Our bodies are pretty good at telling us what it needs. Drink when you're thirsty and nap when you're drowsy. The problem we find, which elicits articles like this, is that our 'work environment' is not conducive to adhoc relaxation.
I am an old man and have learned some things about myself. I was an athlete when younger and am quite good at listening to what my various parts say when it comes to injuries or various kinds of use. Others in my age group like my wife who spent less time doing athletic work when younger are lacking this signal and get injured more often.
However I also worked quite a lot when younger and do not at all hear my body say it is tired or thirsty. Getting an Oura ring has been tremendously helpful, having a signal in terms of tiredness and proper sleep quantity. I take naps now when my "readiness" is low.
I have no signal when it comes to thirst, but can report that getting a fancy ice machine and a fancy seltzer maker in the last few years to make it fun to stay hydrated has been a total life changer. I now drink 3-4 quarts of water a day and I notice on the other side of that all kinds of improvements. But I do not recognize their absenses if I don't follow the drinking regemin. I mean, I do a little bit now, but not really.
Upshot: bodies are probably equally good at generating signal but every brain has different training and tuning as to which signals it picks up, and which ones it ignores.
Rarely. I routinely worked through the night, usually drinking dehydrating light caffeine drinks like tea. I wouldn't get the tired signal until sometime the next day or day after. And a few times I was so dehydrated I had mini-migraines. It was just a groove and I went with it, for hours, hundreds/thousands of times.
> Your body doesn’t really tell you to go to the gym.
I think there are, when I was lifting heavy my muscles would start to have a softer feeling to them if i was a way for a bit. Away from exercise now, Ill start to feel a little bloated and fat. maybe feeling fat is in my head.
If im sedentary for long ill have a feeling like I should get up and do something. hard to explain what it is thinking about it now.
The gym didn't exist as our bodies evolved. But neither did grocery stores. Stress and depression pushing you to eat more is your body telling you to get moving, in the past eating more required exerting a lot more effort.
It seems possibly counterproductive to equate "exercise" with "stress". I find I am invariably much less stressed, emotionally, during and after exercise. I am not convinced that any amount of "stress" is good for you.
Working out give me a mood boost. I've found that if I skip workouts for a couple of months, I'm more prone to depressive moods, which is an alarm to get my ass back to the gym.
On the whole, I agree with you, but sometimes there are actually issues and that's why we get sick, when the body response is out of wack or lacking. Sometimes it's less about being tired and more about something which causes you to be tired, like being stuck in an unwanted situation.
But yes, our work environment are full of dogmatic rules and preconceptions which are hard to break.
On a similar note, something I've observed is that the feeling of tiredness in the afternoon doesn't necessarily correlate with how much I've done in the hours prior.
Recently I started doing more things in the morning hours, with the hope that I'd be more effective at those tasks (especially the more mentally taxing ones) earlier in the day than when I had been doing them previously, which was typically in the afternoon or evening.
Intuitively, this would lead to better productivity in the earlier half of the day at the cost of reducing it in the latter half. Instead, my afternoon and evening energy levels remained unchanged or even improved a bit, meaning that I now get more done with no apparent cost. This is of course welcome but it was quite unexpected, and suggests that some amount of the "tired" feeling is more a result of conditioning than energy expenditure.
Yeah, it's quite interesting how energy works, AFAIK we still don't know if task fatigue is really a thing or not. But if it isn't, doing more in the morning would not leave you more tired than usual, assuming you get regular good sleep.
The body can be affected by so many things, and it's different for people what affects them. What you eat in the morning, sunlight exposure and consistent bedtimes is what worked best for me. I get an afternoon slump no matter what I do, but that is usually remedied by some physical exercise or breathing exercises I've found, and the longer I go without taking naps, the more my natural rhythm gets used to not sleeping at that point. But I've had periods with extra stress where I just need to take naps, but that is just something I've accepted and enjoy now when it happens.
Most of my afternoon fatigue comes down to eating too much or too many carbs at lunch. There's an amount that is just right...and beyond that, I definitely start down-shifting. (YMMV, of course!)
That's because modern life goes against our evolutionary instict.
They weren't developed for when a several trillion dollar industry is hell-bent on selling addictive, over-processed, sodium, sugar, corn syrup etc fulled food-stuff crap, and showings as 100s of ads throughout a signle day. Not for spending our whole days in chairs, staring at a screen, and then relaxing by staring at more screens.
A much much smaller percentage share of adults in the US were overweight before the 80s and 70s.
I'd venture a guess a much smaller share had a sleep disorder before TV, long car commutes, and artificial lights too.
So are ~53% of adults in the EU. And there are more obese kids than before in the EU too: knowing that there's an insane statistic saying something like 93% of obese kids shall stay obese their entire life, that 53% in the EU is only ever gonna go up (unless there's serious food shortage due to a war or climate event).
>knowing that there's an insane statistic saying something like 93% of obese kids shall stay obese their entire life
How is that statistic insane? People rarely shed weight just like that, when they do it takes concentrated effort and persistence. And even if you do, it's dead easy to get it back on in like a few months...
> Our bodies are pretty good at telling us what it needs. Drink when you're thirsty and nap when you're drowsy.
On average, maybe. While the science of how to reproducibly measure the variations is still fairly young, there's evidence that the accuracy/responsiveness of the underlying signals, the baseline intensity of the sensations, and the ability to integrate those sensations into an actionable concept like "thirsty" or "drowsy" all exist on a spectrum [1].
You're absolutely right, one additional point though is that if you're drowsy right now napping is good, but you should also maybe reflect on what's making you drowsy. That carb heavy meal you had? Better scale those down, it's not good for you. The alcohol you had last night that disturbed your sleep (even one beer is enough for that)? Not good for you.
Napping is the right thing to do right now, but there might be overarching changes you should do in your behavior to not be drowsy tomorrow.
I wish this worked for me. Napping when I'm drowsy results in me being more drowsy. Drinking water when I'm thirsty at least mostly only means more trips to the bathroom.
