malvasia bianca

I went to a Nei Gong workshop for a week and a half in June; as often happens after long workshops, my energy levels were noticeably higher when I got back than they had been before the workshop. Then, after a week or so, they went back to normal (though the goodish side of normal, certainly much better than they had been this winter / spring). But, unusually, after maybe half a week of that normal level, they went back up to that abnormally good level.

So maybe there was something going on that wasn’t just the workshop? I made a list of hypotheses for possible causes:

• Summer is better than winter for me in general
• Summer is better than winter, and maybe the causitive mechanism is that there are fewer dust mites
• We recently got a dehumidifier, so there might be even fewer dust mites around than normal for the summer
• My sleep might be doing better because of reduced dust mite load
• My sleep might be doing better because I’m reliably using nose strips
• I’m doing the Spleen Hui Chun exercise once every three days, and two Traditional Chinese Medicine doctors have said I have problems with my Spleen system, so maybe that’s helped
• I’m doing the Spleen Hui Chun exercise frequently and it’s made more effective by increased stores of Cultivated Qi
• I’m doing breathing exercises every day
• The specific breathing exercises that I’m doing (mostly for Blood Deficiency, sometimes for Qi Deficiency) might be helping
• I’m opening up the inside of my body more in general
• I’m opening up my chest more
• I’m opening up my spine more
• I’m sinking my flesh off the bones more
• I’m sinking my flesh off the bones and getting my mind inside the gaps
• I’m improving my head / neck (shoulder, back, …) positioning
• More of my practice time is spent standing instead of sitting
• I’m (barely) starting to activate my Dantian
• I’m benefiting from a virtuous cycle of practicing more -> having more energy -> being in the mood to practice more -> practicing more
• I’ve removed some distracting apps from my iPad, which means that my mind is being sapped less
• Reducing distractions gives me more time to practice and makes it easier to shift out of the end of nap time into practice time, feeding the above virtuous cycle
• Not going to TCM treatment on Monday / Wednesday mornings means I have more time to do stuff I’m excited about, putting me in a better mental space

That’s a lot of hypotheses! Who knows which hypothesis or combination of hypotheses is acurate; or of course it could be something not on the list, or plain old random variation.

If I hadn’t been so behind on my video game blogging, I probably would have just posted the above and left is as a big open question; as it was, though, I wrote down the above list in my notes and then those notes sat in place for a month and a half.

And, unfortunately, the state that I mentioned at at the top of the post disappeared pretty dramatically right after I took those notes: I went on a trip to visit my parents, and my sleep and energy levels were both dreadful during that time period. I’m almost positive that my sleep issues during the trip were linked to breathing problems; I have a pretty strong suspicion that the bed I was staying in has a higher dust mite load than I’m used to. (Not enough to make me congested enough to have breathing problems while just hanging out in the room, but I guess it’s enough to push me over the edge to causing problems when I’m sleeping.)

Things were noticeably better when I got back, but not nearly as good as they were before the trip, more like a two or three notches down from that. I noticed that the humidity levels in our bedroom were higher than they had been before the trip; not 100% sure why, maybe it’s because we’d been opening the windows during the evening to cool down, and it was more humid outside than inside. So I’ve moved the dehumidifier into the bedroom during the day, to bring down the humidity levels more strongly; I think it’s helped a bit, my energy levels do seem to be up another notch compared to a couple of days after I got back from that visit. Still room for improvement, though; it does take a while for dust mites to die out in response to lower humidity, I’m not sure if I’m at the new expected steady state dust mite level yet or if things will get better over the next week.

So now, out of that list of hypotheses, the one about “dehumidifier -> fewer dust mites -> better sleep -> more energy” is looking good. And in particular while I don’t have strong evidence for the first two links there (I have been measuring humidity levels in my bedroom but not dust mite levels), I do have strong evidence that messed up sleep strongly effects my energy levels. (Big surprise, I know.)

Which also makes me glad that I stopped Traditional Chinese Medicine treatment when I did, because the whole dust mite allergies / breathing during sleep pathway was just not something that either my current TCM doctor or my previous TCM doctor were investigating at all. I’m pretty sure that, when I first started TCM treatment most of a decade ago, there were a bunch of things going on that were eating at my energy levels, and TCM treatment helped with some of those. (As well as with some other things: my right big toe is a lot more flexible than it used to be!) But it’s also the case that my improvements plateaued with both doctors; and one potential explanation is that the dominant remaining cause was dust mite allergies / breathing, and both doctors were (after things plateaued) trying to treat something downstream from that issue instead of getting at the root cause.

I was going to claim that, in fact, I should maybe ignore everything but dust mites / breathing in my list of hypotheses. But I guess the one datum that might point in a broader direction is that this did happen right after a Nei Gong workshop; maybe that’s a pure coincidence and it’s just the case that the house dust mite load went beneath some magic threshold at the same time, but I’m not completely convinced. A bit academic, though: I’ll still want to do the body opening, sinking flesh from bone, etc. just for Nei Gong (and Tai Chi) reasons, whether or not they help with my energy levels. Though I might dial back the Spleen Hui Chun frequency: I saw some intestine-related side effects that the Spleen Hui Chun exercise was helping with, which was great, but now those changes have maybe gone a little bit too far, so I might switch to doing that once a week instead.

One other observation is that it’s a little disturbing how my breathing goes from seemingly acceptable (when I’m awake) to waking up every hour and a half (when I’m asleep): it’s one thing if I’m constantly blowing my nose and then have trouble sleeping, but that’s not actually what’s going on. This is all manageable now, but I’m worried that, if some aspect of that system gets worse, it’ll have noticeable effects on my sleep.

Not sure what to do about that, though. My allergist isn’t willing to bump up my allergy shot dose further, and I think my current medicines are okay. My breathing does feel shallower than is ideal, which is one reason why I’ve been working on breathing exercises; the thing is, though, that when those exercises improve my breathing, my breathing gets both slower and deeper, and while I would like my breathing to be deeper while I’m asleep, if it’s slower then that could make my symptoms worse! (FWIW I did try out a CPAP machine last fall; it was a complete disaster, I am definitely not doing that again.) Ultimately I do think it would be healthy in general for my breathing to be less shallow and for my chest to be more open, so I’m still working on that, but I’m less optimistic about that helping my sleep than I was.

And then the other potential area to look for potential fixes is something physiological about the airways in my throat. I honestly don’t know to what extent my tongue is blocking my airways when I’m asleep; I’ve never been able to catch it in a problematic situation when I get startled awake, but it is also the case that I wake up more when I accidentally roll onto my back, which is consistent with tongue problems. (And I have no idea how to fix my tongue’s behavior if that is the issue!) Or maybe it’s an issue someplace else in my airways? A sleep doctor that I talked to mentioned that my palate is narrow, so widening that could help; but that seems like something that’s drastic enough (and with potential unpleasant follow-on problems, e.g. it might mess up my bite) that I’m leery about doing that speculatively. My allergist wants me to get a scan of my head to figure out how constricted the different airways are, to help guide further treatments; maybe I’ll do that, I’m not sure.

Sigh. This stuff is hard to figure out. It was nice to feel good for a few weeks, though! And the last few weeks have been fine, so the current state isn’t bad; honestly, if running a dehumidifier can keep things at the current state when we get into the rainy season, then that would be a huge win.