Study on quality of sleep when pet cats choose location of slumber
spoon-tamago.com
spoon-tamago.com
"Cats will sleep in a variety of different locations, each likely the combination of factors such as mood, warmth, light and coziness." [emphasis mine]
And I think we – humans – should also follow our mood more often in our everyday lives – even things like sprint planning or building our startups. I feel there's something hidden in the feeling of how you feel (your mood).
For example, you look at these 5 tasks in your backlog and choose what you want to work on based on your mood/excitement/feeling.
Maybe the level of excitement you feel for the task is a message from your "unconscious" mind saying that this task is a good one to do right now? And even if that's not the case, you'll just feel better doing a task that you feel excitement for rather than the one you don't feel like doing right now.
Advatages? 1) you just feel better (which I don't have to explain why that is good for you) and 2) you probably finish the task quicker and with a better quality
We definitely keep a lot of what we actually know about the environment out from our daily driver philosophy.
Someone who invents the cure for cancer but has no children is considered a failure by natural selection. Someone who never contributes anything to society but has 15 kids is conversely considered a huge success.
That said, these biological circuits that we are considering get replicated in whatever environment that they exist in. Love may lead to other things than biological reproduction. Our lore regarding the human, personal experience of love and what to do with it also mutates and evolves. A poem then, may take the place of the greatest invention.
Sure genetic material can survive where culture and memory is lost, and evolves more slowly, but cultural contributions do shape the future a lot as well.
Upon reflection, I believe I've been implicitly doing this on tasks for side projects. Whether its feasible on teams may vary.
Yes, me too. I wrote about it here: https://remotehunt.com/blog/startup-art
"The way I work on my side-project is very different from the way I work as a developer at a startup. But what's the difference?"
TL;DR
a) startup: I work on what I have to
b) side project: "I work on what excites me the most at this moment."
Did you change Twitter handle or is the account gone?
I do, to some extent, feel excitement about reducing technical debt. I’d assume that other engineers appreciate taking the time to “clean” outside of writing net new features. I could be totally off base, but I do think it would be interesting to see an environment that was purely mood driven development.
Sort of like the job isn't done until you are putting away your tools.
"At the end of the day there's a lot of emotion that goes into Gumroad, that's not dissimilar from an art project. We sometimes pick what's fun and feels good to work on! We love listening to creators! We don't do tons of data analysis to decide what's worth working on." – @shl, founder
I wrote about it more on my post "Startups should be more like art projects" (link somewhere in the comments already, won't add it here again not to spam)
Somehow I don’t think this will be a successful marketing term for that methodology.
Or maybe we’ll end up getting Mood Master certifications, daily mood-ups, mood retrospectives, and mood boards where we move tasks around. ;)
There is another type of station: cleaning stations.
And they make a call "all hands man your cleaning stations".
Every sailor has an area they are responsible for cleaning and they go there and clean.
I've pitched the same for codebases the past few places I have worked: everyone has a cleaning station in the code base and once every few weeks they go to that part of the code and fix or identify and document needed improvements.
Making it a routine action that keeps up with incremental changes and ideally lowers effort on keeping a code base clean.
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Management-Not-Time-Productivity...
They miss out a key component for some cats: territory monitoring. My boss seemingly often picks places where she can see a lot by just looking up & around, and can hear what is going on around the flat, when taking a light nap. For a deeper sleep coziness seems to be a higher priority.
You should be mindful of your feelings and examine their origins, yes. But I wouldn't recommend being driven by them.
People are not bonsai trees - and bonsai trees are unnatural freaks of nature. We don't have to contort ourselves to live up to an externally imposed ideal. We can - firmly grounded - become greater than these ideals, simply by growing steadily - at our own speed, and with our own, "natural", methods - even within the speeds at which we feel comfortable.
So: DO listen to your gut feelings. Examine them. And listen to them.
No one does an Tough Mudder without a huge amount of support. No one does a TED talk without a huge amount of support.
Throwing categories such as avoidance, procrastination, delusion, and drug addiction into the same group leads me to believe that you might not understand what these supports look like.
I very strongly believe there is a bigger unconscious component to productivity than there is a conscious one.
Some mornings I wake up and I want to jump into the super nasty bucket of customer support tickets. "What the hell is still broken!? I am gonna fix that shit".
On others, I will find customer support items antagonistic in every way, but would really like to spend time on a bunch of deep tech debt that has been piling up.
And then there's the mornings where I wake up and I'd rather just play overwatch or <insert latest AAA title> all day. And you know what? At this point, I just fucking let it happen. I have found, over the course of about a decade, that if I let my monkey brain indulge periodically, the disciplined mind has a much better chance taking control the next time around. Some days I find myself very productively flip-flopping between gaming and work. I've watched some of my peers take this too far in the wrong way, but for whatever reason I can keep it on rails.
I have never, not ever, not once, felt excitement about doing taxes, or about reviewing a functional description, or any of the other necessary evils of my job.
Eventually you just gotta, though. If you only ever had to do things that were fun, it wouldn’t be called work.
You might think that he might just do this out of habit now, but if we go out in the evening and come back late enough that he doesn't get his snuggle time, he almost always shows up on our bed after we've gone to sleep.
So, it is likely just a matter of getting him comfortable sleeping somewhere warm so that he isn't interested in moving to our bed.
Edit: Having said that, before I started this routine, he _would_ come up to bed if he was sleeping somewhere else already on a normal night in. So, I don't know.
People who know cats as unkind typically have only met cats unknown to them.
That's about the worst feline generated behaviour I've ever personally witnessed with our cats.
I haven't had the types of cats that just attack their owners with no provocation though. All three did have the thing where sometimes they get upset by something that is impercetible to humans and swat at apparently nothing and then run away. That's not usually too stealthy though, and you can usually avoid getting attacked in the face.
Of the cats I've actually had myself, only one of them has ever shown any interest in attacking anything related to our faces. It was actually rather terrifying to see the look on her face when she was a tiny kitten, and she spotted her reflection in our eyeballs for the first time. This was clearly a toy she needed to play with. But those damn glasses were in the way, so she had to try to bite them and pull them off. It took us a while, but we discovered that she didn't like puffs of air being blown into her face, so we used that technique to disabuse her of any notion of that kind.
We don't allow the current crop to sleep with us at night, but that was more because as kittens they needed to get used to the new room and the new house after we adopted them, and we have too much junk on the floor of our master bedroom, and we didn't want them climbing under the bed and getting covered in dust bunnies, or maybe peeing on the stuff on the floor, or whatever. These are our first cats we've ever had that we have not allowed to sleep with us at night.
Frankly, the problem of cats sleeping on our face or attacking our face is just not a problem we've ever really had to deal with, over the many different cats we've had over the decades.
Growing up, I had a lot of cats around the house and now with a family of my own we have a pair of kitties. In many years of living with cats this has never been a problem. Our kitties have learned that they can trust us humans to be respectful, to treat them well, and to take care of them, and in return we trust that they won't randomly attack us.
Also, despite being solitary hunters, cats are actually social animals. They will learn to give and take social cues. At worst when I've annoyed a cat, they'll typically express it first by a light swat with sheathed claws; that's signal enough for me that they want to be left alone till they get over it.
(In practice, though, my biggest problem with cats on the bed is overheating; I woke up this morning with my feet sandwiched between our two cats.)
Cats do treat humans as play partners, and frequently scratch the hands and legs in such activity. But I've never experienced more than a boop on the face, from something like five cats (across decades).
I guess those people restricted the cat to the bedroom in the experiment, because the instruction mentioned the ‘corner’ where the cat rests, not just any place. Conveniently in this context, though, olden rural houses here mostly just had one big room, due to heating considerations in the northern winters—so no plopping down in the middle of the bathroom like with some cats I know. While in the OP, the practice was compromised by grossly differing dimensions of the cat and the woman.
P.S.: Gotta say, the photos look like from the good old days of planking and such: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-kCJp1auybWg/Tmk0MBZaRtI/AAAAAAAABo...
It's a very sensible belief! Cats are quite sensitive to drafts, so (especially in days when houses were draftier and lacked central heating) sleeping in the location the cat picks is likely to be much healthier than picking a location at random.
They largely gravitated to wherever the sun shined the most on the floor, and one of them liked to jump into the fridge and nap in there. It was a fun party trick to have a cat abruptly push open and exit the refrigerator in the middle of dinner or a board game, but clearly not the best guide for where to put the bed.
Every cat I have seen loves sleeping in the sun and in the warmest spot (assuming it is not SUPER hot out). I do not enjoy those things.
This of course assumes that you have a large enough plot of land, and no zoning laws telling you where you can and can't build.
My intuition says sheep would graze where the grass is greenest, which if it's like my property would be where the soil keeps water for longer after a rain, which would decidedly be a bad spot to try to set my foundation. But I don't necessarily live in the climate or a similar geological area where this folk belief originated, so now I'm curious.
As a kitten he would be under the covers next to me.
Once in, she's polite and sleeps at the end of the bed or on my legs if she's feeling a bit more affectionate that night. I don't mind having her in the bed.
Two of the remaining three are No Fun to have around when I'm trying to sleep. One will wake up very early and start knocking things off of my night stand in an attempt to get me to feed her. The other one will go into POWER GROOMING mode as soon as he gets into the bed. It's loud, his breath isn't the best, and he won't stop. He grooms himself, thoroughly, for what seems like an eternity. To save myself the headache, I just kick these two out and they will find somewhere else to sleep.
The last one doesn't come upstairs often, but he's not annoying to have around when he does.
It's easy to say that "a cat is a cat" but they really do have their own habits and personalities.
Also, it being cold in the house seems to have a big impact too.
Couldn't help but laugh out loud when seeing the pictures. Especially since I thought at first it's about the cat lying on different spots on the bed, which can restrict your movement.
Hosei University, where this researcher is from, is in Tokyo.
So in absolute terms the statement that "The majority of Japanese people sleep in beds" is certainly correct. In context of the article, where it is being claimed that sleeping on a futon on top of a tatami mat is preparation for sleeping on the floor (and really, it isn't, but we'll ignore that), it is also valid. The majority of the Japanese populace in Japan sleeps on beds, and this researcher likely does as well.
From anecdotal experience, most modern homes I have been in in Japan have only one, if any, tatami rooms. They are not used as bedrooms, except perhaps in the 'family having a sleepover in the tatami room' sort of fashion. Modern apartments seem to have none.
A couple of nights on a hard surface will get your body used to it. (Or at least, it did for me, when I rented an apartment where the previous occupant had outfitted the bed with a board to make it harder. I hurt all over after the first night. But I got used to it.)
Then I became a backpacker and it was like I had a superpower.
That's why her results are inconclusive. The vast majority of "activity" trackers don't measure sleep worth a damn.
My Garmin couldn't even tell when I'd gone to bed or woken up, much less how well I slept.
Also, you could avoid the condescending tone. Especially since your argument is wrong. Adding that time traveling accusation and other examples of common westernization was unnecessary to make your point.
I provided anecdotal evidence (which I added because the tone of your comment provoked me to give evidence that I actually do have some relevant experience and certainly didn't time travel to 1940) and statistics that your claim "a very small minority" is wrong. Here is the link from a sister comment providing the data I spoke about:
We have a cat and she definitely shifts her sleeping place every few days/week. Another theory I have is that it is a natural way of managing fleas, which will die off with no animal sleeping in the spot for several days.
That or curled up on top of the Comcast box (DVR?) which might possibly have a larger cardboard box on top of it to provide a comfy warm spot....
I will attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail this year. So I'll be sleeping at a different place almost every night for almost 5 months. Will I sleep better?
Edit: I cannot find her dissertation.
Also, I don't know how old you are, but I've found the shelter floors have gotten a lot harder as I've gotten older. What I slept well enough, but not quite comfortably on on a Z-rest at 20 is now something I need a NeoAir (or equivalent) to get a good night of sleep and not wake up with lumps on my hips from the hard floor. The ground is much softer unless it's hard-packed mineral soil.
Apart from those things and the occasional storm, etc, you can pretty much count on sleeping like you're dead.
It's like the Japanese watched a movie of scientists doing science, and just recreated what they saw without understanding anything that goes on beyond the surface.
Why is this not science? No control group, no elimination of millions of variables that could affect the animal's choice of location, etc.
Some things graduate to rigor, most things don't.
Gotta do cheap explorations and see if it has legs unless you have infinite time