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Hack your walk with Nordic Walking Guy’s 3 rules:
- Walk with purpose!
- Be consistent!
- Remember everything count’s but not everything matters!
An interesting article about the history of sleep gives us an idea of its importance and how it evolved to accomodate how we now live. We didn’t always sleep through the night. We used to wake up after a few hours, stay up a bit, and then go back to sleep for a while longer, a process called biphasic sleep.
Main point: Biphasic sleep was the natural way we slept.
More about it:
- Here are the steps in biphasic sleep:
- People retired to sleet fairly early in the evening, generally about 9 PM.
- After a few hours, people began to wake up and stayed up for a couple of hours, usually from 11 PM to 1 PM.
- People did different things during that period of wakefulness, called “the watch.” Examples included catching up on chores, saying one’s prayers (formalized by the canonical hours in the monasteries and convents), ruminating, conversing, having a smoke, and making babies.
- Why it changed to sleeping through the night: During the Industrial Revolution, “Artificial illumination became more prevalent, and more powerful…And in addition to altering people’s circadian rhythms. artificial illumination also naturally allowed people to stay up later.”
Why it matters:
- “One major side-effect of much of humanity’s shift in sleeping habits has been a change in attitudes. For one thing, we quickly began shaming those who oversleep, and developed a preoccupation with the link between waking up early and being productive.”
- “…our sleeping patterns are now so altered, any wakefulness in the middle of the night can lead us to panic…when people learn that this may have been entirely normal for millennia…it lessens their anxiety somewhat.”So it doesn’t matter how you get your sleep, just get it.
- If you do wake up after only a few hours, you’re may just be tapping into how your ancestors slept. In that case, it may be worth treating it as a gift and doing something during that waking period. Of course, it helps if you don’t have to worry about the alarm.
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