Hi,

Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where your time is well spent even though you should probably be doing something else.

3 things worth procrastilearning over

1. Blue Zones are not really a thing

You may have heard that there are certain places on Earth where people often live to 100. That the food there is so healthy, the weather so ideal, that people are able to live for longer periods of time. It's one of the arguments why the Mediterranean diet is said to be so healthy, all those olive-skinned OAPs chugging down olive oil daily. These paradise-like places are called “Blue Zones”.

But new research has found this is basically fiction due to errors in old-age records - a lot of those centenarians have lost their passports and are actually younger, or they died a long time ago but nobody informed the government who still had them down as alive.

In fact, a better indicator of old age in a region is the prevalence of poverty and pension fraud, not olive oil.

The Blue Zone effect is a romantic idea, and a money-making one for those who push it. But I still think it’s worth thinking about when examining your own diet. Here’s an inspiring documentary series on Netflix all about it, but just remember to take it with a pinch of salt.

2. Cary Grant cured his alcoholism using LSD

Cary Grant, Hollywood's biggest actor in the 1950s, was born Archie Leach. He was from Bristol in the UK and moved to the US when he was 16. The accent we know him for from Alfred Hitchcock movies such as North by Northwest and To Catch a Thief was part of the new identity he had consciously created for himself. He used to drink heavily to deal with his two lives and fame. I can only imagine what his already wobbly identity was like after then going through 100 acid trips as therapy.

He later said, "Taking LSD was an utterly foolish thing to do but I was a self-opinionated boor, hiding all kinds of layers and defences, hypocrisy and vanity. I had to get rid of them and wipe the slate clean."

Back in the 1950s, this was extremely pioneering - and, importantly, legal. A magazine interview with Grant inspired Timothy Leary and others to trial LSD therapies in clinical research settings (until LSD research was banned, of course). There is even an urban myth that Grant and Leary took acid together, and there’s a short comedy about it.

After decades of being out in the cold, it's only recently that some governments have opened up to the idea that psychedelics can have benefits in therapy settings. Silicon Valley, the home of micro-dosing, is partly responsible - lots of tech bros have been trying to fund and lobby all sorts of campaigns and research to get the science corroborated as much as possible. If it enables more people to access therapies that could completely turn their lives around, then perhaps this is a good use of all that app money.

Either way, there's a great long read about Hollywood's golden era dabbling with LSD here in Vanity Fair:

3. “Rotting” in bed is somehow popular

The so-called rotting phenomenon has been big on social media for a while now. If you’ve ever felt like hiding in your bed for the day, you may have done it - it’s that but seemingly accompanied by posting how you can't get out of bed because you need to look at your phone and eat takeaways. It’s supposedly done in the name of “self-care”.

But rather than a stress cure, rotting lives up to its name. It’s likely people don’t have the will to stop rotting because doing all this drains your dopamine levels, which is the very thing you need to get you motivated to do anything. Quite the cycle.

It used to be that if you lay in bed all day, you were probably depressed. But I guess now you’re just being cool? 🤷‍♂️ If you do fancy being super trendy and rotting, this woman has suggestions on how to “healthily“ make the most of it:

@lenn.xxxx

Bed rotting isnt just having a movie day, it’s when your mental health cant cope so all you can do is stay in bed, sleeping or scrolling. ... See more

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 simple tip to start your day feeling good

Go outside as soon as possible.

Get some sun in your eye first thing. The light and the fresh air will not only wake you up a bit, but it will help calibrate your sleep cycle, your immune system, and even have an effect on your focus for the rest of the day.

Yes, sometimes it is miserably cloudy in the morning. That’s even more of a reason to head out and do this. Here’s neuroscientist Andrew Huberman on this advice:

That's all for today. Many thanks for reading. Here’s a photo of a dumbo octopus.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff
Currently reading: 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

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