercises two or three times a day. In addition to the book inspiring renewed will power and concentration, I also discovered an interesting refinement to the mental technique. Instead of visualizing the energy flowing to the various body parts as I activated them, I imagined it moving just ahead of what my body was doing. If you can get into that flow, it becomes much more an experience of tapping into existing energy rather than generating it all from your own little self. Fun to play with.

The final area I’ve been experimenting in is sleep. I don’t think it was in this book, but I’ve read elsewhere Yogananda’s comment that six hours of sleep a night is plenty for most people, and you don’t want to spend more time subconscious than you need to. I’ve always felt very attached to my 7.5-8 hours a night, ever since Dr. Dement’s Sleep & Dreams class in college, but by the time I got through this book I felt like I might actually be able to change that habit.

So I’ve been gradually trimming down the amount I sleep, and have gotten to the point where I can do 6.5 hours a night pretty regularly without any trouble. Still working on the last half hour, but I feel like I’m almost there. And interestingly, even though I often took short afternoon naps before I had a full-time job, now I find that even if I try to nap on a weekend, I often can’t. It’s a little harder sometimes to get up in the mornings on weekends, but once I am up, I’m fine. And I can sense a difference now between needing sleep and merely wanting sleep, which I never particularly noticed before.

The concurrence of the food experiment has actually helped the sleep part a great deal. For instance, if someone brings cookies to work and I eat them (because I can’t help myself, even though I usually try to avoid sweets until the weekend) I can much more dramatically feel the sag in my energy level. But I can tell that it’s not due to lack of sleep (which might otherwise be my first assumption) because if I sleep the same 6.5 hours that night, without any extra, I still feel fine the next day. So I can tell the amount of sleep is sustainable in and of itself, but other factors can try to fool me into thinking its not.

It’s nice to have the extra couple of hours in the day, though I’m still getting used to being awake that much. I’m using some of the time for extra sadhana, including getting myself to a couple of the hour and a half morning meditations in the community temple, and doing some yoga on other mornings. I’m also spending a little more time reading just for fun, so it’s not all “virtuous and productive” as Mom would say, but it’s an okay balance at this point.

[Another intriguing sleep concept I came across recently is segmented sleep. Sounded to me a little trickier to make useful, though, and one sleep experiment at a time is enough.]

An interesting facet to everything in this post, aside from just the fun of experimenting with how human bodies work, is the sense of attunement. Taking instructions from my guru into the most basic aspects of my everyday life -- food and sleep -- is a good way to practice feeling the discipleship connection at all times. So it’s all worth it just for that perspective, even if nothing else.

One Month Post-LASIK Checkup

I went in this morning for my one-month checkup. My vision is still pretty much where it was on the day after surgery -- 20/20 in my right eye, and slightly better in my left. My right is healing a tad slower, though, so it might yet catch up. Not that the difference is really noticeable in day-to-day life, of course. The doctor could tell that I had gotten something in my right eye recently, as it was slightly scratched, but no big deal. The corneal flap itself is healing nicely, as it should.

I'm still taking pretty regular eye drops, though the frequency is diminishing as my eyes get better at taking care of themselves. Apparently the thing about the dryness isn't due to a problem with the tear ducts. Rather, nerves in the cornea get damaged during surgery, and until those are fully regrown, your eyes have a harder time telling how much moisture they need to produce. The time to restore the nerves varies from person to person. The doctor also gave me a sample of some different, gel-like eye drops that should be better (i.e. longer lasting) for nighttime use.

The various side effects I mentioned earlier are mostly gone. No more noticeable night halos. Computer screens and books stay in focus properly, so I don't get eye strain as easily. And I'm hardly ever reaching to take off glasses I'm not wearing. In fact, it's even gotten to the point where I think pictures of myself with glasses look odd.

I've been very good about not rubbing my eyes (which I'm supposed to keep up for at least another month, though it's a good policy in general). In the beginning, I was so hyper-aware of my eyes all the time that it wasn't actually at all difficult to remember not to rub them. Nowadays my eyes just feel normal the majority of the time, but I've already built up enough of a habit that I've still managed to avoid any lapses. Even just seeing other people rub their eyes makes me squirm sometimes, until I remind myself that they didn't just have LASIK recently.

Earlier on, around week 2 or so, I noticed that I had a light red spot on my right eye, just above the iris. I called the doctor's office and described it, but they weren't too worried, since it wasn't hurting, oozing, spreading, or affecting my vision. If any of that changed, I was supposed to go in and get it checked out, but otherwise it was expected to go away on its own within a few weeks. It was gone entirely in about 2 weeks, I think.

So all is well. I don't have any more scheduled checkups, and this'll probably be all for the blog chronicling of it, unless something else unexpected comes up. But hopefully it won't, since things are in pretty good shape here.

The Week After LASIK

So this is me without glasses. Never having even worn contacts before, it's a big change. Some folks are noticing, others aren't (or at least aren't remarking on it). The funny part was the first day or two after surgery, when I'd be somewhere random like the library or the grocery store, and wondering why complete strangers weren't all exclaiming in awe at the wonder that is Graham without glasses. I guess it's not earth-shattering for everyone else, but it's pretty exciting for me.

The first day after surgery, my vision was good. The second day, my outside vision was officially wonderful. Outdoors on a sunny day, everything is just gorgeous. I went over to Stanford for a couple hours in the afternoon and wandered around some of my favorite places, just looking at things. Went through the art museum a bit, too, though my inside vision isn't anything to write home about yet. Computer work and reading are still a bit variable, which apparently is to be expected for the first few weeks or so. I can still do everything just fine, though my eyes get more tired from the extra work to keep things in focus, especially after a full day at work. (The plus side to this is that I'm playing mandolin more again, since I can do that in the dark while resting my eyes after work.)

I'm off the antibiotic and anti-inflammatory eye drops, though I'm still using regular moisturizing drops pretty liberally. I have to wear this annoying plastic sleep mask at night, though just for a couple more nights. It's rigid plastic, to make sure nothing touches your eyes, or even rubs them through the mask (like could happen with a regular sleep mask). Unfortunately, that means that it doesn't fit very well (because it doesn't conform to your face) and you therefore have to be really careful about rolling over on it or things like that. One night I accidentally pushed it out of place and the edge of the mask itself rubbed up against my right eye. That hurt like the dickens, but luckily there was no lasting damage. I think I've learned to sleep more carefully, though, since I haven't had trouble with it since.

Here's a nighttime tip for anyone getting LASIK: Set an alarm to go off once or twice in the middle of the night, for you to get up and put in eye drops. The first few nights I was waking up at 4AM because my eyes had so painfully dried out. It's completely worth losing a few minutes sleep for preventative eye drops.

My phantom glasses syndrome is gradually fading. It still catches me reaching to take off my glasses at some of the obvious times, like putting on a shirt, or taking eye drops, but I'm already doing considerably less of that. More interesting to watch for are the small moments of self-consciousness or other such situations where I might be adjusting my glasses, or wiping the lenses or something, just to have something to do. There's also a psychological effect of not wearing glasses, where I assume that since I don't have anything on my face, I must not be seeing everything clearly, and my brain tries to reinterpret the clear images as fuzzy. That was actually briefly disorienting at times, though not so much after the first day.

I've been dancing a few times with my "new" eyes, though only once so far at something crowded (i.e. navigationally challenging) enough for them to have a relevant effect. I like having real peripheral vision, without glasses frames fuzzing things up at the edges, though for the most part I wasn't specifically noticing it. Which is good, since it means everything Just Worked™. It's also nice in close dancing situations, like some blues dances, to not have frames to bump into. And of course my glasses will never again be knocked off by an over-enthusiastic underarm turn. (That's only ever happened a couple times, but still....)

So anyway, there are still various little things to deal with in the eye-healing process, but nothing too onerous. It's all far outweighed by the awesomeness of knowing that I can see with my own eyes.

My LASIK Experience

Short story: Everything went perfectly smoothly and I have 20/20 vision now. It's awesome. Read on if you want details (some of which may be somewhat squeam-inducing, so use your own judgment).

Preparation
The day before surgery I had to start taking antibiotic eye drops every several hours. Since I don't wear contacts or makeup, there wasn't much else to do differently from normal. So nothing too bad about that. I spent more time on mental preparation, though.

Between Wednesday and Thursday nights I actually watched about an hour's worth of LASIK videos on YouTube. This is probably not recommendable for everyone, but I really like knowing precisely what I'm getting into. If I can't face it in something as safe as a video, I probably shouldn't be doing it in real life, right? Anyway, I put on some good music and just practiced getting used to the procedure and feeling relaxed around it. I figure if kids can supposedly get desensitized to violence by playing video games, we could probably put the same principle to more positive use. (I did, however, deliberately avoid videos with titles like "LASIK Gone Wrong" and such.) I didn't fall asleep very easily the night before surgery, but I used some of the time to visualize what it would all probably look like from the patient's point of view.

Still, I was a bit on the nervous side on Friday morning. By coincidence, I had a regular physical exam scheduled for the same day, right before surgery. The nurse mentioned that my blood pressure was fine, but that my pulse was a tad high. "Yeah," I said, "Let me explain that...."

Mom drove me down to Dr. Hyver's office in Santa Clara around 12:45. They did some of the same tests and examinations of my eyes as on my initial consultations, and some different ones as well. I was having Wavefront (Custom) LASIK, so they get a custom topographical map of my eyes and use it to program the laser specifically for me. (With regular LASIK you just get a standard treatment based on your prescription.) I've heard that you can get a Valium at this stage of the proceedings as well, but I didn't. Maybe they only give it to the folks who look nervous on the outside. Anyway, there was some more waiting at this point, before the actual operation, so you have a bit more time to get sufficiently nervous about it, just in case you weren't already. I used the time to take deep breaths and get myself to the point where my body was basically in a holding pattern without nervous symptoms and my mind was a little distanced, where it could remain calmer.

Operation
In the operating room, the assistants attired me in stuff to keep my hair out of the way and the eye drops out of my ears, then had me lay down on the operating table and slathered my eyes in numbing drops. They offered me something to hold onto ("Umm-letmethink-yes") and I got a small teddy bear and a stuffed chihuahua. I never actually got to see the stuffed animals, since I had to keep my eyes closed until the operation (at which point my eyes were otherwise engaged) but I amused myself during the wait by figuring out what they looked like by feel. Come to think of it, I never actually saw Dr. Hyver that day, either. It sounded like him, though, so I figure he was there.

They put a patch over my left eye first, so it wouldn't see what happened to the right eye and run away. They taped my right eyelids back and then put some little metal spreaders in there to open the lids further. This is the point in the videos where it starts looking freaky, because an eye that unnaturally open just automatically looks painful and scared. It wasn't actually too bad having it done, though. The part I most disliked, though, was the next bit, where they put the metal ring around my eye to hold it still. It puts a considerable amount of downward pressure pushing into the eye socket, which isn't very comfortable. But it was nice to know my eye couldn't move, because then they slid another piece of equipment over, blocking my field of vision, and I could hear the sound of a miniature buzz saw slicing my cornea open. I didn't feel it at all on my right eye, and only slightly on my left (not even quite enough to really be called "painful," but I could feel it). The info sheet they gave me before the operation described this whole stage a bit vaguely as "preparing the eye."

So then all that stuff came off, and Dr. Hyver folded back the flap he'd cut in my cornea (it was still attached at the top of my eye). It made the yellow and blue light I was staring at go all wavy and watery, which was kind of pretty, then it settled down into just being fuzzy. Then they fired up the laser, which makes a sound like a tiny jackhammer while it's running. Visually, there's nothing scary about the laser. You just focus on the light in front of your eye for about 30-60 seconds or so, and that's it. The smell was a bit more disconcerting, like burnt rubber. I couldn't feel a thing, but it did take a bit of concentration to keep focused.

Once the laser was done, they put my corneal flap back in place, gave it a lot of eye drops, and smoothed it all into place with a little brush, until it had sort of suctioned itself back into place. After that, you just have to trust it to hold itself there until it heals and seals itself again. Then they took off the spreaders and the tape, let me close my right eye, put a patch on it, and moved on to the left, where we went through the whole thing again. It doesn't take very long; I was probably in the operating room for no more than 15 minutes total. Dr. Hyver kept up a comforting monologue the whole time, not necessarily saying exactly what he was doing, but letting me know precisely what I'd be seeing or feeling at each stage of things, which was helpful and reassuring.

Overall, it wasn't at all bad. And in a way, it's easier than watching the videos, because you can only see the tools and lights, not the gross eye bits getting cut up. The thing about doing all this on the eyes, though, is that it takes your complete attention. If it were a foot operation or something, I could imagine being able to ignore it, but with the eyes there's just nowhere to hide. Especially since you have to "help" by keeping your focus on the laser's light, which actually takes some concentration. A couple times, though, I picked up a bit from the part of my mind with the constant background soundtrack. I think it was playing Värttinä tunes mostly. "Seelinnikoi" in particular is now associated with LASIK for me.

Post-Operation
After the operation I got to rest in a dim room for a few minutes, then a doctor came in to take a look at my eyes and confirm that they were looking okay. Then I got my eye drops and instructions and was sent home with dark glasses to cut down on the brighter-than-usual sunlight. Mom drove me back to her apartment for the initial recovery period.

The instructions included keeping my eyes closed for four hours after surgery. I managed to doze a little bit, but couldn't really sleep, though I did keep my eyes closed the whole time. Mom kept me company and we listened to some audio books to pass the time. (James Thurber and P.G. Wodehouse stories make for good, light listening.) I was told to expect some burning scratchiness and irritations, but I didn't really have a problem with it. The preventative Ibuprofen I took might have helped. It did feel like I had a bit of crud in my eye sometimes, but if I kept my eyes mostly still it wasn't a problem. Got a bit of a headache, though, probably as much from deliberately keeping my eyes closed all that time as anything else.

When my four hours were up, I took off the eye covering that was keeping things dark for me, and it felt like I was in bright sunlight even before I opened my eyes. In reality, it was dark outside and Mom had only turned on one bulb in the living room lamp. Pretty dim by regular standards. I opened my eyes in a dark room first and then got adjusted to the light very quickly. At this point, my vision was good, but kind of fuzzy, as if I had just woken up. (And I'm not allowed to rub my eyes for 2 months, so I can't clear them that way.) We went for a nighttime walk and I could see the halos around lights in the dark. They're not too bad -- kind of like seeing the lights through a fog, or through textured glass -- and they're supposed to go away eventually anyway.

I'm on antibiotic and anti-inflammatory eye drops for 5 days, and regular artificial tear drops for as long as I like. For 10 days I have to sleep in a special cover that will keep anything from touching my eyes. It's kind of uncomfortable and annoying, but it would suck to dislodge my corneal flap, too, so I'm motivated to deal with it at least.

The Next Day
This morning I went back for a post-op checkup. My vision was still a bit fuzzy (more noticeably at the computer), but I could see perfectly well to drive myself down there. They measured me at 20/20 for the right eye, and my left could even read some of the 20/15 line. This is compared to 20/300 without glasses before. The fuzziness clears up as the cornea continues healing, and as of this afternoon it was already much better, though it still has occasional weird moments. The eye drops help that. There's no pain at all, though I've got a bit of phantom limb syndrome for my glasses. I tried to see the cut in my cornea in the mirror, but everything looks perfectly normal. I can read and work at the computer just fine, though I'm trying to take it easy and not strain my eyes too much, giving them frequent rests. I've also just enjoyed walking around downtown, going to the library and the grocery store, and just looking at things, seeing what I can see, reminding myself that I'm not actually wearing my glasses. It's a little surreal.

Watch for further posts about life without glasses, once I've lived it a bit more.

Zappy Zappy

Various factors in my life have recently converged to get a certain something off my "someday" list: LASIK. Yesterday I went to the highly recommended Dr. Scott Hyver for a consultation, and next Friday I will be going under the laser and then throwing away my glasses. So I have a week to get over as much of the lingering squeamishness as possible. That part's going pretty well so far, though.

In terms of motivation for this, I've never had much of an opinion on glasses aesthetically one way or the other (so I've stuck with them over contacts just because it seems easier). For me, it's all about independence. With either glasses or contacts, I'm completely reliant on external, breakable, losable objects for one of the most vital means of relating the world. If my glasses were to break, I'd have trouble just getting myself home safely, much less doing anything else. That would be a pain three miles from here at work, or much worse traveling somewhere on the other side of the world. Freedom from that worry and dependency is the gift I'm giving myself here. I expect real peripheral vision will be pretty cool too, especially for dancing.

So... if for any reason you liked seeing me in glasses, get your looks in this next week while you still can. Maybe I should shave my head out of season, too, just to really confuse people. :-)

Fixing My Sleep

I just finished re-reading Dr. Dement's The Promise of Sleep, which was good since I needed to learn different things from it now than when I last read it several years ago. I highly recommend this book to pretty much everyone, since I agree with Dr. Dement that sleep is one of the least understood but most important aspects of our physical and emotional health. The quality of your sleep affects so many other parts of your life.

What prompted this re-reading for me was coming back from my vacation last month with a severely screwed up sleep schedule/ability. Between jet lag, dance camp, Harry Potter, and various kinds of stress, I was a wreck. I had three days in a row at one point where I only slept a scattered handful of hours, and even after that I'd have nights where I was exhausted but unable to fall asleep for hours. Then I'd alternate nights of no sleep with nights of sleeping like a rock. So I started experimenting a bit with my sleep schedule (what did I have to lose at that point?) and also started reading this book to see if what I was doing made any sense. Luckily it did.

What I started by doing was just moving my bedtime later by one hour every night, while still getting up at the same time in the morning. Ever since I took Dr. Dement's "Sleep and Dreams" class in college, I've tried to be very aware of my sleep debt and of allocating enough time to keep it low. The problem is that sleep debt can actually be too low, to the point where it negatively affects your sleep efficiency, and allows other causes of insomnia (of which I have plenty) to come in and take over. My alternating nights of good sleep weren't erasing all my sleep debt, but just enough to cause this problem, given the state I was in. My idea with the first stage of this experiment was to try to regain/maintain a regular sleep schedule, but not let myself get quite enough, so that I could still fall asleep before my mind starts running away with me each night. After adjusting for a little while, this was fairly successful. (Moderately improving stress levels have helped as well.)

The downside to this, of course, is feeling sleepier than I'd like during the day. In the current phase of the plan, I'm alternating nights again, but in a much less dramatic way than when I had no control over it. I just switch between staying up the extra hour or not, so it's not a huge difference, but so far it seems to be balancing well between getting more rest and still falling asleep without too much trouble. There's also the plus that I can time my later nights so that I get more dancing (like the fact that I actually stayed at FNW all the way to the end last night). This does go against the standard advice of maintaining a rigidly consistent schedule of sleeping and waking, but Dr. Dement does stress in the last chapter of his book that it's really just important to understand the principles, and that different things will work for different people. My original idea was to eventually work back to having a fixed schedule, but I'm starting to reconsider this. If this alternating pattern continues to work out well, I may just tweak it a bit to make sure the total sleep time is enough, but then leave it there. We'll see.

Another thing I've been doing -- independent of but beneficial to the sleep times experiment -- is working out and running more. Dr. Dement recommends regular exercise as being good for sleep, but adds that it's best to do it more than 3 hours before bedtime, so as not to keep you awake. This is another case, though, where it's important to really understand how I personally react to it. My favorite time to go running recently has been about 10 PM. Luckily, this not only helps tire me out, but it can be incredibly relaxing. Running is very meditative for me. Nowadays, my mind -- my sleep nemesis -- is never as calm as when I'm running. And when I'm done and cooled down, I can continue relaxing myself for a while afterwards and maintain much of that feeling until I'm ready to go to sleep. So for 3 or 4 nights a week, that's very helpful.

Hooked on Crack

As you may have surmised from the title of this post, I've started going to a chiropractor recently: Dr. Shawn "The Spine Man" Stephenson of Stephenson Chiropractic in Los Altos. I've only had a few visits so far, but I'm already more than happy to give him a glowing recommendation, if any of you in the area are looking for a good chiropractor. I particularly like that he is very focused on patient education, really making sure that everything is explained and understood, which is great because I always ask a bunch of questions anyway. He's also just a generally wonderful, nice, funny guy. And everyone else I've seen in his office so far seems absolutely delighted to be there having him work on them, including the lady who was getting put back into shape after a car accident. Plus Mom's been seeing him for several months now as well, and she raves about him too. So what more do you need? :-)

As for what I'm doing there, I had considered going in to see him a few weeks ago, when my back was stiff and sore from hiking around Ireland and taking long plane flights. But I got busy and distracted, and then got back to feeling normal on my own before I actually got around to doing anything about it. Then last week I had a very bizarre experience, where I was woken up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night by a surprisingly sharp pain in my back. Completely random as far as I can tell, unless I was lifting heavy objects in my dream or something. It gradually faded over the next few days, but not before it had worried me enough to want to get checked out. So I did, and I got some x-rays and had Dr. Shawn poke around at my spine for a bit.

Turns out I'm in a situation fairly common among people who have spent a great deal of their lives reading, drawing, hunching over keyboards, and things like that. (Dancing is probably my one hobby that tries to counteract all this bad posture, but it's outnumbered, I'm afraid.) As a result of this, an x-ray shows that my neck has lost about 58% of the curve it's supposed to have, putting my head about an inch too far forward, which adds an extra 20 lbs of pressure to the muscles in my back and shoulders. The particular pain that brought me in was probably just caused by something very small that just happened to come at the wrong time, on top of my back's general out-of-shape-ness, and bumping it into a painful state for a bit. So while it did let me off easy this time, eventually fading on its own, its main function was as a warning flag. After a couple visits with Dr. Shawn, I decided it was probably a good idea to heed that flag and get this taken care of.

So I'm going in a few times a week now, to enjoy a few minutes of manhandling, spine crunching and getting coaxed into shape. It's very satisfying to have that done by someone who's so good at it. I'm also trying to break my habit of cracking my own back and neck, so I don't mess with any of the work he's doing. Apparently back cracking releases endorphins and such, which your body likes, so I guess it's as much a substance addiction as a plain old habit. But Dr. Shawn is going to be my main supplier of those chemicals now, so I'm practicing resisting the urges.

It'll probably take a while to notice any significant changes, but there are interesting things to observe even at this stage. After the last couple adjustments, I've actually noticed myself breathing a little differently. I don't normally have any trouble breathing, but my breath just felt a little clearer and more open for a little while. I'm also being much more conscious of my posture and precisely how unergonomic I am a lot of the time. As a musician and a computer person, I've spent a lot of time making sure things are ergonomic for my hands, and a lot less time thinking about my neck and back. So there's something to start focusing on more now.

Onsite

I had a dentist appointment yesterday. In the parking lot.

Onsite Dental is a dental service that goes around to various companies on different days providing dental services for employees. They've got a big trailer completely set up to do all sorts of dental work. It's amazing. I hadn't been to the dentist for a while, so they gave me X-rays first, then a cleaning. One of my old sealants had come out a while ago too, so they even filled that in for me. I think this is immensely cool. I'm really bad about going to the dentist, but when it's just down the stairs and out the door, it's easy to go get a check-up once in a while.

Another neat thing that recently came up: on-site oil changes. I'm definitely taking fRed there once his next 3,000 miles roll around.