How to Become Smarter (20 page)

If you do not have a jacuzzi and your bathtub is small and shallow, try a moderately hot shower. Set the temperature of water as above and take a shower without wetting your head. Heating the head is not safe and is, in fact, unpleasant. The duration of the hot shower can be 5 to 20 minutes. Again, turn on the radio or put on music if you like. If water pressure in your plumbing varies (you can sense fluctuations in water temperature during the shower), then either avoid hot showers or exercise caution. If water temperature jumps, you can scald yourself.

Any one of the following signs can serve as a signal that the session of hot hydrotherapy has sedated you and you can stop it:

• yawning
  
• fatigue
  
• sleepiness
  
• feel relaxed
  

Your core body temperature should not increase by more than 0.5°C (1°F) as a result of the warming procedures described above. If you overheat yourself and your core body temperature rises above 38°C (100.4°F), this may disrupt sleep. The recommended time of day to start a hot hydrotherapy session is 30 to 60 minutes before going to bed. It is important that the air temperature in your home be comfortable or neutral because an uncomfortable hot environment will disrupt sleep. After a session of hot hydrotherapy you will need a comfortable, thermoneutral environment so your body can cool. Unlike the hot environment approach, which lowers mood, hot showers and hot baths tend to cause pleasant feelings or mild euphoria during the first few minutes of the procedure. After that, the mood gets back to normal and may decline further if core body temperature rises above 38°C (100.5°F). In addition, hot hydrotherapy can reduce physical pain [
412
], although cold hydrotherapy (described later in this chapter) is a more effective pain-reducing treatment. This is because heat tends to promote inflammation, which is a common underlying cause of pain. Both hot hydrotherapy and a hot environment reduce appetite. Another useful effect of body heating is normalization of blood pressure. Hot showers and sauna reduce blood pressure when it is elevated [
979
-
981
], but do not change normal blood pressure [
982
]. Even simple immersion in tepid water up to the neck reduces blood pressure [
730
] due to the so-called “diving reflex.”

Keep in mind that hot hydrotherapy can produce a
psychostimulant
effect 3 to 4 hours after the procedure. During the first one to two hours after the procedure, you will feel tired, relaxed, or sleepy. When these effects wear off, you may swing in the opposite direction: elevated mood, increased wakefulness, or increased activity. So it’s a good idea to use hot hydrotherapy before bed. The warm environment approach does not cause swings in activity level. If I take a hot bath and follow this by the hot environment approach, the rebound of the activity level does not occur either. This combined approach causes lethargy and works as a strong sedative [
820
]. Therefore, you should avoid this combination or use it as a treatment of last resort. You are not letting your body cool off after hot hydrotherapy and this increases the risk of heat-related illnesses [
654
,
655
]. In my experience, combination of a warming procedure at night with a sedative diet is more effective at normalizing sleep than either treatment alone. The next section introduces a sedative diet.

• A convenient way to slightly increase surface body temperature is a head-out hot shower at 38 to 39 degrees Celsius (100.5 to 102°F) for 5 to 20 minutes, before going to bed. You can also use a hot bath of similar temperature and duration.
  
• A moderately hot environment can help you fall asleep.
  
• Hot hydrotherapy reduces pain, and the hot environment approach has mood-lowering and possibly anti-manic properties.
  
• Hot hydrotherapy and sauna reduce blood pressure when it is elevated. Simple immersion in tepid or warm water up to the neck also reduces blood pressure.
  
• People who are taking medication or have chronic medical conditions should check with their doctor before using heat-based treatments.
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Increased consumption of cooked whole grains also can promote sleep. Some studies show that high-carbohydrate meals have sedative effects (reviewed in [
872
]). My self-experimentation suggests that a diet consisting only of boiled whole grains can cause a noticeable slowing of behavior and improve sleep. In other words, consumption of significant amounts of boiled grains can serve as a sleeping aid. Even a single large meal of boiled whole grains can help me fall asleep. At present, there is not a good explanation of the biological mechanism of this effect. I tested many different high-carbohydrate foods, and cooked grains are one of the few that work as an effective sedative. Fruits and boiled potatoes, for example, have no sedative properties. Boiled grains contain small amounts of Maillard reaction products [
212
-
214
], which are chemicals formed by a chemical reaction between proteins and carbohydrates at high temperatures. We talked about this stuff in detail in Chapter One. Some Maillard reaction products, such as acrylamide, share several biological effects with sedative drugs (e.g., benzodiazepines). Acrylamide can reduce activity levels and cause temporary impairment of learning and memory in experimental animals [
231
-
233
], effects that are characteristic of benzodiazepines, such as
Valium
® or
Xanax
®. These effects manifest themselves at high doses of acrylamide (more than 10 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day), whereas this chemical is undetectable in boiled grains [
215
,
225
]. Other Maillard reaction products may be present in boiled grains at detectable levels [
212
-
214
,
217
-
219
], but their effects on the central nervous system are unknown. Thus, there is not a good explanation of the observed sedative effect of boiled grains.

In my experience, raw grains, such as soaked oats or a raw water extract of wheat, do not have this sedative effect and may have the opposite, wakefulness-promoting effect. These observations suggest that cooking grains leads to the formation of certain chemicals with sedative-hypnotic effects. Acrylamide is one possible candidate, but there may be others (my best efforts at searching biomedical literature have yielded only acrylamide so far). But the amounts of acrylamide present in grains cooked at moderate temperatures (for example, by boiling) are undetectable and do not pose a risk to health. In contrast, bread, which bakeries make by baking dough at high temperatures, contains significant but safe amounts of acrylamide (Chapter One, Table 2). Just like boiled grains, bread improves sleep. But it also can cause a subtle impairment of mental abilities, such as increased clumsiness and an increased amount of errors at work (based on my personal experience). It may also have negative effects on physical health according to some experiments on laboratory animals. Adding bread crusts in amounts that make up 5 to 25% of the diet of laboratory rats can cause kidney damage and weight gain [
236
].

My longest experiment with a bread-and-water diet was seven days, as described in
Chapter One
. Compared to the diet of boiled grains, the bread-and-water diet causes heavier sedation and impairs some mental abilities, although this diet also improves sleep. If boiled grains can’t help you fall asleep, you can eat whole-grain bread, which is a stronger sedative. Eat bread alone, without water, milk, sandwich spread, mayo, and other stuff. It is easy to overeat bread if you consume it with liquids, thus you need to eat it alone and chew thoroughly. You can drink water or low-fat milk after you have swallowed bread.

In summary, if you have trouble falling asleep after disrupting your sleep pattern with work-related activities, you may consider switching to a diet consisting of boiled or steamed whole grains (for example, shredded wheat, brown rice, oats, buckwheat, and others). This diet should not contain any artificial ingredients (food additives, dietary supplements, and seasonings). If you are taking medication for any chronic medical condition, do not stop taking the medication. You can also try the depressant diet (Chapter Four), which can improve sleep as well. Use one of these diets for several days until sleep becomes normal. If you suspect that you have a sleep disorder that you cannot attribute to any identifiable cause, my advice is to seek professional psychiatric treatment.

I had sleep problems in the distant past, but at the time I was unaware of the approaches proposed in this chapter. Nowadays I sometimes have insomnia resulting from travel or daily cold showers. In these situations the proposed sleep-promoting treatments—a sedative diet and hot hydrotherapy—are effective. You do not need to use any of these treatments in the absence of sleep problems.

• Boiled grains contain small amounts of Maillard reaction products, which are chemicals formed by a chemical reaction between proteins and carbohydrates at high temperatures.
  
• Some Maillard reaction products, such as acrylamide, share several biological effects with sedative drugs (e.g., benzodiazepines): reduced level of activity and temporary impairment of learning and memory. Acrylamide is present in bread and French fries but undetectable in boiled grains.
  
• Bread promotes sleep, but I consider bread a “dumb food” because it seems to impair judgment and to increase the amount of errors (at work or at school).
  
• On the other hand, a diet consisting of boiled whole grains only is a good sleeping aid and does not impair judgment. If boiled grains cannot help you fall asleep, you can eat whole-grain bread, which is a stronger sedative.
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The two previous sections discussed treatments that can normalize a sleep pattern by inducing sleep when needed. A less obvious approach is to try to reduce sleepiness in the morning and afternoon. This can swing the pendulum of the sleep-wake cycle in the direction of alertness when the time is right. Consequently, the pendulum will move in the direction of sleep by itself at the appropriate time. Exercise and coffee in the morning may serve this function, but another treatment may be more effective and convenient: moderate cooling of the body. One of the first reports about the effects of cooling on the mental state belongs to Scottish physician James Currie, who two centuries ago used immersion in cold water to treat fever. He noticed that cooling of the body can act as a central nervous system stimulant [
357
]. Stimulants, or, to be precise, psychostimulant drugs, increase activity and alertness and disrupt sleep. Psychostimulants have the effects that are opposite to those of sedative drugs, which reduce activity and promote sleep. Some psychostimulants, such as caffeine and modafinil, have little or no effect on mood, while others can cause euphoria. Most psychostimulant drugs are controlled substances and their use without prescription is illegal in most countries. Coffee, which contains caffeine, is a mild and legal stimulant that you can use to improve your mental abilities. For example, some studies show that caffeine can improve sustained attention in healthy people [
358
], and readers know that caffeine increases alertness, or reduces drowsiness. In contrast to amphetamine-like stimulants, caffeine is not effective as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [
359
]. Coffee carries a low but real risk of addiction. Large doses, when taken daily, can cause symptoms of anxiety, sleep disturbances and, in rare cases, psychotic symptoms [
360
]. Therefore, you need to exercise caution and moderation with this popular drink. Another “legal stimulant” is not a drug but a procedure that involves brief and moderate cooling of the body.

Cooling shares many physiological effects with psychostimulant drugs:

• it increases alertness and disrupts sleep [
  332
  ,
  343
  ,
  361
  ,
  362
  ],
  
• reduces fatigue [
  361
  ,
  363
  -
  367
  ],
  
• increases activity level [
  368
  -
  370
  ] and information processing speed [
  924
  ],
  
• elevates normal mood [
  365
  ,
  371
  -
  376
  ],
  
• causes constriction of blood vessels throughout the body,
  
• slightly increases blood pressure [
  377
  ] and core body temperature (increases production of heat) [
  343
  ,
  378
  ].