I haven't slept enough once again and consequently did not feel so great in the morning. My attempts to bring the eyes together were mostly unsuccessful, as were my attempts to come to presence. I came to work still feeling quite bad. You have probably header what lack of sleep does to you - lack of coordination, slow reaction, blurry vision, and so on. That was not too severe, but I felt I was not in my best shape.
As I was walking somewhere in the building, some though about the Alexander Technique crossed my mind. I tried to walk more effortlessly, and found an unusually high amount of tension in the body. Walking became effortless, though I still felt bad.
Then I found an appropriate place and tried to do some palming. I could see more grey than black; however, I recalled the other method I read in the original book by Bates. The method is: while palming, imagine a perfectly white sheet of paper (or anything else), one that is not too big. If the sheet is perfectly white, its background will be perfectly black.
In this case I succeeded fairly quickly with imagining a white sheet. The background became blacker and the sheet disappeared and got replaced by the background. I reimagined the sheet, it disappeared once again, but the background became even blacker. I tried to recreate the sheet continuously, and the background started to get blacker just as continuously. After less than a minute, perhaps even less than 30 seconds, I got a sudden feeling of relaxation. I am familiar with this feeling. It feels like pulsating waves in the head. I know that when I want to sleep in the morning or in the afternoon, and then I go get a nap, sometimes I feel those waves. Also, after I get a full body massage, I may suddenly experience such waves at random moments during the next several days.
After I was not getting much more relaxation, I stopped palming. I was feeling much better, not perfectly great, but more or less as usual. My eyes felt very relaxed. Now that I was more focused, I was able to notice and undo something else that I was doing to the eyes (not sure what it was), and they came a little more together. I did not try to measure it, but I am sure that my reaction time improved.
I conclude that many negative effects attributed to the lack of sleep probably do not come from the lack of sleep itself, but from the resulting tension.
Another idea that came to me: how do people usually justify that you "intrinsically" need to sleep 7 or 8 hours? They take a group of volunteers, leave them in a stress-free environment, alone or in groups, indoors where they cannot see sunlight or outside, and without any clocks. Then they see how long people will tend sleep after a few weeks. Alternatively, researchers make people sleep for different times every night - one group for 6, another for 7, another for 8, - and then measure the differences.
Those are valuable approaches, but if you take a group of people from the Western society and put them in the forest even for a few months, do you think that they will all walk straight by the end of the period? Natural and habitual are different things. Why do we expect that a few weeks in some "natural" environment will expose anything but our sleeping habit? Similarly, if you are used to sleep for 8 hours and then you are sleeping for 6 in an experiment, of course, it will affect your physical, mental, and emotional state.
As I was walking somewhere in the building, some though about the Alexander Technique crossed my mind. I tried to walk more effortlessly, and found an unusually high amount of tension in the body. Walking became effortless, though I still felt bad.
Then I found an appropriate place and tried to do some palming. I could see more grey than black; however, I recalled the other method I read in the original book by Bates. The method is: while palming, imagine a perfectly white sheet of paper (or anything else), one that is not too big. If the sheet is perfectly white, its background will be perfectly black.
In this case I succeeded fairly quickly with imagining a white sheet. The background became blacker and the sheet disappeared and got replaced by the background. I reimagined the sheet, it disappeared once again, but the background became even blacker. I tried to recreate the sheet continuously, and the background started to get blacker just as continuously. After less than a minute, perhaps even less than 30 seconds, I got a sudden feeling of relaxation. I am familiar with this feeling. It feels like pulsating waves in the head. I know that when I want to sleep in the morning or in the afternoon, and then I go get a nap, sometimes I feel those waves. Also, after I get a full body massage, I may suddenly experience such waves at random moments during the next several days.
After I was not getting much more relaxation, I stopped palming. I was feeling much better, not perfectly great, but more or less as usual. My eyes felt very relaxed. Now that I was more focused, I was able to notice and undo something else that I was doing to the eyes (not sure what it was), and they came a little more together. I did not try to measure it, but I am sure that my reaction time improved.
I conclude that many negative effects attributed to the lack of sleep probably do not come from the lack of sleep itself, but from the resulting tension.
Another idea that came to me: how do people usually justify that you "intrinsically" need to sleep 7 or 8 hours? They take a group of volunteers, leave them in a stress-free environment, alone or in groups, indoors where they cannot see sunlight or outside, and without any clocks. Then they see how long people will tend sleep after a few weeks. Alternatively, researchers make people sleep for different times every night - one group for 6, another for 7, another for 8, - and then measure the differences.
Those are valuable approaches, but if you take a group of people from the Western society and put them in the forest even for a few months, do you think that they will all walk straight by the end of the period? Natural and habitual are different things. Why do we expect that a few weeks in some "natural" environment will expose anything but our sleeping habit? Similarly, if you are used to sleep for 8 hours and then you are sleeping for 6 in an experiment, of course, it will affect your physical, mental, and emotional state.
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