Seth’s blog

From Nassim Taleb’s web notebook:

I was going to have dinner with Seth Roberts in San Francisco. So, out of curiosity, I tried his diet [ clipping my nose and consuming two large tablespoons of flaxseed oil ] . . . When someone who observed me with a noseclip asked: “what are you doing?” , I gave my answer “trying to be healthier”.  It elicited a smile: “Why don’t you dance outside on one leg for ten minutes? That too may work very well”.

Strange strange coincidence.

Why Did I Sleep So Well? directory.

My recent experience suggests that if I stand on one foot until it becomes slightly difficult about four times/day I will sleep much better. Two days ago I measured how long those four bouts of one-foot standing actually were: 6.2 (left foot), 4.3 (right), 4.8 (left), and 5.2 (right) minutes. The median is 5.0 minutes. When I started doing this, about two weeks ago, each bout was about 2 minutes.

It doesn’t seem to matter when I do them. Now I do two in the morning and two in the evening. Fits perfectly with a subway commute. You’ll want to be forced to stand.

In the evening I have a pleasant sense of anticipation: I will fall asleep and wake up feeling really good. I have never before felt this way. I have slept this well before, when I stood 9 or 10 hours/day. The sheer difficulty and all-consumingness of doing that, I now realize, got in the way of anticipating the benefits.

Something else curious is that one-foot standing leaves no mark — I can’t tell at 3 pm how many bouts I’ve done so far just by noticing how I feel. Unlike water or calorie consumption: If I don’t drink anything I’ll get thirsty. If I don’t eat anything I’ll get hungry. But if I don’t get enough of this particular byproduct of exercise I’ll never notice.

I’ve continued to sleep extremely well. I’m sure there’s something to this. I’m almost sure it’s because of the one-legged standing.

Here are some technical details. I usually do four bouts of one-legged standing, two in the morning and two later. During each bout I stand on one leg, pulling my other leg up behind me. Sometimes I touch something to balance myself. Usually I watch or read something at the same time. Each bout lasts until it’s hard to continue — until it becomes slightly painful. At first the bouts lasted about two minutes, now they last about four minutes. I enjoy it more when I time it with a stopwatch.

I haven’t yet systematically varied the number of bouts but I suspect one is too few to get the full effect and four is plenty. I’m still trying different ways of arranging them throughout the day. Doing all four at once is too tiring — it takes too long to recover. Maybe it’s best to do two whenever’s convenient during the day and then do two more in the evening when it’s okay to be tired.

Directory.

1. Initial observation, 9 possible causes
2. Another possible cause: standing on one foot
3. Sleep almost great, narrowing possible causes to two.
4. Sleep great again, narrowing possible causes to two
5. Sleep great again after only standing on one foot
6. Someone else gets similar results
7. Technical details
8. How long I stand
9. Eerie coincidence
10. Patterns of discovery
11. Comparison to other sorts of exercise
12. What’s a good dose?
13. How much I’ve been standing Comparison with conventional exercise.
14. Two more people get similar results
15. How long I stand (continued)
16. Replication details
17. The amount of time needed stops increasing

I have been sleeping much better than usual. Sharp easy-to-notice improvement. After the first time this happened I made a list of 9 possible reasons (lifestyle changes that might have been responsible). I later added one I’d overlooked: standing on one foot to exhaustion a few times.

Yesterday I stood on one foot to exhaustion four times, twice in the morning and twice in the evening. It took about three minutes each time (12 minutes total). Didn’t make any of the nine other candidate changes. And I slept much better than usual. So it is beginning to look like just that one factor is responsible. The one I almost forgot but also the one that seemed most plausible after i remembered it.

Directory.