Too tired for your mental health

Like muscles that are overtired and can't work properly any more, good mental habits can be undone by mental stress or overwork. Those "good mental habits" might be anything you've learned in your lifetime, such as "not having panic dreams about being naked in school just before a test you haven't studied for" or "not slipping into bottomless depression for no reason".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The funny thing is, sometimes you don't know you have these good mental habits until they disappear.
PPS - And then you don't know how to get them back.

No, I did not have "man flu"

I've been sick for several days and counting now, but I'm back at work, coughing, sneezing and snotting my way through the day, trying not to infect every surface I encounter. I've been asked by some coworkers if I had "the dreaded man flu". Now, because I am a man and had flu-like symptoms, some people will not believe me regardless of the evidence I present. As a man with flu-like symptoms, of course, my judgement cannot be trusted on this issue. However, I would like to present Exhibit A: fevers, experienced over the first two days, Exhibit B: constant nasal and sinus congestion and Exhibit C: a cough producing yellow-green phlegm from my lungs. I'm sick. No question about that in my mind, and I wouldn't call it "man flu".

To me, "man flu" means exaggerating your symptoms, demanding to be waited on while lying comfortably in bed. Picture Homer Simpson, lying on the couch, ringing a little service bell and yelling for Marge to come and serve him some specific food or drink. He's clearly not as sick as that, and neither am I. I'm still running the domestic micro-errands requested by the lady of the house ("Can you get me some water, please?"). If I were to accept the diagnosis of "man flu", that would have to be the first thing to go.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I could possibly have gone back to work one day earlier.
PPS - Since I wasn't getting paid time off, however, that's my call to make.

Calorie counting made easier

Counting calories is a massive pain, especially when cooking for yourself or eating out. Who knows exactly how much of each ingredient has gone into a meal? All the charts and tables are really, really precise - often listing individual meals from popular fast food chains down to single-digit accuracy. This means you need to find the exact thing you're eating, not a reasonable facsimile, and if you can't find that, then you're kind of screwed. Calculating calories for your own home-cooked meals means measuring each ingredient, finding that on the chart and adding it all up. If you're eating out at a unique restaurant or little cafe, you'll be guessing more than anything.
My idea of the day is to draw up a rough-idea grid of calorie counts in different classifications of food - not "chicken", "pizza" and "beer" but "bad", "so-so" and "good", with a breakdown of portion sizes, "small", "medium" and "large". From this, you should be able to get a good enough idea of your calorie intake without needing to look up the difference between white rice and brown rice. We're sacrificing some precision for better usability. You do need to know enough to say whether a meal is good or bad, and that might get subjective, but how much difference does it make to your system if you think you've eaten 50 calories instead of 60?
So here's my chart. Consider it a work in progress, able to be tweaked if you want, but remember the goal: simplicity over precision, but maintaining accuracy. By all means, adjust the values, but if you start trying to add in the difference between chicken and beef, stop.

	Healthy	So-so	Unhealthy	Sweets/Desserts
Large	300	600	1200	1600
Medium	150	300	600	800
Small	80	150	300	400
Bite	0	50	100	200

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's weird, but I put off writing up this table for weeks.
PPS - I guess I thought it would be hard.

Preventing HIV infection with drugs

Apparently there was a study recently on a potential HIV-preventative drug that found it could be up to 90% effective for preventing new infections if taken daily. However, a very large number of the participants who were given the drug to take daily during the study failed to do so, and some contracted HIV as a result. Despite this, the scientists were able to create a statistical model based on the amount of the drug present in blood samples in the trial group.

So here's my question. You (hypothetically) have been identified as an individual at risk of HIV infection due to your lifestyle, and you agree to participate in a drug trial for the prevention of that fatal infection. You are provided with the drug for free, plus education on how to reduce your risk of infection via other means, then you go home, go out, neglect to take the potentially life-saving drug, engage in exactly the same risky behaviours as before and get HIV. You will now die.

I'm stunned by this. Really. If I were the scientist administering the study, the first person in the trial group who showed no detectable levels of the drug in their system plus an HIV infection would have gotten a sharp dope-slap to the head. The second person maybe a disapproving glare. From the third onwards, a resigned sigh.

The only thing I can think is that these people are so hopelessly lost to themselves that they didn't see the point in trying to prevent infection and prolonging their lives anyway. And now that I've come to that realisation, it makes me sad. To think that there are people so lost and hopeless in the world that they don't really care if they live or die. It's heartbreaking.

Please, if you're prescribed life-saving medication because your doctor thinks it's a good idea, even if you're too depressed to care if it works, please take it. Please. It would be a tragedy to the world if you were to die, as much as it is a tragedy for anyone else to die.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, it's either depression or the "it's treatable" mindset.
PPS - Treatment should be a last resort. An ounce of prevention, etc.

Sweat

2 January
Weight: 78.8
Distance run: 5.86km
Time: 36m:43s
Average speed: 9.57kph

I should mention at this point that I don't think our bathroom scale is that accurate. It seems to change readings in part, I believe, due to atmospheric pressure changes. Anyway, today I don't want to talk about sweat, but I feel I have to. Even if I run early in the morning and, as happened today, I get rained on, come home and take a cool shower and even try to air-dry to shed even more excess heat, no matter what I do, I'll step out of the shower and immediately begin sweating bullets. It's a thing my body does. My body temperature is always a little above normal, so running doesn't help that. The only cure I know is sitting in front of a fan for half an hour or more, sweating away the heat, trying not to touch anything. This is the price I'll pay to go running every day.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm trying not to rest my arms on my desk as I type this.
PPS - It's disgusting, I know.

It's not about weight loss

1 January
Weight: 79.5kg
Distance run: 5.66km
Time: 37m:39s
Average speed: 9.01kph

I'm measuring my weight during January, as I run every day because I expect it to have an effect, but the goal is overall cardio fitness. Today I had to wait until the afternoon to run because I slept in after some New Year's Eve revelry and today, like most days, was around 31C in Brisbane. Plus some stuff came up.

I'm not really sure what the cause and effect relationship is, but when I run lots, I feel like eating better, and both of those things together contribute to loss of weight and girth. I might not consider it to be about weight loss, but I'm hardly going to turn it away at the door. So these measurements will continue. Posts may be morning or night, depending on when I run and whether I have anything to say about it that day.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I consider my ideal weight to be about 70kg.
PPS - During 2014, I was steadily putting on weight just about all year.

Data is just the first step to control

Step one in any diet or budget plan is "pay attention". Write down everything you eat or everything you spend. Whatever you're trying to control, you need to track it. But tracking is not enough. You can't just track what you're eating and hope for the best. That collected data is just a step. To make progress, you need a plan. You need to set limits on what you spend, and bring the pain of spending off your budget closer to the enjoyment of the moment. When you spend from a credit card, the pain comes at the end of the month, and until then, you have the pleasure of the purchase. To change your habits, it helps to make that pain immediate at the point of purchase. You need to see your balance whenever you contemplate a purchase.

This is where mobile apps can help. Imagine that all of your purchases went through an app that also monitors your budget. You have $100 you are allowed to spend on groceries this week, and when you get to the checkout, that number comes up and your purchases are deducted from it. You see imediately the bite you have taken from your budget. EFTPOS doesn't show your balance on the machine, for good reason, so this would be a step up.

But maybe that's not immediate enough. You might fill your trolley and only realise you've made a mistake at the checkout. What you need, then, is a budget app that helps you track a trolley of shopping as you stack it up. Then every time you pick something off the shelf, it comes off the budget. You'll see the damage you're doing that very second. That's real immediate pain at the point of the decision.

For dieting, this is not so easy. A daily weigh-in isn't enough. You need to see your projected weight gain with every bite you put in your mouth. Perhaps something like Google Glass connected to pressure sensors in your shoes. Every time you stand still you'd see your current weight. If you eat standing up, you'd see the number going up the whole time. That's bound to make you think.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Though, as demonstrated by the faults with BMI, weight is not quite the right thing to measure.
PPS - I'm sure we could arrange a belt to measure your waist at all times.

Food standards and junk food

I think any food standards watchdog organisation has a problem, because the food industry will naturally tend towards addictive junk. Some of that might be acceptable for sale on its own, but when it makes up the majority of food for sale nation-wide, that's not going to work. Say, for instance, that a certain amount of sugar is acceptable in foods for sale. It's kind of okay if it's high in one or two things, but when the high level is the new "normal", you're going to start messing up the insulin sensitivity of your entire population.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It will always, to some degree, be an individual's responsibility to eat healthy.
PPS - A food standards organisation can only really ban foods that will kill you immediately.

Options for sanitary public toilet design

Up to half of men using a public toilet do not wash their hands. Some of them fake it, because they feel enough social pressure to appear like they're not filthy, but not enough pressure to actually use soap. For this reason, I recommend the following options for public toilet designs that do not depend on changing the human nature of people who just do not care.

Option 1, noting that door handles will pick up germs, is to move the wash basin outside the toilet doors completely. This has two huge advantages. One, as implied above, it means handwashing occurs after using the door handle, which is obviously the preferred order of events (assuming there is a door handle at all, see below). Two, because handwashing is now occurring in public, non-hand-washers are forced to parade their behaviour under the withering scorn of everyone around.

Option 2 is to arrange the doors so that "Push" is an option to get out, allowing a clean human to use shoulders, feet, back, hip or elbow to push through the door, preserving the cleanliness of his hands until the next handshake or nose blow or computer keyboard use. The doors don't have to push only one way, either, and they don't have to be ordinary doors. Automatic sliding doors, two-way swinging doors, automatic revolving doors or even S-bend hallways with no doors would be acceptable. I have seen many of those options work.

A side-option, for the truly germophobic is automatic taps. Using a dirty hand to turn on the water, washing, then touching the dirty tap to stop the water is also considered futile by true germophobes, so automatic taps are a nice touch to consider, but not essential.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You can turn off the tap with your paper towel as an option when the taps are manual.
PPS - The easiest changes to an existing arrangement are probably to have the doors swing outwards.

Modern medicine and ageing

How many generations have grown up believing that modern medicine would save them from ageing? They've all been wrong so far, to some extent. There will probably never be a "eureka" moment where lifespans multiply tenfold and the effects of old age never kick in. All of us will have to deal with either getting old or dying young.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Though, actually, nobody has to deal with dying young themselves.
PPS - As long as it's sudden.

Therapy and enabling

Is there a difference in therapy between enabling someone in their illness and changing their circumstances so they can cope? For an agoraphobe, it can hardly be said to be therapeutic to allow them to remain at home all the time, but to force them outside into their panic state as much as everyone else goes outside would be a wrong extreme too. You don't want to allow someone like that to fully withdraw from reality, but at the same time, you don't expect the same level of interaction from them that you would from others.

At some point you have to be able to say "That's enough for today", but how much is enough? I imagine it's hard for therapists to push their patients into uncomfortable situations and leave them there long enough to do some good, but not long enough to do permanent harm. But if you go too far in the "do no harm" direction, you're helping them stay sick.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not speaking from any personal experience.
PPS - On either side of the issue.