It’s a lifestyle that is at once endured and enjoyed. As New York magazine writer and Gawker confidante Vanessa Grigoriadis put it,
Bloggers get to experience the fantastic feeling of looking at everything in the world and then having everyone look at them through their blog, of being both subject and object, voyeur and voyeurant. To get more of that feeling, some bloggers—if we were a blog, we’d tell you who—are in the bathroom snorting cocaine, or Adderall, the ADHD drug popular among college kids on finals week, the constant use of which is one of the only ways a blogger can write that much (“We’re a drug ring, not a bunch of bloggers,” one Gawker Media employee tells me cheerily). Pinched nerves, carpal tunnel, swollen feet—it’s all part of the dastardly job, which at the top level can involve editing one post every fifteen minutes for nine hours a day, scanning 500 Websites via RSS for news every half-hour, and on “off-hours” keeping up with the new to prepare for tomorrow.24
By letting technology lead the pace, we do not increase genuine choice at all. Rather, we disconnect ourselves from whatever it is we may actually be doing. Bloggers disconnect themselves from the beats they may be covering by working through the screen and keyboard, covering the online versions of their subjects. Designers base their fashions and handbags on the computer readouts of incoming calls from housewives at 1 a.m. Lovers expect immediate and appropriate responses to their text messages, however tired or overworked (or drunk) the partner might be. Programmers expect themselves to generate the same quality code at 2 a.m. as they did at 2 p.m. earlier—and are willing to medicate themselves in order to do so.
In each of these cases, the bloggers, designers, lovers, and programmers all sacrifice their connection to natural and emergent rhythms and patterns in order to match those dictated by their technologies and the artificial situations they create. They miss out on the actual news cycle and its ebb and flow of activity. They work less efficiently by refusing to distinguish between naturally peak productive and peak restorative hours. Designers miss out on quite powerfully determinative cultural trends and cycles by focusing on the mediated responses of insomniac television viewers. And their articles, programs, and creative output all suffer for it.
It’s an easy mistake to make. The opportunity offered to us by digital technology is to reclaim our time and to program our devices to conform to our personal and collective rhythms. Computers do not really care about time. They are machines operating on internal clocks that are not chronological, but events-based: This happens, then that happens. They don’t care how much—or how little—time passes between each step of the sequence. This relationship to time offers unique opportunities.
For example, early Internet culture took advantage of the staccato, stepped no-time of digital technology. The first bulletin board services worked as asynchronously as the computer programs themselves: users logged on, downloaded entire conversations, and then responded at their convenience. A participant might take a few hours, or even a few days, to craft a response to a conversation in progress, and then upload it to the bulletin board. We conversed and wrote at our own pace and in our own time. For some this meant reading at night and then composing a response in the morning. For others, it meant a sudden burst of reading and writing. For still others like me, it took on a quality of chess by mail, with responses going back and forth over a period of days.
The beauty of these conversations is that we were all brilliant—more brilliant than we were in real life, anyway, when only the very best conversationalists were capable of coming up with replies that took the rest of us days to construct. The result was that on the Internet we were smarter than we could be in daily life. We had used digital technology not simply to slow down a group’s conversation, but to allow everyone to participate at his or her own pace and in the most effective part of his or her daily or weekly cycle.
By putting email and Twitter in our smart phones and attaching them to our bodies so that something vibrates every time we are mentioned, summoned, or pinged, we turn a potentially empowering asynchronous technology into a falsely synchronous one. We acquire phantom vibration syndrome and begin to experience symptoms formerly limited to air traffic controllers and 911 emergency operators. Even when we take advantage of speed or, pardon, “cognitive enhancement drugs,” we eventually burn out. The same is true for businesses that rework their operations around the time frames of quarterly reports, and mutual funds that “dress up” for end-of-year evaluations by selling unpopular assets and purchasing popular ones. They miss or work against more naturally occurring rhythms and lose the ability to ride the waves underlying essentially all human endeavors. The phones are smarter but we are dumber.
Countless examples of self-pacing systems abound in both nature and culture. The mentrual cycles of women who live in the same dormitory tend to become synchronized. Through a perhaps similar mechanism, children’s playground activity has been observed to be paced by just one or two youngsters who move about seemingly randomly from one group to another, establishing fairly precise rhythms of activity. Social scientists believe this collaborative pacing allows for high levels of group coherence as well as greater awareness of those individuals falling out of sync due to illness or some other stress deserving of collective attention. These processes may be little more than artifacts of more primitive human societies, but they may also be essential coordinators of activity and behavior that we should think twice about overriding.
Rather than being paced by our technologies, we can just as easily program our technologies to follow our own paces—or those of our enterprise’s remaining natural cycles. Or better than simply following along, technologies can sync to us and generate greater coherence for all of us in the process. After all, people have been achieving the benefit of sync since the invention of agriculture. Farmers learned that certain crops grow better in particular climates and seasons, so they plant the right seeds at the right times. Not only is the crop better and more bountiful when planting is organized in this fashion, but the fruits, vegetables, and grains available end up better matched to the human physiology’s needs during that season. Potatoes, yams, carrots, beets, and other root vegetables are in high supply during the winter months, providing sustained energy and generating warmth. The moist, hydrating fruits available during the summer are cooling to the overheated body. Beyond these superficial relationships are very specific glandular and hormonal connections between seasonal shifts and available plant enzymes. Whatever is in season has been in season over the course of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, coaxing and cueing everything from our thyroids to our spleens to store, cleanse, and metabolize at appropriate intervals. We can willfully re-create the dietary regimen that the year-round availability of hydroponic vegetables in the aisles of the Whole Foods Market otherwise effectively camouflages from us.
Much of our culture is already designed around the more subtle influences of the seasons on our moods, hormone levels, and neurotransmitter activity. Religions program their holidays to exploit or, in some cases, counteract seasonal states of mind. Ancient fertility rituals came in April, when both farming and sexual activity reached their heights, redirecting it to local gods and authorities. Solstice rituals brought light, greenery, or oily foods into people’s homes during the darkest days of the year, when as-yet-unidentified seasonal affective disorder was most likely to strike. Today it’s no secret that movie studios release blockbuster action films to meet the higher energy levels of summer audiences, more intellectual fare for the winter months, and romantic comedies for spring. They don’t do it out of any sense of loyalty to our natural chronobiological rhythms, but because it’s good business.
People can program their own activities to conform to these cycles as well—once we know what they are. Athletes and their trainers have always been aware that surges of energy, high performance levels, and unexplained slumps seemed to follow regular cycles over seasons, months, weeks, and even times of day. But it wasn’t unti
l the 1970s that a surging culture of amateur joggers looking mostly for better ways to improve their cardiac health made the first significant breakthroughs tying timing to performance.
Already accustomed to making minute tweaks to their highly routinized workout regimens, runners took a particularly keen interest in the emerging science of chronobiology for any hints on how to improve their efficiency and cardiac results. Many doctors and trainers looked for correlations between time of day, exertion, and recovery in the quest for an ideal sequence. Among them, cardiac surgeon Irving Dardik, founding chair of the U.S. Olympic Sports Medicine Committee (and the first to use umbilical veins for bypass surgery), discovered that he could help runners and patients alike modulate their cardiac rhythms by having them exercise and rest at very particular intervals during the day.25 He based his work on fairly precise but seemingly esoteric relationships between his subject’s cardiac and respiratory rhythms and what he called the “superwave” of lunar, solar, and other cycles. The work got great results for many patients contending with chronic (as in chronos, get it?) illness, but Dardik’s enthusiasm for the broader applications of his theories—including cold fusion research and the treatment of multiple sclerosis—led to widespread derision and the revocation of his license to practice medicine.
The genie was out of the bottle, though, and the notion that there were biorhythms at play in health and performance became a working principle for sports trainers and alternative healthcare practitioners. What had previously been treated as folklore about the influence of the seasons and the lunar phases on human activity was now being confirmed by new information about the brain and its changing states. New insights into brain chemistry began to validate the premise that our moods and abilities change cyclically over time, along with the wash of neurotransmitters in which our gray matter happens to be bathing at any particular moment. Psychopharmacologist and researcher Dr. David Goodman left the mainstream neuroscience community and functioned in academic exile for over thirty years to study—on subjects including himself—how the brain boosts different neurochemicals at different times of the month in order to adapt to environmental shifts over the lunar cycle. He discovered that there are four main brain states that each dominate over a single week in the twenty-eight-day lunar cycle.26
Meanwhile, Dr. Joel Robertson, author of the popular depression manual Natural Prozac, began to study the specific influence of each of the dominant neurotransmitters as they relate to depression.27 He found that certain people naturally seek to avoid depression by boosting serotonin levels, resulting in calm, peaceful mind states. Others are attracted to arousal and excitement, and tend toward behaviors and diets that boost “up” chemicals such as norepinephrine and dopamine. (The former would opt to abuse speed and cocaine; the latter may gravitate toward alcohol and Valium.) As significant as the exercise and behavior regimens he developed were his conclusions about the way different neurotransmitters favor particular mental states and activities.
Putting all this together into a comprehensive approach to the brain over time is Dr. Mark Filippi, founder of Somaspace.org and a sought-after consultant to Wall Street stockbrokers and professional sports teams looking to improve their performance, as well as more crunchy New Age types looking to make sense of the patterns in their lives. I interviewed him at his modest Larchmont office filled with books by everyone from general semanticist Alfred Korzybski to scientist David Bohm. “Why does a baseball player go into a slump?” he asks me. “Because he’s out of sync with the waves in his world.”28 That’s a sports statistic I hadn’t heard about before.
Filippi argues that instead of masking our incoherence on a biochemical level through psychotropic drugs like Prozac and Valium, we need to organize our social routines with more acute awareness of the chronobiology informing them. He helps his clients coordinate their activities and exercises with natural cycles occurring all around and within them, in an effort to increase their efficiency, reduce their stress, and generate well-being. He is doughy but fast-talking—an avid sports fan with a small TV on in his office 24/7, as if it were a window to the sociocultural weather. Watching a sports game with Filippi is like listening to an entirely alternative radio commentary. “Look at his jaw,” Filippi comments of a point guard in a basketball game on the TV. “His ankle is going to give out.” Sure enough, two plays later the point guard is on the ground clutching his shin. “It’s all connected,” he says, as if the structural dynamic between jaw and ankle through “tensegrity”29 were patently obvious.
“When we speak of tensegrity,” Filippi explains, “we mean the capacity a system has to redistribute tension and retain the same physical shape. Our manifested reality, from the infrastructure of our cells to the street grids of the towns and cities we live in, possess a tensegrity.” Most basically, tensegrity is what holds it all together. Our most internalized patterns, such as breathing, moving, and relating, embody it. Without tensegrity, we no longer exist; we’re just a bunch of cells. But it’s also a moving target, changing its forces and rhythms along with our external activities and internal states.
Building on his predecessors’ work, Filippi has been analyzing the biochemical impact of seasonal and lunar phases in order to make sense of human rhythms and determine optimal times for both therapy and particular activities. Just as there are four solar seasons with rather obvious implications (winter is better for body repair; summer is better for exertion), there are also four corresponding moon phases, sections of the day, quarters of the hour, and even stages of breath, Filippi argues. By coordinating our internal four-part, or “four phase,” rhythms with those of our greater environment, we can think, work, and interact with greater coherence. Integrating the research of Dardik, Goodman, and Robinson along with his own observations, Filippi concluded that in each moon phase the brain is dominated by a different neurotransmitter. According to Filippi, the prevalence of one chemical over the others during each week of the lunar cycle optimizes certain days for certain activities.
At the beginning of the new moon, for example, one’s acetylcholine rises along with the capacity to perform. Acetylcholine is traditionally associated with attention. “The mood it evokes in us is an Energizer Bunny–like pep. That vibe can be used to initiate social interactions, do chores and routines efficiently, and strive for balance in our activities.”
Nearer to the full moon, an uptick in serotonin increases self-awareness, generating both high focus and high energy. Serotonin, the chemical that gets boosted by drugs like Prozac, is thought to communicate the abundance or dearth of food resources to our brain. “When under its influence we can feel euphoric, spontaneous, and yet composed and sedate. Whereas acetylcholine worked to anchor us to our physical world, serotonin buoys us to the mental realm, allowing us to experience the physical world from an embodied, more lucid vantage point. We actually benefit from solitude at this time, as when an artist finds his muse.”
Over the next week, we can enjoy the benefits of increased dopamine. This chemical—responsible for the rush one gets on heroin or after performing a death-defying stunt—is responsible for reward-driven learning. “It allows us to expand our behaviors outside of our routines, decrease our intensity, and essentially blend with the energy of the moment. If acetylcholine is the ultimate memory neurotransmitter, dopamine is the ultimate experiential one. Functionally, it serves us best when we’re doing social activities we enjoy.” In other words, it’s party week.
Finally, in the last moon phase, we are dominated by norepinephrine, an arousal chemical that regulates processes like the fight-or-flight response, anxiety, and other instinctual behaviors. “We tend to be better off doing more structural tasks that don’t involve a lot of reflection. Its binary nature lets us make decisions, act on them, and then recalibrate like a GPS with a hunting rifle. The key with norepinephrine is that if it’s governed well, we experience a fluid coordination of thought and action so much so that we almost fail to feel. Everything becomes sec
ond nature.” So instead of letting the natural rise of fight-or-flight impulses turn us into anxious paranoids, we can exploit the state of nonemotional, almost reptilian arousal it encourages.
Further, within each day are four segments that correspond to each of these moon phases. In the new moon phase, people will be most effective during the early morning hours, while in the second phase leading up to the full moon, people do best in the afternoon.
Admittedly, this is all a tough pill for many of us to swallow, but after my interviews with Filippi, I began working in this fashion on this book. I would use the first week of the moon to organize chapters, do interviews, and talk with friends and colleagues about the ideas I was working on. In the second, more intense week, I would lock myself in my office, set to task, and get the most writing done. In the third week, I would edit what I had written, read new material, jump ahead to whatever section I felt like working on, and try out new ideas. And in the final week, I would revisit structure, comb through difficult passages, and recode the nightmare that is my website. My own experience is that my productivity went up by maybe 40 percent, and my peace of mind about the whole process of writing was utterly transformed for the better. Though certainly anecdotal as far as anyone else is concerned, the exercise convinced me to stay aware of these cycles from now on.
Digital technology can be brought back into the equation as well, promoting altogether new levels of sync. Think of it the way biofeedback works: a person is hooked up to a bunch of equipment that monitors his heart, breath, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, and so on. That information is then fed back to him as an image on a monitor; a moving line; a pulsing light, music, or sound; or an animation. The person who wants to slow his heart rate or lower his blood pressure might do so by attempting to change a red light to a blue one. The sensors are listening and the computer is processing, but the data they feed back is the articulation of inner, cyclic activity, not its repression. Seeing this previously hidden information gives us new access to natural rhythms and the ability to either adjust them or adjust ourselves and our lives to their warning signals.
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