Brief discussion: The impact of self-control and sleep

Last week, I took a group of children on a study tour and found that they generally went to bed late, many of them went to bed after 11 o'clock, and some even stayed up until after 2 o'clock in the morning, which surprised me. When I asked my friends around me, they were also the ones who stayed up late. With the blessing of the recent "Black Myth: Wukong", staying up until the early morning seems to be commonplace.

Staying up late and suffering from insomnia used to be considered bad habits, but now I find that no matter men, women, young or old, all suffer from lack of sleep. I can’t stop watching short videos or playing games, and my brain seems to be hijacked by dopamine.

Vicious cycle

I read two books two years ago, one was "Self-Control" by Kelly McGonigal, and the other was "The Nature of Poverty: Why We Can't Get Rid of Poverty". Both books expressed the view that the body and mind are consistent: physiological problems will affect psychological problems; psychological problems will also affect physiological problems.

"Self-control" believes that people's self-control needs to consume brain resources. When it is almost consumed, it needs to be "recharged" in time. If you force yourself to be self-disciplined at this time, it may be useless.

The Nature of Poverty argues that poverty and the stress of life caused by poverty will increase the level of cortisol in the poor, and high cortisol levels will cause people to become forgetful, absent-minded, and have difficulty concentrating. In severe cases, it will also cause damage to the brain's cognitive function. Therefore, the poor are more likely to lose control and become addicted to behaviors that stimulate the brain, such as alcohol and gambling.

Can't stop scrolling through the phone - lack of sleep - the brain's self-control resources are not replenished - regret and stress cause cortisol to rise - more out of control - continue scrolling through the phone , and this becomes a vicious cycle.

The reasons behind poor sleep

There are many reasons for insomnia. Wang Weigong mentioned one of the principles of insomnia in "The Music of Qi": lack of oxygen in the brain.

Wang Weigong is a doctor of biophysics from Johns Hopkins University. He provides a unique perspective on insomnia with an empirical approach. Why can't we fall asleep due to brain hypoxia? Because circulation decreases and breathing weakens during sleep. If we are in a state of anxiety, fear, depression, etc., the brain is always in a "tense" state, and the brain's activities continue to consume oxygen, so the brain's oxygen supply is further reduced. Therefore, the most effective way to treat insomnia is to improve the brain's oxygen supply. Once the hypoxia problem is improved, you can fall asleep immediately.

Blood circulation is governed by the law of scale

I bought The Music of Chi two years ago, and I recommended it to my family. At that time, I happened to be reading Scale by Geoffrey West.

West is the former director of the Santa Fe Institute (known as a holy place for complexity science research). In his book "Scale", he explained the scaling theory . Scaling theory shows that living organisms, cities, companies, and even all complex things have the same internal growth logic, and they are all constrained by mathematical laws.

Another name for scaling theory is "scaling law", which is gradually becoming known to people because it is the underlying belief of Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT. As the saying goes, "more is different", Altman believes that we should do everything possible to feed artificial intelligence with more data, and then it will emerge with more intelligence.

Photo: The last stop of the study tour was to visit the Cai Zhizhong Art Museum. The illustrations in "The Movement of Chi" were all drawn by Cai Zhizhong, and the last two pictures are illustrations from "The Movement of Chi".

Let’s go back to these two books. Scale and The Movement of Qi seem to be unrelated, but don’t forget that West and Wang Weigong are both physicists, and they can immediately find a consensus on the issue of life.

My family and I were reading these two books separately at the time, and after we finished reading, we discussed them. We immediately found that the two books were a link between the past and the future. The Movement of Qi mentioned questions such as "Why elephants are big but their heartbeats are slow, while mice are small but their heartbeats are fast", "Why the blood circulation theory under fluid mechanics cannot provide enough power to 'pump' blood to various organs and flesh in the human body", etc. These are exactly the phenomena that the scaling theory of Scale wants to explain.

Figure: Professor Zhang Jiang from the School of Systems Engineering at Beijing Normal University is the proofreader and translator of the book "Scale". Last year, he published his new book "The Law of Scale".

West explained that the larger the body size, the more efficient the body's overall operation will be (which can be simply understood as the whole is greater than the sum of its parts). Therefore, although the number of cells in an elephant is 10,000 times that of a mouse, its metabolic rate is only 1,000 times that of a mouse. In precise mathematical terms, "the metabolic rate varies with approximately 3/4 power of body weight."

For example, blood needs to reach the capillaries at the end of the limbs, which is a bit like squeezing thick liquid through a very fine sieve, and it will encounter considerable resistance. The capillaries are only 5 microns thin, and it takes a lot of effort to squeeze the thick blood into the flesh. At this time, each blood vessel and the heart need to resonate (blood waves), and in the process of resonance, the "echo" reflected by the blood wave at each blood vessel bifurcation should be minimized as much as possible, otherwise it will bring a great burden to the heart.

West went on to say: "To ensure that no energy is lost by reflection, the radius of the successive vessels must be proportionally varied in a regular, self-similar manner, with the radius of each branch being √2 times the radius of its branch." It's just that Wang Weigong proved this empirically, while West used mathematical statistics to illustrate that the two authors' views on some fundamental issues are surprisingly consistent.

Photo: During a visit to Guichuang Tongqiao Medical Technology Co., Ltd., we learned that the thinnest microcatheter that can be inserted into the human body can now be as thin as 2 mm.

A good scientific theory often has to go through the double test of empirical observation and mathematical calculation . Only when the reality and the abstract are consistent, the theory is declared successful. The Movement of Qi and Scale, one talks about empirical observation and the other about mathematics, which happens to be the classic paradigm for exploring scientific theories.

If some readers have questions such as "Why is there a scaling theory? Why do blood vessels follow the fractal geometry?", I suggest you study the "chaos" theory and complexity science behind the appearance. Due to space limitations, I will not expand on this here.

Photo: The author explains the phenomenon of "fractals" to the children in the study camp in Baizhang Town. I bought Roman broccoli as a teaching tool for fractals. Due to the existence of "fractals", the total length of human blood vessels can circle the earth about two and a half times.

Ways to improve insomnia

Knowing the principle, we have an idea to solve the problem of insomnia: the key is to strengthen the blood circulation in the brain. Here are several measures to intervene in insomnia based on the meta-category of "blood wave resonance":

First, try not to sleep on your stomach.

Sleeping on your stomach (prone) is a very harmful sleeping position for the body. When people sleep on their stomachs, their joints, muscles, and internal organs are compressed, which not only prevents the body from relaxing, but also causes breathing difficulties . This is why many people feel sore all over after sleeping on their stomachs all night.

Second, massage your lower limbs before going to bed to enhance blood circulation in your lower limbs.

Massage may seem to have nothing to do with helping you sleep, but that's actually not the case.

First, we need to answer a question: Why does the brain have insufficient blood oxygen supply? We know that humans have venous blood and arterial blood, and pulmonary circulation and systemic circulation . When the blood goes to the lungs, it carries oxygen and becomes bright red. This is mainly pulmonary circulation. When the blood goes to the internal organs and limbs, it brings oxygen from the arterial blood to the cells and brings back metabolic waste and carbon dioxide. The blood becomes darker and becomes venous blood. This is systemic circulation.

Now the problem arises: modern people sit for a long time, and the blood circulation in the lower limbs will become poor . The blood reaches the lower limbs and returns slowly, and the venous return becomes poor. When the venous return becomes poor, the total blood volume remains unchanged, and the blood delivered to the brain by the heart becomes less.

Many people with insomnia often have problems such as arrhythmia , because the heart (it is not just a piece of meat, but an intelligent organ with many nerve endings) sees less blood, so it works harder, the load becomes greater, and the resonance becomes worse. In Chinese medicine, this is called heart-kidney disharmony .

Therefore, walking more and exercising more, in addition to psychological relaxation, also has clear physiological significance - it strengthens venous return in the lower limbs, increases the efficiency of blood supply to the heart, and better improves blood supply to the brain.

Third, try meditation.

This may seem a bit mysterious, but it does make sense. The main point is that meditation can relax the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems , which has been proven by sufficient evidence and will not be elaborated on here.

Secondly, I personally feel that meditation, by focusing the mind on one thing, can prevent your brain from wandering, avoid wasting brain resources due to idling, and reduce the overall brain consumption.

Meditation can also soothe your mood and reduce stress levels, and reducing stress levels can improve your self-control, allowing you to control yourself to fall asleep in time when you want to sleep.

In addition, dimming the lights and not looking at your phone before going to bed can also help you sleep, because the light can make your brain excited, just like chicken farms turn on lights at night to keep chickens active.