After trying the Shangri-La Diet, Jazi yechezkel zilber found that other aspects of my research (“stuff of seth”) were relevant to his life:
Years ago, I was part of a community where people would be up early praying etc. For an hour and then eat together. I noticed that going there in the morning was good for me, but was puzzled by the effect. I hypothesized it was the social effect per se.
At some point, I stopped this (what the hell do I have with religion and prayer?) and noticed that I got depressed. I remember that the depression came with a delay. It was funny to see it, as I could not make sense of it. But this I remember well. The depressive effect was not the same day as not going to the prayers but tomorrow (or later?).
I was not having early awakening then. Afterwards, I started having periodically early awakening, I cannot remember the frequency, but it was there and annoying. Now when going to the community, I had two hours between awakening and eating. Whereas at home I would eat immediately after waking. Another thing that puzzled me was how I came to wake up naturally *before* my scheduled wake-up time. I used to wake up much later. With food anticipation it makes perfect sense. I woke up two hours before conditioned feeding.
The Amish have extremely low rates of depression — and eat communal breakfasts. The story about early awakening reminds me of a student who told me when you told us this in class I didn’t believe it but lately I started waking up too early and was puzzled until I realized I had changed my breakfast.
do people who ride mass transit in the morning have lower rates of depression?
You need to look people straight in the face to get the benefits. What you see during a conversation. I have found that is very hard to do via mass transit.
I do think “stuff of Seth” is a phrase that will have legs…
This material interests me because I expect some day in the middle distance to look at retirement-and-beyond housing programs. I notice that the most well-regarded place in my city has excellent dinners, but people are on their own for breakfast and lunch. It strikes me that if I moved there — or elsewhere — I would try to spearhead a cadre to have breakfast together, even if they are not a natural seamless social group otherwise. (Fortunately I enjoy cooking and serving simple meals.) The retirement programs sponsor lots of social features for the apparent purpose of keeping depression at bay; but not in the relatively early morning.
In fact, I now think I will keep my ear to the ground in my current homeowner’s association for a chance to set up something. And do some very simple kind of record-keeping of the results.
Here’s to further testing of Stuff of Seth!
The waking up thing works in the other direction too: I had a really hard waking up on time for years, I started eating a higher protein/fat breakfast with about double the calories of my old breakfasts and now I wake up on my own about an hour before my breakfast time, which is great, since I lie in bed and read and have time to get dressed, etc.
around the same time I discovered that breakfast is bad for sleep I discovered that the faces you would see at a communal breakfast are very good….