Today marks the last Sunday of October and clocks in Sweden have been adjusted from Summer time to Winter time. Or from "daylight saving time", to "normal time". I myself have never really understood why changing time by one hour is so important. I love the annual transitioning from one season to the next (they really do serve their purposes in beautiful ways), but why would it be logical to push time back or forth by one hour? Can't we just stick with what's called normal time?
Surely, the pushing of time disrupts the sleep and innate circadian rhythms for most humans. And sufficient quality sleep along with having a healthy nervous system, is not exactly a given but rather a challenge and something of a luxury in these modern times. Most people struggle with the exposure from artifical light sources that are all around. They light up the screens at day jobs, they radiate from smartphones – or should I say the digital extension of wrists on both kids and adults – and since a few years back in the cities, one can barely walk more than a few meters from home before the flickering light shows invades one's vision in the forms of moving media and highly illuminated advertisements, and blinding lights from cars and trains, shining so strong that their brightness can feel like kryptonite for the human brain and central nervous system.
We are ancestral beings living in a modern world
These things hijack the autonomic nervous system, because the ancestral brain and biology that you are built with, will interpret them as potential threats, and prepare your physical body (from within) to get ready to attack or to escape as fast as humanly possible.
Whether or not you are aware of it happening, the respiration rate and heart rate will rise. The diaphragmatic, functional breathing will be replaced by shallow breathing. Kortisol levels and blood sugar levels will increase. All to help you survive. Except, the only real threat nowadays is what's happening inside you when the nervous system interprets danger.
Everyday life in to not so natural surroundings and the vast exposure of digital, artificial things, keeps you more or less constantly hijacked by the sympathetic, stressed, part of your nervous system. Amongst the consequences are hormonal and metabolic imbalances, anxiety, stress and underlying, chronic illness. Feeling wired but tired. Losing the connection with presence and the physical body. And hijacked by a distracted, dopamine-craving and cluttered mind.
The solution
Two key solutions, or tools, for handling city life and the many challenges of being an ancestral human in modern times, is building a foundation of eating functional foods, and practicing, repeating and returning to functional breathing patterns. This will help lower the stress in the moment and create greater stress resilience, proactively. It's like building a healthy armour to support you through any stressful experience, throughout any event or moment of any day. And I guarantee that it will improve your innate circadian rhythms with better chances of sleeping peacefully through the night.
Proper food, and proper breathing patterns and breathwork practices together create a gateway that makes it possible for you to take yourself back into homeostasis – the balance, harmony and state of peak efficiency from within that your entire being is always striving to maintain. Every hour, every minute and every second of every day.
Food and breath are indeed the main pieces for building a holistic wholeness in terms of your individual health puzzle, and in my experience they're also key for staying in touch with your heart.
Add to that some cultivation of small, healthy and daily habits of your liking. Perhaps some sweat-breaking movement and the consistency of lifting of heavy weights. Immerse yourself, often, in things that are most joyous to you. Get daily doses of nature, and connect with it completely as often as possible. Nurture and prioritise the relationships that you hold dear or which feels like home in your heart.
Meditate daily on gratitude and keep an open, curious, courageous and willing-to-evolve kind of mind (a growth mindset). And add a dash of spirituality (whatever that means to you). Then you have a great, and constantly changeable, recipe for the rest of your life. It can be both harmonious, sincere, loving, mind-blowingly energised and healthy. Life in technicolor, from inside and out.
With love, Hanna
Above, an illustration of two lateral views of a human heart drawn by G. Kurtland, from a preparation in the collection of St. Thomas's Hospital, London.
Below, a music video by Mt. Wolf with words from & the voice of the British philosopher, writer and speaker Alan Watts (1915-1973).
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