PaleoPathologist has some vivid memories from his seven years at Duke Medical School. One is the sound coming through the back wall of his apartment starting at 10 at night; the adjoining unit housed some fellow medical students. They claimed to start studying at 10 PM. Paleopathologist was studying the backs of his eyelids at 10PM on a weeknight.  The other little vignette was walking into the Seely G. Mudd Medical Library and seeing one of his classmates asleep, his head on an open medical text, and drool pooling on the page!

Here is an article from the BBC on sleep.  Thanks to Chris Kresser.  I love the line in here about arrogance:

“We are the supremely arrogant species; we feel we can abandon four billion years of evolution and ignore the fact that we have evolved under a light-dark cycle.

“What we do as a species, perhaps uniquely, is override the clock. And long-term acting against the clock can lead to serious health problems.”

PaleoPathologist was listening to Doug McGuff, MD on a podcast recently about how to efficiently and effectively train up some good muscles.  He said that people spend far too much time worrying about the “stimulus” side of the equation, trying to tweak and refine their exercise routines. They tend to ignore the recovery phase, which of course is when the benefits of exercise actually happen. Sleep is one key. (I’m not totally certain which of the podcasts it was, it was either the 15 Minute Corporate Warrior post or the Philosophy in Action podcast.  Both had worthwhile information, however.

My Fitbit has a cool little function in addition to keeping track of steps and stairs: it also tracks sleep. Last night PaleoPathologist and PaleoPathologistMate got…drumroll…8 hrs and ten minutes of sleep. It was great.

What gets in the way of you sleeping?