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15 Jul 2024
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Why Am I So Tired All the Time?

Al Herpin of Trenton, New Jersey, died on January 3, 1947. He was 94. Herpin spent a large chunk of his adult life making a peculiar claim: that he never slept.

It’s unclear whether Herpin had a sleep disorder, or was confused, or was just a weirdo liar, but he made headlines regardless. “The man’s story is sustained by physicians who have examined him,” The New York Times first reported in 1904. This admittedly came at the tail end of the Yellow Journalism era, but let’s for a moment entertain the idea that Herpin never slept. How’d he manage that? And why are the rest of us, even though we (presumably) don’t share Herpin’s purported superpower, so dang tired all the time?

There are two universally dependable subjects of small talk: the weather, and complaining about perpetual exhaustion. In your teenage years, that manifests itself as some iteration of “OH MY GOD I’M SO DEAD” in between classes; in adulthood, it takes the form of the subtle head nod exchanged when you and a co-worker converge at the coffee machine to gorge yourselves on caffeine and talk about…the weather. Everyone, everywhere is officially resigned to perpetual sleepiness. Here’s what we know about why this problem exists, and what you can do about it.

The science of sleep

This part you probably know: To be less tired, you need a consistent amount of sleep. Not necessarily eight hours, but that’s ideal, and it must be uninterrupted, complete with several REM cycles. Otherwise, you’ll accumulate sleep debt, which is like credit card debt, except physically draining instead of financially ruinous.

This part you might not know: The typical sleep schedule for humans in WEIRD countries (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) is wildly different than it was throughout the rest of human history, according to David Samson, Ph.D., a sleep anthropologist at the University of Toronto. By default, early primates adhered to a rigid system that involved falling asleep when the sun went down and waking up when the sun rose. Hunter-gatherers figured out how to use fire and thus weren’t as beholden to passing out at dusk, but they often slept in shifts to watch for predators. Only since the mid-19th century have post-industrial humans aligned their sleep around the ol’ nine-to-five day at the office.

“When you want to look at ‘normal’ sleep, you can’t look at us,” Samson says. “In our society, where we have 24/7 access to light and to temperature regulation, we have basically just muted our circadian amplitude.” In other words, we’ve stuffed nature’s blueprints for sleeping in the trash, which could have something to do with why we’re so bad at it.

No one knows for sure, though. “It might be that post-industrial sleep is by far the healthiest way to sleep,” Samson says. And by comparing WEIRD-country data to data collected from studies of the world’s few remaining hunter-gatherer groups, researchers are reasonably sure that on balance, our ancestors indeed got fewer ZZZs than we do; they had more napping opportunities during what Samson estimates to be a roughly 18-hour “work week,” but weren’t keen on long, monophasic blocks of uninterrupted sleep. They also didn’t have comfy mattresses at their disposal.

Samson is sympathetic about the whole Ugh, I’m exhausted thing—to a point, because relatively speaking, we’ve got it pretty good. Mouse lemurs, for instance, sleep 15 hours a day. “Being a mouse lemur would probably make you feel way more tired than you do as a human,” Samson says. “We’re reliant on high-quality sleep, but we’re remarkably resilient to sleep deprivation.”

Get enlightened

To slow down the accumulation of sleep debt, wear blue-wave-light-blocking glasses, which can help promote sleep onset at night, Samson says. Any method of reducing the amount of light around you at night is a smart approach, actually; he even tried an experiment where he walked around his home only by candlelight, which worked pretty well, although he admits it wasn’t so practical.

What about at work? “There’s some evidence that if you want to keep your circadian rhythm nice and tight, actually getting some exposure to your environment—going outside, sitting out there for a half an hour in the sunlight, even if it’s cold out—is good for strengthening your circadian rhythm,” Samson says. Light and temperature are the two biggest factors that affect how tired you are on a day-to-day basis. Keep tabs on them, and you’ve got a fighting chance.

Naps: not just for kindergartners

Around 3 P.M., our body temperature starts to drop, and we get super sleepy. When that happened to our ancestors, they shamelessly curled up and passed out. But in order to achieve MAXIMUM WORKER PRODUCTIVITY, the United States has generally pooh-poohed this tendency, which is a shame. When you start to fade, a nap is always helpful, should you have the luxury of being able to take one; the practice is normal and not a sign of laziness, unless you’re doing it to put off all the errands you have to do on a Sunday afternoon. And even then, you probably deserve it.

Blame your parents

To a certain extent, your drowsiness isn’t totally within your control, because humans encode their preferred sleep schedules in their children. “If you look at things like REM, it’s very heritable,” Samson says. “Things like homeostasis—whenever you’re sleep-deprived, and how strong your drive is to go back to sleep—are 90 percent heritable. Your chronotype, and where you are on the ‘lark versus owl’ continuum? That’s moderately to highly heritable.” Next time you nod off at work, remember that it’s really mom and dad’s fault. Your boss can’t argue with science.

The promise (?) of a less sleepy future

David Prober, Ph.D., a professor of biology and biological engineering at Caltech, is studying zebrafish—these little guys—as part of an effort to improve sleep for humans who suck at it. “Their brains are structurally and anatomically similar to ours but much simpler and smaller, and we can use them to identify genes and neurons that regulate sleep,” he explains.

What Prober has uncovered thus far is that specific neuropeptides in zebrafish brains—and probably our brains—regulate whether it’s time to go to sleep or not. “Activating” the neurons that produce these neuropeptides, he says, made the zebrafish get sleepier. Prober believes in 10–20 years, it’ll be possible to identify which neuropeptides have the same effects on humans. “If we can target pathways that specifically regulate sleep, hopefully we’ll be able to mimic a natural sleep state and get the benefits of sleep without the side effects that you might get from something like Ambien.”

Prober cautions that while sleep disorders might be treatable, a Herpin-like, Limitless-esque goal for everyone is highly unlikely. “It could very well be that sleep is doing many beneficial things,” he says, “and it may not be possible to find one drug that will take care of all those things without us having to spend eight hours asleep. I think that’s pretty far in the future, if ever.”

This unfortunate reality check is one of many things that call Al Herpin’s story into question. “Humans have always had better things to do than sleep,” says Samson—but that doesn’t mean we don’t need it. “I bet he was getting microsleeps throughout the day. He’d get deep delta sleep for 15 seconds and then wake up. But you can’t not sleep.” To those who wish otherwise: Keep dreaming.

Original article here

12 Jul 2024
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Everyday Philosophy: Is it better to forget your past or keep revisiting it?

I have conflicting thoughts about letting go of the past and repressing negative feelings. Does documenting our bad experiences in personal writing, a diary, or poetry actually help us in the long run?

~ Dee, US

Immanuel Kant had a manservant named Martin Lampe, whom he cared deeply about. Kant was a strict and austere man, but he committed to his relationships with the resolve of a man whose entire philosophy was based on doing the right thing. For forty years, the two wedded their lives together. The peculiar Kant and his dutiful servant. But then, one day, things turned sour. History is unclear on the details—it might have been drunkenness or theft—but Kant had to let Lampe go. Kant was devastated. Living hand in glove with another human for 40 years is a kind of love, and this was a kind of divorce. And so he pinned a note above his desk saying, “Forget Lampe.” Every day he would not forget to forget Lampe.

Of course, this is ridiculous. You cannot easily force yourself to forget something or someone. In fact, the more you try, the harder it becomes. But you can stop yourself from reliving those memories. This is what lies at the heart of this week’s question. When something bad happens to you — something traumatic, even — how far should we try to move on and how far should we try to unpack our past? I do not have a psychology degree, and I am not a psychotherapist, so I will approach this from a philosophical point of view and ask: How important is our past to our future? Should Kant try to forget Lampe or carry his memory as part of him? Should Dee let go of the past or dig it up and face it down?

To answer that question, we will look at two radically different answers. The first comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, who says that, sometimes, forgetting is an act of self-creation. The second, Edmund Burke, offers a curious, and possibly controversial, opinion: Sometimes reliving our past is a beautiful experience and worthy of that alone.

Nietzsche: Live like the beasts

Philosophers have a curious relationship with animals. Some, like John Stuart Mill, see them as a source of pity. When he wrote, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” he was arguing that human intelligence and higher faculties are what allow us to be supremely happy. But, roughly around the same time as Mill, Nietzsche was arguing the complete opposite. He wrote:

Observe the herd, which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today are. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard for man because he boasts to himself that his human race is better than the beast and yet looks with jealousy at its happiness.

There is an innate in-the-momentness to being a beast. They are unworried by the past. They do not care about their past mistakes and wrong turns; they just keep moving forward. The beast is not bowed low by the “invisible and dark burden” of their memory, but rather they live what Nietzsche calls “unhistorically.” Of course, no one can meaningfully live without remembering things to at least some degree. Cows might enjoy chomping on grass all day long, but I am not a cow. I cannot change that. Nietzsche’s answer is a kind of mental realignment and a useful self-help strategy: View the past as a resource to be mined.

You have a whole library of memories. Some are traumatic, and some are happy. Some are pointless, and some are deeply important. For Nietzsche, we should “appropriate or forcibly take from the past” what we can. We use the past and bring it into ourselves like an elixir. But if that past is poison and weakens us, then forget it. Move on.

So, Dee, Nietzsche would ask this: Does your diarizing about your hard past make you better, stronger, and fuller? If yes, go on and do it. Breathe it in and “transform it into blood.” But if it leaves you broken, scared, or worse, forget it.

Burke: The beauty of trauma

Writing a century or so before Nietzsche, the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke offers an interesting take on this: What if there’s an aesthetic benefit from remembering our trauma? For Burke, the “sublime” is an aesthetic experience that is “capable of producing delight — not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror — which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all passions. Its object is the sublime.” The sublime is when we stand at the foot of a huge, crashing waterfall or in the middle of a flashing thunderstorm. It’s the booming chant of a stadium in song, and you’re staring at the enormity of the night’s sky. It’s appreciating the terrible from a safe position.

Traumatic experiences and a broken past are terrible. They are life-wrenching and often life-breaking. But they are in the past. They are no longer, in and of themselves, a threat to us. So, when we dig up and stare at these experiences, we encounter a moment of the sublime. We are pulled to the terrible beauty of the darkness inside of us. We pick at scabs and relive past trauma because we enjoy the aesthetic experience of the matter. The masochistic pleasure we get from digging up our past is not new wisdom — it’s found in ancient philosophy and in Freud — but Burke’s spin is interesting. It treats our past as a kind of artifact to appraise — an item in a museum to enjoy, safely behind the rope.

Dig it up or bury it deep?

As is almost always the case in these kinds of dilemmas, so much depends on what we do not know. We do not know exactly what “bad experiences” Dee is talking about, and we do not know what’s going on in her mind when she relives them.

Ultimately, I think Nietzsche’s advice is sound. It amounts to the saying, “If you’re better off forgetting, do so” and, “If it makes you stronger, remember.” This is true for everyday acts like keeping a diary and talking with friends. It also applies to therapy. Anecdotally, it therapy seems to work. Almost everyone I know who is in or has come through therapy says the experience is a good and healthy one. But the Nietzsche test ought to apply here as well. After six months, a year, or whatever, it’s useful to ask, “Am I a better person after talking about all this?” If not, then perhaps it’s time to try something else. Perhaps it’s time to forget instead.

Original article here

09 Jul 2024
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Why Being Near Water Really Does Make Us Happier

Every time my brother crosses the Sagamore Bridge from mainland Massachusetts to Cape Cod, we all know where he’s headed: a sandy spot off an ocean road on the Nantucket Sound, home to the little beach club my family has belonged to for over 30 years. On clear days, you can see the shores of Martha’s Vineyard in the distance. That’s his water.

If you talk to Wallace J. Nichols, Ph.D., a marine biologist and the author of Blue Mind, a book about the physical and psychological benefits of water, for long enough, he’ll eventually ask you what your water is. And as it turns out, nearly everyone has an answer.

Since humans started exploring the planet, we’ve followed the water. Crossing oceans gave way to new discoveries and changed the course of history; chasing rivers opened our horizons. As travelers, we seek waterways on vacation, driving new coastlines in search of wild surf spots. We return to familiar “blue spaces” we grew up around. Month after month, water graces the covers of travel magazines like ours.

The immeasurable sense of peace that we feel around water is what Nichols calls our “blue mind”—a chance to escape the hyper-connected, over-stimulated state of modern day life, in favor of a rare moment of solitude. Research has long found that humans are pulled toward Mother Nature’s blue for, in part, its restorative benefits. Take the Victorians for example: Doctors in that era prescribed “sea air” as a cure for all sorts of issues, from pulmonary complications to mental health conditions.

More recent studies—including those out of a UK-based project called Blue Gym—have found that people who live near the coasts are generally healthier and happier. Other studies find that when shown photographs of natural green spaces, people’s stress levels drop, but the more blue spaces in the photos, the more people prefer them. Nichols, who has spent the last 25 years studying our relationship to water, has heard of everything from a drop of dew on a flower to the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, providing a sense of calm.

Real estate data even suggests a water view tacks a 116.1 percent premium on a property; and real-world figures suggest we’re willing to pay 10 to 20 percent more for the same room with a sea view in a hotel. For the ultimate in luxury, we seek out overwater bungalows in the Maldives, and underwater hotels all around the world. And even in places where water isn’t always a given, such as urban metropolises like Pittsburgh and Austin, crowds frequent refurbished river ways and gather in fresh water pools. Paris, too, now has its long-anticipated canal swimming pools, where tourists and locals alike can take a dip.

Our love of water is pervasive, and the reasons behind why we travel—and rack up vast credit card bills—to be by the water can be hard to articulate. “You’re paying for a feeling,” Nichols tells Condé Nast Traveler. “When you ask people to describe that feeling, it’s hard for them to describe other than to say they really like it, need it, and are willing to pay a lot of money for it.”

Take travelers by their own words. Cassie Abel, 34, a communications manager in Sun Valley, ID grew up on Vashon Island, WA, the largest island in the Puget Sound. “I love the water because it’s so much bigger and more powerful than anything else on Earth,” she says. “It’s moody—sometimes it’s the most calming presence, sometimes the most turbulent.”

Lara Rosenbaum, a 38-year-old writer and editor based in landlocked Nashville shares a similar sentiment. “Water pulls on me the way the moon pulls on it. It’s just in my blood and bones. It makes me feel alive in a deep, calm way. It sort of brings me in.”

Rosenbaum isn’t wrong, either. While water makes up about 70 percent of the human body (and about 70 percent of Earth), it also comprises 31 percent of our bones. “When we are by the water it…cuts us off from the rattle and hum of modern society,” says Nichols. “Moving water is expert at masking noise, especially the sound of the human voice,” he says, noting that the human voice is considered the number one source of workplace stress.

Offering us an auditory break, water even helps us fall asleep. “There is some research that says people may sleep better when they are adjacent to nature,” explains W. Christopher Winter, M.D., author of The Sleep Solution. “No wonder sleep machines always feature the sounds of rain, the ocean, or a flowing river.” One small study out of Northwestern University found that people who fell asleep listening to “pink noise”—sounds like rushing water or rain falling on pavement—not only slept more deeply but the experience also boosted their memories.

Jim Tselikis, co-founder of Cousins Maine Lobster, grew up in a small coastal town in Maine where everything from the rising and lowering of tides to the smell of fresh salty ocean air plays a role in the everyday. He remembers a fog horn from Portland Head Light, a mile from his bedroom. “The sound was so soothing. It represented the ocean, where I loved to be on muggy summer days, when I wanted to get away from the stress of school or work, or where I wanted to find peace.”

Currently living in Los Angeles, Tselikis says: “Every time I drift asleep I think of that fog horn back home and my need to someday return.”

When we physically enter the water, our body can rest muscles used every day, and work others that are used far less frequently. Not only that, but we give up gravity, something that’s somatically a break for your brain. For some, time spent in the water is an opportunity for insightful thinking, creative output, and quality conversations.

“If we are close to someone, they join us in that private bubble and conversations become more intimate; an intimate conversation while walking the beach with waves nearby becomes more private,” Nichols says. “People a short distance away can’t hear our words, and 180 degrees or more of our surrounding is open blue space.”

When Jenn Lawson, a 33-year-old member of San Francisco’s South End Rowing Club starts her days swimming in the Bay, she says, “Everything pulls into perspective—my divorce, work worries, anxieties about the future. The world focuses down to the next breath, the feel of the water on my skin, the glimpses of the foggy skyline, or the Golden Gate bridge glowing with the morning sun. In the water, everything becomes clear.”

The Science of Wanderlust

Are some people genetically predisposed to travel? Science says maybe.

Marie Stanislaw, a 69-year-old who lives on Vashon Island, WA adds: “Swimming in lakes and oceans, the water encompasses me…I can float for long stretches in salt water and feel totally peaceful.”

Charlie MacArthur, of Aspen Kayak & SUP in Aspen—who grew up surfing in Southern California and Hawaii, but moved out to Colorado for the snow—says that in his early days in the landlocked state, he returned to the coast when the snow melted. “I could not fathom living inland during the summer.” Then he discovered mountain rivers and started raft guiding in 1983. “Soon I was teaching kayaking for the Aspen Kayak school. I also took my surfboard on the river to surf big standing waves that would form during the spring floods,” he says. MacArthur has since traveled the world—New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Peru—paddling and surfing new rivers and oceans.

So, what do we miss when we miss out on water? Ask Andrew Gray, a 25-year-old from Oklahoma City. Growing up in a landlocked state, he didn’t see the ocean for the first time until college.

“I had watched so many movies, documentaries, and shows and was always fascinated with the idea of not being able to see land on the other side of the water,” he says. “I think the fact that there is this feeling of being ‘trapped’ in a land-locked state just made that desire so much stronger to breathe in the ocean air and lose yourself in its vastness.”

That’s why he signed up for Semester at Sea during college, a four-month-long study abroad program that takes place on a globe-roaming ship. While drifting out of the port of Southampton, England he finally saw the sea up close. “It had such a still and calm presence, but there was this overarching feeling of being in awe and feeling completely tiny and helpless—that there was this force of reckoning beneath my feet. I was completely speechless, just staring off the aft of our ship for about 30 minutes,” he remembers. “It was very humbling, I will never forget it.”

Without water, then, we miss a part of ourselves, perhaps.

A California resident, Nichols recalls natural disasters such as the state’s multi-year drought. “Simple things like taking a shower made you feel bad,” he says. “But if your shower or bath was your moment of solitude and clarity and disconnect—if that was your ‘blue mind’ moment—it was taken away. It became a source of guilt and stress and fear and anger.”

‘Our oceans, waterways, and the life they contain are so much more than their ecological, economic, and educational value. They have vast emotional benefits. They make life on earth possible, but also worth living,’ says Nichols.

Issues like pollution, oil spills, and droughts don’t just have ecological and economic costs, then, but emotional ones, too, Nichols argues. “Pollution shatters our ‘blue mind’ experience—even in beautiful places,” he says. “The beach can become sad. The ocean can make you angry or frustrated.”

During a U.K. study last year, researchers observed people during a visit to the aquarium: Participants watched an empty tank of water, a partially-stocked tank (home to fish, crustaceans, and plants), then a fully-stocked tank, containing double the number of species. Other experiments involved measuring people’s heart rates and blood pressure while watching either an empty, partially-stocked, or fully-stocked tank. As it turned out, even just looking at an empty body of water at an aquarium proved to be relaxing. But the experience grew boring after time. The antidote? Biodiversity.

As wildlife, flora, and fauna increased in the tank, so too did the therapeutic benefits of standing there. With more wildlife, people’s blood pressure and heart rates dropped; and the longer they wanted to stay. It’s a poignant argument for keeping our planet healthy.

“Our oceans, waterways, and the life they contain are so much more than their ecological, economic, and educational value. They have vast emotional benefits. They make life on earth possible, but also worth living,” says Nichols. “I like to imagine the world would be a better place if we all understood just how true that is. Water is medicine, for everyone, for life.”

Original article here

05 Jul 2024
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If the calling runs through you…

Eight years ago my husband and I gave away pretty much all that we owned and headed off on a year and a half of travel round the world. This was the third time in my life that I had let go of a version of my life and leapt into the abyss without knowing where I’d land. In all three instances they were the best thing I could have done … as each of those leaps led me to here. And here is a destination so far beyond my earlier life reckoning of who I was and what I could be up to, that I am even now still astounded by it.

My point: If the calling runs through you, if you see a dream of a different life in your visions, if you know you’re meant for greater things than you’re currently experiencing … then dive my friends, dive. The water is awesome and the beaches deevine!

About the Author:

Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

Why Am I So Tired All the Time?

Everyday Philosophy: Is it better to forget your past or keep revisiting it?

Why Being Near Water Really Does Make Us Happier

If the calling runs through you…

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