Today, let's talk abit about sex and self control. How both these could come into place to crosslink with circadian rhythm and sleeping cycles. How is everyone sleeping cycles lately? Have you been sleeping well? Non interrupted quality sleep throughout the night? Able to sneak into bed and sleep within 10-15 mins?
Well, life goes on. The prime survival is reproduction. So, after hearts beating and lungs breathing, all energy is directed to reproduction. Life, without all we do to kill time, is only sleeping, eating and sex. These activities must be maintained at all cost or nature percieves you to be a liability. Sleeping, then eating, is the pre-requisite for reproduction, in that order.
Human primates were always seasonal breeders until fire came in to stay. Seasonal breeding, needles to say, is run by a clock that is wholly dependant on light and dark cycles. Reproductive function depends on metabolic clocks and mechanisms. You can't reproduce without enough fat to survive. That's the reason why lean female athletes often stop ovulating and having menstrual periods. Sorry to tell you women out there. No fat, no future, for you or your offspring. So, why waste the eggs? Thats how nature reads it. Fertility and sleeping are as closely linked as eating and sleeping because in the end, it's all one thing. This is the painful truth.
In the real world, perfect function, whether it be reproductive, a good night's sleep, or weighing the right amount, exists in a tight boundary that is dynamic with all other living things. There's really no margin for error. The 'give and take' among the life forms on our ball of rock creates our bio-ecosystem, our world. The lifeforce of the bio-ecosystem is all the energy of the sun circulated in what's known to science as the food web. Simple food chains interlace through their interaction with each other to web all substances and species into smaller 'feedback loops' where in each species affects another. Big fish eats little fish, who eat much little smaller fish, who then eat plants that suck nourishment from the rocks, and so on and so on. This is positive feedback loop. Many feedback loops are 'negative' or fail-safe feedback loops.
All feedback loops work like the automatic transmission in your car. If you increase the pressure on the accelerator, as the car goes faster, the transmission will jump up a gear to compensate. If you glide downhill, slowing as you go, the transmission naturally drops down a gear to slow you down. The transmission works perfectly well unless you keep up the pressure on the gas pedal while you hold your foot down on the brake. Well, keep this picture in your head. Try imagine and you will understand.
Not only you are going nowwhere, but you are destroying your car. Feedback loops are delicate mechanisms that read a signal from one system in the body and send it back to another. Negative feedback loops read a signal and control the reaction in that system, like the transmission in a car going downhill. Usually the signal sent back in a negative feedback loop will be stop, or at least slow down. These loops feedback within you and all other species and then feedback to the larger ecosystem. The cosmos, the planet, the little animals, and the people are all connected biologically in one big feedback loop.
Sitting at a desk or in meetings under a fluorescent lights wearing Armani way past sundown totally screws with your feedback loops, and of course, your circadian rhythm. According to a study in the journal Nature, even too much or too litle sex changes the size of your neurons. If that's true, then we can certainly conclude that the amount of sleep you get affects appetite and fertility, which affect metabolism. All of these actions together are part and parcel of the immune system.
Now, let's talk abit about self control. Remember that adaptive intelligence continues to evolve by reacting to input from the environment provided by information-driven feedback loops. These feedback loops are really just streams of information that report back the various 'outposts' to their points of origin to control the process.
Let's take a trip to an imaginary place, the natural world, where you don't live anymore. You are just tagging along with your buddy when you see a big breadfruit. The fact that you saw a big breadfruit means the tree are fruiting, not flowering and that it's late spring or summer. The smell get's your juices going and you remember eating one before and, since it was a good experience, you make the decision to eat another. What happens? The sugar hits the portal vein between your liver and stomach and your pancreas kicks in with a big shot of insulin. Just as the sugar from the fruit is crossing the blood brain barrier, sending you to HappyLand, that the big shot of insulin simultaneously sends the excess sugar to shirt term storage.
Short term storage in your liver and muscles can't take in too much more, because you ate that other kind of fruit with the larvae in it and that shrub with the thorns and berries on it about an hour ago. So, instead insulin converts some of this breadfruit to cholesterol and the rest is sent to your inner thigh for fat storage because if you are eating breadfruit and berries and whatever that other fruit was your immune system knows winter must be around the corner and, as every immune system also knows, that means no more breadfruit.
So, the insulin and the stored sugar, in the form of fat, hits your leg for long term storage. Your are a big eater and you've already got twenty pounds of fat, so leptin from your fat cells sends a signal to your brain. This leptin nails a button in your brain called neuropeptide Y that controls the appetite for carbohydrates. That appetite now goes off.
You stop eating because you have enough energy in shirt term and long term storage to make it through tomorrow. That's a negative feedback loop. A negative feedback loop is a self controlling program that works day by day.
There are also self perpetuating feedback loops. They tend to work year by year and season by season. For example, if it's late summer and the days are long, and you already have more then 20 pounds of fat, plus a full supply of short term storage, it's a different story. It's a winter's tale. Instead of a negative feedback loop, a positive one will ensue.
A different adaptive hormonal and behavioral scenario kicks in, because different environmental buttons have been pushed. The positive feedback loop on your newly gained 20 pounds means you can continue to gain, self propelled by your own expanding fat base, until all the carbohydrates are really gone.
Prolactin pushed into daytime by short nights suppressed leptin and left your appetite far carbohydrates and neuropeptides Y are turned on. This gave you the 20 pounds to get the ball rolling. Then, the leptin from your own fat base took over to create leptin resistance.
This leptin shutdown mechanism serves the purpose of saving you from longing for something as such sugar, that's long gone until next summer. Your leptin receptors on the NPY button go dead from overload. With no receptors to read the leptin, it's as if you have none, and your appetite for carbohydrates stays permanently switched on until all of the carbohydrates run out. This mechanism exits because in nature you would never get that fat unless you needed to, because all the food will be gone.
The problem in the world now we live in, is that the food and sugar will never be gone. In our unnatural world of endless summer and sugar, this leptin 'overdrive switch' gets flipped. In our world, all you have to do is get 20 pounds overweight for the leptin streaming from your expanding fat base to cause the leptin receptors in your brain to retreat, creating leptin resistance and causing the fat to get fatterm because fat people are always hungry people. Why? Because their negative feedback loop is broken, their leptin receptors burned out, and there is no longer a curb on their appetite for sugar.
There are also self perpetuating feedback loops. They tend to work year by year and season by season. For example, if it's late summer and the days are long, and you already have more then 20 pounds of fat, plus a full supply of short term storage, it's a different story. It's a winter's tale. Instead of a negative feedback loop, a positive one will ensue.
A different adaptive hormonal and behavioral scenario kicks in, because different environmental buttons have been pushed. The positive feedback loop on your newly gained 20 pounds means you can continue to gain, self propelled by your own expanding fat base, until all the carbohydrates are really gone.
Prolactin pushed into daytime by short nights suppressed leptin and left your appetite far carbohydrates and neuropeptides Y are turned on. This gave you the 20 pounds to get the ball rolling. Then, the leptin from your own fat base took over to create leptin resistance.
This leptin shutdown mechanism serves the purpose of saving you from longing for something as such sugar, that's long gone until next summer. Your leptin receptors on the NPY button go dead from overload. With no receptors to read the leptin, it's as if you have none, and your appetite for carbohydrates stays permanently switched on until all of the carbohydrates run out. This mechanism exits because in nature you would never get that fat unless you needed to, because all the food will be gone.
The problem in the world now we live in, is that the food and sugar will never be gone. In our unnatural world of endless summer and sugar, this leptin 'overdrive switch' gets flipped. In our world, all you have to do is get 20 pounds overweight for the leptin streaming from your expanding fat base to cause the leptin receptors in your brain to retreat, creating leptin resistance and causing the fat to get fatterm because fat people are always hungry people. Why? Because their negative feedback loop is broken, their leptin receptors burned out, and there is no longer a curb on their appetite for sugar.
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