For most of my life I have tried to eat healthily. Aside from living mostly off of leftover brownies and garlic bread as a river guide, I’ve typically enjoyed things like fruit and granola rather than ice cream and chocolate sauce.
I’ve read food books, I’ve watched food documentaries, and I oppose dieting. I believe eating foods from the ground is the logical choice for health. I avoid fast food, soda, packaged meals, GMOs, dairy, and meat for the most part.
But I’m starting to experience the fact that there is more to health than what you put in your mouth. Because in this phase of my life, although I eat more healthful foods than I ever have, I seem to get sick more often. And the sicknesses last so much longer.
I’m seeing that happiness, laughter, sleep, climate, routine, and other factors unrelated to food and activity may be a lot more weighty than we typically acknowledge.
My mom has always chosen to live in ways that make her happy. Wine, cheese, laughter, and nature, among other things, fill her soul. She goes to bed when most bakers are awakening for the day, and wakes up when she wakes up. She always sees the silver lining in every situation; she simply doesn’t see the negative in anything. One time she laughed at something that was horrible and I said, “Mom, that’s actually really bad.” She said, “Oh… You’re right!” My mom is 83, takes two medications, is happy as a clam, and I can’t ever remember her being sick. Except for a TV, my mom has no devices.
I, on the other hand, have been sick more times than I’d like to remember since moving here five years ago. I don’t have cable, a cell phone, or anything other than an “old” laptop. But it’s no coincidence that in the last five years the internet has given our world much more to do, especially around bedtime, speaking as a night person – watching TED Talks and Netflix documentaries, writing blogs, comparing foreign language sites, putting holds on e-books, watching old Downton Abbey episodes, researching homeschooling resources on Amazon, publishing family albums on Shutterfly, making photo calendars on Vistaprint, researching around-the-world plane tickets, you name it. The number of seemingly non-frivolous internet-related pastimes is inexhaustible. And it’s literally killing me when I give in to them. Especially because I have a rule for myself – I don’t get on the computer around my kids. That means nighttime is it. There’s a lot of nighttime, but being awake isn’t what it’s for.
Thanks to a desire to create, learn, and research ideas at night, I’ve learned over and over that sleep loss, for me, means immediate next-day effects: diminished close-range vision, lower confidence when looking in the mirror, proneness to injury, lack of physical and mental stamina while homeschooling, higher reactivity around discord, higher incidence of sickness, more prominent hormonal fluctuations, more post-nasal drip and airway difficulties, bloated tummy, less discretion and discipline, foggier mind, useless memory, less motivation for physical activity, inability to smile and feel lighthearted, and the list goes on and on. And I’m one of the people championing device-less living. How Jekyll and Hyde; device-less in the day to preserve real life with others, harmful to myself at night when it’s time to get creative.
So what about climate in all of this? I just got a book from the library called The Little Book of Lykke: Secrets of the World’s Happiest People, which was written by the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. Upon hearing what winter is like from a Danish friend of mine, I have nothing to complain about here on Orcas. And yet the Danes supposedly rank highest in world happiness statistics. Their Northern European neighbors follow them in the rankings.
But here’s what I wonder about climate. I lived my first 11 years in a Dallas suburb, where we couldn’t escape the sun’s heat no matter what the season. As a kid born there, though, it was my norm; it was all I knew. For the next 27 years of my life, I lived in idyllic California towns where sun was a lovely and welcome year-round friend. Now… For the past 5 years, I have lived on this Northwest island that lacks daily sunlight from November to March. You never know if the sun will come out. Maybe once a week; maybe once a month. I wonder if that can shock a system normally bathed in sunlight all its life. Not to mention the new microscopic world surrounding it – mold and mildew spores floating in the stale air of a living room shut off from the cold air outside.
Then there’s the idea of routine. My husband and I are perfect complements: He lives his life in a routine and I live my life in spontaneous bursts of random activity. His body knows what to expect. Mine doesn’t. He doesn’t get sick. I do. When I sold books door-to-door one summer, the company I worked for told us right from the start that if we stayed in a predictable, solid routine every day, we wouldn’t get sick even though we’d be eating only an English muffin, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a pack of ramen each day. They said we’d know someone was off their routine if they got sick. Sure enough, though I ate nothing of nutritive value that summer, worked constantly, and hated what I was doing, I never got sick.
In fact, one of my non-baby-related realizations after I gave birth to our first son had to do with routine. As I lay there in bed recovering from a C-section and nursing our baby, I thoroughly enjoyed being served meals at such predictable intervals. It didn’t matter if it was Jell-O and fried squid – I loved the routine-ness of it and felt very balanced. I’m so far from Type A that I don’t think I could even force myself to serve meals at the same times each day. But boy, did I enjoy that predictability when someone else was in charge of my routine.
Now I’m on to see if essential oils are all they’re cracked up to be for health and wellness. If I stay up too late researching them tonight, you’ll know. I’ll be sick later in the week.
