Look at the picture. Those are my biomarker readings this morning. I would like to have the readings like these every day. Particularly, Sleep – that's the most elusive one. Activity is the easiest one, that's in optimal range pretty much every day. Readiness is to a great extent a function of sleep as such somewhat more difficult to hack.
Now, why these readings are important? Because of the way they have been 'achieved'. The hint is obvious by now – indeed, they have been 'achieved' doing exactly the wrong thing. Ask any doctor what are not-to-do and the chances are on the list will be a few things which are obviously wrong, like wrong 'food', wrong dose of alcohol, wrong amount of sleep, wrong a few more things which for the sake of decency I'll keep to myself (although that part may be the most healthy of all).
What those doctors and health gurus tell? I'll get the vibe from one email received this morning – a very typical message either by email or in-person visit. Whole foods, stay hydrated, prioritise restful sleep (ok, don't forget to grab that 'innovative solution',i.e., $4000 pod ...), regular exercise, reduce stress (breath work, cold plunging, journaling, gratitude ...ok, buy that $600 gene testing as well). Look, if this is told in a dietician's consultation which sets one back $300-500, then it's done for the money. If it comes from a 'guru' who has built his following through self-promotion, then it's to gather the commissions from the products (supplements, gear, tests) you buy. Well, nothing wrong with this – business as usual, nothing wrong if you understand what happens here.
I follow the advice as above pretty much like 90% of time. That helps me to keep biomarkers in 'good' area most of the days. I'm aware of things which will surely push me out of balance – and to what extent – like too much drink and overtraining will have the exact same effect on Readiness value the next morning. Although the feeling from the latter will be much better. Yet, stress background will be the same. No doctor or diet consultant has told me this and I've seen a few in due course (not that there was much need).
There are often many days and sometimes weeks when I have done everything right by this conventional wisdom – clean paleo diet, optimal exercise, swimming, grounding, journaling, optimal sun exposure, stress reduction ... you name it – all the right things every day all day long. Yet, good sleep is never guaranteed by those measures and neither are biomarkers in 'optimal' area (they usually remain in 'good' area). Well, there are a few modes which work predictably well – like long hikes with proper food but those are usually not applicable to a typical business day.
A few weeks ago I got so frustrated with lack of results from 'doing all the right things' that I started to experiment of doing 'the wrong thing' to see if it will worsen the results. No, I didn't start to eat junk food or bread, or sugary things, or drinking, or whatever I know predictably hurts. But I started to do things like having 4 coffees in late afternoon. Who would suggest it? Or eating some cottage cheese right before going to bed. What about that advice 'not to eat a few hours before sleep'? And you know what? The coffees had no detectable effect on sleep quality. Pretty average in 'good' area as usual. Eating a light meal of high protein food (cottage cheese, meat, egg) seem to improve the sleep substantially.
Now back to this extreme case where I technically deviated from any baseline what could be considered healthy. 36 hours of wrong things and on the morning of the next business day coming out with optimal biomarkers. It all started with a hard workout (well the kind of workout which predictably pushes the Readiness reading in 'fair' or 'pay attention' area). It was followed by a dinner (well, steak in a restaurant with Michelin recommendation – but, contrary, to expectations and previous experience in the same place the steak was hardly good). The dinner was followed by a cigar in the cigar room of the same restaurant (here, the unhealthy part starts ...). The cigar was accompanied with Zacapa rum, as usual. My first drink in 15 days, the unhealthy part keeps unfolding ...). My date had to work next day and she went home. I went to a bar. The unhealthy part unfolds fully. Way too much drink. One night stand. She got 2 orgasms, I got 1. By the time we woke up, it was 5pm and she left the hotel room casually without saying good-by. None of us asked each others' name. We both understood the sex was safe.
This is exactly the scenario I tagged as 'horror movie' when a friend of mine, a young woman, told this has recently happened to her twice. Yet, here I am, tired of doing all the right things and doing something what seems stupid. The only difference from me and my friend was that I had no regrets. But soon after I'm in supermarket, at just after 5pm buying – guess what – beer (somewhat predictable), ice cream, chocolate ... the latter two I consider junk food, and the prior a weakness, and usually do not use any of it. Survival state. The kind of state I look at others with compassion when I see one in such a survival state (like with an open beer in park). Fast forward. Another bar. Then another one. Then a recovery day. Not even much hangover. Kefir. Back to paleo diet – eggs, etc. Sleeping pretty much all day. As usual after more than a few drinks. It was Saturday when I do no work ever, so no problem.
On Sunday morning I woke up with these perfect biomarkers. Even RHR curve was classically perfect, with low at the middle of sleep span. While I appreciate the result I perfectly understand that the way the results have been 'achieved' is totally unsustainable.
The occurrence only reinforced my scepticism of what I've heard of doctors and consultants and I got an urge to find out what allows to get optimal sleep and why I can't reliably hack my sleep every day by just adhering to healthy habits.
I've pretty much documented most the biomarkers daily, alongside with body weight and dietary choices, and other habits (like fasting) for most of the last year. 345 days of reliable data to look back. Implications of various scenarios on body weight, mood, sleep and readiness ratings.
This obvious diversion from baseline made me look closer at data. What percentage of days are with Sleep reading above 90 (85 is considered borderline optimal)? What are the preceding events leading to such occurrence. Some cases were clear-cut – like hiking a fairly easy route 48 hours in fasted state, then having a clean paleo meal and sleeping in silk sheets in a French country house where hardly any cell tower signal arrives ... Other cases were not so clear-cut.
What I found pouring over the last 345 days worth of day is that only 14 days (4% of all) were with Sleep reading at 90 or above. Further, I looked at the preceding events that lead to sound sleep and this is what I could find from the data:
On 5 occasions the preceding day was calorie surplus (like a specific refeeding day, or just a consuming more calories than burned – sometimes including some limited amount of junk like chocolate or sugary yogurt),
The night after breaking long fasts (27 - 120 hours) – 3 occasions. This seems to work almost every time. By far the best summary biomarker readings were after breaking 27-h dry fast, walking 17 km on that day and breaking the fast by eating 250 g of cheddar cheese only, complete with 2 large beers. I dunno if the biomarkers would have been even better without the latter.
Total rest days – 3 occasions. Like staying at home, doing work on computer but doing no exercise. Not even short exercise sessions which I customarily do. Well, those rest days are usually after hard exercise days or, rarely, mild hangover days.
Alcohol use – 3 occasions. This is tricky. Works only, if used rarely. One entry I was surprised about retrospectively is that of alcohol use (wine) after 110 teetotal days (every calendar year I go for 100 consecutive teetotal days). On that particular day the Readiness reading was just 53 (must be a lot of wine, unless some other factor I've failed to document – like workout), yet Sleep index was 90.
As to negative preceding events predictably ruining Sleep reading (pushing the reading to low of around 50 +/-5 area) are:
Hard workout. Even if done rather early in the day (just after noon), toward the end of the winter (I was training consistently during the winter) I was starting to get very bad sleep – on two consecutive occasions resulting in insomnia. After those occasions I reduced my usual exercise time to half (from about 1.5 hours to 45 min or 1 hour max) and that somewhat remedied the issue to bearable. A recent occasion was a day when I overexercised a day and got Readiness reading at 46. The overexercise included jogging 10 km (I'm against excessive cardio, haven't had run for years and it was more for 'data collection' interest following a discussion with a friend), alongside with medium intensity workout and walking-swimming.
Alcohol – if to look at biomarkers, there seems to be no minimal beneficial dose. A night in the bar invariably produces bad biomarker readings. Alcohol should be avoided, no question about it, even if it can occasionally lead to impressive biomarker readings on very selected occasions.
Are there any neutral factors? I could not discern any positive or negative effect on sleep from these activities:
cold water swimming,
grounding,
sun exposure,
ashwagandha supplements,
coffee consumption (although, usually no caffeine after 2pm).
I know the theory suggests there are good cause-effect relationship from all this – particularly, cold water exposure and sun exposure, and grounding – but I could not notice any effect, good or bad, on sleep.
What's next? Contrary to what health gurus and doctors say, it seems complicated. Everybody has to figure out his/her own formula. The ingredients seem to be universal but the dosage and timing is rather individual.
What I plan to do is to continue experimenting in teetotal mode. How to get consistently good sleep without the crutch of common drugs and harming substances? There are good hints (breaking fast days, rest days ...) but no congruent formula yet which works all the time. But then, probably just sleep in 'good' zone but with clean living is good enough and/or better than resorting to the pharmacology or unhealthy habits.
Now I'm going for my rather usual 12 km walk and swim. That's very relaxing and enjoyable, I do it on every occasion whenever I have time. That's nice, that's useful but that's no hack for optimal sleep. I wish it was but it is not.
However, there is a rather esoteric cause for good sleep. I notice that I sleep better on days when the days have been very productive work-wise. So, maybe this is the direction to explore further.
FOLLOW UP
Somewhat ironically, the following day, the day after the very day when I had the perfect biomarker readings came in with disastrous biomarker readings. As already described, I started the day with perfect biomarkers. And lived the day stacking all the good and none of bad habits. Grounding, sun exposure, clean paleo diet (no ultraprocessed food) with nutritious meals, optimal exercise (walking 12 km) and went to swim in river, meditation, meaningful social interactions, no stress whatsoever ... textbook perfect, I don't know what to add to make it better.
Yet, that supposedly perfectly spent day ended up in insomnia and led to disastrous biomarkers the next morning. I couldn't put a finger on what caused it until later when I could only guess that it was some kind of virus (and could read that from mild diarrhoea during the day and sweating the next night). Short-lived illness, with full recovery in less than 24 hours – yet, that does not cancel the fact that disastrous biomarkers came after starting with very strong biomarkers and living the day textbook perfect.
And by 'bad' I mean like heavy hangover bad or 3x the amount of optimal exercise bad (somewhat counterintuitively, those things are equal when it comes to biomarker readings).
Now, this day I did some routine walking for errands I couldn't delay. That gave me about 1/2 of exercise what could be considered optimal. I ate fine, just continued what I know is a healthy protocol.
As at the moment of writing, I'm back to baseline with Readiness reading at 82 and that of Sleep at 79 – both rated as 'Good' allowing me to execute the day with exactly the right pleasure-and-productivity balance I'm happy with. And as I write this, the things are going my way with a major solution just flashed on the screen.
P.S. Today I stumbled on a video which I found very interesting. That's not about the product (Oura ring, I like it) or personalities (Attia, Huberman, I don't care about them) but about the subject why NOT to listen to doctors and health gurus (those two fit in that category). The video shows the 'kitchen' now the doctors and health gurus manufacture the message for their own benefit. I'm not saying it's good or bad but I'm saying we should take everything we hear with a grain of salt as – by all probability the message is just an exercise of building a personal brand and corrupted for money. The video on YouTube is here. Since we're on decentralised platform, an alternative link (on decentralised platform LBRY) is here.