Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Making the Ordinary Precious: revisiting the cup of coffee
Follow @mcphoo
Tweet
The common practice/addictions often become common because they are accessible private or social pleasures around which we celebrate our days. What's problematic of course is when we're so wedded to such practices we can't seem to function without them. What's worse is when we find out that what we begin to call "functioning" isn't functioning - at least not optimally. Does that mean that these pleasures are evil? Can they be redeemed?
Recently, for example, i wrote about the effect of caffeine on our sleep quality. In sum, it can really really disrupt the restorative phase of sleep, the deep sleep cycle. Does that make coffee evil?
At the time i wrote the above post, i was actually *really* tired, heading into the last leg of a long business road trip. The airline had lost my bag, didn't know where it was and i was sitting in a workshop with a colleague saying to me "i've never seen you look so tired." Super.
Normally, at times like this i would have fled to the nearest coffee pot and tried to jack up. It then occurred to me that perhaps what my body was telling me was that i needed some sleep, and wouldn't it be nice, rather than interfering with the quality of that process, i actually let myself *get* some sleep that evening. So i opted not to get the coffee. And i didn't touch any coffee for the next four days. Alas i didn't have my zeo on this trip to check the shifts in deep sleep cycle, but i know how i felt with a four day java break. What happened on day four?
The Best Cup. When i was gigging my way through grad school, our band's drummer, Burt Harris, had a simple heuristic: no beer for the band till the last set break.
I was reminded of that on the last day of the workshop as a colleague, Jen Waak, and i went for lunch and decided to go for coffee at the neighboring starbucks where i had whatever passes for a small latte. i asked them please (a) to make it with love and (b) not to scald the milk, as this was a precious, rare coffee. It was fabulous. For which i was really grateful since not all starbucks experiences are equivalently dandy.
I know it had only been four days, but that coffee was *so* nice.
Considering how i'd felt getting my recovery back while not being on coffee, and how good that single latte tasted, well it got me thinking: maybe there are benefits to rare-ing out the common into the precious. That way perhaps even our simple pleasures can become exquisite ones - affordably, wonderfully, easily.
Fave Places for Precious Blends? Please let me know if you've given such a strategy a go and how it's working. Also, if you have a fave non-chain coffee place - what is it and why is it a fave. For me, when i'm in Edinburgh around the eScience Center, i make a pilgrimage to Black Medicine. Awesome
ps:
my gratitude to Heidi Rothenburg for the zipfizz on that first day off the plane with no luggage and no sleep.
Related posts
At the time i wrote the above post, i was actually *really* tired, heading into the last leg of a long business road trip. The airline had lost my bag, didn't know where it was and i was sitting in a workshop with a colleague saying to me "i've never seen you look so tired." Super.
Normally, at times like this i would have fled to the nearest coffee pot and tried to jack up. It then occurred to me that perhaps what my body was telling me was that i needed some sleep, and wouldn't it be nice, rather than interfering with the quality of that process, i actually let myself *get* some sleep that evening. So i opted not to get the coffee. And i didn't touch any coffee for the next four days. Alas i didn't have my zeo on this trip to check the shifts in deep sleep cycle, but i know how i felt with a four day java break. What happened on day four?
The Best Cup. When i was gigging my way through grad school, our band's drummer, Burt Harris, had a simple heuristic: no beer for the band till the last set break.
I know it had only been four days, but that coffee was *so* nice.
Considering how i'd felt getting my recovery back while not being on coffee, and how good that single latte tasted, well it got me thinking: maybe there are benefits to rare-ing out the common into the precious. That way perhaps even our simple pleasures can become exquisite ones - affordably, wonderfully, easily.
Fave Places for Precious Blends? Please let me know if you've given such a strategy a go and how it's working. Also, if you have a fave non-chain coffee place - what is it and why is it a fave. For me, when i'm in Edinburgh around the eScience Center, i make a pilgrimage to Black Medicine. Awesome
ps:
my gratitude to Heidi Rothenburg for the zipfizz on that first day off the plane with no luggage and no sleep.
Related posts
Tweet Follow @begin2dig
PDF
We're Walking Here - and feeling much better as a result: walking to rep in performance improvements
Follow @mcphoo
Tweet
Walking is an action most of us take for granted. It's such an automatic, effortless, thoughtless practice that we tend to forget it's actually a learned, practiced, skill. But it's this natural effortlessness of this deeply rep'ed & acquired practice that makes it so valuable for locking in better movement practice - what we practice when say working with a coach to tune dynamic joint movements (like those in z-health's R-Phase (overview) and I-Phase (overview) drills) into our lives.
Indeed, walking is a huge component of Z-Health (overview). Folks familiar with Z-Health assessments know that they usually begin and end a session with a walk – and often walk in between various drills done within a session. But folks are also encouraged to walk on their own immediately after their own practice to help dial in the work they do during their session. It’s this part of the role of the walk ithat is the focus of this article, but to get at that part, we need to understand a little bit more about why the walk is so valuable in general.
Thoughtless Action – in a good way. Walking is a powerful communicator: it tells us a lot about our movement for a two key reasons we've touched on above: it’s autonomous, and its reflexive. Autonomous, from the greek auto, means can act on its own. So we can walk while we do other things. Like chew gum and talk all at the same time.
Walking, as noted, is not innate; it is rather like riding a bicycle: a learned skill. Indeed, research shows two interesting things (at least) about this skill acquisition: (1) that when we begin to acquire the skill has been pretty steady for us for hundreds of millions of years (Garwicz09) but (2) that this motor skill acquisition is also affected by cultural practices (Karasik10).
Once we do get going, we learn and practice this skill millions of times (each step is a practice) it becomes not only autonomous but reflexive. Reflexive means that the function moves from an act where we are thinking about it to something that is pre-cognitive – happens without having to think consciously about what to do. So with these two related qualities – autonomous and reflexive – we have an action that gives us a pretty good picture of how a person actually moves when they’re not thinking about it vs how a person may perform a less familiar action that requires their cognition and concentration. Something that is, in effect, thoughtless, therefore seems to give us a more accurate picture of the quality of a person’s movement
From this picture of the walk, Z-Health practitioners starting at an R-Phase certification level (the first cert, overviewed here) have a repertoire of drills available to help address the performance issue identified. Kinaesthetically, the person themselves also get feedback from the walk: it’s not unusual for the person walking to volunteer comments at the end of a session like “that feels more open” or “that’s looser” or “something’s easier.” In this respect, the walk forms a kind of assessment/reality check for the person to see how all those little z-drills have had not only a local but a more systemic effect on their performance.
Loading Action More than just a self-check, because of its very systemic nature, walking is a great way to begin to enpattern (to coin a phrase) the better-ness being experienced in that self-check.
In other words, our walking at the end of a session begins to practice the new way we are moving as a result of the drills we practiced to move better. By checking to see if we are moving better, rather ironically, when we are moving better (shown in the better walk), we are helping to practice the better-ness. That’s why if we’re not moving better after a drill and a re-walk, we keep working out more drills until there is a betterness. And then we practice betterness – not by doing the drills that helped open up the paths – or not them alone – but by putting the positive effect of the drill into a real and fundamental movement. Thereby improving the movement (which is what we care about really more than an isolated gesture) into a positive feedback loop.
Making Music vs Playing Scales Walking post session or for that matter after doing our own mobility practice is rather like after doing scales on an instrument, playing the real piece; the real piece benefits not because the piece is playing scales, but because the scales give us skills that are useful in playing real pieces – any piece - better. But then, the magic is likewise that by playing the tune with these enhanced skills, the tune playing is itself also practice of the specific movement – as a whole. Feedback loop. Thus drills give us skills that improve movement such as the very familiar autonomous walking, and walking itself with this practice makes walking better. That post-session walk-in is a rather Magic Walk that captures and integrates into the Real Movement the experience built from the (corrective) drills.
But wait! There’s more. This practice of engraining drill practice, as it were, within the real movement – translating the skills of the scales to enhancing the quality of the performance – that work itself changes the shape of the movement.
That change in the walk is a physical thing: those physical changes are effectively structural. Consider if to improve the walk, the walk shows us that ankle work may help; we do ankle drills; re-walk. Better. That improved movement in the ankle is practiced within the walk itself. Improved movement means improved function; improved function, with many reps, leads quickly to fundamentally enhanced structure. Thus function creates structure.
This cycle of improving function to create improved structure occurs because we are plastic people. Woolf’s law demonstrates this effect with bone tissue (Frost01). Davis’s law shows this with our other tissues, like skin and fascia. And the SAID principle (specific adaptation to imposed demand) (Wallis & Logan) suggests this process of adaptation begins as soon as we introduce a demand upon the system.
But wait! There’s Even More.
Keeping it Real; Keeping it Cool Another aspect of the walk to dial in the drills we do for our performance improvement is that it may well also be neurologically soothing . The dynamic joint mobility drills in R-phase for instance help open up new signalling to the nervous system to say that a joint is moving better; a muscle is firing better and so we can move better.
To walk means to move. To move helps reduce stress (overview of why in 10 tips to de-stress); to move well means that a familiar, autonomous, reflexive act – something that therefore is in itself very low threat to the nervous system - is becoming better, easier, even less threatening – especially if there’s been any pain in the walk that’s lessened from our practice.. This better-ness amplifies all the positive benefits of movement. Easier, better, too, means less stress. We learn quickly from our body's responses that better movement means inner peace, happiness and perhaps improved prospects for a better incarnation: feeling better means easier to be nice rather than grumpy. And who wants to be grumpy and go to hell? Or reincarnate in a nasty place?
So we practice our drills, and then we walk them in. Beautiful music; beautiful movement.
PS - running and practicing running gait to reduce pain in running
Recent research (Noehren10) considered that gosh, knee pain in runners (Patellofemoral pain syndrome) seems to be connected to hip mechanics. The approach to address this problem was to wire up study participants not unlike the way folks are wired up to map computer animation to human movement. In this case markers were placed on areas of the hip, low back, knee, shin and foot.
Runners were then asked to run on a treadmill and look at their movement performance data against a Normal Curve (shown below). Participants were asked over the course of 8 sessions of running on a treadmill to get their movement curve (the white line) to match the normal curve of treadmill running (the white line in the grey band). The amount of feedback given was tailed off over time to see how well the training was being internalized. Participants were also retested a month after the trial to see if the new patterns had stuck.
While the results were not statistically significant (but very close to being so), they showed that hip mechanics did change/improve, and that most importantly, knee pain went down. The paper is free and worth reading.
From a neurological/SAID principle lens, there are a couple of points here. First, if someone is having hip issues, is that all that's going on? sometimes hip issues are the result of low back stuff, upper back stuff and in particular foot/ankle stuff. Focusing on the hip alone may be part of why the results in improvement were not significant. One might argue, though, that in order for the person to "move their curve" as shown above, perhaps they were also working on the ankle and back position issues to achieve the hip effect.
Second, running on a treadmill is a kind of weird thing relative to normal running or walking gait. When we run we choose our pace and stride length - it varries. On a treadmill, there's not much room for those subtle variations; the vestibular/visual dissonance also seems to create a performance hit vs land running/walking (ever feel a bit dizzy coming off a treadmill?)
Third of course, these folks all seem to be running with squishy largely not bendy heal-striking shoes. How about just thinking about getting out of those shoes or perhaps learning to get up into more natural/barefoot running type gait??
So what i wonder to myself is that if some of these folks with knee pain had come to see a Z-Health person with even just an R-Phase cert under their belts, and they'd been asked by said Zed folks to go for a walk (rather than step on a treadmill) to look at how they move at their own pace, in their own way, what might have been seen? Would a few reps with a few simple but very precicise R-Phase drills, followed by the Magic Post Session Walk have helped set up this better function sooner, faster, easier, and potentially have even greater benefit since the practice is located in the every day of the walk (using the SAID principle of specific adaptation) rather than the artifice of the treadmill? Just a question, but i'm guessing based on practice the answer is "uh huh."
And the beat goes on.
A few Refs
Walking is an action most of us take for granted. It's such an automatic, effortless, thoughtless practice that we tend to forget it's actually a learned, practiced, skill. But it's this natural effortlessness of this deeply rep'ed & acquired practice that makes it so valuable for locking in better movement practice - what we practice when say working with a coach to tune dynamic joint movements (like those in z-health's R-Phase (overview) and I-Phase (overview) drills) into our lives.
Thoughtless Action – in a good way. Walking is a powerful communicator: it tells us a lot about our movement for a two key reasons we've touched on above: it’s autonomous, and its reflexive. Autonomous, from the greek auto, means can act on its own. So we can walk while we do other things. Like chew gum and talk all at the same time.
Walking, as noted, is not innate; it is rather like riding a bicycle: a learned skill. Indeed, research shows two interesting things (at least) about this skill acquisition: (1) that when we begin to acquire the skill has been pretty steady for us for hundreds of millions of years (Garwicz09) but (2) that this motor skill acquisition is also affected by cultural practices (Karasik10).
Once we do get going, we learn and practice this skill millions of times (each step is a practice) it becomes not only autonomous but reflexive. Reflexive means that the function moves from an act where we are thinking about it to something that is pre-cognitive – happens without having to think consciously about what to do. So with these two related qualities – autonomous and reflexive – we have an action that gives us a pretty good picture of how a person actually moves when they’re not thinking about it vs how a person may perform a less familiar action that requires their cognition and concentration. Something that is, in effect, thoughtless, therefore seems to give us a more accurate picture of the quality of a person’s movement
From this picture of the walk, Z-Health practitioners starting at an R-Phase certification level (the first cert, overviewed here) have a repertoire of drills available to help address the performance issue identified. Kinaesthetically, the person themselves also get feedback from the walk: it’s not unusual for the person walking to volunteer comments at the end of a session like “that feels more open” or “that’s looser” or “something’s easier.” In this respect, the walk forms a kind of assessment/reality check for the person to see how all those little z-drills have had not only a local but a more systemic effect on their performance.Loading Action More than just a self-check, because of its very systemic nature, walking is a great way to begin to enpattern (to coin a phrase) the better-ness being experienced in that self-check.
In other words, our walking at the end of a session begins to practice the new way we are moving as a result of the drills we practiced to move better. By checking to see if we are moving better, rather ironically, when we are moving better (shown in the better walk), we are helping to practice the better-ness. That’s why if we’re not moving better after a drill and a re-walk, we keep working out more drills until there is a betterness. And then we practice betterness – not by doing the drills that helped open up the paths – or not them alone – but by putting the positive effect of the drill into a real and fundamental movement. Thereby improving the movement (which is what we care about really more than an isolated gesture) into a positive feedback loop.
Making Music vs Playing Scales Walking post session or for that matter after doing our own mobility practice is rather like after doing scales on an instrument, playing the real piece; the real piece benefits not because the piece is playing scales, but because the scales give us skills that are useful in playing real pieces – any piece - better. But then, the magic is likewise that by playing the tune with these enhanced skills, the tune playing is itself also practice of the specific movement – as a whole. Feedback loop. Thus drills give us skills that improve movement such as the very familiar autonomous walking, and walking itself with this practice makes walking better. That post-session walk-in is a rather Magic Walk that captures and integrates into the Real Movement the experience built from the (corrective) drills.
That change in the walk is a physical thing: those physical changes are effectively structural. Consider if to improve the walk, the walk shows us that ankle work may help; we do ankle drills; re-walk. Better. That improved movement in the ankle is practiced within the walk itself. Improved movement means improved function; improved function, with many reps, leads quickly to fundamentally enhanced structure. Thus function creates structure.
This cycle of improving function to create improved structure occurs because we are plastic people. Woolf’s law demonstrates this effect with bone tissue (Frost01). Davis’s law shows this with our other tissues, like skin and fascia. And the SAID principle (specific adaptation to imposed demand) (Wallis & Logan) suggests this process of adaptation begins as soon as we introduce a demand upon the system.
But wait! There’s Even More.
Keeping it Real; Keeping it Cool Another aspect of the walk to dial in the drills we do for our performance improvement is that it may well also be neurologically soothing . The dynamic joint mobility drills in R-phase for instance help open up new signalling to the nervous system to say that a joint is moving better; a muscle is firing better and so we can move better.
To walk means to move. To move helps reduce stress (overview of why in 10 tips to de-stress); to move well means that a familiar, autonomous, reflexive act – something that therefore is in itself very low threat to the nervous system - is becoming better, easier, even less threatening – especially if there’s been any pain in the walk that’s lessened from our practice.. This better-ness amplifies all the positive benefits of movement. Easier, better, too, means less stress. We learn quickly from our body's responses that better movement means inner peace, happiness and perhaps improved prospects for a better incarnation: feeling better means easier to be nice rather than grumpy. And who wants to be grumpy and go to hell? Or reincarnate in a nasty place?
So we practice our drills, and then we walk them in. Beautiful music; beautiful movement.
PS - running and practicing running gait to reduce pain in running
Recent research (Noehren10) considered that gosh, knee pain in runners (Patellofemoral pain syndrome) seems to be connected to hip mechanics. The approach to address this problem was to wire up study participants not unlike the way folks are wired up to map computer animation to human movement. In this case markers were placed on areas of the hip, low back, knee, shin and foot.Runners were then asked to run on a treadmill and look at their movement performance data against a Normal Curve (shown below). Participants were asked over the course of 8 sessions of running on a treadmill to get their movement curve (the white line) to match the normal curve of treadmill running (the white line in the grey band). The amount of feedback given was tailed off over time to see how well the training was being internalized. Participants were also retested a month after the trial to see if the new patterns had stuck.
While the results were not statistically significant (but very close to being so), they showed that hip mechanics did change/improve, and that most importantly, knee pain went down. The paper is free and worth reading.
From a neurological/SAID principle lens, there are a couple of points here. First, if someone is having hip issues, is that all that's going on? sometimes hip issues are the result of low back stuff, upper back stuff and in particular foot/ankle stuff. Focusing on the hip alone may be part of why the results in improvement were not significant. One might argue, though, that in order for the person to "move their curve" as shown above, perhaps they were also working on the ankle and back position issues to achieve the hip effect.
Second, running on a treadmill is a kind of weird thing relative to normal running or walking gait. When we run we choose our pace and stride length - it varries. On a treadmill, there's not much room for those subtle variations; the vestibular/visual dissonance also seems to create a performance hit vs land running/walking (ever feel a bit dizzy coming off a treadmill?)
Third of course, these folks all seem to be running with squishy largely not bendy heal-striking shoes. How about just thinking about getting out of those shoes or perhaps learning to get up into more natural/barefoot running type gait??
So what i wonder to myself is that if some of these folks with knee pain had come to see a Z-Health person with even just an R-Phase cert under their belts, and they'd been asked by said Zed folks to go for a walk (rather than step on a treadmill) to look at how they move at their own pace, in their own way, what might have been seen? Would a few reps with a few simple but very precicise R-Phase drills, followed by the Magic Post Session Walk have helped set up this better function sooner, faster, easier, and potentially have even greater benefit since the practice is located in the every day of the walk (using the SAID principle of specific adaptation) rather than the artifice of the treadmill? Just a question, but i'm guessing based on practice the answer is "uh huh."
And the beat goes on.
pps - if you're interested in the R-Phase cert, or in checking out zed (via the essentials of elite performance dvd or course) here's more info about z-health and the approaches here; if you do decide to take a cert, please consider indicating you came in via mc (that's me). We don't get paid money for any referals, but we do get some money off our own continuing ed with zed. Which is cool. And appreciated.
A few Refs
Frost HM (2001). From Wolff's law to the Utah paradigm: insights about bone physiology and its clinical applications. The Anatomical record, 262 (4), 398-419 PMID: 11275971
Garwicz, M., Christensson, M., & Psouni, E. (2009). A unifying model for timing of walking onset in humans and other mammals Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (51), 21889-21893 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0905777106
Karasik LB, Adolph KE, Tamis-Lemonda CS, & Bornstein MH (2010). WEIRD walking: cross-cultural research on motor development. The Behavioral and brain sciences, 33 (2-3), 95-6 PMID: 20546664
Noehren, B., Scholz, J., & Davis, I. (2010). The effect of real-time gait retraining on hip kinematics, pain and function in subjects with patellofemoral pain syndrome British Journal of Sports Medicine DOI: 10.1136/bjsm.2009.069112
Wallis, Earl L and Logan, Gene Adams, 1964 Figure improvement and body conditioning through exercise, Prentice Hall, NY. [presentation of SAID principle]Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Friday, October 15, 2010
Squish your Eyes - and Relax
Follow @mcphoo
Tweet
A while ago over at iamgeekfit, i posted ten tips to destress - very much related to hormone responses and ph balance. Well, recently learned there's one more thing we can do to relax that's pretty durn neural: squish our eyes. With little circles.
How do it? As eric cobb puts it, imagine you're picking up a grape (using all your fingers). Take that position to the eye and press/massage for about 30seconds.
Yes, closing eyes and massaging around the eye, pushing gently on the eyeball through the lid, will help calm us down based on something called the "oculocadiac reflex"
In other words, the eyes, via a big nerve group in the head/face (the trigeminal nerve) are connected to this great big vagus nerve; the vagus nerve goes through touching our heart, our lungs and importantly our guts.
Doing a little eye squishing massage will help trigger the calming wonder that is the provinence of the valgus nerve.
If you dig these kind of tips there's way more eyeball wonderfulness covered in the Complete Athlete Vol 1 DVD. Turns out our eyes are important for more than vision.
Doing eye squishing daily - may make more of a difference than just feeling relaxed. If you give it a go for two weeks, daily, please let me know what you notice changes in your well being/performance.
Related
How do it? As eric cobb puts it, imagine you're picking up a grape (using all your fingers). Take that position to the eye and press/massage for about 30seconds.
In other words, the eyes, via a big nerve group in the head/face (the trigeminal nerve) are connected to this great big vagus nerve; the vagus nerve goes through touching our heart, our lungs and importantly our guts.
Doing a little eye squishing massage will help trigger the calming wonder that is the provinence of the valgus nerve.If you dig these kind of tips there's way more eyeball wonderfulness covered in the Complete Athlete Vol 1 DVD. Turns out our eyes are important for more than vision.
Doing eye squishing daily - may make more of a difference than just feeling relaxed. If you give it a go for two weeks, daily, please let me know what you notice changes in your well being/performance.
Related
- practicing on the other side of the weigth room: tuning visual vestibular and proprioceptive systems
- overview: the complete athlete, vol 1
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Caffeine makes us Crazy - or at least messes with our sleep
Follow @mcphoo
Tweet
i *love* good coffee. You? Do you know how you react to coffee? Do you find caffeine keeps you awake/alert? Yes? or maybe you find it doesn't affect your getting to sleep? We know that the magic in coffee is caffeine. Guess what? apparently whether or not we can fall asleep with caffeine is less of an issue than what it does to our sleep quality, in particular, our deep sleep state. That is, it screws it up.
So yes, we might be able to get to sleep (or not) with caffeine in our systems (caffeine genetics is cool), but once we are asleep - based on what's happening in our brain - we just mayn't have enough signaling in the presence of caffeine to tell us to get to DEEP sleep. Wild, eh?
So what's caffeine doing to us? There's a great detailed write up of the chemistry of caffeine and the brain (calmly titled "Is caffeine a health hazard?") by Ben Best. If i can summarise that article without wrecking it, here's the simplified version, and it's so cool, it just makes sense.
Energy. All or our systems require ATP to do work. Adenosine Triphosphate. Folks into performance are v. familiar with ATP in terms of energy system work, and how Fat for instance is our biggest but slowest generating source of ATP. ATP produces energy by being broken apart into two parts: adenosine and adenosinediphosphate. The work of energy production is a cycle of putting a and adp together again to from new ATP.
Fatigue. Fatigue is a really interesting process. All we're going to look at here is one tiny tiny bit. When we get fatigued and need rest, the adenosine that gets generated from ATP being broken down, rather than being reassembled into new ATP actually just builds up around the cells and doesn't get used. That's a really good thing. Adenosine on it's one is a brain signaller. As adenosine builds up in this fluid around the cells a bunch of things happen, including effectively signaling the brain to shift down, and when asleep to fasciliate deep, slow wave sleep. As the presence of adenosine goes up, brain wave activity goes down, deep sleep can happen.
Caffeine the Disruptor. An amazing property of caffiene is that it is a Master of Disguise. It connects with adenosine receptors (getting across the blood brain barrier) so that adenosine can't get to those receptors (A1 in particular), and effectively means that the brain doesn't perceive the degree of adenosine build up, and so the signaling to slow the heck down can't happen. All sorts of tests show that with caffeine folks do better in various kinds of tasks, and has been tested with soldiers and athletes rather a lot. But even more recently with soldiers, there's an effort to get away from "stimulants" and think more about scheduling.
Bottom line is that caffeine a way to fake out our system into believing its less tired than it is. There are costs. It's pretty easy to see that while coffee'ing up will give most of us a jolt, we're still actually fatigued, and we are artificially asking our bodies to work beyond what they require for optimal function.
The effects are at least in two ways:
The other thing is that caffeine can actually take awhile to flush from our systems. Yesterday in talking about the value of darkness at night for sleep quality, i mentioned zeo as a tool to see how one's sleep quality changes. We use zeo in our lab for "self-monitoring." We can see that deep sleep quality seems to stay effected for days after even with single doses of caffeine. Bummer.
As zeo sleep researcher Stephan Fabregas has said previously at b2d, using caffeine in extremis for the occaision we need it, it can be great and useful. As a regular practice, maybe not so good. Bummer again. But that turns out to be the same for athletes using caffeine to help perk performance too.
The worst part of caffeine apparently is coming off it. Get through that, and sleep gets better, and we need caffeine less. How about that?
Break the cycle (of dependence); improve sleep quality, improve recovery and quality of life.
If you are a big starbucks mega coffee drinker, and you try going from Really Big to Not Quite So Big to maybe one less a day, let me know if you notice a difference over time of being on less or none of the stuff.
Good luck on your caffeine control mission.
Quick Ref
i *love* good coffee. You? Do you know how you react to coffee? Do you find caffeine keeps you awake/alert? Yes? or maybe you find it doesn't affect your getting to sleep? We know that the magic in coffee is caffeine. Guess what? apparently whether or not we can fall asleep with caffeine is less of an issue than what it does to our sleep quality, in particular, our deep sleep state. That is, it screws it up.So what's caffeine doing to us? There's a great detailed write up of the chemistry of caffeine and the brain (calmly titled "Is caffeine a health hazard?") by Ben Best. If i can summarise that article without wrecking it, here's the simplified version, and it's so cool, it just makes sense.
Energy. All or our systems require ATP to do work. Adenosine Triphosphate. Folks into performance are v. familiar with ATP in terms of energy system work, and how Fat for instance is our biggest but slowest generating source of ATP. ATP produces energy by being broken apart into two parts: adenosine and adenosinediphosphate. The work of energy production is a cycle of putting a and adp together again to from new ATP.
Bottom line is that caffeine a way to fake out our system into believing its less tired than it is. There are costs. It's pretty easy to see that while coffee'ing up will give most of us a jolt, we're still actually fatigued, and we are artificially asking our bodies to work beyond what they require for optimal function.
The effects are at least in two ways:
- compromised deep sleep quality means our recovery is compromised, and if as athletes we're trying to build physical function, deep sleep is where that building takes place, so we've just screwed the efficacy of our build phase;
- because we're actually still fatigued, and not getting sleep, sleep deprivation effects kick in. Stress goes up, fucntion goes down, ability even to process food, have sex, do anything gets screwed up. Irony eh? we take caffeine to perk up and it ends up actually screwing up our sleep recovery.
As zeo sleep researcher Stephan Fabregas has said previously at b2d, using caffeine in extremis for the occaision we need it, it can be great and useful. As a regular practice, maybe not so good. Bummer again. But that turns out to be the same for athletes using caffeine to help perk performance too.
The worst part of caffeine apparently is coming off it. Get through that, and sleep gets better, and we need caffeine less. How about that?
Break the cycle (of dependence); improve sleep quality, improve recovery and quality of life.
If you are a big starbucks mega coffee drinker, and you try going from Really Big to Not Quite So Big to maybe one less a day, let me know if you notice a difference over time of being on less or none of the stuff.
Good luck on your caffeine control mission.
Quick Ref
Gore RK, Webb TS, & Hermes ED (2010). Fatigue and stimulant use in military fighter aircrew during combat operations. Aviation, space, and environmental medicine, 81 (8), 719-27 PMID: 20681231Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Ferré S (2010). Role of the central ascending neurotransmitter systems in the psychostimulant effects of caffeine. Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD, 20 Suppl 1 PMID: 20182056
Yang, A., Palmer, A., & Wit, H. (2010). Genetics of caffeine consumption and responses to caffeine Psychopharmacology, 211 (3), 245-257 DOI: 10.1007/s00213-010-1900-1
Cover your eyes - better sleep in one night
Follow @mcphoo
Tweet
Here's a very very simple thing you can do to get a better night's sleep. Really. Seriously: eye covers.
If you do not have a totally dark, pitch black room to sleep in - and i mean any fricking electrical light - then consider giving eye covers a go. You may *think* you have a dark room, but if you can see your hand easily when the lights are off, maybe not.
Why is total darkness important? My understanding from Zeo Sleep Research Stephan Fabregas is it's hormonal: darkness triggers melatonin to come on which helps put us nighty night. Any light starts to tell melotonin to turn off the hormonal pipe to la la land and that means we start to wake up.
In my personal experience with the eye covers - especially in the summer when i have not wanted to get up with the sun - i have found that using these covers means that i sleep longer, better, deeper with less wakeful states. How do i know this? besides how i feel, i do use a Zeo to track my sleep (discussed here and here with Stephan), so i know. Yes i'm the type of person that if someone asks "how did you sleep" - i check the zeo.
ANYWAY cheap experiment: try a few nights without; a few nights (give yourself a chance to get used to the eye patches), and see if you feel more rested avec le mask. Let me know how it goes. Expecially travelling, this thing is a life saver.
Here's to your better night's sleep, fast. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Why is total darkness important? My understanding from Zeo Sleep Research Stephan Fabregas is it's hormonal: darkness triggers melatonin to come on which helps put us nighty night. Any light starts to tell melotonin to turn off the hormonal pipe to la la land and that means we start to wake up.
ANYWAY cheap experiment: try a few nights without; a few nights (give yourself a chance to get used to the eye patches), and see if you feel more rested avec le mask. Let me know how it goes. Expecially travelling, this thing is a life saver.
Here's to your better night's sleep, fast. Tweet Follow @begin2dig
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
COACHING with dr. m.c. 
