The default in nature is health, so why are we fat, sick and broken? It is because our environment has change, our bodies have not. We share 99.7% of the same genetics as our relatively disease free hunter-gatherer ancestors yet eat worse, move less, sleep worse, encounter more stress and toxins, and wonder what the cause is of chronic disease. It's really not that hard! Take control of your health with the 7 Pillars of Health.
By Tim Kreider
If you live in America in the 21st century you've probably had to listen to a lot of people tell you how busy they are. It's become the default response when you ask anyone how they're doing: "Busy!" "So busy." "Crazy Busy." It is, pretty obviously, a boast disguised as a complaint. And the stock response is a kind of congratulation: "That's a good problem to have," or "Better than the opposite."
This frantic, self-congratualtory busyness is a distinctly upscale affliction. Notice it isn't generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the ICU, taking care of their senescent parents, or holding down three minimum-wage jobs they have to commute to by bus who need to tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It's most often said by people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they're "encouraged" their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they are addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.
Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren't working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with their friends the way 4.0 students make sure to sign up for some extracurricular activities because they look good on college applications. I recently wrote a friend asking if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn't have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. My question was not a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation: This was the invitation. I was hereby asking him to do something with me. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he as shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it.
I recently learned a neologism that, like political correctness, man cave, and content-provider, I instantly recognized as heralding an ugly new turn in the culture: planshopping. That is, deferring committing to any one plan for an evening until you know what all your options are, and then picking the one that's most likely to be fun/advance your career/have the most girls at it -- in other words, treating people like menu options or products in a catalog.
Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half hour with enrichment classes, tutorials, and extracurricular activities. At the end of the day they come home as tired as grownups, which seems not just sad but hateful. I was a member of the latchkey generation, and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from scouring The World Book Encyclopedia to making animated movies to convening with friends in the woods in order to chuck dirt clods directly into one another's eyes, all of which afforded me knowledge, skills, and insights that remain valuable to this day.
The busyness is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. I recently Skyped with a friend who had been driven out of New York City by the rents and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the South of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a circle of friends there who all go out to the cafe or watch TV together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone is too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious, and sad — turned out to be a reformative effect of her environment, of the crushing atmospheric pressure of ambition and competitiveness. It’s not as if any of us want to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school; it’s something we collectively force one another to do. It may not be a problem that’s solvable through any social reform or self-help regimen; maybe it’s just how things are. Zoologist Konrade Lorenz calls “the rushed existence into which industrialized, commercialized man has precipitated himself” and all its attendant afflictions — ulcers, hypertension, neuroses, etc. — an “inexpedient development,” or evolutionary maladaptation, brought on by our ferocious intraspecies competition. He likens us to birds whose alluringly long plumage has rendered them flightless, easy prey.
I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter. I once dated a woman that interned at a magazine where she wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d’etre had been obviated when Menu buttons appeared on remotes, so it’s hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. Based on the volume of my email correspondence and the amount of Internet ephemera I am forwarded on a daily basis, I suspect that most people with office jobs are doing as little as I am. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor or a worm in a Tyrollean hat in a Richard Scarry book I’m not convinced it’s necessary. Yes, I know we’re all very busy, but what, exactly, is getting done? Are all those people running late for meetings and yelling on their cell phones stopping the spread of malaria or developing feasible alternatives to fossil fuels or making anything beautiful?
The busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness: Obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. All this noise and rush and stress seem contrived to drown out or over up some fear at the center of our lives. I know that after I’ve spent a whole day working or running errands or answering emails or watching movies, keeping my brain busy and distracted, as soon as I lie down to sleep all the niggling quotidian worries and Big Picture questions I’ve successfully kept at bay come crowding into my brain like monsters swarming out of the closet the instant you turn off the nightlight. When you try to meditate, your brain suddenly comes up with a list of a thousand urgent items you should be obsessing about rather than simply sit still. One of my correspondents suggests that what we’re all so afraid of is being left alone with ourselves.
I’ll say it: I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel like 4 or 5 hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and see friends, read or watch a movie in the evening. The very best days of my life are given over to uninterrupted debauchery, but these are, alas, undependable and increasingly difficult to arrange. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, “What time?"
But just recently, I insidiously started, because of professional obligation to become busy. For the first time in my life I was able to tell people, with a straight face, that I was “too busy” to do this or that thing they wanted me to do. I could see why people enjoy this complaint: It makes you feel important, sought-after, and put-upon. It’s also an unassailable excuse for declining boring invitations, shirking unwelcome projects, and avoiding human interaction. Except that I hated actually being busy. Every morning my inbox was full of emails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I had to solve. It got more and more intolerable, until finally I fled town to the Undisclosed Location from which I’m writing this.
Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check email I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stinkbugs, and the stars. I read a lot. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what that might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again. I know not everyone has an isolated cabin to flee to. But not having cable or the Internet turns out to be cheaper than having them. And nature is still technically free, even if human beings have tried to make access to it expensive. Time and quiet should not be luxury items.
Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence, or a vice: It is an indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often the essence of what we do,” writes Thomas Pynchon in his essay on Sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll and Hyde, the benzine ring: history is full of stories of inspiration that came in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbrickers, and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions, and masterpieces than the hardworking.
"The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was in fact Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write Childhood’s End and think up communications satellites. Ted Rall recently wrote a column proposing that we divorce income form work, giving each citizen a guaranteed paycheck, which sounds like the kind of lunatic notion that’ll be a basic human right in about a century, like abolition, universal suffrage, and 8-hour workdays. I know how heretical it sound in America, but there’s really no reason we shouldn’t regard drudgery as an evil to rid the world of if possible, like polio. It was the Puritans who perverted work into a virtue, evidently forgetting that God invented it as a punishment. Now that the old taskmaster is out of office, maybe we could all take a long smoke break.
I suppose the world would soon slide to ruin if everyone behaved like me. But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My own life has admittedly been absurdly cushy. But my privileged position outside the hive may have given me a unique perspective on it. It’s like being the designated driver at a bar: When you’re not drinking, ou can see drunkenness more clearly than those actually experiencing it. Unfortunately the only advice I have to offer the Busy is as unwelcome as the advice you’d give to the Drunk. I’m not suggesting everyone quit their jobs — just maybe take the rest of the day off. Go play some see-ball. Fuck in the middle of the afternoon. Take your daughter to a matinee. My role in life is to be a bad influence, the kid standing outside the classroom window making faces at you at your desk, urging you to just this once to make some excuse and get out of there, come outside and play.
Even though my own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since you can always make more money. And I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth is to spend it with people I love. I suppose it’s possible I’ll lie on my deathbed regretting that I didn’t work harder, write more, and say everything I had to say, but I think what I’ll really wish is that I could have one more round of Delanceys with Nick, another long late-night talk with Lauren, one last hard laugh with Harold. Life is too short to be busy.
1. People who thrive are the ones that make and metabolize acids correctly. Acid can be your friend if you manage it properly.
2. Here is a pearl from Dr. Rakowski, he showed a scientific paper on B12 absorption and brain aging. If you don't absorb B12, your brain ages 617% faster! As I have stated before, the greatest impact of not testing your HCl levels is compromising your brain health.
3. Growth hormone is a significant anti-depressant. Deep sleep is the real way to achieve optimal growth hormone levels.
4. The major benefit of using Arginine is boosting growth hormone during effort, besides boosting NO2.
5. Only fat people make too much estrogen.
6. People who have elevated triglycerides have low levels of growth hormone.
7. The body ignores constant stimuli. Changing everything constantly is one of the keys to success whether we are talking about training, diet, or supplements.
8. Brain derived neurotrophic factor is a strong anti-depressant produced by exercise that induces lactic acid production.
9. Learning improves 20% after exercise. Why are we canning Physical Education classes?
9. Charlie Chaplin fathered a child when he was 80. Sexual dysfunction is rampant because people are simply unhealthy.
10. Low-grade systemic inflammation (metaflammation) is associated with obesity, insulin resistance and chronic disease (Brithish Journal of Nutrition (2009) 102, 1238-1242
11. Friends do not let friends get fat.
12. Sleep is your most powerful anti-inflammatory agent
Unhealthy lifestyle habits (poor diet, inadequate exercise, insufficient sleep, lack of relaxation, and internalizing emotional stress) are sources of chronic stress that may be underlying causes of adrenal fatigue and hormone imbalance. Other common sources of chronic stress include: food sensitivities, heavy metals, environmental toxins, radiation exposure, and regular use of prescription drugs. Chronic stress slowly erodes health and compromises longevity.
Under chronic stress, the adrenal glands increase their output of cortisol—often referred to as the “stress hormone.” The principal hormones produced by the adrenal glands—cortisol, DHEA, aldosterone, testosterone, estrogens, and progesterone—share a common precursor, the master hormone pregnenolone. When under stress, the adrenal glands are hyperstimulated and pregnenolone is diverted (stolen) from other pathways to produce cortisol.
This increase in the production of cortisol (and the resulting diversion ofpregnenolone) causes fatigue and the general aches and pains associated with chronic stress. However, with time, pregnenolone steal has a much broader damaging effect on health. It exacerbates any developing or existing health problems because pregnenolone is not being adequately converted to other essential hormones. Refer to the following chart to see the dynamic of pregnenolone steal:
What stresses have become chronic, causing the body to divert pregnenolone to provide for the production of cortisol? The sooner you identify and deal with the offenders, the sooner you restore your patients’ health. Consider the following sources as a logical starting point:
A doctor's acute skills of observation, physical examination and deductive reasoning, which used to be considered his most essential diagnostic tool, have now been replaced by reliance on narrowly interpreted lab-tests and lists of numerical diagnoses allowable by insurance plans. The health insurance industry has forced the entire practice of medicine to restrict itself to pre-approved numbered codes for both the diagnosis and the treatment of all health conditions. Drugs or even surgery are usually the only therapies offered by modern medicine, even when they are inappropriate. So if an illness does not show up clearly on a lab test or fit a diagnostic code, and if there is no known surgical or drug treatment for the symptoms, then it is as though the problem is not real.
Medical doctors of today are constricted by medical licensing boards, the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and their patients' expectation of quick recovery. As a result of these influences and a certain bias in their training, they think and practice primarily pharmaceutical medicine, seeking to prescribe the appropriate drug for the condition. Because of the ever-present threat of a malpractice suit and the conservative influence of peer review boards, medical doctors have become much less willing and able to try something different to help their patients...
...In addition to the fact that medical training is now dependent on huge pharmaceutical corporation for funding, modern medicine is currently in the stranglehold of insurance companies. Under our present medical system, most physicians' incomes come primarily from insurance companies. Paperwork created by the insurance industry and licensing boards that required of therapists, physicians, clinics and hospitals demands that each patient be given what is called an "ICD" (International Classification of Disease) code for their medical condition. This ICD code puts a name on your disease or condition. No one can fit in the cracks. You must have an ICD code to classify your illness. Despite the fact that it is absurd to assume that all patients will fit into a description found in some pre-designed code-book, everyone is required to have an ICD. If there is no ICD the financial medicine wheel quickly comes to a halt for that patient and for the doctor treating them. Records are incomplete without codes and bills cannot be submitted to insurance companies without them. Consequently, physicians must identify the patient's with an ICD code or the insurance companies will not pay for them.
Because adrenal fatigue is not a recognized disease, it is not in the ICD code book and is often misdiagnosed.
