Oblique Strategy #24 — The young podcaster said, “Your brain dries up like a sponge while you sleep, so as soon as you get out of bed you should drink water to rehydrate your brain so it can work well,” and I believed him.
The guy doing the podcast said that to become a fully effective and realized person you should, along with many other things, “Mix in the juice of a lemon and drink a large glass of water as soon as you get out of bed.”
These “Oblique Divorce Strategies” are not intended as empirically supported statements of truth. The notion of Oblique Strategies came from composers Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, who learned they each kept and referred to a notebook of pithy, provocative statements when they got stuck writing a song.
Then they discovered the contents of the notebooks were remarkably similar. The notebooks were combined, culled for the best entries and reproduced in the form of a deck of cards.
Just as composers will invariably get stuck writing songs, people going through divorce are also bound to get stuck.
They get stuck because their beliefs and values preclude them from seeing the situation in a way that allows for a solution or from acting in a way that will result in a solution.
One’s existing beliefs about facts and values are never fully identified and evaluated. Examination of deep beliefs and values is a difficult and destabilizing experience that most avoid for as long as possible.
The impetus is usually the pain of having a set of beliefs and values that aren’t up to the task of coping well with a problem of vital importance.
A sufficient modification of old beliefs and values dissolves the impasse and causes personal change. The characterization of the change is subjective and only the person experiencing it knows whether it is positive or negative.
A set of Oblique Strategies is like a collection of physical agents known to work as catalysts for change, but it is unknown in advance which, if any, will function in a specific circumstance until it is tried.
Before writing this column, I made a list of sixty Oblique Strategies I’d seen employed over a period of more than thirty years.
Because this column only appears once a fortnight, it will take about two years to describe them all. With the passage of time some of the Strategies on the original list seem to hold up well while others don’t.
Further, the original expression of some requires improvement; sometimes that’s been possible and sometimes it hasn’t. I put together the original collection of Strategies in early January 2015 and did a total revision in December.
Today’s topic was not on either the January or the December list. It’s included because I woke up to a podcast on “self-realization.”
From the sound of his voice, the source of the wisdom was a man under the age of thirty. I made a deliberate decision to listen to what he had to say.
Before he got to the part about drinking water and lemon juice first thing in the morning, he explained that to live fully one must get up early.
I grew up in a family of sack rats; no one got up before it was absolutely necessary. This may be genetic or it may be environmental.
I’ve long suspected that early birds have an advantage over the rest of us. For the last fifteen years I’ve been able to rise by or before seven to exercise. In December, January and early February this means getting up at dawn!
This practice has probably prevented that which I’d like to avoid — death, for example — but I haven’t found any early bird worms and it is not getting easier with practice.
I’m rarely thirsty in the morning, but I’ve been repeatedly encouraged to “hydrate” before leaving the house to jog. I complain that, for me, water is so insubstantial in the morning that forcing myself to drink it feels like I’m trying to drown myself.
I’ve been encouraged to add lemon juice, which helps. So this young podcasting guru comes along and advocates early morning lemon water as something on the path to a full life. It went something like this:
“Why drink water as soon as you get out of bed? Because your brain is like a sponge and it dries out when you sleep. It actually shrinks. When you hydrate, the brain soaks up the water and returns to its full size, which is what you need for full functioning,” said the guru. “And the lemon juice counteracts the alkalinity that increases during sleep, thereby restoring your blood to the correct pH.”
For me, the image of my brain as a dry sponge that springs back to life when hydrated is rather compelling and a damn good reason to drink water upon rising, even if it does simulate the experience of drowning.
I will have to forever withhold judgment on the lemon juice. I understand that solutions, including blood, have an acid-base balance that can be measured as pH.
An imbalance in either direction can kill you. I know how to measure pH in water, but I didn’t really understand how it worked when I “studied” chemistry in high school (I didn’t really understand it when I “studied” it in college either).
More recent and more sincere attempts to understand the principle involved in the proper and efficient titration of hot tub water have been no more successful.
The same day I heard about shrunken-morning-brains, I encountered our next door neighbor, Becky Gazzaniga, who is the perfect person to engage on this subject.
Becky is a physician, and she’s also Michael Gazzaniga’s sister, with whom she has worked on publications.
Michael Gazzaniga is the head of the UCSB SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind and is by all accounts both a pioneer and a leading researcher in cognitive neuroscience.
Becky would know about shrunken-morning-brains and where I could look for the original research papers.
I asked, “Does the brain really shrink at night and respond like a dried up sponge when you drink water in the morning.”
She replied, “I haven’t heard of anything like that.”
I had listened to and believed the podcaster, who had no academic credentials, and I believed him for no other reason than that his words catalyzed an image in my mind that overrode my resistance to the daily advice, “Drink some water before you exercise.”
I DELETED the podcast, and I can’t even remember the guy’s name. Note that Becky didn’t say he was wrong — it was just something she hadn’t heard about. Yet, if it’s been demonstrated, it’s the kind of thing Becky would have known about.
Since then I’ve been thinking about, “Who do we listen to and why?” I’ve come to only a partial conclusion. I personally won’t listen to that podcaster again because I find him untrustworthy.
What he said about shrunken morning brains may be true, but it hasn’t been accepted as a demonstrated truth as his presentation implied.
It’s the personal opinion of a young man without scientific expertise. To those who know him, he may be the kind of person who seems to “just know stuff.”
I don’t know him, and I’m annoyed at myself for my short-lived uncritical acceptance of his pronounced wisdom.
I write about the discovery and reexamination of one’s old ideas and beliefs in part because I’m sure I’ve got plenty that should be thrown overboard when and if I realize what they are.
I’ve also got some that are lousy and that get in my way, but I find I’m attached to my own ideas; it’s been too hard to give them the boot.
There is a huge difference between entertaining an idea provisionally — as a hypothesis — and accepting it as true.
I began by emphasizing that these Oblique Strategies are tools for the imagination and make no claim to truth. The acceptance of these ideas as “true” can be insidious and, if the idea is wrong or otherwise pernicious, it can do a lot of mischief before it can be identified and excised from one’s understanding of what is real.
Next column: Oblique Strategy #25 — Whether made by you or by someone else, a statement that follows the word “just” often means the opposite of what it says.
— Brian H. Burke is a certified family law specialist practicing family law and mediation in Santa Barbara. A researcher and educator in the field of divorce and family conflicts, he is also the creator of the Legal Road Map™. Click here for more information, call 805.965.2888 or e-mail info@burkefamilylaw.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.