Game, Set(point), Match

I’ve long been fascinated by the set-point theory of happiness, which suggests that our level of emotional well-being is mostly determined by heredity and early-life-ingrained personality traits. As a result, our level of happiness remains mostly constant throughout our life, transiently changing due to events before returning again to a baseline over time.

Fortunately for me, my own set-point seems to be quite high. As Scott Adams put it, “my optimism is like an old cat that likes to disappear for days, but I always expect it to return.”

Earlier today, I had to deal with the tail end of a long-looming disaster, and two former colleagues were there, too. They seem to be wired precisely the opposite in terms of set point, as, though they came out standing objectively better than me, I watched them mope out the door, angry and miserable nonetheless.

Which made me realize: being happy by default is an enormous blessing, and one I shouldn’t overlook.

Penance

“And the only thing to do with a sin is to confess, do penance and then, after some kind of decent interval, ask for forgiveness.”
– Joseph J. Ellis

Reboot

“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”
– George Elliot

June 23, 2017

Contacted

Though both of my parents wear glasses, I didn’t myself, at least until eleventh grade. At that point, from my customary seat in the back row, I started having trouble reading what teachers wrote on the board. Rather than force a move to the front of the class, I got glasses. And though my prescription is totally pansy, enough so that my driver’s license doesn’t even stipulate a ‘corrective lenses’ restriction, I was thrilled enough by the razor-sharp clarity the glasses provided that I took to wearing them all the time.

A few months later, I got disposable contacts, too. And for my last two years in California, and my four years at Yale, I wore contacts more than half of the time. But when I moved to NYC, I found the gritty city air made contacts wildly uncomfortable for me after just a few hours. So, for the most part, I switched to wearing glasses full-time, defaulting to contacts only when glasses were particularly inconvenient, like when I was working out, or headed to the beach. Eventually, given the expense of disposables, I started phasing them out for workouts, too, defaulting instead to wandering the gym slightly blind.

So I was excited a few months back to discover Hubble Contacts, a subscription web service that delivers daily disposable contacts to your door for less than half the price of other providers.

I’ve been a loyal Warby Parker customer for the past six or seven years; their glasses are stylish, well constructed, and perfectly priced. And though the quality isn’t quite as good, and they don’t offer a home try-on option, I’ve also purchased a number of sunglasses from Zenni Optical. I have a terrible history of losing sunglasses in ocean waves, smashing them in bike crashes, etc. And as the Zenni’s run about $25 a pop (including the prescription lenses!), they’ve been perfect for me. (Jess, who’s also a Warby fan, has similarly used Zenni to stock up on a handful of ‘fun’ frames from Zenni; while you might not want bright red glasses as your only daily wear, at $25-30, the Zennis are cheap enough to be an occasional accessory).

Hubble offers a first set of 15 pairs of disposable contacts for just $3 in shipping cost. With next to nothing to lose, I decided they were worth testing out.

Based on some Googling, I determined that Hubble’s lenses are made from methafilcon A, with 55% water content, and a Dk score (a measure of oxygen permeability; higher is better) of 18. By way of comparison, Acuvue 1-Day Moist (what I’d worn before) have a Dk of 28, Acuvue1-Day TruEye a Dk of 55, and Dailies Total 1 a whopping Dk of 156.

And, indeed, for extended wear, I found the Hubbles just slightly less comfortable than than my prior Acuvues. But, frankly, neither are particularly comfortable for me for more than four or five hours. And within the hour or three window of a trek to the gym, I couldn’t differentiate them all, even when wearing a different brand in each eye.

So, for me, Hubble is a big win. They’re cheap enough that I’ve again returned to wearing contacts while working out. Though, if you’re an all-day contacts wearer, they may be less ideal. Nonetheless, for $3 in shipping, and the prospect of a 50% savings going forward if you decide you love them, it’s probably worth the experiment. Try Hubble out.

(Physical) Therapist’s Couch

The human body is pretty miraculous. It evolved to allow a nearly infinite number of movements: running, climbing, jumping, swinging, and more.

But you mostly use it for one thing: sitting down. You sit in your car or on the subway, you sit all day at your desk, you sit to eat lunch and dinner, and you sit on your couch to binge-watch Netflix at night.

That disjoint – between how your body was evolved to be used, and how you’re actually using it – causes all kinds of problems.

Here’s just one: when you sit, your hip flexors are in a shortened position. And after enough sitting, your body starts to treat that shortened position as the new normal. So when you stand back up, there’s not enough slack in the system. Your hip flexors are permanently tight.

That’s a problem by itself, since so many athletic movements – from running and jumping, to throwing a ball or throwing a punch – depend on generating powerful hip extension. Tight hip flexors oppose that extension, reducing the power you can create. It’s like driving with the parking brake on.

But the secondary effects are even worse. Let me explain:

Perhaps, in the past, you’ve bought beef to cook for dinner, and had to cut off the silver-skin.

Your muscles have silver-skin, too. It’s called fascia. In your body, your muscles cells are held together in bundles, and the fascia is what does the holding together.

In recent years, however, we’ve begun to realize that fascia also connects one bundle to the next, in running lines of tension. As the song says, your hip bone’s connected to your thigh bone. And, similarly, your hip muscle’s connected to your thigh muscle. Which, in turn, is connected to your calves, ankles and feet in one direction, and to your lower back, thoracic spine, shoulders and arms in the other.

In fact, there’s a single run of fascia that extends from your toes, up through your entire body, to your elbows. And your tight hip flexors are right in the middle of that fascia run.

When hip flexors get tight, they take slack out of the middle of the system, creating a game of ‘crack the whip’ that causes problems all the way up and down that chain. Now, your tight hip flexors start causing foot pain, or knee pain, or a bad back, or a tweaky shoulder.

Normalizing the length of your hip flexors, getting slack back in the system, has huge and far-reaching impacts.  It will make you a better athlete, prevent future injuries, and knock out a slew of nagging pains you’ve been living with too long.

Fortunately, you can make big inroads on fixing your hip flexors with just one simple stretch, popularized by Dr. Kelly Starrett. He calls it the ‘couch stretch’, because he and his family do it at night, on the front of their couch while they watch TV.

Here’s a demo, pulled from Composite’s 14-day Jump Start for new clients. (I cover similar topics as in this post for the first half of the video; if you just want to see the stretch, hop to about the six-minute mark.)

To recap:

  1. Get on your hands and knees in front of a wall (or, if you can’t peel yourself away from the tube, the arm of a couch).
  2. Put your right shin flat vertically against the wall; your knee should be wedged into the corner where the wall and floor meet, and your foot should be pointed so that your instep is against the wall.
  3. If you’re not bendy, this may be a stretch already. If you’re more flexible, you can put your left foot flat on the ground.
  4. Squeeze your butt. In particular, squeeze your right glute, the side with the foot that’s against the wall. This will help stabilize your low back, and correctly position your hips.
  5. While still squeezing your butt, try to lift your upper body upright. Think about making your spine long, extending the straight line between the top of your head and your tailbone. You want to get upright by opening at the hip, and not just by arching your low back.
  6. For bonus points, you can eventually work towards reaching both hands overhead, so long as you can do so with tight abs and glutes and with your back long and straight. In the beginning, however, you’ll probably want to use your hands on the floor or on your forward knee, to help push yourself upright. You can also put a box in front of your body, and push up on that.

Now hold that stretch for two minutes. (That’s how long it takes for the Golgi tendon organ receptors to give up, allowing you to reach your full stretch and make lasting change.) Then switch to the other side, and do two minutes on the other leg.

I strongly, strongly suggest timing yourself, as two minutes is waaaaaay longer than most people tend to hold a stretch by default otherwise. (Side note: interestingly, dentists similarly recommend toothbrushing for two minutes. There, too, without using a timer, most people average brushing for only a third of the recommended time. If you like having teeth, consider deploying your two-minute timer next to the sink while brushing, much as you do while Couch Stretching.)

The most common problems to guard against while doing the Couch Stretch:

  1. Your rear knee isn’t against the wall. Even if it means you can’t get your opposite foot up on the ground, keep your rear knee / shin / foot all the way up against the wall. That takes all the slack out of the system, making the stretch much more effective.
  2. Your forward foot is too close in. Take a big step forward with that foot, so that your forward shin is vertical, too.
  3. You’re over-arching your lower back. Hyper-extending your lumbar spine is a very common (and not very good for you) habit in general; it’s even more common in something like the couch stretch, where it’s easier to bend at your low back than to actually stretch the hip flexors you’re gunning for. Think about making your spine tall, and about keeping your low back flat, even if that means you can’t get as far towards upright.
  4. You’re making a ‘pain face’. Effective stretching isn’t a relaxing experience. Done right, the couch stretch is hard work! At the same time, it’s important not to grimace while doing it (more technically called ‘facial fixing’), which actually undercuts the neurological effectiveness of the stretch. Breathe, go to your happy place, and try to keep your face serene. It’s zen and the art of stretching!

That’s it.

Try it daily for the next two weeks; I suspect you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the huge positive impact.

June 19, 2017