Sleeping Health

These are some things I have learned over the years to help myself sleep like a baby. FYI, though I mention a little science, it’s from personal experience and from memory, and is subject to errors. Feel free to correct me. This is not a researched article.

I took a three-hour nap today. It was awesome. I welcome your comments to make this even better!

Key Points:

1. Sleep in the right position(s) with the right cushions
2. Make sure the temperature and air flow works for you
3. Work with the melatonin/cortisol cycles
4. Work with the light/dark cycles
5. Manage your activity and eating to prepare the mind and body for good sleep
6. Keep the body flexible and healthy to avoid cramping at night

Sleeping Posture

It is ideal that your muscles rest in a neutral position to avoid creating aches and pains that can wake you up or disturb your quality of life while you are awake. Lying in a prone position (on your belly) at night can be fine, as long as the bed is not too soft or your pillow too high to create a deep arch in the low back.

Lying on the back is fine, but avoid using too thick of a pillow or you may lose some of the natural cervical spinal curve in the neck. You may not really need a pillow at all when lying on the back. Too soft of a bed may also cause the hips to sink too far down into the bed, so one can use pillows to support the hips if the mattress cannot be exchanged. Sometimes pillows placed under the knees can take pressure off the low back. It is recommended to stretch the front of your legs in the morning if pillows are used under the knees, however.

Side-lying positions can be really ideal. Wisdom from yogic traditions tells us that sleeping on the right side is the most conducive to falling asleep quickly. While you sleep on the right side, the left nostril opens for breathing. Having the left nostril open correlates to right brain stimulation, which is more likely to lead to a sleeping state.

In a side-lying position, a pillow should be kept between the knees to keep the knees in line with the hips. A pillow (or two) should be placed under the head to keep the head in line with the spine. How many pillows you use depends on how wide the shoulders are and how soft your bed is. Also, a pillow can be encircled with the arms in front to keep the elbow in horizontal line with the shoulder, to prevent the shoulders from collapsing forward too much while you sleep.

Body Temperature

Most people are comfortable sleeping with the temperature around 60-70 degrees, but this depends on the amount of heat the body releases at night. Some bodies will give off more heat than others.

If you get too hot while you sleep, you may not sleep comfortably. It is recommended to use linens and clothing that allow air circulation to your skin, such as cotton. Tighter-woven linens or manufactured fabrics may prevent air circulation so if you get too hot at night, try using lighter cotton sheets with a lower thread count or change clothing to natural fibers to allow the skin to breathe.

Muscles can also get too cold if exposed to cold, circulating air at night, and can cause muscle cramping. If you wake up with sore muscles, try shutting off fans at night that blow directly across the skin, or cover the sensitive, exposed skin with clothing.

Body Rhythms

In terms of hormones, the cortisol/melatonin cycle determines when we feel awake and when we feel sleepy. Cortisol is depleted during the day and melatonin levels rise. When melatonin levels peak, we feel most sleepy and need to rest. During rest, cortisol levels climb and melatonin is depleted. At peak cortisol, the body awakens.

Sleep can be disturbed when the melatonin/cortisol balance is disturbed. Often stress will throw off the cortisol balance during the day.

Stress causes the adrenals to release more cortisol during the day. After a cortisol release, the body naturally wants to exercise, then rest to increase your melatonin to balance the stress/cortisol spikes. Managing your stress is an important factor in being able to keep your body rhythms on cycle.

Light Cycles

UV light also plays a part in sleep rhythms. The body becomes stimulated by light and sleepy in the dark. Sleep can be disturbed by too much exposure to blue light or UV light too close to bedtime. If you have trouble sleeping and live in a climate with sunlight in the evening, it may help to wear sunglasses in the few hours before bed to start to trick the body into thinking night is coming. Use an eye cover if you are trying to sleep and become aware of too much light.

There are also software programs that dim your computer screen so that not as much blue light reaches the eyes after a certain time of day. Although zoning out to tv images can help you wind down, it is not recommended to watch the television before sleeping because it can be light-stimulating, and if it is left on, sound is the first thing that usually disturbs someone’s sleep.

Keeping your bedtime consistent is the easiest way to keep your body rhythms on track.

Preparing the Body for Sleep – Winding Down

During deep REM sleep, the muscles of the body are completely relaxed (not being sent messages by your brain to fire), and the brain and thoughts are uncontrolled by the conscious mind. Therefore, if you wish to fall asleep, it is wise to prepare the body for this state and not expect it to just automatically shut down on your command.

Ideas to relax the body:

• Do not stimulate the body for 2-3 hours before you wish to sleep. Stimulating activities include exercise with exertion, or taking in substances which stimulate the body (caffeine, sugary, spicy foods, etc.)
• Take a warm bath or shower. Again, avoid stimulation, so not too hot and not too cold.
• Magnesium is the relaxation mineral. You could take a magnesium/calcium supplement an hour before bedtime to aid the muscles in relaxation if your diet is low in magnesium.
• Don’t eat a whole meal in the 2 hours before bed. Digestion shuts down somewhat while you sleep and you will wake up feeling like things are fermenting in your stomach instead of digesting (because they are!)
• Actively tense and relax each muscle group before bed to ensure the muscles all feel relaxed

Ideas to relax the mind:

• Do not stimulate the mind in the hour before you wish to sleep. Avoid hyperfocused activities and activities which produce anxiety, like tasks which require decisions or concentration.
• Listen to calming music, not stimulating music
• Learn mental relaxation techniques to release attachments to thoughts and worries. The more you can let your mind be free and let your thoughts swirl around and weave together without your controlling them, the better you can approximate what the unconscious brain does while you dream. Allow your thoughts to not make sense right before you want to sleep, just lay back and enjoy the show!

Keep the body supple and make resting a habit:

An overworked and under-rested body will tend to cramp up at night. Take time throughout the day to incorporate resting between periods of working and sleep will come much more easily. Learn a daily stretching routine that helps you relax and lengthen your muscles to their optimal resting length. Incorporate non-pattered movements into your day to avoid hyper-focusing the muscles on any one activity. Mix it up!

The more I learn/notice, the more my mind is blown.  I really don’t understand how people just walk around this planet and take it all for granted and hold it all together mentally. It makes me feel either really smart, or really stupid: Smart, that I’ve caught onto something so profound in the mundane, or stupid, that I should take it for granted that it’s profound and go along with it like I’m supposed to be paying attention to something else of greater profundity, or indulging in hedonism.

In looking for and at patterns, I reflect on what my life is manifesting. In times of chaos, I look for signs, directions, currents. I find myself back in a pattern of sorts, that makes me feel young/retarded at an older age. Again, six years into a new “place.” Trying not to tell myself any stories. Noticing who and what is around me. Clearing my paradigms, so that I can avoid the trappings of the One who tells the worst disturbing stories to me. Excited for the opportunities that lay ahead of me, and the chance to reinvent myself, yet again. The chance to recreate new routines, to align myself a little more closely with the parts of the universe which delight me. To get rid of the mismatching, shabby old curtains that someone else picked out, that I got used-to. To travel.

Feeling the upheaval of my next transformation, in a single phone call, where someone hadn’t communicated with me their intention very well, then offers me something I don’t want and assumes me to be like something I am not, and then I have to decide what to be and what to want all over again, and it overwhelms me. I don’t know who I am nor what I want right now. I only vaguely know what I don’t want. There is no yellow brick road, and I’m lost. The wisest people I knew understood a lot of my life would be about collecting experiences. But did they know how frustrating that would feel? And that I would search for answers in really dark places, and feel so isolated that I would want to make something magical out of the nothings that would flutter by, and experience such highs and lows as a result?

Someone old enough to know, listening to my story last week: “Oh! You’re a student!” Yes, it seems so. A student with a bad case of “usefulness-wanting disorder”, or “Anti-art disease”, or “process distrust,” or SOMETHING. If #winning at life requires deep-diving into an object of devotion, I am surely not #winning. I am Gemini-ing. Rejecting un-awesomeness at every turn, without feeling like I’m creating much awesomeness of my own, though there are glimpses. Taking with not much feeling-offered. Being hard on myself. Still getting my bearings. Still learning how to give. And take. Appropriately. And with authenticity. And to communicate.

I must trust, that, if humanity allowed me to be spawned from it, that ya’ll would be really the most happy if I just did what came the most natural and easy to me and made the most sense, in a 20/20 hindsight kinda way. Whatever the hell that is. And I don’t want you to tell me any more anyway.

Perhaps the lesson for the student tonight was simply: Don’t take caffeine on an empty stomach. You have a delicate mood, and it is easily disturbed. Now go to bed.

A wife is loyal to her husband, even though he beats her and abuses his children.

An employee is loyal to the company, even though the organization is failing and the cause of the problem is well-known.

A citizen is loyal to a leader, even though he is a tyrant who causes mass amounts of suffering.

Parenting methods reinforce people’s response to authority. OBEY vs. QUESTION. Therefore, proper parenting, that is, parenting a child as if that child would later be taken on by tyrannical parents, is in society’s best interest.

Proper parenting is like creating a constitution within a person’s mind that limits future destructive powers. It’s powerful :-) Coaches and mentors have opportunities to do what parents cannot for children in these departments as well.

We cannot afford, as a society, to become a nation of tyrants/bullies and passive loyalists.

Just realized how marvelous it is that I have a friend I can call just to have phone sex with every so often. This is a very special situation that requires several factors to align: a previous hot physical relationship with enough spice and variety for some good content and connection, we know what the other likes and what turns them on. We haven’t seen each other in about 1.5 years (moved). He’s got a sexy voice, likes to talk a lot, and keeps a schedule that lines up pretty well with my needs. And neither one of us wants an in-person relationship with the other nor bothers the other person too frequently.

These are the kinds of expressive thoughts that probably prove I’m unsuitable for traditional marriage.

But! I think it’s really neat when someone can fit a specific need in your life so well. That takes a lot of investment, luck, acceptance of what works and what does not, etc., and ultimately is a thing of beauty and art. Yay.

23 year-olds are like puppies: Have to train them and say no to them all the time, but hard cuz they’re so cute and full of energy.

Love that someones calls me “Charlene” and says stuff like, “We’re going to Costa Rica, Charlene.”

Probably had fair warning: “I piss off all the women I date so, no, I don’t have stalkers.” And, nearly every story ending with, “and then they said, ‘You’re an asshole!'”

“I can’t go back to the Mission, people want to kill me there. I’m moving to Portland for a while.”

“All my exes live in the Mission.”

So…I guess I’m finally to that age where you start asking men if they wanna make frozen embryos with you…

I had a most interesting weekend full of stealing, rescuing, and interactions with people and animals.

My St. Patrick’s Day lover came over Friday night as I was drifting off to sleep for my early-rise weekend. I had gone to bed early. I had been meaning to break it off with him, so when I sleepily heard him call my name from outside after I failed to answer the door, I dragged myself out of bed to bring him the nearly-empty tequila bottle he had left at my house, and have a little chat on the front porch. He was halfway through a clear bottle of a Miller Genuine Draft and looked mischievous, as usual, and said he had brought me a present of Kombucha, that he, then, bewilderingly failed to produce from his grocery bag. For being so cute, fun, and charming, he is really just far too young, with work and moral standards leaving much to be desired. Having just revealed to me he had stolen some batteries from Whole Foods for his voice recorder (he couldn’t afford them), and was now in need of a cell phone charger, batting his eyes, I wished him good luck and blew him a hand-kiss, and silently scolded myself for, once again, taking a relationship too far out of sheer curiosity (for, in this case, magic, timing, and novelty). You’ll have to trust me on the upsides to this one, which I won’t go into right now.

Perhaps it was some kind of leprechaun revenge karma then that I got my cell phone and charger stolen three hours away at Chico State University the following day. I left it charging in what I thought was a great spot free from wandering eyes and sticky fingers for a couple hours. Nope. And the kicker was that I had left it just inside what appeared to be a locked batting cage. When I jogged by it briefly an hour in, I noticed people inside. They had just popped a ball out, and asked me to throw it back. I retrieved it for them on my way back, not remembering to check on my phone. I realized later it was most likely them who took the phone. I doubt anyone else would have noticed it. Buggers.

Rescues:

I went to warn a couple groups of people that they were in the travel path of the hammer throw. I have seen someone get hit with a hammer (an 8.8-pound steel ball) at 180 feet out and it is not pretty. A lot of people will falsely assume they are “safe” along the sidelines of a hammer throw competition, even turning their backs, and I know better now. While I was warning this couple I noticed they had the cutest 8-week-old black and white puppy under a blanket, and I got to pet him a few times. They said he had been rescued and turned into a shelter after someone found 7 puppies in a tupperware container on the side of the road. He was already such a loyal pup to his owner, who said they had had him for only one day. He kept crawling into the shade of his owner’s body to get out of the midday sun and falling hard asleep.

Later, I found myself under a tree at the track, and little branches started falling on my head. I look up, and a bird is furiously tearing off little six-inch branches and throwing them down toward me. The bird then seems to find a multi-spoked branch she likes, and flies away, carrying it off in her beak somewhere. Some time later, the bird has made a couple of trips, and I’m sitting on a chair under the same tree and I see a bright green caterpillar drop into the busy footpath. I quickly “rescue” him and take some time letting him crawl on my hand and admiring him before finding him a good branch to live on while he “gets his wings”. Got a few cute shots.

Cute Face

Caterpillar’s New Home

I drove semi-cross-eyed from fatigue back from Chico to San Francisco in the team van, arriving close to 1 a.m. It’s too late to catch the BART, and I decide not to just show up and crash at my old house on the couch in San Francisco like a bum, and instead, take, for the first time, the late night bus back to Berkeley. I already know this will be a minimum 1-hour trip. Thankfully I get a ride to the pickup point, where a different bus pulls up 10 minutes later with a man in it wearing REALLY thick, weirdly misshapen, almost triangular wedge-shaped, eye glasses, thicker in the middle, that appear cracked, foggy, and pointless to the point of being comical. His hair is a little Einsteinian and he is trying to chat up the bus driver, teasing and taking his time, and the driver seems slightly annoyed. It turns from comical to deep as the man gets off the bus with no small frustration and two walking sticks with balls on the ends, and I realize this man is more blind than crazy. It’s nice how, just when you think your life is giving you lemons, someone like this shows up and makes you go, yeah – my problems? Not so bad after all. He asks for help, says his balance is not good, and I help him traverse the island and get across the road to try to find his next bus. He says he’s from LA, and as we pass a sewer manhole he starts going off about how bad the San Francisco sewers smell. Like diapers. And he’s right. Sewers here are particularly repulsive. He says I guess that’s how you know you’re in San Francisco, the sewers smell of diapers, unlike sewers in other cities, he says.

At 1:47am my bus arrives, and I have to leave the blind man alone to depend on another stranger or else I risk waiting 30 minutes for the next bus. I wish him luck and board amidst a cast full of characters. Half an hour in, somewhere in Oakland, a thin young black man gets on and sits next to me. He smells thickly of alcohol and weed, and his music is rapping in his headphones. Ten minutes goes by and he falls fast asleep, leaning toward me, and his head falling notch by notch finally onto my shoulder, where it comes to rest heavily as he knocks out. I decided to just let him rest there. It makes me feel a bit maternal. He has a cute short afro and he has no idea he is leaning so heavily on me right now. Unsure of whether to wake him so he doesn’t miss whatever stop is his, I finally wake him gently after about 10 minutes, a few stops before I have to get off. He smiles apologetically, mostly sleepily, realizing he had probably trespassed my space, but not knowing to what extent, and keeps an upright posture the remaining time.

A nice lady originally from New Jersey sits across from us with her husband, they both appear a little tipsy. They transferred seats after they noticed a noxious odor coming from a rather short and round woman with a small head, her hair wrapped up in a dirty wrap, who after pacing the aisles, decides to sit in front of them. The New Jersey woman has beautiful, loving and sparkling eyes, and a strikingly misshapen mouth where parts of the jaw don’t line up and teeth are missing or not aligned.  She chats me up about being from Montana, and she likes my earrings my friend U made. We talk about family and the pace of life in California versus the east coast (the reason she moved out here). She tells me to be safe as I leave the bus to walk home.

It was actually kind of nice to bump into so many “others” this weekend and have some good exchanges. LML

PS – I got to pet a huge iguana today, named Skippy. He was strapped to his owner’s back, riding on a bicycle down Valencia street during Sunday Streets. Couldn’t get a picture as my memory card went with my stolen cell phone yesterday :-)

I visited Harbin Hot Springs last weekend to “celebrate” my upcoming birthday 4/16. My original plan, conceived 6 months ago, was to take one of those open top tour buses around San Francisco like a tourist, then go out for dinner. I like the idea of treating your city like you don’t live there, sometimes it helps you appreciate it more. This might have been a good time, but somehow, at the last minute, a weekend free from track meet competitions opened up and I decided to cancel my bus celebration and do something that felt way more awesome: get out of town to the country, camp, and soak naked in some hot water out in the fresh air for a weekend.

I’m glad I went. It was perfectly relaxing and lovely. They also sell my favorite chocolate there: Sacred Steve’s Sacred Chocolate – and my friend N. picked out my favorite bar, by coincidence (The Amazonian) to give me for a birthday present.

While I was there, I had a few minutes to read from a book I’ve had a while on organization. I got a couple good ideas (choose my clothes in advance! pack lunches in advance! sort incoming files by “To Do, To Pay, To Read, To File”, etc.). So I was feeling good about coming home and getting more organized. I even chose three pet projects to start working on.

It’s just that….

The teacher/coach who knew me best in high school said something like, “She has a lot of interests and talents and it may take her a while to find her niche in life.” I didn’t understand what he meant at the time, but those words came back to me today as I struggled to put my finger on how to spend my time at the moment.

I think I’m learning a few things about myself:

1) I lead best by doing. I need to be doing what I am teaching. I enjoy teaching after someone asks me a question, or asks me to teach. It’s important to me that someone is hungry for information.

2) While I can initiate activity, I prefer to be attracted into an activity. I think of the friends I had in grade school and high school. I like going along with someone else’s good idea and making it even better.

3) I enjoy creating systems and organizing information and objects.

4) I need to write more.

5) I like starting businesses, but only when I’m truly compelled by the passion of the idea. And even that has led me astray in recent months (passion), so not sure I can trust that as a guide anymore either.

6) I love politics, specifically the discussing of ideas about how to make our lives better and how to make our communities and businesses more aligned with our values. I don’t understand my place in politics however. I do not enjoy lobbying, nor do I have any current affiliation (though I am leaning Green Party), nor do I even have community.

So it really feels like I am “starting over” at 33. Mentally, I feel like I did after graduating high school: looking around for clues as to what to do next.

One of my inner voices is saying: “Stop mulling over it and just get three jobs already like a responsible adult would and pay off your debts.”

One of my other inner voices is saying: “You can’t have the lifestyle you dream of if you continue short-term thinking and take shit jobs that take your time, energy, and creativity away from other more amazing opportunities.”

And I’m not sure which one to listen to. I’m inclined to listen to the second voice because I’ve spent my whole life listening to the first voice. I guess that’s why I’m dragging on my painful indecisiveness so long, and torturing myself with the financial and emotional uncertainty that accompanies inaction.

I’m ready for a wealthy, healthy, thriving phase of life, and I want to make choices in line with that desire.

I’m determined to restore my own vision naturally. Time for a new protocol!

I have a hunch the focus exercises are way more beneficial than the eye exercises, so I’m swapping emphasis. Also, I think one has to “correct” for the anount of near-work focus one does. Will try to incorporate that as well!

No corrective lenses for one month

Morning:
1-2 Eye Exercises for controlled Eye Movement
5 Minutes “Far Focus” exercises with plenty of blinking (2.5 mins each eye)

Throughout Day:
Balance each focused “near-work” phase with one “far-focus” correction

When walking, each trip perform at least one intense “far-focus” to avoid “lazy eyes”

Evening
1-2 Eye Exercises
5 Minutes “Far Focus” challenges

Standing at a new crossroads in my life…

I have a lot to think about.

I’m at a friction point, where I am not making enough money to support myself, and I’m feeling the need to figure out how I can be most useful/valuable to society so that I can escape being broke all the time. Being broke means you miss opportunities. You miss family. You miss the spontaneous part of you that can’t just go do what the heart desires. Being broke holds me back. Some might argue this is a good thing! But it feels more deflating and restricting than helpful really. I’m not sure that others are being helped by it. Looking at my tax history, I learned that I managed to get by on $200,000 for six years in San Francisco. That’s 33K/year, in a city where the median income is like $80K/year. It sucks.

I’ve spent the last six years making conscious choices around what I want to do with my time and energy. That is significant, given that my college years were very much guided by me not feeling safe to pursue what I enjoyed doing, to some extent. I started my own business(es), I coached college athletes, I became a yoga teacher, and I worked for a federal government contractor. And I tried every part-time job on the side that would accept me, which led me to meet dozens of amazing people, not to mention create 6 new amazing families via egg donation.

But none of it really panned out. I learned that I do not like setting up a shop and running it. Correction: I like setting up a shop. I do not like running it. I learned that federal government work is really interesting – but I do not have the patience to jump through hoops and red tape. I learned that I loved teaching athletes new skills, being outside for work, and learning more about health and wellness, but I have zero interest in becoming a head coach or staying with any particular program.

It’s like with my Chemical Engineering degree. I loved learning about the environmental side of it. But I’m not all that interested in the daily job of cleaning up the environment. I’m not all that interested in creating new chemicals. I’m not all that interested building facilities that extract oil.

After all this, I start to feel judgmental toward myself, like, jeez, some people would die to have just one of your opportunities, yet you’ve passed on all of them. And have no interest in going back to any of them.

People listen to my life story with wide eyes and a slack jaw. So far, it’s a meandering, somewhat bold, and suspenseful story with no defined ending.

So I’m at a new juncture.

I have friends who have tried to cheer me up, saying, it will all come together eventually. All these experiences and skills will somehow culminate. But now I’m just frustrated. Financially, and directionally. I’ve cast a wide net, and pulled in many nuggets of wisdom (i.e. failed a lot), but have no idea what to do with them from here.

I got super fired-up listening to Obama and Romney talk about healthcare and the economy. It reminded me that health is simple, and we find myriad ways to mess it up. And now the whole country is suffering economically and creatively because of it. And I want to help. I just want to feel really helpful actually. And although I love the Mother Teresa axom of helping one person at a time, the person closest to you, it doesn’t get you far if that one person isn’t paying your rent and your back taxes and your student loan, feeding you, and helping you travel to see your family, and paying for your continued education, etc. etc. etc.

So I want to be helpful on a larger scale. God knows I have enough talents and skills to do that.

I think I’m on a new path about how to work within a community.

The closest thing to a community I experienced growing up was our church and school systems.

My parents were separated from their communities in a lot of ways. My father often worked out of state. My mother stayed at home with us. We viewed the wealthy with suspicion, so it was more of an antagonistic rather than synergistic relationship. When you’re accustomed not not getting enough, not having enough, you can start to blame the system, and the “haves” for your condition.

Perhaps I’m just on a final push out of the poverty mindset. I want to be able to connect with others in the community and even in the nation to accomplish things together. It’s just that I’m not sure where to come from (I have no organization nor a clear sense of trajectory). And I’m not sure where to go!

I think this is what is delaying my “Center for Public Wellness” concept that I had spent the past few months contemplating and defining. I want to organize people on a large scale, but I’m not sure I have the skills to do so. In fact I do not have any demonstrable skills in this area. It may take only a small spark to light a fire, but…