I've read that the concept of a solid chunk of sleep in total darkness and isolation is not traditional to humans.
What do you make of this?

http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn..._25_99/bob2.htm


SO this is evidence people evolved getting a lot of sleep... but it doesn't support the advice to sleep in total darkness, for at least a solid 9 hour block. People sleep in large communal groups, and they are lit by fire... they sleep and wake irregularly.

Oh one more thing:


That people, in a natural environment, sleep and wake irregularly - and the existence of night owls and morning people - are a survival advantage. If someone is more likely to be awake at night, and someone more likely to be awake during the morning, it's a lot harder to get attacked by a competitor.

Personally:
Keeping a somewhat regular rhythm is important (sleeping to your body's impulses that is), and getting lots of sleep is important.I just don't believe it's necessary to sleep a certain time of day, for a certain duration, in total darkness. Everything I read about the sleeping habits of traditional people leads to this conclusion.

From the same link:



This is interesting because, if I take a nap for a few hours (3 or 4), I find I wake up and enter a state that sounds very similar to what they describe. Semi-conscious, *veeery* relaxed, sorta sleeping but not. It is a light, pleasant groggy feeling. There is a feeling of peace and euphoria, music sounds more beautiful, jokes are funnier, etc. I have often talked about and described this feeling to other people, how "sometimes you feel so good and semi-awake after a nap"... no one can relate.

I can only do it if I nap in the evening, never happens when I "sleep normally" (probably conditioning, training my body to "cram as much sleep in as it can" before the day starts).

I get that too, with the nap. It is so relaxing.

I have experienced that a few times, but in the morning when sleeping in late. I think the profound relaxation is a mechanism that happens during REM sleep to prevent the body from enacting dreams, AKA "sleep paralysis". BTW, if you want to try having an out of body experience, that's the time to do it.

Wyv

>says psychiatrist Thomas A. Wehr of the National Institute of Mental Health >(NIMH) in Bethesda, Md.

Don't believe anything Tom Wehr says.

That's his study, 15 people? How much did that study cost taxpayers?

Susie has spoken to him numerous times. She's tried to get him to come along on TV. He has a lot of good stuff that he's not sharing, about the roots of disease in sleep loss. When she asked him why the people who paid for this weren't entitled to hear the results, he said, "It wouldn't make any difference."

The real reason is that the government doesn't want you to get the idea you need more sleep. Then you wouldn't work as much.

As for the total darkness thing, I find I sleep better that way and I don't wake up. What harm does it do? Is there a reason you have to have light to sleep? And the Anthropologists? Wait a few years, they will theorize about every possible mode of sleep, and there is no way of knowing. But if you read Lights Out critically, you will see that the darkness causes certain things to happen, that don't happen if there is ambient light.

Hello All!

Yesterday I finally finished reading Lights Out, and I have to say I LOVED it!! I've been trying to diligently follow this (huge) thread so forgive me if this question has been answered before, but here goes:

If it is reccomended that one should sleep in as dark a room as possible (heavy curtains, no blinking lights, etc.) how will the body register/recognize the sunrise if the room is still blacked out? In other words, if I'm still sleeping and can't open the drapes the room will still be blacked out and my body won't "know" it's dawn yet, right?

Also, as far as human evolution goes, I thought one of the theories follows that we did most of our evolving in an equatorial region of Africa that had little, if any, seasonal change. In other words, no real winter to speak of. I know that it takes huge "chunks" of time for us to make any physiological adaptation and perhaps there was enough during the last Ice Age to allow us to develop a seasonal eating pattern. Does any of this sound right?

Also, I'm an aspiring theBear WOE devotee and hoping to move to a carnivorous diet. Obiously that's different from the Lights Out seasonal eating reccommendation, but does anyone have any idea if Susie would find that acceptable in the winter? Just curious...

Thanks folks. I'll be enthusiastically reccommending Lights Out to anyone who will listen. Take care.

Kevin

Good Questions Kevin! Can't wait to hear the replies!!!

I've got the window in the bedroom covered with blackout, the stuff they sew to the back of drapes in hotel rooms. A big sheet of it, completely covering the window. At night, this makes the room pitch dark, and I cannot see any light. However, in the morning, I can actually see little slivers of light shining through the duct tape that I've used to seal the blackout to the window frame.

With this setup, I wake up just fine, and later in the winter than in the summer. The goal is to get the room pitch dark at night. If you can leave the door open to a dark hallway that will let the sunlight in come morning, then you've got the best of the situation. If you don't have trouble waking up in the morning, I wouldn't worry about no light in the morning. If you're talking about drapes, there should be plenty of light sneaking around the edges in the morning.

Again, pitch dark at night. If you can see light, it's not pitch dark.



While equatorial regions aren't known for their variation in temperature across the seasons, they ARE known for wild variation in rainfall across the seasons. It's the rainy season that plants wait for to flower and fruit. Dormant for most of the year, in the dry season.

Kevin, here's your answer, straight from the horse's mouth:

*************************************

Kevin,

I appreciate the appreciation.

The way your body and mind actually calculate "dawn" is through the cortisol spike driven by, not just the light, but geo-magnetic incremental daily changes driving toward the bigger seasonal shifts. Therefore; if you start to sleep in rhythm with the circadian cycle (dawn and dusk), your eyes will, in fact, pop open within 15 minutes of dawn on either side. The "wake-up call" in the beginning came from the sun (optically and through skin receptors), but over time, big long time, timers for place and season became embedded in every cell (the brain, for example, is full of magnitite: Biomineralization of ferromagnetic magnetite is known to occur in a number of organisms including animals. Recent investigations have revealed the presence of biogenic magnetite in human brain tissue as well. The presence of magnetite in the brain has been established using a variety of magnetic and electron microscopic techniques. The presence of ferromagnetic material in human brain tissue also provides plausible theoretical mechanisms for the interaction of environmental magnetic fields with the human central nervous system. These relationships are under investigation as well. One surmise being that these magnetic particles in the brain are used to “instinctively” indicate North to humans and animals.)

So, your whole being knows when the sun comes up, unless you stayed up past nine or ten and screwed up the melatonin pulse before midnight. Then melatonin re-surges around 5am for three or four hours, so that if you try to get up, you freel "drugged". That's why staying up late and trying to "catch-up" the next morning on sleep only further destroys normal rhythms, particularly prolactin.

At the top of page 90 in Lights Out, I explained that before various forms of artificial light after dark, human beings experiencing up to fourteen hours of darkness in winter, often spent as much as five of those in an "awake-alert" state very much akin to newborns not quite registering the world. The brain waves are like those monitored in Transcendental Meditation. The NIH agrees that a fourteen hour dark period in winter for as much as six months out of the year is what our ancestors would have experienced. The awake-alert period in adults has now become an "extinct sleep state" because we have shortened our possible sleep to no more than nine or ten hours all year round. That mid-night 4 to 5 five hours was when babies were born, problem solving happened and, literally, when we talked to the gods. Now no one hears from them on a daily or seasonal basis.

In terms of evolution. I lean toward the Pangaea Premise, http://geology.com/pangea.htm that some of the "starter" of the soup of life resided on all of the pieces of Pangaea that became the Continents now extant. All the races, as we identify them, simultaneously adapted differently from the same beginnings, to different latitudes and Hadley Cells http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadley_cell, thus the differences in all of us. However, If you remember in Lights Out, the woman in Borneo, catching Orangutan urine to measure hormone content, proved that there are not only yearly seasonal cycles at the Equator, but seven-year larger reproductive cycles over and above the smaller circannual cycles of food supply and weather. As for the Paleolithic Prescription, any primate group has the potential to be omnivourous depending on the season and food supply. It is important to remember, of course, that there is no candy, trans-fat or red dye #2 season, ever. -T.S. Wiley

I posted a long reply from her yesterday, but it isn't here.

I'll wait another day and repost if it doesn't show up.

I've just come across this very interesting article on the BBC news site and thought that it might be appropriate to post it here:

Interesting

I was wondering what you guys make of this. I notice it true in myself.

Moods are like music. There are sounds which are louder and sounds which are quieter, but these natural highs and lows are part of an average "volume" level - the overall emotional level. Now that I am no longer underweight, nor overweight, and eating consistently LC, my "volume" is as high as it's ever been in my life. It was abysmally low when fat and on carbs, and even *lower* when I was rather underweight. Now I actually feel normal almost all the time, and most of the time I feel on the happier/relaxed side.

One thing I find interesting is that it is only in the sleep deprived state when I can reach whatever the maximum volume of "happiness" I am able to feel. That is to say, I never (or almost never) feel as emotionally good as I can feel when sleeping 6 or 5 hrs several days in a row. Then the next day - after the first bit recovery sleep - moods are lower than they were before (and I am often very hungry as well).


The link between sleep deprivation and reducing glucose metabolism in the brain is very, very interesting. My depression cleared up almost instantly when I went into ketosis, I'm not kidding - it was as rapid as losing acne and PCOS (and shedding lots and lots of excess fat without trying). Within a weekends time I went from depressed to *happy* and like a new person.

If it is true that some types of depression are related to abnormal glucose metabolism in the brain, this would explain why many people find depression lifts on the very low carb diet... but others find it is made worse. If sleep deprivation has a similar effect to the LC diet in this respsect (reduces glucose metabolism in the brain), then that would explain why some depressed individuals respond to sleep deprivation in this way. Those who respond to sleep deprivation therapy would probably also respond to a very low carbohydrate diet as a treatment for depression don't you think (as the LC diet would automatically reduce glucose metabolism).


I always thought my weight and restriction obsessive tendencies were just a bad habit I picked up due to having really not liked being fat... perhaps, I do what I do the same reason some others eat to feel better. My moods are best treated by glucose deprivation, whereas emotional eaters moods are treated the opposite way. It's interesting how we think we understand why we do the things we do so well, but in reality we can be so very wrong...

For those who's depression is related to the abnormal pattern glucose metabolism in the brain, a high fat diet should be just as important as the low carbs. The more fat we eat, the less the body burns sugar from any source. I do tend to notice my moods, in the rested state, respond *very* well to higher fat intakes (with lower intakes of carb or pro).

Oh and just one more thing: I want to clarify my overall well being is much better when well rested, but it *is* true that whenever I feel *my happiest* and best from a purely emotional perspective, it is usually the 2nd day of 5-6 hrs sleep. Fortunately I am not very depressed, and my usual moods are okay.