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.
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.
Cheers.
A bit of stress is healthy for the body. 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.
Oh it does. I feel like crap (including mentally) if I don't go for a few days.
In winter I tend to stay up later at night, I get less sleep and I eat very poorly. I always put on weight and get cranky in winter.
But yes, our work environment are full of dogmatic rules and preconceptions which are hard to break.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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].
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.