WIL Weekly 5-Point Review #18
The Pill & Women's mate preference, Mood boosting lamps, polyamory & more...
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1. The Pill makes women like low T men?
A 2008 Scientific American article reported on an interesting consequence of taking the pill. A 2008 study found that women on the pill became more attracted to ‘less compatible’ men due to pill’s pregnancy simulating hormonal influence. Less compatibility, means they are more likely to be attracted to men with a similar major histocompatibility complex (MHC). The MHC is basically a group of genes that help the immune system recognize foreign substances. So, for the child to develop a more robust immune system, it is better for the child if the two parents have dissimilar MHC’s. However, the pill may influence women to be more attracted to men with similar MHC’s.
Women who start or stop taking the pill, then, may be in for some relationship problems. A study published last year in Psychological Science found that women paired with MHC-similar men are less sexually satisfied and more likely to cheat on their partners than women paired with MHC-dissimilar men. So a woman on the pill, for example, might be more likely to start dating a MHC-similar man, but he could ultimately leave her less sexually satisfied. Then if she goes off the pill during the relationship, the accompanying hormonal changes will draw her even more strongly toward more MHC-dissimilar men.
Per the 2009 paper, Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?, in the journal Cell, women on the pill may be more likely to be attracted to men with less masculine features:
As compared with normally cycling women, pill users show no or weaker preferences for facial (Figure 2 [33]) and vocal masculinity [34,35]. For instance, the preferred face shape is more masculine during the high conception-probability phase of the menstrual cycle in non-pill users, but pill users do not show similar preference [35]. … These results suggest that the use of the pill is related to women favouring less symmetrical, masculine and MHC-dissimilar men, a preference attributed to the pill-induced changes in hormone levels simulating pregnancy (Box 2), and could lead to subsequent preference for individuals likely to support child rearing [31,37].
A large body of evidence in nonhuman species suggests that ovarian hormones change females’ attraction to males who show masculine characteristics.(S) The below figure suggests that the more estrogen (estradiol) women had, the higher their preference for more testosterone in men.
2. Time to bust out the SAD lamp
I bought a 10,000 LUX SAD Therapy Lamp a while back and it has been great for days when I’m stuck inside or during the winter when there’s not much sun.
・Dr. Gregory Potter argues that when it comes to light-viewing behavior’s effect on sleep, contrast is very important. So yes it is in general very good to avoid blue light at night, but you also want to get exposure to very bright light during the day. The idea is that if you are exposed to several hours of very bright light during the day (ideally sunlight, but otherwise a bright light device), you are less susceptible to the circadian rhythm disrupting effects of light at night.
・Personally, I find that the bright light itself really wakes me up, but the circadian rhythm anchoring effects of the light see to be very important. A 2001 study on SAD found that using a bright light device to simulate dawn (setting the device to slowly raise in brightness up to 250lux from 4:30am to 6:00am) was more effective in combatting seasonal depression than just bright light itself.
3. Stop eating so long for better sleep
A 2015 study found that by simply getting people to restrict their eating window to 12 hours instead of their typical 15 hours decreased body weight, reduced hunger, increased energy levels and improved sleep.
This could all be attributed to the fact that restricting the time frame you eat in, makes your mealtimes act as a more reliable circadian anchor which improves your sleep. That is, your body is constantly keeping track of all kinds of different things to set the circadian rhythm - when you’re exposed to light, to dark, when you exercise, and the time you eat is a very strong circadian anchor.
This is why fasting can be a very effective tool for jet lag. If you keep eating at your normal times while on an international, you will reinforce to the body that you are still in your home time zone. A strategy that I picked up from Dr. Charles F Ehret's Overcoming Jet Lag is to simply fast all day on the day of your departure and not eat until it is dinner time at your destination. He actually says to eat breakfast at your destination, but I found that the thing keeping me awake is the hunger, and the moment I eat breakfast, sleepiness hits me like a train. So, I don’t eat until dinner time at my destination. A later dinner is better because within about an hour I’m knocked out like corpse and usually can sleep until about 6AM or so. If you can fast for 36 total hours before dinner at your destination, even better.
4. Polyamory is stupid
I recently picked up the textbook Evolutionary Psychology by David M. Buss and a section on jealousy over infidelity reminded me of a book I read a while back called Sex at Dawn. While very interesting, the book essentially makes the case for polyamory from an anthropology perspective; it asserts that humans are probably closer to the peaceful and highly sexual polyamorous bonobos than say chimpanzees. It also implies that we could be more peaceful if we were more like the bonobos. This may have helped support the more recent acceptance of polyamory. At first, it seems quite logical, listing various natural innate behaviors that suggest humans enjoy polyamory. For example they argue that the reason (some) women are naturally inclined to moan during intercourse is that they have an innate drive to attract other men to the session.
I remember reading this book and thinking ‘wow, this is quite logical,’ while at the same time thinking ‘…though it doesn’t actually matter because I have absolutely no interest in sharing my girlfriend or wife with anyone.’
The Evolutionary Psychology book points out that men are overwhelmingly more concerned about sexual infidelity than emotional infidelity. That is, in the case of suspected infidelity, men are asking “Did you have sex with him?” and women are asking “Do you love her?” (Kuhle, 2011)
Table 11.1 in the book notes that out of 28 studies in several different countries testing for the sex differences in jealous, only 1 study found that there was no sex difference. Men and women are very different. If a couple enters a polyamorous relationship where they maintain an emotional bond but have sex with different partners, it’s more likely than not to be a win for the woman and a loss for the man.
5. Rich Roll & Trauma: Seek, and ye shall find?
I was listening to an episode of Rich Roll’s podcast with Dr. Paul Conti and it reminded me a lot of my Substack post Are we creating trauma for ourselves?
Give me a sense of how pervasive this epidemic of trauma is because I think a lot of people, when you say the word trauma, it conjures you know an image of being sexually abused or being y’know victimized by some very violent act when in fact there’s a broader definition at play here. I just know that my kind of introduction to these ideas came at the hands of Gabor Mate. We had a podcast and he did what he does which is he flips it and it becomes a session - we started talking about my upbringing and I grew up y’know my parents took care of everything, everything was pretty good. I have nothing that I can point to in my past that would ring a bell and say that was a traumatic experience, but the more I’ve kind of excavated that, the more I realized that I did suffer… my parents are good people and they’re well intentioned but there were some traumatic experiences there. And it’s really reframed how I think about trauma in terms of how it lies on a spectrum.
Based just on what Rich Roll said in this particular excerpt (I don’t know the extent of the Gabor Mate conversation), I couldn’t help reframe it in my mind as:
‘I never thought of myself as a traumatized person until a specialist in childhood development and trauma encouraged me to excavate my past in search of trauma.’
Based on the title of the video, apparently this trauma dictates Rich’s life. There’s also apparently an “epidemic” of trauma.
Polyamory is stupid:
I think that the uncomfortable and politically incorrect truth is that men are more polyamorous and women are more monogamous. A man dreams about having his harem that are exclusive to him, a woman dreams about being the wife of the top tier man. She would not like to share him of course, but she would prefer sharing him over ending up with a man from the bottom.
Those biological preferences are not really good for creating a stable society, so we reigned it with socially/religiously enforced monogamy.
Do polyamory, other subjects may be more practical or important , but we already have a very good info on then. Polyamory is much less explored topic.