Weekly WIL 5-Point Review #9

Improving Coffee, sus McDonald's dieter, Master Meditative techniques and more...

This is my free weekly newsletter covering 5 interesting points from the week. Subscribe if you’d like to get it in your inbox each week!

1. Why Peter Attia is Bullish on Sauna

From a post on Twitter by Tim Ferris:

“I'm way way way way more bullish on sauna than I have ever been before. I used to be in the camp of 'Sauna feels great, maybe even helps you sleep a bit better... that's probably about it, there's no way you're really gonna live longer because you're in a sauna.' I think this is one of those things where the burden of evidence in the non-randomized data is so strong, it's becoming hard to ignore. If the data showed that sauna versus non-sauna was like a 5% improvement in mortality, it would be hard ot get that excited about it. But when you look at the largest published series on this, you see a benefit in all-cause mortality - a relative risk reduction of 40% and an absolute risk reduction of like 18%. Those are ridiculous numbers. I think based on the research, the M.E.D. is four sessions, twenty minutes, 80 degrees celsius. [That’s 176 degrees F.]”

P.S. for those of you who use Twitter, I’m on there too! @JEverettLearned

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2. How to get more out of your Coffee

(1) Hydrate
(2) Stretch
(3) L-Theanine

L-Theanine
I think many of you have heard about pairing L-Theanine with coffee. I discussed it briefly in my These 5 Pills Upgraded my Brain video. It’s main effect is that it helps you relax without making you drowsy. Research has found better memory and attention in people who combined L-Theanine with caffeine. I think one important thing that it does is reduce the jitters. Caffeine can have an anxiety-boosting effect along with the boost in focus, so taking something to reduce that can mellow out and make the caffeine high more useful and enjoyable.

Hydrate
I always feel better if I’m hydrating and taking electrolytes while drinking my coffee. Makes sense that doing something to counteract the diuretic effect of coffee would make me feel better but I’m not 100% sure if that’s the only reason why I feel a reduction in jitters/tension from the extra hydration.

A 2018 study in the World Journal of Psychiatry found that those who drank more water had a lower risk of anxiety. A 2015 study in the journal Appetite found that lower habitual water intake was associated with greater tension in women. A 2011 randomized controlled trial found an association between dehydration and tension/anxiety in otherwise healthy men. Lastly, a 2019 study in the journal Nutrients found that water with electrolytes added “tended to be the most effective means of preventing a decline in mood” after having subjects sweat it out in a 30 °C room for 3 hours.

Stretch
I discussed in last week’s newsletter how/why an imbalance in my bite after going to the dentist left me with tons of tension in my neck. Along with that tension meant I couldn’t tolerate as much coffee. I’m pretty confident that most anyone will be able to notice extra physical tension in their body if they are feeling anxious or jittery mentally. (Not a surprise that valium works for both muscle spasms and anxiety.)

Drinking coffee in itself usually adds some slight but noticeable tension to my neck. It’s like I have a tension meter: if I had a great night’s sleep, didn’t clench my jaw too much at night, and I’ve been stretching plenty and don’t have much tightness, then I can enjoy more coffee than usual.

Sometimes if I’m sitting down at the cafe and feel I overestimated my caffeine tolerance for the day, going to the bathroom for a covert stretch session usually helps with the tension and the jitters.

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3. The Man who ate only McDonald’s for 90 days to become ‘healthy’

I just watched an interesting video from Kiana Docherty titled The Bizarre Aftermath of Super Size Me | McDonald's Documentary where she discusses John Cisna’s 90-day McDonald’s only diet that was featured in Cisna’s own mini-documentary the McDonald’s Project. Cisna was a high school science teacher who apparently was disappointed with Morgan Spurlock’s SuperSize Me, the documentary where Spurlock ate only at McDonalds for 30 days and became very fat and unhealthy. He thought it was bad journalism and unfairly criticized fast-food.

Docherty points out that Cisna states his goal is to to teach his kids ‘critical thinking,’ but apparently one of his other goals is to convince them that McDonald’s is healthy. He even asks in his documentary:

"Is it possible for a person to eat nothing but breakfast, lunch and dinner at McDonald's for 90 straight days to become healthy?"

Why doesn’t he just say ‘lose weight?’ There’s even a portion in the documentary where he’s asking students at his school whether eating nothing but McDonald’s could be healthy, and the kids all say ‘No.’

Docherty asks:

"So you currently have a school full of children who all think that McDonald's is unhealthy and your goal as their science teacher is to prove them wrong?"

She cuts to clip of Cisna saying:

There’s nothing wrong with fast food. There’s nothing wrong with McDonald’s.

Docherty is suspicious that Cisna was straight up working with McDonald’s. Cisna was friends with a McDonald’s franchise owner and got all his meals for free. Would a few $ grand of meals entice Cisna? Maybe not considering all the work necessary to make his documentary, but it would be decent advertising for his buddy.

She offers up a couple reasons why she thinks Cisna isn’t just doing this by himself, but a slip-up of Cisna’s makes a pretty strong case for her McDonalds involvement allegations. At one point he asks his students how they think he should conduct the experiment, and one of the students offers up that Cisna should get his blood tested halfway through. Cisna says that this is a good idea because it “will give McDonald’s an idea of whether this is working or not.”

Some of Cisna’s blood markers did improve but the previously sedentary Cisna did also begin a new exercise routine along with the experiment.

Despite Cisna’s criticizing SuperSize Me for not making a food log public, Cisna himself didn’t give a clear idea of what exactly he was eating at McDonald’s. In fact not even a one-day sample menu was presented in the documentary, Docherty had to dig elsewhere to find one.

Seems pretty healthy, but (a) this isn’t what the average person thinks of when they think of ‘eating only at McDonald’s, and (b) the McDonald’s menu only started to include more healthy options like this after the SuperSize Me film came out.

There’s a lot more to the video, it’s a great watch so I won’t spoil it here.

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4. Conversation with Master Meditator Delson Armstrong

Here is a snippet from my conversation with Delson Armstrong in India. (My voice sounds a bit strange because I used Adobe’s AI-based audio clean-up tool to remove the background noise.) By the way, I think what’s discussed here will make more sense if you read my post Why the Mind makes you Suffer.

Some background:
About a year ago, I had a conversation with Delson Armstrong. He was the subject of a study done by neuroscientist Ruben Laukkonen investigating the nature of an incredibly difficult meditation technique that few have mastered. In order to be in a position to simply practice for the technique, one has to have first achieved multiple ‘cessations.’ A cessation refers to the cessation of the subjective experience of consciousness. It doesn’t mean you die or go brain dead, but that you have quieted various faculties of the mind such that you have essentially ‘turned off’ your inner narrator, a concept of space, time and the felt sense of a self. (People experienced with psychedelics may liken this to ‘ego death.’) Eventually all faculties of the mind have shut off so not even awareness is online, nor is the part of the mind that tracks time, so there is no felt sense of a cessation ever having taken place. It’s like a sudden skip in time. By definition, you don’t experience the cessation of consciousness, so it doesn’t feel like the frames of your life movie reel go black. It’s like frames were cut out. Achieving a cessation is incredibly difficult and just because you did it once, doesn’t mean you can make it happen again when you want.

The technique Delson mastered is called Nirodha samāpatti and this is essentially where someone enters cessation at will and can even determine how long they want the consciousness to be shut off for. (The intention ‘I will enter cessation for x minutes’ or ‘for x hours’ must be made beforehand because there will be no consciousness of time elapsed.)

While there is no objective way to confirm whether someone is indeed ‘in’ a cessation, Dr. Laukkonen’s team did observe peculiar brain activity when Delson performed what he claimed was a cessation. In the study that resulted in Dr. Laukkonen’s paper Cessations of consciousness in meditation: Advancing a scientific understanding of nirodha samāpatti, they found that Delson’s cessation technique induced what’s called ‘alpha-desynchronization’ in the brain. Elsewhere in the paper they liken such desynchronization to the effect of ketamine on the brain.

The point isn’t ‘Hey guys, you can get ketamine on tap if you practice meditation!,’ but simply that EEG shows that Delson can indeed induce a deep alteration in his brain activity at will.

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5. Meditation Retreat in Japan

I’m organizing a meditation retreat in Nagano, Japan that will be led by Delson Armstrong. It will take place from November 18th to the 27th, 2023. There are two (maybe three) spots left. If you would like to attend, please fill out this form so that you can be added to the waitlist:

https://forms.gle/npppF3oDye15pi4r9

Delson will be teaching Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation (TWIM). 
The full instructions for TWIM are here, but three points that make it unique are: 

① This technique makes mettā (often translated as “loving kindness”) the primary object of meditation, rather than the breath or the body. 
② Participants will balance periods of sitting and walking meditation as recommended by the teacher. It’s important to move the body so the mind does not stagnate and become dull or sleepy.
③ TWIM acknowledges that a happy, comfortable mind is easier to keep focused and steady, so maintaining a specific rigid sitting posture on the cushion for long periods of time is not a goal. You may sit upright in a chair, lean your back on the wall and so on - whatever keeps you still and alert without making you drowsy.  

Delson will hold a ‘Dhamma talk’ each night, which is basically a lecture on the Buddhist perspective on the nature of consciousness, and guidance on how to realize a more tranquil mind by understanding how it operates through meditative practice.

If you’re wanting to know what the straightforward ‘benefit’ of the practice is, I’d say it makes your mind more tranquil and less emotionally reactive. This allows you to get less caught up in the unproductive ruminative stories the inner narrator likes to generate. (If you really get into the practice, maybe one day you can pull off some cool tricks in an EEG.)

I discuss more about why I was attracted to TWIM in this old Substack post of mine. While I had tried a couple other meditation techniques before it, I personally found TWIM to be more effective for less effort. I participated in a retreat led by Delson in India last year and found him to be a very straightforward and helpful teacher, so I invited him to Japan to teach here as well. If you’d like to know more about Delson, recommend his interview with Guru Viking. They focus on some of the more ‘high-level’ aspects of meditative practice there, but Delson is very good at presenting the TWIM technique in a practical way that is accessible for beginners.

I will be releasing my interview with him next week on my channel.

Note: Delson will be the teacher; I am just an organizer/facilitator of the retreat. Since the retreat will take place in silence (except when you need to ask questions about the technique), there won’t be much interaction with me unless you need to ask where the washing machine is or something.