Seth’s blog

Today I spoke to someone who has been looking at his face in a mirror every morning to raise his mood. “It’s a big effect,” he said. It raises his mood “about 30 points” on a 0-100 scale where 0 = misery, 50 = neutral, and 100 = ecstasy. He starts around 6 am and does it for about an hour. This is close to what I observed with TV faces: one hour of faces at the best time produced about a 30-point improvement.

Thirty points, however wonderful, is not enough to change his life, he said; he would need 60 points for that. He has been in and out of mental hospitals several times and of course mental illness of that severity destroys all sorts of things we need, such as a decent job and friendships. As he looked at the diagram (two causes of depression) on p. 237 of my self-experimentation paper, his situation sunk in on him. It wasn’t just lack of morning faces that was making him depressed; it was also on-going life events.

My guess is that most Americans, asked to rate their mood, would say they are around 50 — neutral. Sure, they procrastinate, and bad traffic bothers them, but on the whole life is okay. But when something awful happens — they lose a job or a spouse, for example — their mood goes way down and takes a very long time to come back up. It is like AIDS. Our mood regulatory system, which requires morning faces to work properly, functions like our immune system to fight off damage and push us back to normal. In most people, unfortunately, that system is broken, just as AIDS sufferers lack a working immune system. So many people have far too much trouble getting rid of crippling bad moods. I suspect that most addictions, including the food addictions behind serious obesity, Internet addiction and video-game addiction, are self-medication to get rid of bad mood. It is the fact that the addictive act pushes a mood of 20 or 30 up to 50 that makes it so attractive. One of my students investigated the connection between depression and drug addiction; in her small sample, the depression always came first.

Earlier post about faces and mood.

Addendum: A February 2007 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry about bariatric-surgery candidates (average BMI = 52) reported this:

The discrepancy between lifetime and current substance use disorders was striking (32.6% versus 1.7%).

In other words, they used to take drugs but they don’t any more — possibly because food has replaced drugs.

A fascinating thread in the SLD forums about unexpected reactions to your weight loss:

As I’ve lost a significant amount of weight and really started looking different, I’ve started noticing more . . . unsupportive behavior. One of them has started offering little biting comments about my size. . . . The other has started getting very upset with me as I approach her weight. . . . When one of their husbands commented on how nice I looked I thought I might be murdered in my sleep.

I had a friend once tell me I was a “traitor” when I lost a lot of weight.

The dragon used to have an issue with my weight, now I’ve lost a lot, she still has an issue.

Addendum. The discussion wandered slightly:

I used to have hair down almost to my bottom & was used to getting lots & lots of attention…..i just thought men liked me…then I cut my hair quite short…whallah….where did all the men go? Very interesting & sobering experience.

From the SLD forums:

I stumbled on SLD when I, after a sinus-infection, lost my ability to smell and therefor also taste the flavor of the food I was eating. I could only tell if the food was sweet, sour or salty. I was devastated especially after reading that it could very well be permanent. During those days I noticed how much the flavor of the food means to me but also how my appetite was affected. I just didn´t want to eat. After 3-4 days my ability to smell started to return slowly and to my great joy so did my appetite.

Of course, you can simulate loss of smell by closing your nose with swimmer’s nose clips ($4) when eating. By what factor is that easier, cheaper, faster, and safer than bariatric surgery? One million?

Elmer Gates (1859-1923) was an inventor who did a lot of self-experimentation or self-observation. He wanted to figure out how to make his mind work better:

He kept voluminous records on his own physiology, taking urine samples several times a day and blood samples. He would take his temperature. He was doing this to find out what his physiological state was when he was most productive.

Gates was ahead of his time. Studies of body temperature and simple mental problems (e.g., arithmetic) suggest your brain works best when your body temperature is highest — around 5 or 6 pm for most people. When you are most likely to be stuck in traffic.

A Washington Post article about Gates.

Thanks to Robin Hanson.

From the nutrition chapter of latest (2006) edition of The Joy of Cooking (p. 5):

We get essential polyunsaturated fats from corn oil, soybean oil, seeds, nuts, whole grains, and fatty fish, such as salmon and tuna. The omega-3 fats are a particularly important type of polyunsaturated fat. They help with everything from normal brain and nerve development to healthy functioning of the immune system, heart, and blood vessels.

This is misleading because the first sentence lumps together foods high in omega-6 (such as corn oil and nuts) and foods high in omega-3 (fatty fish), even though omega-6 and omega-3 probably have opposite effects when consumed in the amounts we consume them. (We consume too much omega-6, too little omega-3.) The Israeli Paradox is reason to think that high amounts of omega-6 are harmful. I don’t know if omega-6 fats make one’s brain work worse but I’m sure they don’t make it work better, as omega-3 fats do.

The nutrition section of The Joy of Cooking was reviewed by Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist. This blanket statement about the goodness of polyunsaturated fats is similar to what he wrote in Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy.

My earlier post on the Israeli Paradox.