Are You Getting Enough Sleep? Sleeping properly?

[Gaby]

THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS

It is your central nervous system in the form of your brain and gut that responds to your endocrine system. Your hormones report changes in your HPA axis to your immune system, which uses cytokines or neuropeptides to direct all traffic with regard to homeostasis. The immune system is much more than bone marrow or spleen, peyer's patches or thymus cells. Even the lymph system is only a part of what we call the immune system. Those sites are actually just factories for the production of white cells, lymphocytes, or the now infamous T cells. About eighty percent of the full force of your defensive immune system resides in your intestines or gut. This makes sense, since most toxins will enter through your mouth.

Even though we're led to believe that the immune system is our defense system, nothing could be further from the truth. The immune system i5 planetary, not individual. Our hormonal interface with the world in the form of the HPA axis means that the immune system is really "the mar behind the curtain" working the knobs and dials that make the broil-seem so competent. The elements of the immune system—gut, skin, fa: lymph, brain, and glands—all recognize, communicate, memorize, rear_ and even plan to survive earth changes that have been timed into or.: programming by millennia of experience. These capabilities mean that the immune system is as sentient, on its own, as you think you are.

It also makes sense that eighty percent of the immune system is locate in the gut because the gut was your original brain. As we slithered across rock, pre-"head brain," the neurotransmitters we know, like dopamine serotonin, and norepinephrine, and hormones like adrenaline and insulin ran The Project from your midsection.

The real clue to the overwhelming power and control the immune system has comes in the realization that it is completely mobile, so like free thinking individual you perceive yourself to be. The immune system within is, at least, your equal. Your immune system controls your behavior by controlling neurotransmitter activity. All immune cells have receptors to read both neurotransmitters and hormones controlling energy regulation and sex hormones. By the same token, the immune expressions called cytokines are active in your gut and your brain and your fat base and gonads.

[...]

JUST CHILL

[...]

Mammals in cold climates sleep for months at a time, or hibernate, to slow metabolic processes during food scarcity and darker days. Cooling us down in the dark, melatonin does antioxidant work, times ovarian and testicular function, and revs up the immune system for the next waking period, when we must keep harmful microbes out from behind the front lines.

Sleep is the biggest immunological defense scheme we've come up with yet, because not only does it defend us against other organisms in our environment, it defends us against starvation by the insulin-melatonin system. Insulin is produced only when your body senses sugar or stress. Since stress is heralded by cortisol, and cortisol is elevated as long as you're bathed in light, circadian rhythmicity, or day-night cycles, along with carbohydrates, control your insulin production. Light-and-dark cycles control insulin so you can store fat for hibernation, or dormancy. Long days meant the end of summer and food supply. The short sleep cycles of long days translate hormonally into an increased need for carbohydrates to store fat and cascade other hormones to put you to sleep. Carbohydrate craving is a precursor to sleep that we all still respond to every night that we're up late. Hibernation "drives" drive us to eat ice cream or have a glass of wine after a long day. Remember, a midnight snack is never a hard-boiled egg.

That last thing you think about, the last thing you want to eat before surrendering the light, is always any kind of sugar you can get your hands on.
Insulin secretion is controlled by the food you eat, but the food you want is controlled by your immune system responding to perceived seasonal variation in the light. When your body and brain need sleep to maintain immunity and reproductive capacity, melatonin and prolactin must surge. We even have melatonin receptors on our ovaries and testes that "read" light-and-dark cycles.

Melatonin is a potent antioxidant that, along with prolactin, controls immunity while you sleep. Without sleep, you become defenseless and autoimmune. Your immune system, too, like every other mechanism of life, is comprised of a sacred duality. Th1 and Th2 cells stand on that board on the log as the two halves of your immune function. [...]

I'll continue later on, almost done though.

 

[Gaby]

...before and, since it was a good experience, you make the decision to eat another. 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 Happy Land, that big shot of insulin simultaneously sends the excess sugar to sort-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're eating breadfruit and and whatever that other fruit was your immune system knows must be around the corner and, as every immune system also that means no more breadfruit.

So the insulin and stored sugar, in the form of fat, hits your leg (long-term storage). You're a big eater and you've already got about 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 appetite for carbohydrates. That appetite now goes off.

You stop eating because you have enough energy in short- 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 also day by day.

There is also self-perpetuating feedback loops. They tend to work year by year and season to season. For example, if it's late summer and the days are long and you already have more than twenty pounds of fat plus a full supply in short-term storage, it's a different story. It's a winter's tale. Instead of a negative feedback, a positive one will ensue. A different adaptive and behavioral scenario kicks in, because different environmental buttons have been been pushed. September's days are shortening, so meriting on the "light signal;' nature's evolved a bonus system for a literally rainy day. The positive feedback loop on your newly pounds means you can continue to gain, self-propelled by your own expanding fat base, until all the carbohydrates are really gone.

This will circumvent the light response and buy you a month or two more to get really fat. Only then will the food definitely be all gone for until next spring, when the planet wakes up again. So the end of summer is only the time in actual nature you would ever have full stores and twenty extra pounds, which the long light and short nights have provided.

Prolactin pushed into the daytime by short nights suppressed leptin and left your appetite for carbohydrates (neuropeptide Y) turned on. This gave you the twenty 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 (sugar) that's long gone until next summer. Your leptin receptors on the NPY button go dead from overload. With nc 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 exists 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 we live in is that the food (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 twenty 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 fatter, 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.

HIDDEN AGENDA

Insulin and the counterregulatory hormones cortisol, human growth hormone, and epinephrine deal with the ultimate use of food you take in. They also control sleep, along with melatonin and prolactin. Food human primates exists in a sum total of three possibilities: protein, fat, and carbohydrate.

The pathways of protein, fat, and carbohydrates through the body all distinct. And three distinctly different neurotransmitters control your appetite for the three different substances. The control of carbohydrate intake by the neurotransmitter NPY (neuropeptide Y) is not at all like controls on your appetite for protein or fat. Carbohydrate consumption part of a planetary energy metabolism that holds true for every organism with insulin. Carbohydrates are energy that can be stored, and they can only be stored by insulin That's why you can't eat fat and get fat; but you do eat sugar and get fat.

No other substance that you can eat provokes an insulin response. These different paths for dietary fat and sugar are always and have always been dictated by the interaction of hormones responding to the environment and your stress levels.

Insulin is on one side of the board on the log and epinephrine, cortisol, human growth hormone, and glucagon are on the other. The balance between the two sides of the board is accomplished when a hormone molecule heads for a receptor—often its own, but not always. Remember, survival rests on the cross-talk. Hormones and their receptors are single molecules of different weights.

'Ligand" is another term for any molecule that binds to a receptor—mot just hormones, but brain and gut neuropeptides and immune system cytokines, too. Remember the lock and key metaphor. Receptor molecules Ere large and ligand molecules are small. Ligare is Latin, meaning "that which binds." (Ligare is also the source for the word "religion." It's not a coincidence.) Receptors float up from within the cells like water-lily pads with really long roots. As the pads answer a call to "surface" for an interface, the roots reach to connect with the cell's nucleus. [...]

The receptor changes shape in the presence of a ligand. The receptor molecule actually embraces the ligand's chemical key. When this happens, the receptor begins to wiggle and shudder, and the shimmy or message is passed on as both the receptor and ligand literally, not figuratively, vibrate and hum. In Molecules of Emotion, Candace Pert says that "a more mmaraic description of this process might be two voices—ligand and mentor—striking the same note."

There's the music again.

Hormones, neurotransmitters, and cytokines are ligands whose message is translated by the effect of a molecule tickling a receptor until the disturbance creates a conformational change. Once the receptor is mounted and the crescendo is past, the ligand molecule's message travels along the root of the "lily" deep below the surface to throw switches on the strand of DNA in the nucleus.

 

[Gaby]

SPECIES II

But those of us who remained after the miracle of mobile fire slept less imagined more, and started to talk during the dark, cold time because it wasn't as dark or as cold inside anymore, thanks to the fire. We didn't know that the fire, through its light, could kill without leaving a mark without so much as a blister. We had no idea then, nor do most of now, that being bathed in artificial light during those hours of the nigh: when it had always been pitch black was changing us inside.

Molecules like melatonin, a hormone that we know is secreted during dark time, report on the planet's angle and orbit. When the hours of light stopped varying acutely with the seasons, thanks to the light of fire, our "sentinel molecules" became stuck in a springtime report. It was just enough, at first, to make us a little brighter, too. Dreams that used come in the night sometimes came in the day, thanks to the shifting prolactin production toward morning. We began to imagine. The urge communicate and symbolize those daydreams gave us language.

It was reproduction after the acquisition of fire that set us apart from all other living things by artificially increasing our numbers. Babies longer waited for springtime to be born. We were fertile all year around because it was eternal summer in our ovaries and in our minds. Although a lot of the babies starved at first, there were such a great many more that it was, somehow, easier to bear.

Memory, too, thanks to more dopamine from the light, began to cross our expanding brains with "reward pathways" to give us an intellectual edge. That phenomenon, along with all of the meat we ate in winter, made brain expansion a physical reality, too. Imagine the hornet static mess that all of the up-all-night, up-all-winter, multiplying-out-of control, big-brained, small-minded, eternally hungry, sex-crazed, sensiartists must have created for the rest of the earth's creatures still living. Out of sync with each other and the cosmos.

To be continued...

 

[Gaby]

Those thousands of years of heavy protein and fat intake directly increased brain weight, which fostered the evolutionary neural expansion we've cited. For all human time, man lived and thrived on a diet comprised of eighty to ninety percent protein and its attendant fat content at least seven or eight months out of the year, and the rest of the time on vegetation foraged only in season. The total absence of grindstones and mortars and pestles makes a definite statement on Ice Age nutrition. They never had enough to bother to invent grinding.

Their skeletal remains also testify to their diet. In 1988, anthropologists at Emory University took a look at diet and lifestyle then and now in The Paleolithic Prescription: "By studying the skeletal remains from the Late Paleolithic period and analyzing the attributes of recent hunter gatherer groups, it's possible to develop a detailed anatomical and to some extent biochemical profile. With as little as one limb bone and a formula which relates overall height to limb-bone length, the stature of early man has been deduced. Thirty thousand years ago, Eastern Mediterranean males stood an estimated average 5'10", but the Leakey-Walker fossils indicate: more like an average of 6'2"."

These people attained heights comparable to or greater than those reached by today's "well-nourished" populations.

They go on to say, "These skeletal remains also reflect strength and muscularity; the size of joints and sites where muscles are inserted bones indicate these people's muscle mass and the amount of force the were able to exert. The average Cro-Magnon was easily as strong today's superior male and female athletes. They worked many fewer hour; than the coming Agriculturists, but were significantly more robust."

Even 50,000 years ago, the hominid Homo sapiens sapiens was biologically indistinguishable from us. If he were wearing a hat and sunglasses, you couldn't pick him out in a lineup. Culturally and socially, the sarl traits that kept them alive keep us alive today. We made stone tools, passed down a cultural framework, learned skills, and practiced solutions all within the accepted notions of family and kinship structure. These qualities of life are still recognized today as important to functional mental well-being. Anthropologists and forensic experts who re-create actual faces from fossilized jaws and skull parts say Cro-Magnon faces completely modern.

Although people living between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago had not altered the natural world around them to continue their existence for one million generations, one day some woman, tired of making and remaking said, "Honey, what if we just try growing this stuff right outside the door?" That day, the world changed forever.

It was only 10,000 really short years ago, give or take a millennium, that we became capable of controlling the interactive earth-given food supply that assured our survival. Until this last century, from that distant point ten millennia ago—i.e., during our entire prehistoric existence—we could eat only the carbohydrates that we could steal and tame from the planet's cornucopia. What that means is we've eaten the same kinds of "natural" carbohydrates for the last 9,900 years, and the same amounts.

Not anymore.

No other species has ever had unlimited access to carbohydrate energy without regard for effort, season, competition, and natural disaster. Farming forever altered the balance of nature.

If we were in trouble before, from that moment on, we were in serious danger.

The coming of agriculture 10,000 years ago as a viable alternative to hunting and gathering effectively ended the Paleolithic period and pretty much eliminated the hunter-gatherer lifestyle worldwide. The Neolithic Revolution meant the end of our coexistence with everything else on the earth's terms. From then on, all interactions would be on our terms. "Revolution" implies an intentional overthrow of one institution for another. In reality, the sudden abundance possible when the food supply became controlled by the consumer also provided enough calories to further support the changing patterns of reproduction.

SETTLING DOWN

After we learned to grow "this stuff right outside the door," we stopped moving as much. Instead of following the herds to eat what we needed, we started to store the increasingly tame grains and fruits and meat. [...]

When we settled down to farm, however, the dynamic became weighted toward male economic control. This is where sexual inequity was born.

One farmer could not only nutritionally support more children; sometimes he could support more women and their children. A land "owner," in fact, could support all that and the men to defend the land and the women that these men owned. Somewhere along the way, the big farmer-landowner evolved into a sultan owning 16,000 virgins, because he could feed them. Agriculture translated not only to farmers outnumbering hunter-gatherers; it also became the means for any man to be unimaginably reproductively successful.

 

[Gaby]

SLEEPING, DREAMING, AND DYING

What happens when we don't get enough sleep? Not just fatigue, but obesity, Type II diabetes, depression, heart disease, infertility, and cancer are on the horizon, if you don't fall asleep at the wheel first. Mental and computational insufficiency are garden-variety symptoms of fatigue. But everybody knows the signs are really physical. When you get really tired, you actually ache all over, your eyes burn, and some people actually get a stomachache. These flu-like symptoms would support the bacterial endotoxin-LPS buildup theory. As the endotoxins from the bacteria living in your middle build up from no sleep, you actually get sick from it. But that's just what we cognitively feel as symptomatic cues. Feeling lousy when you lose sleep is a symptom of much bigger, life-threatening things that are unraveling inside of you.

You're losing the beat.

All living things must be part of the project. On the big screen, molecules called chemophores are present in all animals, plants, and bacteria. Think of them as transducers of energy. When hit by light, chemophore cells capture the energy and pass it along. The photons of light enact chemical and electrical changes to the nuclei of all cells. This is a bolt from the blue. This electrification by radiant energy takes place everywhere inside you. Each of your cells is a clock that times exactly one revolution around the sun. All the molecular machinery that you need to keep the beat of the cosmos resides in each individual cell. Every cell in your body is a clock.

You have a gene expressed in every cell of you called dCLOCK. And another one called dBMAL1. The proteins that these two genes code for build up in the cell and join together. The proteins from dCLOCK and dBMAL1, as they join, bind to and throw the switches on two more "clock genes" called per and tim. Per and tim, once bound and activated, begin to produce proteins of their own that in a very general way accumulate inside the cell, just floating in the cytoplasm, around the nucleus, where they join as the hours of the day wear on. That's the "tick."

It's the "tock" that rocks. The tock happens when the proteins of per and tim reach a critical mass floating in the cytoplasm and reenter the nucleus, where they block the function of good old dCLOCK and dBMAL1. And the clock stops—to reset. This negative feedback loop, by stopping dCLOCK and dBMAL1, self-limits per and tim's protein production. In a mechanical clock, the swing of the pendulum to one sidle and then the other involves an ever-so-brief halt before it returns to the other side. In the cell, this evanescent hiccup only lasts as long as it takes for the proteins of per and tim to dissipate in the nucleus. Then it starts all over again. Like a Chinese water clock that drips from one bowl to the other, as soon as one gets full, it trips and pours into the next.

Of course, in your cells, it takes exactly one day, or one turn around the sun, for a complete feedback loop.

This cellular metronome was evident when scientists found photoreceptive cells on the legs of flies called drosophila. To test the same location in humans, researchers at Cornell University put a fiber-optic cable behind the knee of a study subject. They illuminated a patch of skin no bigger than the size of a quarter. The subject was otherwise in complete darkness, yet this small amount of light affected the subject's temperature and melatonin secretion. Imagine what sunbathing, all-night TV, air ravel in and out of brightly lit airports at all hours, and staring at computer screens do to confuse your life-support systems.

Since you are no more than clocks upon clocks upon clocks, if the =ration of light changes it's only a matter of time before ancient switches on millions of genes controlling your physical and mental states are turned on. All of you, every cell in your body, ticktocks. So just turning off the lights at 11:30 P.M. and closing your eyes to the street lights shining in your windows, the green glow of the VCR, or, ironically, your alarm clock isn't fooling even one of your cells.

 

[Gaby]

WHILE YOU WEREN'T SLEEPING

Carbohydrates and insulin comprise the tools we need to survive scarcity only if we know when the time is coming. [...]

THE TRUTH REALLY IS OUT THERE

Studies in 1993 and 1994 reported that human volunteers at the NIH were monitored for hormonal release and brain activity by Dr. Thomas Wehr. The volunteers slept eight hours (a short night) and fourteen hours (a long night). The first result was the obvious: Longer periods of melatonin secretion upped white cell macrophage and lymphocyte production. This is a good thing.

The second most obvious difference hormonally between short and nights was the amount and length of prolactin secretion. This change in melatonin and prolactin secretion reflected the long night's fragmented sleep pattern. The long-night subjects spent as many as five of the fourteen hours lying almost awake. Wehr's group slept in two nightly bouts, each preceded by up to two and a half hours of wakefulness, with a high secretion of prolactin throughout. That means they got a total of about nine hours of actual sleep as we know it. And, in our time, nine hours of sleep is all we know. The sleepless five hours were very much like the awake-alert quiet state infants display repeatedly in a twenty-four-hour period. The brain-wave readings were akin to those observed during transcendental meditation. Interrupting the subjects' reveries—by talking to them—caused prolactin levels to drop.

Wehr's study goes on to suggest that "prolactin in humans probably facilitates a switch to 'quiescent wakefulness: just as it prompts brooding behavior in birds." The NIH doctor does agree that the fourteen-hour dark period in winter, or at least seven months out of the year, is exactly what our ancestors would have experienced before the invention of artificial light sources. This awake-alert period in adults is now an extinct sleep state.

It is statistically proven that ninety or so percent of all babies are born between midnight and 4:00 A.M., the exact time their mothers would, it nature, be in a meditative state with high endorphin (painkiller) levels just like yogis who are able to walk over beds of nails and hot coals without any effect. In this state, an unmedicated birth would be far more tolerable. It was in this period of time, which we no longer have access to that we solved problems, reproduced, and transcended the stress, an most likely, talked to the gods.

In follow-up standardized tests designed to evaluate mood and fatigue subjects exposed to fourteen-hour nights rated themselves as happier more energetic, and more wide awake during the following day. But those tests were designed to uncover only debilitating sleepiness. Sleepiness is only a cognitive symptom. When you're tired, you really are experiencing massive metabolic derangement between you and the bacteria controlling your immune system and reproduction, which is translating to mental aberrations.

Short nights that mimic summer mean:
• Reduced melatonin secretion, which reduces white cell immune function;
• A severe reduction in the most potent antioxidant you have—melatonin;
• Less prolactin at night and way too much in the daytime (prolactin secretion at night means more and stronger NK and T cells. Prolactin secretion during the day means autoimmunity and carbohydrate craving).

 

[Approaching Infinity]

I've been sleeping in a blacked out room for about 3 nights so far. Last night I had an extremely vivid and emotional dream. I was a young woman (interesting gender switch!) who had been separated from her husband/partner (the dream started out as a "high school" dream, and he had to leave for some reason). It had been years and years since that, and I was sitting in a library, studying. He walked through the door and I looked up, saw him, then ran to him, and embraced him. The emotion of the meeting was so overpowering I couldn't stop weeping, for all the suffering of the last years and the joy of being together again. I felt like the crying would never end and I slowly woke up, still sobbing (real tears didn't start until I regained waking consciousness, though). As I came to, the emotion passed and I went back to sleep. It was pretty intense!

 

[Gawan]

Hopefully my tent idea around my bed works out, so I ordered cloth which is used in theaters to block light out, if this shouldn't work I could make curtains out of it. :)

Years ago I was sleeping in a very noisy apartment without any shutters or curtains. So I made a tent with thick cloth around my bed and it worked very well. It also felt like a small sheltered space.

Maybe you'll want to add a layer of silk to your cloth so you have light protection and also waves protection.

Also, I've been sleeping in total darkness for a few days and the dream activity really increased. It's like I'm dreaming non-stop all night long!

That's a very cool idea. :)

And I really like sheltered places, most often during EE I'm covering myself with a blanket.

And thank you Psyche for these quotes, they are really an addition to the diet for example.

Some years back I lived for over a month in the bush (almost no power, only solar power and the main light source were candles) and there we lived also with the sun, woke up as the sun has been rising and went to bed soon after, it was a really interesting experience.

 

[mkrnhr]

:) i dreamt i was a woman two nights ago. I was bathing in some strange (like a rocky bathtub in some rocky mountain with plants in it) water then i went to a cascade to rince. There was another woman there and we were chatting about the colors in the waters.

 

[Turgon]

How are folks dealing with the light that comes through the gaps in your door?

I haven't tried it yet, but figured that draught excluder foam would probably do the trick at blocking the light road the door. For one thing, its extremely cheap.
_http://www.amazon.co.uk/Foam-Weather-Strip-Draughts-excluder/dp/B002OHZX1S/ref=sr_1_36?ie=UTF8&qid=1294923655&sr=8-36

Thanks, Redfox. These strips work at blocking out the light that comes through the gaps. When the light directly outside the door was turned on, it let light seep through (which is never on anyways). But it did block all the other light sources completely that come from either downstairs or the open room at the end of the hallway where the TV is. And seeing as those are the only two light sources that are on during the night, that's all that really matters.

So for anyone else, it's well worth investing in these as they can be found at any local hardware store and are easy to apply.

Edit - A little update. Even though I haven't completely blocked off all light in my room as of yet, I have been going to bed earlier than usual, and am having vivid dreams, two of which in the last week involved Laura and Forum members. Also, a co-worker who hadn't seen me in a few weeks had said, the day after trying this out, that my skin looked healthier and the bags under my eyes (which are sometimes brownish or purple in colour) look much better.

 

[Nathancat7]

I haven't seen this mentioned in the thread. Perhaps it would be beneficial to think about what time you will wake-up after the 8 hours before going to sleep--so that one's bio-rhythms can acclimate naturally to the sleep patterns--even if they vary. Will this work in a darkened room?--yes I think it can.

 

[Nawd]

This is an excellent thread! Thanks!

I learned a heck of lot and it makes perfect sense.

I've blackened my room tonight and I can't see a thing in there now. I put up sleeping bags over the windows, just tacked them up there and there is zero light. But it's the first's night's run, so I don't know yet how much light will come in during the morning. I live in the country so artifical light or noise isn't really much of a problem. Full moons in the fall and early winter are however a problem. I don't know how many times that moon light has made me not sleep, but anytime it comes through my window I stay awake!!!

Also I don't know if I'll be able to wake up to go to work in the morning. :D I've never used alarm clocks, I wake up when the sun rises in a specific light (7am) automaticly. In winter it's when it's pinkish ouside, and summer I can measure the time by the light and shadows.

I don't want to be late for work. I actually don't own an alarm clock.

There was one final light to cover, the space heater. So I put some black tape over the red switch.

I do sleep in a really awsome sleeping bag on my bed. There is no chance of my skin 'seeing' any light. It's one of those -20 degrees appoved sleeping bags. All down feathers and canvis covering. I've called it "My Pod" for awhile now. So there is never any skin exposed to light except my head...and that dang light from the heater--which I fixed.

My question with this post is....what about kids? My children are afraid of the dark and insist on a night light. Should I go and grab it once they are asleep? What about them finding the toilet at night?

 

[3DStudent]

Whoa! Thanks for the quotes Psyche. I really dig all of the science tidbits. That does seem like an important book.

I found interesting the parts about how we messed up in our evolution. So farming wasn't really as good as I thought it was. It allowed for a much greater consumption of carbs and access to food in an unnatural way. And also the invention of the light bulb, which has molded our lifestyle to what we see today. I was thinking that some of these things might have been planned by 4D STS. Like just another thing to tax our bodies, but still keep us alive.

The part about, "You can't get fat by eating fat" is something I think a lot of people don't know. It seems that people are afraid of fat, that they'll get fat if they eat it.

 

[Gaby]

Whoa! Thanks for the quotes Psyche. I really dig all of the science tidbits. That does seem like an important book.

I like the way she writes and half the book is just references. There are some things that sound off, but non the less, it is worth reading.

I found interesting the parts about how we messed up in our evolution. So farming wasn't really as good as I thought it was. It allowed for a much greater consumption of carbs and access to food in an unnatural way. And also the invention of the light bulb, which has molded our lifestyle to what we see today. I was thinking that some of these things might have been planned by 4D STS. Like just another thing to tax our bodies, but still keep us alive.

The part about, "You can't get fat by eating fat" is something I think a lot of people don't know. It seems that people are afraid of fat, that they'll get fat if they eat it.

Yeah, it was really our disgrace. This low-fat and grain-based diet, plus the vegetarian hypothesis. So wrong!

 

[GRiM]

Just like Approaching Infinity, I also have been working on my sleeping via blacking out my room as much as possible. I have been having slight sleep problems for a very long time, but these last days have been much much better for me sleep-wise.

Will try to incorporate the other tips too as I go along.

Thank you for sharing the great sleeping tips and tricks :)