Category: faces and mood

Morning Faces Therapy: Personal Account

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Five years ago I heard from someone that he had been successfully using my discovery that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood the next day. Recently I asked him to write about his experiences with it. Here’s what he wrote:

I’m a male professional in my 30s and have had mild to moderate depression since my early teens. I am a considerable rationalist and skeptic, so when I read about Seth’s morning faces therapy in a New York Times article about 5 years ago, my first thought was to doubt its effectiveness. But it was so easy and simple to try, with nothing to lose, that I gave it a shot. To my surprise, it really worked, and the change was quite noticeable.

I do 30-40 minutes of faces therapy every morning, starting around 7:00, 7:15, but the timing moves around a bit based on my schedule or sometimes for experimentation purposes. My first few years I used videos of actual faces (some of the recommendations that I found on Seth’s blog and others that I found on my own). Over time it’s become harder to find quality videos of sufficient length and compelling interest, and I now more often use a mirror. The effect, for me, usually lags by a day or two. So if I haven’t been doing faces for a while and I’m depressed then it takes a couple of day or so to get back to where I should be, and similarly when I stop the faces therapy it takes a few days or so for the depression to return.

While the therapy itself is simple, getting up on time and doing it every single morning has proven more difficult than expected. Even when I do it for several weeks in a row with no break, at some point the tiredness and weariness inevitably kicks in, whether because I was up late several nights in a row and am too tired to get up early, or because I’m traveling, or for other reasons.

Proof the therapy works is that I’m still carrying on five years after discovering it! When I stop for more than a few days, the resultant drop in mood inevitably brings me back.

As an aside, I sometimes spend time in the evening or morning doing other depression exercises, such as writing a gratitude list (google “count your blessings exercise”) or doing meditation/self-hypnosis. In the spirit of self-experimentation, I am currently seeing whether I can get the equivalent effect I get from the faces, by doing these other therapies in morning sunlight at the same early hour as I do the faces therapy. Full results are not yet in.
More about morning faces therapy.

Morning Faces Therapy For Bipolar Disorder: A Story (Part 2: First Two Months)

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In the 1990s, I discovered that if I see faces on TV early in the morning, I feel better (happier, more eager, more serene) the next day, but not the same day. Faces Monday morning, for example, make me feel better on Tuesday but not Monday. I studied this effect extensively. The results suggested that a circadian oscillator controls our mood and sleep and needs morning face exposure to work properly. Absence of morning face exposure, this theory says, increases your risk of depression — a view not compatible with the “chemical imbalance” explanation of depression but one supported by the strong association between depression and insomnia.

I told friends about this. One of them had devastating bipolar disorder. As he describes here and here, he got great benefit from looking at faces in the morning. After I posted his account of his experience, a man I’ll call Rex wrote me that he was going to try it. At 29, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. At 32, he slit his wrists. He is now 37.Since then he’s been in and out of mental hospitals. Now he lives at home. I wanted to follow his use of morning face therapy “prospectively” — before knowing what would happen. I posted this, about his background, around the time he started.

Treatment details. He began about two months ago. He gets up naturally (no alarm) at about 8 am. He starts watching faces on TV — Squawk on the Street (CNN) — soon after he gets up. He watches for 1-2 hours on a 43-inch high-definition TV; the faces are roughly life-size. He sits 10 feet away.

Mood. Before starting the faces, he was in a depressed mood 5-7 days per month. During those days he had low energy, low motivation, and a bad attitude. The low phases would last a few days, then he’d start feeling better. Now, he says, “my mood is better first thing in the morning. I feel ready to go, turn the TV on, watch something. I feel a little lighter. I no longer feel the early morning doom that I used to feel. I’ve never been a morning person, but I feel that way more now than any time I can remember. I haven’t had any depressed moods since I started the faces. I haven’t had any really adverse or negative emotions. Things are going very smoothly. I have less worries, I feel a more uplifting, upbeat tempo throughout the day. Everything seems better.” (Note: Morning faces likewise shifted me toward being a morning person.)

Medication. He used to take an antidepressant every day (Simbalta, 60 mg/day). Now he takes 30 mg once every 3 to 4 days. He’s tried to stop taking it entirely but gets withdrawal symptoms (headache, nausea) when he does that. Note that he still had 5-7 days/month of depressed moods every month even when taking the antidepressant. In the spring his depression was better so he cut back slowly on the medication.

Sleep. For a long time he has had great difficulty falling asleep. He would lie in bed for an hour without falling asleep. He took sleep medication, usually Lunesta or Ambien, very often. “Lots of times in the past I would give up [after lying in bed a long time] and go watch TV. Or start to read, stay up to 2:30. That’s always been a problem — ever since I was in college. In college, my sleeping schedule went nuts. When I got into the working world, it continued to where I would stay up late and couldn’t sleep.” Since he started the morning faces, his sleep is much better. He usually falls asleep within 20 minutes of lying down, a very noticeable difference. He has taken much less sleep medication — about 20% of what it was before. (He still takes it when he knows he has to get up early or he feels wired.) At one point, when he took antipsychotics, he did fall asleep quickly “but the side effects were awful,” he said. “Grogginess, foggy head all day. I didn’t have as much mania and depression but I would sleep 11 hours per night and I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t go back to college, because I couldn’t think clearly.”

At the same time he started the faces, he started getting blue light exposure in the morning from a blue light box called the Apollo Health goLITE. He started with 20 minutes of exposure. It did seem to improve his mood and make him feel tired earlier. However, it also made him feel anxious and tense. To try to get rid of this effect, he reduced the exposure: 10 minutes, 5 minutes, 2 minutes. After a week, he stopped using it altogether.

“I’m just ecstatic about the results,” he said.

 

Morning Faces Therapy for Bipolar Disorder: Follow-Up Questions

Seth Roberts9 Comments

In May I posted a friend’s story about how he used my morning-faces discovery to improve his life. It helped enormously (“It felt like a giant headache was just lifted off me”). I asked him some follow-up questions.

What time of day do you look at your face in a mirror? For how long?

I look at my face in a mirror for an hour starting at about 6:20am (Daylight Saving Time). It doesn’t feel weird or vain to me. I usually listen to C-SPAN, Comedy Central, or music during the therapy.

You wrote: “I’m able to enjoy life and relate to others in ways that I never could my entire life.” Could you elaborate?

In my letter I said that my initial reaction to the face therapy was that it felt like a giant headache was just lifted off of me. That “headache” was the weight of depression and anxiety on my mind. My whole life I have been burdened by that weight, under its shadow to one degree or another. Another angle on this: Your initial reaction was “I felt great – cheerful and calm, yet full of energy”. I am quite certain that before the therapy I was never in that state of mind. But I’m not just talking about typical enjoyment—hearing the music, conversing and laughing, a fine meal, etc. In The Simpsons episode “Barting Over”, Homer is twirling slowly high in the air on a skateboard, and a novel idea pops into his head: if he buys two kinds of nuts separately, he can combine them at home to get “mixed nuts”. That sensation of weightlessness, with little solutions to little problems just popping up, is new to me. When you add up hundreds of those solutions, you find life itself less burdensome. You make more room for appreciation, gratitude, friendship, and so on. You begin to get an inkling of what a full human life could be.

People “automatically reject the idea”, you wrote. What happens?

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard” was the comment of a woman in the bipolar support group. Some in the group of the if-it-sounds-crazy-enough-I-believe-it persuasion would nod their support. My sister theorized that it was all just meditation (!) and finished by saying, “I get enough faces at work.” My dental hygienist was somewhat persuaded by the fact that a newborn can recognize its mother’s face within hours of birth.

Do you continue to see a psychiatrist and/or a psychologist? If so, are they curious about how well you are doing without meds? If they’re not curious, how do they explain it?

My psychiatrist and psychotherapist are glad that I’m doing well, but they are not curious about the face therapy, the bright lights, or the fish oil. They are skeptical toward alternative treatments. I gather they think that my improvement is due to remission, or an upswing in the illness’s cycle, or the accumulated years of talk therapy. Or they abandon reason altogether, saying, “Whatever works for you.”

Why do you need to go to bed “early”? What happens if you don’t? What makes it difficult or discipline-requiring to go to bed “early”?

If I go to bed late, I need to take an hour nap the next day, which is a drag. At 10pm I’m almost never tired enough, plus I usually feel that I haven’t accomplished enough for the day. At your suggestion, I am trying to reset my circadian rhythm by getting 2 hours of morning light from approximately 7:30am to 9:30am.

What effect does the early morning bright light therapy have? How do you do it (e.g., equipment, time of day)? Why did you start it?

As I recall, the lights helped me to wake up early, fairly rested and alert. I started in 1997 at your suggestion with a bank of four GE F40SP65-ECO tubes, 40 watts each, 48 inches long. I now cover half of the bank to reduce the intensity. I get thirty minutes of exposure starting at about 6:50 am (Daylight Saving Time).

In 1997, what made you decide to try the faces?

I was primed for the idea that a big change might help. Six months prior, I had made a somewhat beneficial switch to Depakote after taking lithium for 11 years. Also, you claimed that you already had good experimental results with several people, and that Andrew Gelman at Columbia University was impressed with your work.

“I hadn’t needed Moban since 1999,” you write. Why not?

From 1999 to 2003, the face therapy was so effective that I didn’t need an antipsychotic (e.g. Moban). From 2003 to 2006, when I didn’t use the face therapy, I kept certain habits that I had adopted during that therapy: keeping a fairly normal sleep schedule, avoiding fluorescent lights at night, and getting a decent amount of social interaction.

With the benefit of hindsight, why do you think it did not keep you out of the hospital in 2003?

When I told my psychiatrist in 1999 that I was going to use the face therapy instead of medications, he exclaimed, “That’s like taking off a cast and trying to walk right away!” Indeed, for 12 years my mind had been numbed with psychiatric drugs. Although the face therapy was seemingly miraculous, it couldn’t restore all that was lost. Yet with little support from others I was trying to “walk”: I had the goals of getting a job and a social circle; I had a dream of leading the way for all depressed people. It was unrealistic to expect that I could do much more than crawl through life. By 2003, I needed the hospital because I was in over my head.

Why did back pain and stress put you back in the hospital? Why did they lead to a suicide attempt?

My mental state deteriorated because of lack of sleep, which in turn was due to back pain and stress. Both back pain and stress are manageable—given enough time and attention. Unfortunately, at the time I was overwhelmed with many new problems and many lingering old problems. I had just moved. The house had far more traffic noise and housemates than I was accustomed to. I didn’t have the money or strength to move again; I was falling out with an old friend; my wrists and feet were injured. If I went back to the mental health system, I would be more handicapped than ever. The situation seemed hopeless.

Why did publicity related to The Shangri-La Diet make you try this again?

I actually thought that Diane Sawyer might call me after saying to herself, “Wow, what else has Professor Roberts discovered?” So I wanted to shape up my mood fast! I assumed that the Shangri-la Diet in its way must be about as great as the face therapy. I didn’t suspect that the media would treat your diet like any other—as an offbeat fad.

You wrote: “In August of 2010, dissatisfied with my low energy level, I decided to go off medications completely again. What did you do?

I had been “stabilized” on 250 mg of Depakote, which is a sedating anti-manic drug, and 20mg of Prozac, which is an antidepressant that can induce mania. About once a month, I got rid of the sedation by skipping the Depakote for a few days. On one occasion, when I tried to skip the Depakote for 9 successive days, I became slightly hypomanic and had trouble sleeping. Over the course of several months, I reduced the Prozac to 10mg, and even to 5mg, but still I couldn’t stay off the Depakote for more than about 7days without problems.

You wrote: “Getting off just the two drugs was tricky, because of the difference in half-lives.” What was “tricky” about it?

I was boxed in by the difference in the drugs’ half-lives. Prozac has a plasma half-life of about 10 days, while Depakote has a half-life on the order of only 10 hours. I considered splitting the enteric-coated Depakote, but never did. I decided that the only way out was to stop taking the Prozac, but continue taking the Depakote for 10 days until the Prozac was out of my system. So I tolerated being depressed and sedated until I could stop the Depakote, too.

 

 

“Stuff of Seth”: Faces/Mood and Anticipatory Waking

Seth Roberts5 Comments

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.

Morning Faces Therapy For Bipolar Disorder: A Story (Part 1: Background)

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In the mid-1990s I discovered that seeing faces in the morning raised my mood the next day. If I saw faces Monday morning, I felt better on Tuesday — not Monday. This discovery and many other facts suggest that we have an internal oscillator that controls our mood — in particular, how happy we are, how eager we are to do things, and how irritable we are. For this oscillator to work properly, we must see faces in the morning and avoid faces and fluorescent light at night.

In rich countries, almost everyone gets nothing resembling the optimum input. One of the problems this may create is bipolar disorder. A week ago I posted how a friend of mine used my faces/mood discovery to control his bipolar disorder. After that post, a man I’ll call Rex wrote to me thanking me — that post had inspired him to try to control his own bipolar disorder that way. Before knowing anything about whether he would be successful, I decided it would be good to follow and record what happens. Either way — successful or not — it should be revealing.

I am going to post his story in several parts. The first few parts are background.

My first full-blown bipolar episode was at 29 years of age. (I am now 37.)

I was a civil engineer working for the government in an Eastern State. I had self-diagnosed myself as having Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), also known as the morning blues. The symptoms are mild to severe depression, lethargy, apathy and weight gain. A form of treatment for SAD is the light box. Mine is an Apollo GoLite Box. As soon as I read about this device, I was excited. It came via UPS. I plugged it in during my lunch break soon after it arrived. By the end of the work day my mind was in overdrive. I was a total motor mouth, with racing racing thoughts and unusual activities such as inventing things, writing songs and books for the first time. Friends knew I was totally not myself. I went without sleep for days at a time. I began drinking heavily and not going to work. My mind could not rest. Alcohol or extreme exercise were the only medicine. I stopped eating, lost about 30 pounds in 30 days. I became paranoid and shut everyone out of my life including my friends, family, and co-workers. I was buying hundreds if books and dozens of bottles of supplements. Overall I was turning into a different person with new interests.

Finally my parents stepped in because of my isolation and irresponsible behavior. This led to a three week outpatient clinic stay in Illinois. Right away I was diagnosed as Bipolar I. I was vaguely familiar with it, but was quite stunned I had it. On the other hand, it was a huge relief to have a name to this craziness I was feeling. I was put on four medications and went through extensive therapy, including talk therapy, group therapy, family talks, and letter writing. It was a wonderful experience that helped me to deal with painful past experiences. It had an excellent scheduled program with early-morning group therapy and prayer. [Note the morning exposure to faces.] This was a Christian-based psychiatric clinic. Then daily small classes on mental health issues, then one-on-one discussions with a licensed therapist and plenty of other group activities and meals on the town. Lots of love, support and scheduled work.

That was an ideal setting. After three weeks I came home. I slowly went back to those sad, frustrated days. The drugs seem to stop working. My moods began turning sad or mad, for no particular reason. [Note that this downturn happened soon after exposure to morning faces — via group therapy — stopped.] The frustrations of an unfulfilled, boring and dead-end career grew worse. Maybe the worst was a lonely life. Silence in the mornings and only late-night television before bed.

The disappointments of my life were bad, but the bipolar manifestations of the highs and lows seemed to magnify all emotions to the nth degree. My medications were replaced by the new ones, without expired patents. Perhaps I have been prescribed ten different anti-depressants overall, sometimes in combinations, but I only found relief in narcotics such as prescription xanax or klonopin.

They truly numbed the pain, but led to regrettable behavior. I took to cutting myself as a sort of punishment for the unwarranted guilt and self-absorption (for feeling depressed and angry) and to ease the pains with the endorphin releasing that was given by cutting with a razor blade. It seems insane now, but at the time it was the quickest release. These cuttings not only led to my first surgery, but led me back into a different psychiatric hospital in Vanderbilt at age 31. I had a tendon transfer surgery from my the top of my wrist to closer to my thumb, where I had severed my tendon. It was very embarrassing to my family and myself. I came clean to my employer and became eligible for FMLA (The Federal Medical Leave Act).

During these last couple of years, my manias have been much rarer and weaker. I faithfully take my medication daily. I still experience mild depression, but to a lessor extent, a more numbing feeling. I still feel sad but not the weepy, nostalgia I felt overwhelmed with previously.

To be continued.

Comment on “Morning Faces Therapy For Bipolar Disorder”

Seth Roberts7 Comments

In yesterday’s post, a friend of mine with bipolar disorder told how he used my faces/mood discovery. It allowed him “to enjoy life and relate to others in ways that I never could my entire life,” he wrote. Partly because it allows him to stop taking the usual meds prescribed for bipolar disorder, which have awful side effects.

What do I think about this?

To begin with the obvious, I am very happy that something I discovered has helped someone else. Practically all science has no obvious use. (A tiny fraction is eventually helpful.) In experimental psychology, my field, I can’t think of a single finding that’s helped many people. Because of this background, managing to help someone via science seems like a fairy tale. It’s too soon to say the story has a happy ending — it isn’t over — but it is beginning to have a happy ending.

Thank heaven for blogs. Something like my faces/mood discovery is difficult to publicize, yet without accumulation of evidence it will go nowhere. It wouldn’t be easy to publish in a psychiatric or psychotherapeutic journal because I’m not a psychiatrist or psychotherapist. Even if published, the chances of interesting psychiatrists and psychotherapists are low because it doesn’t involve a treatment you can make money from (gatekeeper syndrome). It should greatly interest persons with bipolar disorder but they are not the typical readers of the scientific literature on mood disorders. However, like all sufferers, they search the Internet.

In my internal calculus, the story provides what I think of as “ industrial strength” evidence. Industrial-strength evidence is evidence that something works in practice, not just in the lab. In a laboratory setting, which to some extent includes me studying myself, you try to keep things constant. You want to reduce noise. Noise reduction makes signals clearer. An effect you can see easily in a lab experiment, however, may be too small to matter outside the lab, where more powerful forces push people around. Whether your lab experiment — in which you have managed to control Force X — has practical value depends on the size of Force X relative to other forces at work outside the lab. An example is the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet. Does that theory tell us anything useful about why people are fat? Does it explain the obesity epidemic, for example? I knew the theory had plenty of truth because it had led me to several new ways of losing weight and had helped me lose considerable weight and keep it off forever. But that was far from showing (a) it was the only thing that controls weight or even (b) one of the big things. Lab experiments can’t do that. It’s been claimed that obesity is due to a virus. Experiments support the idea. Yet the idea is irrelevant to everyday life, I’m sure. No one has written How to Lie With Laboratory Science but it could be written. The only way to find out if a “true” idea explains enough of reality to be useful is to use that idea in real-world situations. Which is what my friend did.

But that isn’t the biggest thing. The biggest thing, from my point of view, is that what my friend has done helps keep this idea alive. When it comes to ideas, grow or die. My friend’s story keeps the idea alive by expanding it. It gives it a new and personal dimension. It isn’t just about mood measurements, it’s about living a reasonable life. I’ve given talks about this idea, but this story makes it much easier to talk about to a general audience.

 

 

 

 

Morning Faces Therapy for Bipolar Disorder

Seth Roberts4 Comments

In 1995, I discovered that seeing faces in the morning improved my mood the next day. If I saw faces Monday morning I felt better on Tuesday — but not Monday. The delay was astonishing; so was the size of the effect. The faces not only made me cheerful, they also made me eager to do things (the opposite of procrastination) and serene. This is the opposite of depression. Depressed people feel unhappy, don’t want to do anything, and are irritable. Eventually I found that the mood improvement was part of a larger effect: morning faces produced an oscillation in mood (below neutral then above neutral) that began about 6 pm on the day I saw the faces and lasted about a day. As strange as this may sound, there was plenty of supporting data — the connection between depression and insomnia, for example.

After I had observed the effect on myself hundreds of time, I urged a friend with bipolar disorder to try it. Recently he wrote me about how it has helped him.

Here is the very short story of my experience with this treatment.

I have used your treatment since 1997. As an indication of its effectiveness, from 1999 to 2003 I was completely off of medications, and now I’ve been off again since August of last year.

I was severely ill when I began the treatment. I was first hospitalized in 1985 for manic psychosis, and I was hospitalized later for suicidal thoughts and then again for psychosis. In 1997 I was 46 years old, taking Prozac, Depakote, and Moban (an anti-psychotic), and I was barely functioning.

The initial reaction, after three days of the treatment, was astonishing. It felt like a giant headache was just lifted off me. But the [new] clarity of mind enabled me to see my awful condition, and I had acute suicidal thoughts for a day or two. After that initial bounce, the improvement in mood was more subtle, but definitely correlated to how early I started looking at faces.

The early years of the treatment were often rocky. You were still working out some of the kinks in the treatment. The biggest surprise came when you found that exposure to fluorescent lights at night cancelled the effect of the faces. Another problem, also having to do with fluorescent lights, arose when I added early-morning bright-light therapy: the start-time and duration had to be adjusted by trial-and-error. At least six times I was one step away from becoming delusional, and then the treatment would pull me back within 48 hours. You were indispensable during those early years because I could call you and you would give me advice and the will to pull through.

By 2003, I had made some good progress. I had moved back to Berkeley, I was living with “normal” roommates instead of with other bipolar guys, and I had even been able to work for short periods. But along the way I had accumulated several minor pains. Back pain and stress made it difficult to get more than 4 hours of sleep. Sleeping pills did not solve the problem. I was scared that I would have to return to the mental health system; I would be a failure at the only thing I ever cared about [using the face treatment to stay out of the mental health system]. I made a pathetic attempt at suicide and wound up back in Herrick Hospital.

It was back to the crappy life—dulling medications, the psychiatrist and the psychotherapist, the support group, a volunteer job. Then, in 2006, the publicity for your diet book motivated me to try the “faces in the morning” treatment again. By that time, you had found that using a mirror was as effective as using videotapes [such as C-SPAN Booknotes recordings], which greatly simplified the process.

By 2009 I had reduced my doses of Prozac and Depakote to only 10 mg and 250 mg, respectively. (I hadn’t needed Moban since 1999.) In August of 2010, dissatisfied with my low energy level, I decided to go off medications completely again. Getting off of Prozac and Depakote gradually was tricky, because Prozac, which can induce mania, has a plasma half-life of about 10 days, while Depakote, which is anti-manic, has a half-life on the order of only 10 hours.

Today, most people would no doubt say that I’m still a loser. No matter, I’m able to enjoy life and relate to others in ways that I never could my entire life. I’m a Total Believer in the treatment. I don’t proselytize, though. People automatically reject the idea, and in any event I don’t want to be (directly) responsible if the treatment doesn’t work for someone. (Example: My nephew has clinical depression; he also has guns. If he tried this treatment, went off of medications, and then for some reason killed himself, my sister would never speak to me.)

The most difficult aspect of the treatment for me has been simply going to bed early. Even though I feel better the earlier I go to sleep, 10:45 pm is the best I can do on a regular basis.

To sum up, I believe you have discovered a powerful anti-depressant treatment that, in my case, has been effective for severe bipolar disorder. As a complete substitute for medications, however, it has entailed serious risks, and it requires substantial discipline to maintain. It is also important to note that “face therapy” is not the only alternative therapy that I use. In addition to the bright-light therapy that I mentioned above, I currently take 3 grams of omega-3 per day in the form of fish oil capsules.

There are a few more details and observations in these blog posts:

https://sethroberts.org/2007/05/06/life-size-faces/#comment-10539

https://sethroberts.org/2007/07/31/more-about-faces-and-mood/

https://sethroberts.org/2009/10/15/more-about-faces-and-mood-2/

Tomorrow I will comment on this.

Two Faces Better Than One?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Here I describe my discovery that seeing faces on TV in the morning improved my mood the next day. The details of the effect suggested that the ideal stimulus is what you’d see during a conversation. For a long time I used the C-Span show Booknotes as the main source of the faces. I watched it on a 25-inch TV. More recently I used my own face in a mirror. It was readily available and perfectly life-size. I listened to a podcast or book at the same time.

A few months ago, Caleb Cooper commented saying that he’d found that looking at two faces every morning seemed to work better than looking at one face. He found that Bloggingheads.tv expanded to full screen on a 24-inch monitor (measured diagonally) produced close-to-life-size faces, which is what he wanted.

This interested me for several reasons: 1. It might make the effect stronger. 2. Bloggingheads.tv has a big selection, offering control over size. 3. I disliked looking at my face for long times. 4. It seems more naturalistic than looking at my own face.

I’ve been trying this with a 22-inch monitor (which I already had). Perhaps 24-inch would be better. The effect does seem stronger, as Caleb said.

I asked Caleb several questions about his experience.

How did you get started doing this?

I think it started when I read your posts about standing and sleeping. This led me to read your paper on self experimentation and sleep. Like you, I often suffered from early awakenings where I would wake up around 2-3 hours early, still feeling tired but having a hard time going back to sleep.

Based on what I learned from you and other sources, I tried out the following; got a pair of blue blocker clip-ons for my glasses which I put on about two hours before bed; ordered an Apollo goLite blue light emitter that I use for about an hour in the morning, I would sometimes take 1/3 mg of melatonin nine hours after waking up, and 3mg half hour before bed, and I started standing on a high difficulty Thera-Band balance pad on one leg while looking into a mirror for 30 minutes in the morning.

What made you think it was worth a try?

Well, why not:) Most self experimentation can be easily done for practically no cost, while the potential upside is significant. There’s also satisfying curiosity, expanding self knowledge, gaining mastery over your mind and body… You had a plausible theory, had collected suggestive data, and I’d already found the appetite suppression effect of the Shagnri-La was very real, so you had a track record of introducing ideas worth paying attention to.

What happened at first?

It felt to me like my sleep modestly improved, sleeping through the night longer and having the energy to get up and go much sooner after waking. This was awhile ago though, I didn’t keep any data, and I was adding and dropping different things, so my experience doesn’t have a high enough confidence interval for drawing any general inferences.

When did you make those changes?

I’d guess around sixteen months ago.

After you made those changes (“got a pair of BlueBlocker glasses…”) did your mood change?

It improved in as much as waking up feeling rested makes you feel a lot better than trying to get up while still tired.

Tell me something about yourself (job, age, etc.).

I got into medicine through Clinical Massage Therapy. Being a high school dropout I wanted something I could get into quickly, then sink or swim on my own. Massage is one of the few fields the university-accreditation complex hasn’t sunk its tentacles deeply into (a mixed blessing; for an autodidact it lets you quickly start a great career, but the field really needs a bifurcated certification track to separate medical massage from relaxational spa massage). I live in the Pacific Northwest, near the site where they developed the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Despite all the lingering nuclear waste, it’s a nice, mid sized metro area. I’m in my mid twenties.

More About Faces and Mood

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A friend with bipolar disorder writes:

When I wrote in your blog that I use your discovery daily, it means that every day I look in a mirror for an hour, starting at approximately 6:30 a.m. I have the mirror about 20 inches from my face because I have read that a mirror image is half the size of the object reflected. [Life-size faces appear to work best. Using a mirror means the face you see is perfectly life-size, allowing for distance. TV faces can be larger or smaller than life-size.] To keep from being bored while looking at my face in the mirror, I mostly listen to tapes of C-SPAN programs. Sometimes I listen to music. Once or twice a week I may just think, or plan my day. That does get boring after about 30 minutes.

Sorry, I definitely was exaggerating when I wrote “doctors are amazed”. “My doctors” refers only to my psychiatrist and psychotherapist; at best, they seem “impressed” by my condition. My therapist regularly says that I’m doing “great”(variously referring to social relations, self-awareness, and general functioning) — “especially considering my situation“ and my psychiatrist once exclaimed that my bipolar disorder was in “complete remission”, albeit when we were composing an online personal ad. I do think both of them are at least mildly surprised that I seem to be doing alright on half the standard therapeutic dose of Depakote, and a low dose of Prozac.

There was an actual experience that weakly supports my claim about practitioners having no interest in utilizing your idea. I once asked my therapist to suspend his disbelief, and just imagine that your treatment does work as a strong antidepressant. Then would he mention the treatment to his other patients, or give a talk at a conference, or write up a report, or tell his colleagues? In all cases, he said “no”. Although he agreed that ideas for clinical trials have to come from somewhere, evidently that somewhere was not part of his concern.

I stress that my therapist is compassionate and reasonably intelligent, and he has helped me deal with many important practical problems. And of course in your blog even you have admitted that your idea, on the face of it, sounds way too crazy. It’s to my therapist’s credit that he claims to believe your treatment works to some degree — adding positively, “whatever works for you”. Unfortunately, that addition implies that your treatment is somehow working “psychologically” for me (e.g., as a kind of meditation) rather than working “biologically” in a way that, presumably, would work for most people.

If my doctors were following my particular case as closely as they pretend to, then they ought to be amazed. Instead, my sense is that they see me through the lens of their diagnosis. Without actually dismissing the sheer statistical improbability of my having been off of drugs and without a hospitalization for four years, they do seem to forget that fact when we discuss drug therapy. When I mention those four years, they sometimes play the skeptic, offering up alternative possibilities: it was a fluke, or I was in remission anyway, or something else. I don’t try anymore to persuade anyone, not even family, about the treatment — it’s not worth the effort.

I suppose the bigger picture is that there is little credibility to the testimony of a bipolar person who has experienced psychosis. (Perhaps my case is not helped by dramatic pronouncements of mine such as, “History will judge you. People will wonder, “why didn’t they listen to him?”) Too, I’m not paying my doctors enough to get lengthy consultations. If I were paying enough, and if I made the case with details to my psychiatrist, she might be persuaded that there is a big effect. She has a high opinion of you; in fact, she’s the person who told me of the report in The SF Chronicle (5/30/06) about the SLD diet. And, she gives some credence to Dr. Stoll’s results with omega-3 for treating bipolar. Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, I would stand by my original opinion about her not changing her practice.