My Shenanigans

- Charles Dickens

via oldfarmhouse

i honestly believe that sleep deprivation is the biggest ignored/neglected root cause of health dangers that prematurely kill adults

ask me sometime about the role of sleep in the leptin ghrelin cycle and how its interruption destabilizes weight homeostasis

or about the new research showing that heart disease is not caused by fat, like we thought for years, but by inflammation in the circulatory system whose root cause is unknown but one of the prime suspects is, you guessed it, sleep deprivation

but nobody wants to hear that lack of sleep is killing people. employers don’t want to hear it. and god knows that having sold their waking hours to capitalism to survive workers don’t want to lose the only time they have left to them to live their lives, mostly stolen from sleep

our society places almost zero value on sleep

on enough sleep

on uninterrupted sleep

on regular, predictable, cycling sleep

- Humans are not meant to sleep for extended periods of uninterrupted sleep. 

By this I don’t mean “humans shouldn’t have 8+ hours of sleep a night”; I mean that we are supposed to sleep for four to five hours (ish), then get up and do something relaxing like reading for a half hour to an hour, then get another bout of four to five hours. This is what our bodies were designed for. 

Sleeping the whole night through was a fad started with the advent of the lightbulb. Sleeping the whole night through is so recent (and artificial) that First Sleep and Second Sleep are mentioned in Dickens’ novels.

- Lack of sleep for even a single night severely compromises your immune system.

If you’re planning on getting little sleep or pulling an all-nighter, make sure to eat lots of fruit and veggies/take vitamins that day. Or even better, get yourself some bee propolis. It’s a natural remedy used for thousands of years in Latin America and is insanely good for boosting up compromised immune systems (if you get the drop kind, put 3 to 4 drops in a spoonful of honey and mix well with a 2nd spoon to mask the strong taste). It has no side effects and is all but impossible to overdose on.

- According to several government bodies around the world, chronic lack of sleep is literally tied for 1st place as the worst kind of torture (the other is solitary isolation)

- Expecting a teen to get up for 8:30 classes is the equivalent of expecting an adult to be at work at 4 am.

After babies, teens are the age group that needs the most amount of sleep. Puberty is exhausting, and the body needs time to recharge. Ideally, a teen should be getting between 10 to 12 hours of sleep at the bare minimum. Most teens are lucky if they manage to get 8. And that’s a gigantic problem; not only does lack of sleep affect mood (which is extra significant when your hormones are already riding a rollercoaster to begin with), but also has massive effects on growth, which is kinda what the whole puberty thing is supposed to be about.

- According to research “starting work before 10 a.m. is tantamount to torture and is making staff sick and stressed”

- Humans were not designed to have the same sleep cycle across the species. Much the opposite in fact.

Night owls and morning people are an actual thing. Because we’re pack creatures, Nature came up with a clever way for our ancestors to always have someone on the lookout for predators and threats: make people naturally alert at varying times so that there’s always someone alert to keep watch. 

i must make…

b e a d l i z a r d

B…

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my oldest patient, so I thought I’d share one of them.  Teddy was born in 1927.  He had been through a couple generations.  His person was refurbishing his original owner’s chair, and wanted him healthy to enjoy it.  Here’s Teddy’s diagnosis photos:

The plan was to recover Teddy’s pawpads (all four so they would match), give him a spa, stitch any small wounds (like his ear), a new felt toungue and give him a new growler.  His current person remembered his growler when she was little, but it hadn’t worked in years.  We were keeping his wear, because he’d earned it after 91 years!

Here’s Teddy starting his spa:

Yep, he sunk into the bubbles. :-)

Teddy had a small heart of original stuffing with a tiny bit of the wood strips from his head.  His new stuffing was all modern polyfiber:

His body had to leave room for a new growler.  The old one had hardly any stuffing around it, and was rubbing against his skin on the inside.  The new one (ordered special from Germany) had to share his torso with the heart and some stuffing.  Teddy’s growler sounds a bit like a lamb, usually making a long “baaaaa” sound, but if you bounce him up and down he goes “ba ba ba ba”.:-)

Here were the first photos of Teddy feeling better:

His person wanted his hand stitching adjusted a bit, and a touch more stuffing in his belly.  Here are the final photos before he went home:

Teddy flew home yesterday to Iowa.  His person wrote:

Thank you for making Teddy a heirloom our family can be proud of for years to come!

And even when he finds the Atlanteans, he treats the culture and people with the utmost respect (peek the scene where the crew has their audience with the king). He never tries to interfere in the people’s way of life nor change them. He’s merely an observer fascinated with the culture/people and just wants to know more about them.

In most movies, the white savior comes into the situation with an attitude of superiority and only through his interactions with the native people (and a lot of times a beautiful native woman) is he humbled and then eventually brought in as an honorary member of the people. Milo never asks for thanks or wants to make a name for himself. He does what he does because he loves it and it’s a way to keep his grandfather’s legacy alive.

ALRIGHT. LISTEN UP.