An intriguing discovery
The power of heat
I’m reporting two days in one edition today.
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Friday
The night before
10:00pm: Lime cheesecake and 1 pot (60g) of Sainsbury’s chocolate mousse, followed by 2g omega 3 fish oil. As I wrote in the last edition, it seems cheesecake alone doesn’t work so well for my mood - but I had to eat the cheesecake before it expired, so I decided to have both.
Slept 6h.
During the day
8:30am: 300mg Tru Niagen, 1000 IU Vitamin D, 0.2mg Vitamin K2, 1mg Vitamin B12, 5mg Lithium Orotate - same as the day before
Felt great in the morning. Seems the chocolate mousse did at least help there.
Note for context that before I started taking omega 3 fatty acids from fish oil + a fatty food to maximise absorption of the omega 3, I was regularly feeling pretty sad in the mornings. But, as we all know, correlation is not causation - for example, maybe I stopped feeling so sad because maybe I have Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.) and the days started to get longer again, which attenuated my S.A.D.? But that theory doesn’t seem plausible to me. And the science indicates that omega 3 does help with mood.
Felt sleepy in the afternoon, and my mood was poor.
After 6pm
Continued to work during the evening, but this was unpleasant - it felt like a bit of a slog, probably due to a combination of (a) not getting enough sleep and (b) it being a Friday evening. Not that I had anywhere to go on the Friday night, it being lockdown here in England and all! But I’m not really one for going out at night anyway, even during normal times.
Saturday
The night before
10:00pm: 1 pot probiotic yoghurt (again, I had to eat it before it expired), followed by 2g omega 3 fish oil.
Slept 7h… at least, according to my sleep monitoring device, which doesn’t always seem to be entirely accurate.
During the day
8:15am: 150mg Tru Niagen, 1000 IU Vitamin D, 0.2mg Vitamin K2, 1mg Vitamin B12, 5mg Lithium Orotate - change since the previous day shown in italics. Because I started a new bottle of Tru Niagen, and it came in 150mg capsules in this bottle, I decided to try taking one capsule in the morning and one in the evening.
Felt OK in the morning.
In the afternoon, my mood started to get lower again, until I put my coat on in preparation to go out shopping. You see, I had to wait for my late wife’s father (who I will refer to as my father-in-law from now on) to finish a call with someone, so that he could come shopping with me, at his request. I decided to keep my coat on for that period of time, which I presumed would be short, because I noticed that my mood was improved. And it continued to stay high until I went out into the cold air.
The problem is, I think I fried my brain a little - I didn’t take my coat off indoors even when I became uncomfortably hot. The reason I say this I think I fried my brain is, I then went to the bus stop and then discovered I had forgotten to bring my wallet, then went home to get my wallet, and then when I got back to the bus stop, I discovered I had forgotten my face mask, which is compulsory on public transport on the UK unless you cannot wear one for health reasons. So I had to go back home a second time to get a face mask!
After that fiasco, I took my coat off, to be on the safe side, and didn’t put it back on until I’d finished shopping - I thought “better to be a little cold than too hot and make a fool of myself again by doing something silly”.
My father-in-law joked that I seemed to be sleepy - but I replied (using the Google Translate app) entirely seriously “No, I don’t feel sleepy at all - I feel very wide awake!” So it didn’t seem like it was sleep deprivation - I’d had a good amount of sleep - but I did suspect that it was a consequence of overheating my brain.
In conclusion: great result for my mood - maybe there’s even a correlation between my body temperature and my mood - but terrible result for my cognitive abilities, it seems. Even though this was only N=1 attempts (and was completely unplanned), I am not planning to repeat this - at least, not to the extent of getting too overheated.
Instead, I think I need to find a more moderate approach. Perhaps increasing the heat on my electric heater, or putting on a second sweater.
After 6pm
Good mood
Discussion
It has been known for a long time that exercise can be good for improving a person’s mood. And science indicates that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) specifically, works really well for that. Likewise, so does dancing, as is well-known.
On the other hand, the evidence is mixed, and it seems the average long-term effect of exercise on major depressive disorder (a.k.a clinical depression or just depression) is very small. This wouldn’t necessarily mean that it would have a very small immediate effect on mood - only that it wouldn’t cure the depression in the long term.
But I wonder - has anyone tried to scientifically investigate to what extent these benefits might just be due to increased core body temperature? Plus, of course, if you are doing those activities with other people, then you might get increased mood from social contact with other people. Is there any residual effect after controlling for those two factors?
Don’t get me wrong. There are reasons to exercise which would be valid regardless of that (e.g. just from some quick Googling, here, here and here). Even if it had no intrinsic benefit for mood after adjusting for those two factors (which I intuitively doubt is the case), exercise would still be worth doing.
Postscript
Writing this edition definitely had a positive effect on my mood!