Field Notes #23: The energizing power of a cold shower, Frank Bruni's "The Beauty of Dusk" & how to deal with decision fatigue
The alertness and happy mood sparked by a cold blast can apparently go on for 4 or 5 hours
Hello, friends! Happy Wednesday! I’ve lost some momentum with the Odyssey schedule and finding it difficult to regain. It’s almost like a magical grease or friction-ease substance in the air when you are in a sustained habit. How can you can get that back? I imagine the only way is repetition, but whew, I wish there was a way to slip back into the rhythm more easily.
What have you done when a regular habit skipped a beat or two? How do you get back in the groove? (Mental note: Look into the research around momentum.)
Today’s Field Note includes three interesting insights I’ve run across lately, all related to living better — how to jolt your day to an alert and happier start, how to deal with decision fatigue, and how to respond to loss, which we all will face.
1} Blast of a cold shower
This podcast interview with Dr. Wendy Suzuki, Professor of Neural Science and Psychology and incoming Dean of NYU, on the Huberman Lab Podcast is just terrific. She talks about the 4 factors that cause memories to stick, the role of exercise in mood and health, the power of verbal affirmations, and much more. I’ve now reserved her book Healthy Brain, Happy Life: A Personal Program to Activate Your Brain and Do Everything Better (what a title!), from the library, and her latest book is Good Anxiety. (Sounds like the good side of stress, doesn’t it?)
Around minute 24, she shares her morning routine, which includes:
Tea meditation (I had never heard of this. Have you?)
Aerobic exercise
Warm shower that ends with a blast of cold water
On that blast of cold, she says: “It makes me feel SO good. Because I’ve been doing it for several years, it is so much less painful” than it was at the beginning.
The cold creates a vibrant sense of alertness, she says.
“I could feel the awaken-ness come up in me after that. And I miss it! If I forget to do it, sometimes I run back in and give myself a cold blast.”
Host Dr. Andrew Huberman, who is a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford, details what is happening in that blast of cold:
”Basically the cold stimulus — that shock — is adrenaline from the adrenals, but also, from what we understand now, some new neuro imaging, there’s epinephrine and norepinephrine released from locus coeruleus, which is a brain structure in the back of the brain, kind of sprinklers that give the rest of the brain a kind of wakeup chemical.
“And there’s a long arc on dopamine release. There’s a paper back in 2000 that showed there’s a steady increase, up to about a 2.5x of circulating dopamine…
“But it goes on for 4 or 5 hours. So the improved mood and the feeling of alertness is a real thing.”
Wow. It’s enough to make me want to try it, though I’m dreading the initial blast of cold. What do you think?
Listen to the full episode.
2} How to combat decision fatigue
I’ve read before that your ability to make decisions gets depleted throughout the day. Some people who have to make many consequential decisions try to reduce unnecessary decisions — say, by eating the same thing for lunch or wearing the same basic outfit, so decision making fuel isn’t wasted on frivolous issues.
This NYT article from 2011, Do You Suffering From Decision Fatigue?, starts off with a case study of judges making parole decisions, and detailing (very disturbingly) that the time that the plaintiff’s case was heard made a significant difference in the outcome.
For those of us not making immense decisions like that, there are still things to learn here. For example, glucose helps restore willpower. But the most important thing seems to be being aware of the issue of decision fatigue, which is present every day for all of us and yet hidden.
As the article explains:
The cumulative effect of these temptations and decisions isn’t intuitively obvious. Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Big decisions, small decisions, they all add up. Choosing what to have for breakfast, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend — these all deplete willpower, and there’s no telltale symptom of when that willpower is low. It’s not like getting winded or hitting the wall during a marathon. Ego depletion manifests itself not as one feeling but rather as a propensity to experience everything more intensely. When the brain’s regulatory powers weaken, frustrations seem more irritating than usual. Impulses to eat, drink, spend and say stupid things feel more powerful (and alcohol causes self-control to decline further).
Social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister notes:
“Good decision making is not a trait of the person, in the sense that it’s always there. It’s a state that fluctuates.”
As the NYT article says:
His [Baumeister’s] studies show that people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.
“Even the wisest people won’t make good choices when they’re not rested and their glucose is low,” Baumeister points out. That’s why the truly wise don’t restructure the company at 4 p.m. They don’t make major commitments during the cocktail hour. And if a decision must be made late in the day, they know not to do it on an empty stomach.
“The best decision makers,” Baumeister says, “are the ones who know when not to trust themselves.”
Read the full article (open-access gift link from me to you).
3} The key to thriving
In The Beauty in Dusk, long-time New York Times writer (and now Duke journalism professor) Frank Bruni chronicles his sudden loss of sight in one eye and the experience of learning to cope, of gaining a new, sharp awareness of everyone else’s particular hardships, and of figuring out the way forward. It’s a thoughtful meditation on illness, laced with philosophical contemplation and a joyful side section on the love of dogs.
Frank also includes stories of all sorts of people who are blind — a visual impairment can show up as foggy shapes, or light, or smears of vision, not the pure black darkness that is commonly, mistakenly, he pointed out, thought of as blind — and who have led ordinary and extraordinary lives, not letting the obstacles obscure what is still possible.
He quotes his college psychology professor:
“Life is about adjusting to loss.”
This struck me as immediately true. It’s not that we won’t have loss — each of us, all of us, in some way, visible or invisible — but that our days and our life comes down to how we adjust. Our attitude toward the loss. Our resourcefulness. Our decision to look for what is possible instead of what is not.
Frank elaborates:
“The challenge of life, present for most of it but more dominant in the second half, is adjusting to loss or, more specifically, developing the judgment and grace not only to accept its inevitability but also to recognize that it’s not the only trajectory, that there are many ways to meet and measure it and that there are consolations, including all that remains. Cherishing those leftovers—those holdovers—is the key to thriving, and sometimes even to surviving.”
I hope you have a week ahead with helpful adjustments. There’s always something we can do that can make a difference.
To our journeys,
Brianne