Edmond Chan

In pursuit of better sleep

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I’ve been an insomniac for most of my life. The first memory I have of it being a thing for me was in my first or second year at boarding school when my housemaster remarked on it. He said it was a condition that affected bright people. Of course, I took that. 🙂

Left to my own devices on school holidays, I would stay awake long past midnight. I would read the latest Harry Potter until I finished it, say at 6am in the morning. I would then wake at 11am or 12 noon and not be tired until the early hours again. Over and over. This is fine when you’re on holiday but less so when you have stuff to do the next morning.

I remember at university, I had a 9am exam on Personal Identity. I went to bed at 11pm and watched the hours tick by. By 4am, I was literally punching the walls in frustration. I knew that I had to sleep in order to be at my best in the exam but as 7am rolled around, I knew that ship had sailed. I still did okay in that exam but it was a classic example of insomnia getting the better of me.

The same happened on my attempt to get into the Army. I stayed over at Westbury and that night went to bed at 12am and couldn’t get to sleep for ages. The 5.30am wakeup call and early tests should have screamed at me that this probably wasn’t the best-suited career for me.

Later, I had a second round interview for a pupillage at a criminal law chambers at 12pm on a Saturday. I had done well at the first interview and now was the big one. I lay in bed all night knowing that I needed to sleep to do well in the debates that I knew were coming. I didn’t sleep a wink and all the coffee in the world couldn’t help me. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.

Insomnia hits every now and again in bursts. I can’t predict when it happens. But when it does, it hits for a few days at a time. I’ve gone through periods where before work the next day, I’ve had to get out of bed at 2.30am/3am and go and drink a few shots of port just to calm my mind down and almost numb my mind so that I can get just a few hours before waking at 7.45am. I’m not at my best at work by any stretch.

The results of insomnia aren’t good. On zero sleep, you feel sweaty as your body is unable to regulate its temperature properly. You feel hazy and almost drunk. You start praying for bedtime although you know that’s miles away. You crave sugar hits and empty carbs. You pray that you don’t have any difficult tasks that require mental sharpness. Did I say that you start praying for bedtime?

What would be the dream? I would love to be able to sleep whenever I wanted. To put my head down at 10pm and be asleep within 10 minutes would be amazing. Angelique is exactly like this. She can close her eyes and be asleep in 2 minutes. To be a morning person like you read in the press, where CEOs like Tim Cook get up at 4am to work out would be the dream. I come closest to being a morning person when I’m back from a visit to Australia, when the jet lag means I’m tired at 8.30pm and wide awake and bouncing out of bed at 5.30am.

What’s working for me at the moment….

Touch wood, I’m almost there. Without jinxing it, my sleep has been okay for a couple of months now. Here’s my routine:

I try to get up around 6.30am so that I’m tired around bedtime. I have a coffee to loosen the bowels and after that, I shower and go to the gym to lift some compound movements to stress the central nervous system. I do bench press, pull ups, seated rows, overhead press in 2o minutes, then up for another shower, then work.

I try not to eat supper too late in the evenings, ideally around 8pm, then the sleep hygiene wind down routine kicks in. I try to avoid too much blue light from screens. I have my laptop screen set to dim after sundown (try installing f.lux). I also set my mobile to dim as well. I try to have just low lighting in my flat after dark and try to be in bed by 12am at the latest.

I write down on post-it notes any thoughts I have for the next day and I try not to have any meetings booked in for the morning, so that I don’t have that anxiety of trying to get a good night’s rest beforehand.

To help calm my mind down at bedtime, I take two capsules of Kalms and then two tablets of melatonin. Melatonin is the hormone that tells your brain to sleep. This might seem like a bit of a cocktail, and it might also be a bit of placebo, buts it’s working for me. Also, I need Angelique to be in bed as well. I like to feel safe as well so I check the doors a couple of times (might well be my OCD as well).

For now, it’s working. I feel great. Rested and energetic. Let me know if any of this has helped you in the comments below.

To paraphrase Jocko Willink, Decisiveness Equals Freedom

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The legendary Jocko Willink says that Discipline Equals Freedom. I take this to mean that accepting and embracing discipline and structure in your life will take away the need for willpower as well as paralysis by analysis and procrastination.

In recent days, I’ve been feeling good and I think it’s down to making decisions, quick decisions and good decisions about things big and small.

Deciding yesterday in a Waterloo pub that I’d book us in for lunch in 25 minutes in St. John and Uber it there was pretty good. (Angelique seemed to like the decisiveness)

And today, we took inspiration from my sister and decided to sell our flat and buy a bigger one. It’s a decision we’ve put off and off, but having made it in 5 minutes of discussion in the car on the way to dim sum with my Dad, was decisive for sure.

Of course, it’s nothing like an Obama-sized decision but for me, someone is probably quite indecisive (although I wouldn’t like to call myself that, who would?!), making decisions quickly has been liberating.

If you’re not decisive, you’re probably weighing up all your options before making a decision.

But, paradoxically and counter-intuitively, umming and ahhing is the wrong thing to do.

Think about an easy decision, one where the options are just so obviously imbalanced, where one is great and the other is bad. In that case, you just pick the great one in no time at all.

But where the options are more balanced like on a wine list or menu, then you might um and ah, taking your time over the decision and weighing up the lost pleasures of the option you pass over. In cases where the options are finely balanced, then there’s not much to choose between the options and you should just plump for one. Don’t waste time and mental energy faffing over the decision.

Where the decisions are much bigger like should you move house, change careers, end a relationship, move countries, the pros and cons feel so complex that you don’t make any decision at all. Hopefully, the decision gets made for you or you happen to end up with the right outcome just by having not made any decision at all.

That’s pretty shit though isn’t it? Passively bumbling through, feeling paralysed by the options. No wonder you don’t feel liberated most of the time. Like me, you’re not captaining the ship. That ship is the most important ship of all: you.

What’s exhilarating about making a decision is that you are saying to yourself that YOU are in control. YOU are committing to this course of action. That there’s nothing more to be said.

Decisiveness equals freedom.

Should we self-censor what we consume?

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When I was at uni, I took an Aesthetics class. The Philosophy of Art. I don’t remember much from that course except for a couple of essays on Plato and Tolstoy.

Plato was keen that when educating the young men of his Republic that their art be censored and that the youth should only consume art that promoted nobility. So poetry shouldn’t be about loucheness and hedonism, rather they should be about promoting bravery in battle and moral uprightness.

I was reminded of this recently after binge watching a series of Mindhunter on Netflix, a show about the FBI’s profiling of serial killers in the 1970s. This is show that goes deep into the minds and motivations of deeply disturbed people, and it’s very entertaining and very compelling. We watched this off the back of Unabomber, another Netflix show, this time about the hunt for another serial killer, Ted Kaczynski. Again very entertaining and compelling.

The question I had was: “is this type of show good for me? Is it making me a better human?”

You might say “lighten up mate, it’s just a show”.

But is it just a show? Say that you watch 2 of these series. That’s nearly 20 hours of dark subject matter. Are we really saying that this has no effect on your brain, on your neural pathways? By exposing yourself to the fetishes of psychopaths, is your own mind becoming corrupted or infected? What are you consuming to offset this? What positive, elevating content are you consuming to counteract this negativity?

Let’s look at what Plato might recommend for our viewing consumption.

Say you watch one hour of TV a day after work. Instead of Netflix, imagine that for one month you watched TED Talks. A TED Talk is around 15 mins, so that’s 4 TED Talks a day. That’s 120 TED Talks a month. How much more elevated do you think you’d be on this diet as opposed to on just consuming Netflix?

We can do the same with our other channels of consumption. Take Instagram. If you wanted to lose weight, replace the photos of burgers and huge pizzas with buddha bowls and salads. Make your feed one that is congruent with your overall goals.

Maybe Plato was right. Censor what you consume for the better.

What is the future of mobile phones?

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I saw this question and I thought I’d try to answer it:

  • First off, I don’t think that mobile phones will become obsolete, even in 50 years. Whilst many functions of a smartphone might one day be available through a chip in your brain, I think that it would be difficult to replace the convenience of a screen when interacting with your smartphone.
  • Phone size will remain handheld as that’s the most convenient size for portability and for interacting with it.
    The materials of the phone might be able to deliver things directly into your skin such as hormones or nutrients that you’re deficient in.
  • Processing power will continue to develop according to Moore’s Law and eventually will utilise quantum computing for even faster computing power.
  • In the near-future, I think all the niggles with smartphones today will be solved i.e. much longer battery life, unshatterable glass, much better sound delivery, lightning quick recharging, 100% waterproof to 50m, and incredible lifelike graphics as standard.
  • Smartphones will replace Google Home and Amazon Alexa, because why have two devices when one can do the same job? Voice recognition will be far in excess of what we’re currently seeing with Siri, Cortana and Google Now.
  • Costs: I think that they will become cheaper and cheaper, as the marginal utility of newer smartphones becomes smaller and smaller, and whilst the iPhone X has broken the ÂŁ1,000 mark, the fact that S9 has just come out at ÂŁ799, shows that there is a point that people will stop paying for the latest phone.
  • Smartphones are another form of computers and when computers become more interactive, to the point of sentience and beyond, then our smartphones will become ever more interactive and sentient. They will become our assistants, booking meetings and socials, booking flights and scheduling dentist appointments, alerting us when we go overdrawn.
  • I think we’ll see holographic calls, so that we’re having almost true face-to-face calls.
  • Lastly, what are the opportunities for the time when everyone in the world has a smartphone in their pocket? We’ll see an tremendous leap forward in human potential, with EdTech being able to reach billions, access to basic banking and lending, and peer-to-peer micropayments.

Why I’m learning Python and CS at the age of 38

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I’m 38 years old which means that I have probably about 30 years of working life left. That’s AGES. Think about what working life was like 30 years ago. That was 1988. I think my computer at home was an Amstrad CPC464. It ran a tape deck and took 20 mins to load Double Dragon. That’s if it successfully ran and you didn’t need to restart the whole process. Now, we have smartphone computers in our pockets that are thousands of times more powerful. Think about how much more powerful computers and technology in general will be in 10 years, 20 years or 30 years. Moore’s Law dictates that processing power doubles every single year. That’s literally exponential. Quantum computers already exist. People are talking about huge chunks of the workforce being automated. How do you not become obsolete? For me, as someone who has never programmed, it’s not about becoming a super developer. It’s about becoming conversant in programming as that’s going to underpin much of the future. If we’re going to be replaced by algorithms, it’s better to be the person who writes them.

So that’s the practical answer. The second reason is much more interesting and that’s because coding and CS is FUN. Honestly, it really is. I don’t know whether it’s my mindset but I love learning more and understanding more about how the world works. I read an interview with Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson in Smith Journal where he talks about understanding the world as deeply as he can as being his life goal. I don’t know about you but that resonates hard with me. Also check out the free Harvard course on Computer Science by David Malans (an absolute rock star lecturer) and tell me that it wasn’t fun learning how bits worked and how binary worked. Ones and zeros. Ones and zeros.

So why Python? I’d read that when you start to code, you should pick one language and stick to it until you’ve learned it. This makes picking the right choice important. So I just googled which one to pick. And Python was pretty popular. I checked with a friend of mine too as to whether it was a good choice and he seemed to respect Python, which sealed it for me.

More on this in upcoming posts.