Patterns: delayed effects of accumulation
This article offers no greater novelty than that of reporting a common pattern underlying several phenomena which I previously had recounted and explained individually. It is nothing more — and nothing less — than the unification of all those events under their single pattern: non-immediate effects that appear belatedly, disconnected from present conditions, in an apparently illogical and disconcerting manner, which might only be explained as the unpredictable result of a latent accumulation.
I recently came across doctors explaining that what we consume can influence our body temperature more than factors that at first seem much more important.
At first glance, for instance, one would think that a heater is more important than drinking hot broth, or that a fan or air conditioning matters more than drinking cold coffee (initially an option to always avoid) instead of hot: but… No!
(And this would make summer, with its unsatisfying cold meals and cold coffee, less preferable to winter.)
The effectiveness of the coffee with plenty of ice I drank yesterday afternoon at 40 degrees Celsius confirmed the theory set out above, and I then thought that the ice would not have been nearly as effective — not even at night — if the drink had contained alcohol.
— A normal human being can’t get drunk in summer in Puerto Banús without ending up dehydrated. Even at dead of night. I had no doubt that its nightly attendance could only be explained by strange people or by them doing strange things in addition to (or instead of) getting drunk.
Then came the notion of heat accumulating over months, with no nightly respite.
Peak temperatures can be withstood. The problem is the (high) lows, the lack of respite, the night ruminating on the heat of the day instead of cooling it off.
Heat accumulation has its repertoire of perfectly well-known, trivial and immediate effects, but there were also other types of accumulations that produced effects whose connection to the cause was not so obvious, mainly because of the time lag.
A good example of this ‘discontinuous’ causality is that experienced by people with bruxism.
Bruxism has many disconcerting consequences. For example, it can cause discomfort in the soft palate, and at first, one would never think of the real explanation for what is happening.
As a result of excessive muscle tension, orofacial muscles can become blocked, displaced, inflamed, and so on, affecting chewing and speech: however we feel that our teeth are misaligned, that we have lost dexterity in articulating sounds, and so forth.
What is more, we can’t even believe it when we find out the diagnosis. Why on earth would we do such a stupid thing while sleeping, or even during the day without realising it?
I accepted it because of the evidence of the symptoms. But the most incredible thing was when one night, waking up in the middle of a nightmare, I found myself doing a kind of rhythmic chewing, with the regular beat of a metronome.
It is suspected that the main cause of bruxism may be psychological stress. Psychological stress, in turn, also has its own set of time-lagged consequences, and all the evidence suggests that certain anomalies related to sleep deprivation could stem from this same process of generating deferred symptoms — disconnected from the present moment and possibly linked to the accumulation of sleep issues.
Sleep deprivation might have long-term effects, due to cumulative impact in absolute terms — in addition to the effects of each individual day-night.
The other day I didn’t hear my alarm and overslept. I hadn’t had a recent or big sleep deprivation and had not taken lorazepam.
On many other occasions, despite having had much greater recent sleep deprivation, having taken a significant amount of lorazepam, and sleeping for only a few hours, I still heard my alarm.
The only explanation I can think of is a latent, ‘invisible’, unpredictable cumulative effect — like that of certain types of anxiety, which sometimes trigger when you’re not feeling nervous or the current circumstances don’t warrant the symptoms.
Finally, if we consider the relationships between excessive heat, insufficient quantity and quality of sleep; anxiety and bruxism, and draw up a table showing the specific immediate effects, the specific delayed effects of all these accumulated problems, and the resulting complex interactions between all these effects — stemming from the various interrelated causes — occurring at the same time, we would undoubtedly have a physiological and psychological picture well worth studying.