Month: October 2017

Maintaining a healthy sleeping schedule

I am into health very much, which is also the overarching theme of this blogsite, so I think a post on sleeping schedule is definitely necessary. I had postponed this post a long while since I was not sure whether I can actually identify and maintain a healthy schedule myself. Now that I did find it and have been maintaining it for a while, I decided to pop up here and share it with you.

Sleeping is essential to our health and bad sleep can play a deteriorating effect to our productivity in our waking time. I have done some research and found that successful (a caveat here, success can mean different things to different people, here I am limiting it to the generally accepted version of success) people maintain in general 6-8 hours of sleep. There are a couple of extremes who sleep for 3, 5 or even 9 hours a day.  The time ranges are also interesting. Please see the non-exhaustive list below:

  1. Benjamin Franklin: 8 hours, 10 pm-5 am.
  2. Thomas Edison: 5 hours, 11 pm-4 am.
  3. Winston Churchill: 5 hours, 3 am-8 am.
  4. Barack Obama: 6 hours, 1 am-7 am.
  5. Donald Trump: 3 hours, 1 am-4 am.
  6. Bill Gates: 7 hours, 12 am-7 am.
  7. Tim Cook: 7 hours, 9:30 pm-4:30 am
  8. Elon Musk: 6 hours, 1 am – 7 am.
  9. Ellen DeGeneres, 8 hours, 11 pm-7 am.
  10. Arianna Huffington, 8 hours, 10 pm -5 am.
  11. Marissa Mayer, 4-6 hours, 12 am-4 ~6 am.

As you can see, there is no general rule of thumb in terms of what time frame contributes to the success of the people listed above. I was experimenting the schedule myself as well. I sometimes get tremendous creativity in the wee hours if I end up staying late, but I also notice the strong negative health effect late sleep has on me. So I decided to stick to my healthy schedule, and I believe the creativity part is mostly a result of habit, since your brain can be trained/tricked.

And below the list ends:

12. Hellen Jiang, 7 hours, 10 pm-5 am.

Sometimes your brain can be so active that it is hard to fall asleep, and here are some tips in helping reduce that:

  1. maintain a consistent sleeping schedule
  2. work out and break a sweat regularly
  3. avoid heavy meals/drinking a couple hours before sleep (if you really need to drink something, herbal tea could be your safe choice)
  4. meditation, deep breathing, and progressive muscle relaxation
  5. hot bath or aromatherapy or try to visualize tranquility
  6. power down one hour before bed: turn off electronics and dim your lights
  7. write down what is bugging you, if there is any; don’t leave unresolved negative feelings before sleep
  8. paint your bedroom in tranquil color, keep it cool and keep it dark
  9. make sure hands and feet are not cold
  10. reserve the bed only for sleep and sex.

Time to power down for me 🙂

Good luck finding that schedule that works for you the best!

Adopting a mucus-less diet

I have suffered quite serious diseases when I was younger due to problems with my lungs, like pneumonia (multiple times before the age of 7) and tuberculosis (end of high school). My grandparents joked that I would live long since I survived what some others probably wouldn’t have. My health history probably attributed to the fact that I am extra health conscious compared to an average person.

Health starts with the diet, the part that you have a control over, anyway. I had experimented with different diets, vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, even fasting. Sometimes, I would go back and embrace a balanced diet, which includes meat. This was also true if when I have to go to restaurants with limited options. I also try to keep mental notes of my bodily reaction towards the food that I have eaten. One thing that I found that really affects me negatively is that some food triggers more mucus/phlegm than others. So I dig into this topic and decided to post what I found out.

Meat and sugar are two major items that can generate extra mucus. It seems diary products also do the same, fortunately I am not a big fan of diary products in the first place. I personally also found gluten contributes to mucus in your throat as well. While I was searching for this topic, I also found some articles or treatise by professor Arnold Ehret, a Germany born nutritionalist who had experimented different kinds of diet and started to promote his own creation–mucusless diet. He also asserted that it was closely related to solving problems of constipation. It was said that his experimental dieting saved him from his some diseases, but this claim was not verified. It was also hard to verify his longevity/health with his promoted diet, since he unfortunately died when he fell on the ground and hurt his skull when he was in his fifties.

On a different note, I would like to touch on causes of extra mucus or phlegm (or snot) induced during or after an intensive workout. 1) exercised induced asthma which can only improved by doing more warm up exercises and expanding your lung capacity by exercising: 2) allergy related, not much to do there except to be aware of the environment and/or take allergy meds; 3) underlying diseases related to lung or others (pneumonia, pulmonary edema, or cystic fibrosis etc); 4) diet, such as diary…

In any case, I am with the opinion that our bodies are as different as they are the same. Think about the basic similarities that make us human beings when we have conflicts or the tendency to judge emerges, but please don’t ignore the vast differences that define each one of us as an individual person. Do what makes you feels good and be responsible for what it brings you.