Valerie Reiss: November 2006 Archives

Yesterday I stumbled across "40 Facts About Sleep You Probably Didn't Know (Or Were Too Tired to Think About)" from the National Sleep Research Project in Australia.

Here are some of my faves--and things I in fact did not know about sleep:

- Anything less than five minutes to fall asleep at night means you're sleep deprived. The ideal is between 10 and 15 minutes, meaning you're still tired enough to sleep deeply, but not so exhausted you feel sleepy by day.

- A new baby typically results in 400-750 hours lost sleep for parents in the first year

- REM dreams are characterised by bizarre plots, but non-REM dreams are repetitive and thought-like, with little imagery - obsessively returning to a suspicion you left your mobile phone somewhere, for example.

- Some scientists believe we dream to fix experiences in long-term memory, that is, we dream about things worth remembering. Others reckon we dream about things worth forgetting - to eliminate overlapping memories that would otherwise clog up our brains.

- Scientists have not been able to explain a 1998 study showing a bright light shone on the backs of human knees can reset the brain's sleep-wake clock.

- The NRMA estimates fatigue is involved in one in 6 fatal road accidents.

- In insomnia following bereavement, sleeping pills can disrupt grieving.

- Tiny luminous rays from a digital alarm clock can be enough to disrupt the sleep cycle even if you do not fully wake. The light turns off a "neural switch" in the brain, causing levels of a key sleep chemical to decline within minutes.

- Some studies suggest women need up to an hour's extra sleep a night compared to men, and not getting it may be one reason women are much more susceptible to depression than men.

- Exposure to noise at night can suppress immune function even if the sleeper doesn’t wake. Unfamiliar noise, and noise during the first and last two hours of sleep, has the greatest disruptive effect on the sleep cycle.

By Valerie Reiss. Amy's on vacation.

After a long day yesterday, I stopped at ABC Carpet & Home, a mecca of pretty, pricey, spiritual things.

Buzzing past all of the crystals and Marys and Buddhas, I went straight for the bodycare wall. The eco- and toxin-conscious store only stocks lotions and potions and pastes and masks and scrubs by all-natural companies like Dr. Hauschka, Pangea Organics, and my favorite of the moment, Red Flower. Completely synthetic- and paraben-free, the latter bodycare line is practically edible and surely divine.

I'm now madly in love with a Red Flower bottle of Amber and Cardamom Body Oil. Just a few dots on my hand, rubbed in, and sniffed deeply seemed to erase a day of intense stress. It's not cheap, but it's $44 worth of heaven. I think I know what I'm doing at my lunch break. At least for another sniff/smear. And it might be just the thing for the nuture-starved lovely on your holiday gift list.

Amazon sells it here.

By Valerie Reiss. Amy's on vacation.

Ok, it's not just the scrumptious body oil that wows me, it's the amazing Gifts of Compassion at ABC Carpet & Home's store and website. Many orgs offer a similar donation-as-gift program, but none have such diverse offerings--or packages for certificates as nice(ABC uses hand-sewn sari fabric).

By partnering with organizations like Seva Foundation, The Ranforest Alliance, and V-Day, ABC has arranged it so you can buy a "kid for a kid"--a milking goat for a child in Haiti, for example. Or you can give a "Gift of Vision"--a much-needed eye operation for a child in a poor country. You can also make gift donations for the environment, literacy, and pet rescue.

All very cool, moving, beautiful stuff. Visit here to buy or learn more.

By Valerie Reiss. Amy's on vacation.

"True charity only occurs when there are no notions of giving, giver, or gift."

--Buddha


From the book "Good Karma: How to Find It and Keep It".


By Valerie Reiss. Amy's on vacation.

It always amazes me when the word—or symbol for—"peace" upsets people.

A couple in Pagosa Springs, Colo. was recently told by a community association to remove a peace sign-shaped wreath from outside their house, reports The New York Times, lest they be fined $25 a day. They told the couple the symbol was politically divisive and one member later said it looked like "a sign of the devil."

When outrage broke out, the three members of the homeowner's association resigned and neighbors held a march, hung their own symbols, and created a 300-foot peace sign on a local soccer field.

One of the sign's owners said all he meant to promote was world peace.

This all brings back vivid memories from my Quaker boarding school days during the first Iraq war. A bunch of students wove blue garbage bags into a chainlink fence on our property that faced a highway to read "peace." Oh, the calls, the harassments, the threats. The school was inundated with demands for its removal. It was my first experience of wide-eyed shock at how something that seemed so instrinsic to me, so "duh" as to be cliché, could be so controversial.

We debated long and hard at our community meeting—I lost all respect for the librarian who suggested we take it down to avoid conflict—but ultimately, peace won.

And it looks like it's winning in Colorado. It still boggles my mind though, that it was ever a question in the first place. You know?

What are your peace-sign associations? Do you wear them, hang them, think they're bad?

By Valerie Reiss. Amy's on vacation.

Just wanted to spread this far and wide. This week's cover story in the Village Voice is about the link between 9/11 and blood cancers, especially Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. That's what I just recovered from. My exposure to Ground Zero was...

Really great article in this week's New York magazine, "The Science of Burnout" by Jennifer Senior. The subhead alone speaks volumes: "In a culture where work can be a religion, burnout is its crisis of faith." It's about how burnout—that...

If you have a modern-ish sensibility and live in an apartment or a small-scale house, you may love this blog as much as I do. Apartment Therapy.com has been my haunt for the last two years or so for home-related...

As her post-"Artist's Way" work has seemed more and more recycled, one thing I still love about Julia Cameron's books is the little quotes she puts in the margins. I'm always happy to dip into these bite-sized, short-attention-span founts of...