I really like this, I've never seen a premise quite like it!
(Wow, I was commenting on LW thirteen years ago...) I didn't suggest saying this out of the blue! My recommended riposte borrows the story protagonist's vocabulary and tone. If a woman asks you:
"What you're saying is tantamount to saying that you want to fuck me. So why shouldn't I react with revulsion precisely as though you'd said the latter?"
then, it may be appropriate to discuss, optionally using the word "fuck", why she'd react that way if you'd asked that question, which you didn't, having instead (as in the story) made a much more innocuous suggestion, neither culturally inappropriate nor abrupt and crass.
There's this though it is imperfect.
My impulse here is to itemize - X hours for this step, Y for that step, Z as safety margin in case of P, Q, or R.
I don't have a great episodic memory so I can't be as detailed as one might hope about the trajectory from 2010, but I think it worked fine! I no longer do much active mood maintenance. I'm on an SSRI again as of last year, but that's about energy levels and "anxiety" (I don't experience anxiety-the-emotion that often, but I seem to maybe have the underlying correlate of anxiety disorders that just pops out differently). I am sometimes irritated, frustrated, bored, exasperated, etc., but seldom sad and often happy..
This post is very interesting and I'm excited to hear back from anyone who is going to experiment based on it. My experience with sleep deprivation is mostly centered around having children; my functioning is unquestionably impacted by that kind of fragmented and reduced sleep (especially emotionally) but maybe a solid yet shorter period of sleep would actually be fine. The trouble is I'm not sure how I'd check... because I've found that if I have an alarm set to go off in the morning, not only is it in itself staggeringly unpleasant, it makes me anxious enough that I sleep very poorly the night before. I've gone to a lot of effort to (kids and all) arrange that I can sleep in as late as feels right.
Isn't lithium in water linked to lower depression rates and not really something you'd want to straightforwardly remove even if it turned out to be making people fat? I guess you might win on net if it turned out you could cure about that much depression with lotsalightboxes and be rid of obesity in the bargain, but it's at least a little complicated.
Your link to Quillette is broken for me.
Related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9ZodFr54FtpLThHZh/experiential-pica
I will also match this bounty, and encourage others to do the same.