Because learning about your brain and sleep can be fun . . .
Can sleeping be considered a real hobby? You just lay there and close your eyes. Hearing that and thinking about it, some might say, What a boring idea for a hobby! People who pursue hobbies usually have events where they get together with other like-minded people. Motorcycle enthusiasts get together with other enthusiasts to ride…
In many ways, Bernarr Macfadden was the “father of fitness. He had strong opinions about how to avoid insomnia. Bernarr Macfadden started a magazine and a popular movement. The movement and magazine had the same name: “physical culture.” Watching what you ate and seeing that you got exercise wasn’t as popular among Americans before he…
There are many reasons to eat moderate amounts of good, healthy food. Eating healthfully, however, can be challenging to do consistently. Anyone who has tried and failed at a diet can attest to this. It’s a daily conflict between the desirability of eating healthy versus the taste and convenience of junk food. As they say,…
As a species, we didn’t start out this way. We weren’t really meant to live amid all this light pollution. It’s progress in some ways, an irreplaceable loss in others. There’s no going back. Our ancestors didn’t have streetlights, neon signs, porch lights, and motion-detecting lights every hour of the day. Light at night has…
You don’t always have to ingest or inject some substance to take medicine. Your body, wonderful living “machine” that it is, is like a compounding pharmacist—it makes a lot of its own. People don’t think of their body making medicine, but it does every hour of every day of every year. Your body produces a…
Every branch of the United States military knows coffee. It’s a “mission essential.” Generally speaking, military members don’t appreciate coffee as a gourmet, though brands like Starbucks and Seattle’s Best are available at many facilities. The military knows coffee in the way that it’s a well-used tool to get the mission accomplished. Whether it’s to…
Why illustrate an article about how to stop someone from snoring with a picture of Charles Atlas? Charles Atlas was not known to snore. Because… Isometric exercise is nothing new. They work. They’re safe. They’re simple. You can do them anywhere. Charles Atlas was known for his ads in comic books and for building his…
Sometimes meeting the need for sleep calls for mental and emotional flexibility. Stuff happens. Airlines cancel flights. You end up sleeping on the floor of an airport lounge. Sometimes you run over something and that something puts a hole in your gas tank. You end up having to sleep on the side of a lonely…
So how well do you think you’d sleep if your muscles kept twitching all night? If someone gives you a hard time about eating somewhat healthfully, tell them twitching all night might be fine for them. You, on the other hand, like to rest when you sleep. They might look at you quizzically. Inform them…
Your mind is pretty much behaving like a game of Jenga. Instead of wooden blocks, however, it’s one worry after another that’s stacking up. Up, up, up, the tower of worries go until they eventually come crashing down. It’s a bad kind of creativity. Instead of coming up with interesting ideas, you’re coming up with…