Stability
I had a wonderful time speaking with Lee-Sean for his podcast Easy Cook Bear about my path from tech to cooking, my relationship with my family's food, and making buns. Have a listen!
What does it look like when you turn your life upside down at the same time that the world does? Like doing somersaults during an earthquake. Taking drugs on a rollercoaster. Flying on a trapeze on a swaying ship.
I think I’m lucky. This year was very difficult for maintaining schedules and stability, say for people with small children, but for someone who had no idea what the year was going to bring anyway, it was easier to recalibrate as everything changed.
On a physical level, our endocrine system is what’s constantly recalibrating so that we stay as stable as possible on the inside while things outside change. Homeostasis, some would say, is the very definition of health. Our endocrine system strives for this by releasing hormones in concert with our activities. It produces cortisol in the morning to get us going, peaking at around 8:30am, and melatonin at night, beginning when darkness falls until around 4am. It makes insulin when it detects that we’ve eaten to regulate the amount of glucose in the blood. It adjusts our metabolism to work harder when it thinks we can afford to sit around digesting, or ease up if we might need extra calories soon.
Disorders of the endocrine system can happen spontaneously, or because of genetic factors, but the things we do with our bodies have a significant effect on whether we’re helping the system with its job, overloading it or confusing it. For example, stimulation causes the body to produce cortisol, which tries to give us energy by increasing blood sugar and storing fat around the organs. When the stimulation or stressors don’t let up, the endocrine system learns to keep its finger on the cortisol button, perpetuating these metabolic effects that change our weight, suppress our immune system, and compromise digestion. Similarly, eating too much sugar can eventually increase insulin resistance, meaning that the cells don’t react as strongly to insulin and the pancreas starts making more of it. That can lead to Type 2 Diabetes, in which you have to take over the work of the endocrine system yourself by checking and regulating your blood sugar. Things like traveling far distances, caffeine or being exposed to bright blue-spectrum light at night all interfere with the release of the hormones that help us be alert or sleepy.
Learning about this reactive system has made me want to treat it better. I’ve started noticing the way certain feedback loops in my life end up putting continual stress on my endocrine system. Too much alcohol at night makes me sleep badly, which means the next day I want caffeine and sugar, which makes me lethargic, and might mean I skip my yoga session even though I know it helps me sleep at night, so then I can’t sleep which starts the cycle over. I don’t want to abstain completely from all these fun things (though I have managed to cut out coffee), but I’m trying not to let license for one indulgence give way to everything else. Even though it’s the holidays and I just want to relax, truthfully I’ll enjoy it more if I stay in touch with my system and help it do its job. I’ll be more alert for the things I want to enjoy and more calm when it’s time for sleep. Instead of thinking about what I need to put into my body to feel good, I’m working on the assumption that feeling good is my default state, as long as I don’t interfere too much.
We’re heading into 2021 and even though there are many hopeful signs, we don’t know much about what will be demanded of us this year. If I’ve learned anything from 2020, it’s that staying grounded internally is what allows us to roll with uncertainty and change. There are many components to being grounded, not all of them physical. But ultimately the brain is an organ of the body, so what we can do to help our body in its endeavor for homeostasis will be reflected in the mind.
This is the last newsletter of 2020, see you in 2021!
What I’m reading
Transit, by Rachel Cusk
He had come to the conclusion, he went on, that up to a certain point his whole life had been driven by needing things rather than liking them, and that once he had started interrogating it on that basis, the whole thing had faltered and collapsed. But the question of liking was, as he had already said, more complex than that: people would swear that they needed things because they liked them, or that what they needed they also liked…
He had started to realise that what he called need was actually something else, was more a question of surfeit, of the desire to have something in limitless supply. And by its very nature that thing would have to be relatively worthless, like the cheese sandwich, of which there as an infinite and easily accessible number. To desire something better required self-control, required an acceptance of the fact that you might not have it for ever and that even if you did you would never feel full to bursting on it. It left you alone with yourself, that desire, and when he thought about his life he saw it as a series of attempts to lose himself by merging with something else, something outside him that could be internalised.