WIL Weekly 5-Point Review #17

Binaural Beats, Testosterone, Creatine 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. Binaural beats for Creativity?

Interesting study looking at binaural beats’ effect on creativity. It found that depending on the person’s baseline dopamine levels in the striatum,* binaural beats enhanced divergent thinking. Apparently it did not make a difference if it were a gamma or alpha binaural beats.

“Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions. It typically occurs in a spontaneous, free-flowing, "non-linear" manner, such that many ideas are generated in an emergent cognitive fashion. Many possible solutions are explored in a short amount of time, and unexpected connections are drawn.” Basically brainstorming.

As suggested by Eysenck (1993) and Ashby et al. (1999), creative performance seems to depend on an individual’s basic supply of (striatal) dopamine.

*Note: Dopamine levels were estimated based on spontaneous eye-blink rate (EBR). This apparently is in fact a decent way to predict dopamine in various contexts.

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2. Testosterone & Drive Workshop

As y’all saw in a previous Substack post, I had been working on a course about fasting aimed around getting into a better body composition, increasing focus and overall, crafting a more satisfying lifestyle. The plan was to tie in several different strategies to make the fasting easier and more effective and refeed in the right way to reduce baseline hunger and make it easier to jump back in and out of the fasting as needed.

Actually speaking to a lot of you about your goals and what you’d actually want from a course made me take a step back. I thought a more effective way to start would be a workshop that tackles mental focus, motivation, productivity as well as a bit of the health puzzle through the lens of testosterone first.

I just wrote a post about why therapy is often too feminine of a solution to men’s problems. Talk therapy may be enjoyable for women, but it’s likely not a lasting solution to men’s problems considering:
・Men have 15 times the testosterone of women.
・Women have about 4 times the oxytocin of men.
・Women have 3-4x the estrogen (estradiol) of men.

I’m putting a together workshop all about Testosterone that will take place over two days - November 4th & 5th. The theme is using testosterone as a lens for understanding male motivations. The aim of the workshop is to:
(1) Reprogram y’all’s brains to where it feels like a logic fail to not put effort towards your goals.
(2) Set up a structure to increase the felt sense of ‘winning’ as this will reduce latent anxiety by increasing the felt sense of certainty about yourself.
(3 ) Implement other dietary/supplemental/lifestyle strategies to directly increase testosterone.

All these should tie back into each other to create a positive feedback loop to where as you take small steps to increase testosterone, it will feel more enjoyable to exert the effort necessary to take bigger and bigger steps towards your goals.

Format:

・about 4 hours total video content
・about 1 hour Q&A each day
・Access to Discord with other workshop members
+ Cheat sheet PDF

The first day will be about:

・Why testosterone is a proxy for men’s motivation and drive in life
・How testosterone’s action on the brain affects behaviors and mentality
・How behaviors and mentality affect testosterone secretion
・Some differences between men’s and women’s motivations
・Stress and anxiety's relation to testosterone
・The effect of indecisiveness on testosterone
・Mental and behavioral strategies that are likely to raise testosterone
・Mental and behavioral pitfalls that are likely to lower testosterone
・Practical strategies for interpreting the world in a less stressful and anxious way
・Reducing indecisiveness in general
・How the nature of testosterone changed my philosophy about purpose in life

The second day will be about:

・How testosterone interacts with other hormones in the body
・What a testosterone promoting diet looks like
・Which supplements have promise in raising testosterone
・Other practical strategies for directly increasing testosterone
・What lifestyle factors & foods decrease testosterone

The number of spots will be limited, but don’t worry the signup page isn’t officially out yet. I’ll send out another post soon with more details, the price and the signup link. If you’re not Subscribed already, make sure to grab a Subscription to the Substack to be notified when the signup page comes out.

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3. Creatine is great for muscle but for Mood too

Creatine increases lean body mass and strength and pulls water into muscle tissue which in and of itself may be anabolic. However it has several benefits on cognition.

2012 trial testing 5g of oral creatine monohydrate on women with major depressive disorder taking SSRI’s found significant improvement in depression rating after just 2 weeks.

I think most people see creatine as a muscle improving supplement, but it’s more of an energy production improving supplement. Thus, it can be good not just for the muscle but for the brain.

Per Creatine for the Treatment of Depression

The brain is an energetically demanding organ and accounts for approximately 20% of body energy consumption at rest, even though it accounts for roughly 2% of body mass [11,12]. The best-characterized role of creatine in energy metabolism is as an energy buffer: creatine is converted to phosphocreatine (PCr) by the creatine kinase reaction, thereby storing energy in a more stable form than is provided by adenosine triphosphate (ATP) [13]. The creatine kinase reaction occurs in muscles as well as in the brain [13]

There is growing evidence from human neuroimaging, genetics, epidemiology, and animal studies that disruptions in brain energy production, storage, and utilization are implicated in the development and maintenance of depression. Creatine, a widely available nutritional supplement, has the potential to improve these disruptions in some patients, and early clinical trials indicate that it may have efficacy as an antidepressant agent.

Of the 9 studies looked at in Table 2 of this review paper, 7 suggested improvement in depression, 1 found no improvement in depression rating but an improvement in verbal fluency and only 1 found no notable improvements.

Up to 5g of creatine has been found to have a very good safety profile and it’s very inexpensive.

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4. The WIL Podcast & Rumble

I’ve been working on the podcast for the channel lately, but it seems that uploading two-hour long videos that far fewer (compared to my typical videos) people click on is quite bad for the channel’s performance. So, what I’ll be doing is uploading the full episodes to another Youtube channel of mine and Spotify and then uploading clips onto my main channel.

Make sure to follow the WIL Spotify page and give a Subscribe to the Joseph Everett channel.

Further, I’ve made a Rumble page and will be releasing all my Youtube content on there. Please give it a follow. For now, I’m just slowly releasing all my content on Youtube onto Rumble but I may start adding some Rumble-specific content that is too spicy for Youtube before long.

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5. Mike Mew says people shouldn’t have braces or Invisalign

He says that orthodontic treatment can damage the roots of the teeth and the actual length of the teeth can shorten. He also says that bracing the teeth (holding them in place) can damage the facial structure such that it is less attractive and less functional (shrunken airway etc)