Sleep is a very essential part of being alive, at least for humans.  If you don’t sleep, bad things happen.  Aside from the obvious, being tired, sleep deprivation affects your metabolism, your healing time, your mood, the bags under your eyes, your blood pressure, your ability to handle hard work or blood sugar swings, your ability to think straight, and your pain.  If you sleep less than 6 hours per night, you’re more likely to die.  You’re more likely to get into an automobile accident.  You’re more likely to have heart disease, or develop dementia.

Athletes need more sleep.  We just do.  Sleep is the time when a bunch of internal cleaning, healing, and growth happen in the muscles and bones, in the circulatory system, in the endocrine system.  However, injuries causing pain tend to decrease the amount of good sleep you get.  If you can’t sleep, you can’t heal, and you hurt more, which causes you to sleep less.  That’s why good physical therapists will try to get you to find a position where you can sleep.

There are things you can do in order to get better sleep, but it is never a one size fits all.  I know that I work best when I get 9 hours sleep at night.  That doesn’t mean I’m lazy.  That’s just how long it takes.  My husband needs a mere 7 hours per night.  That’s fine too.  Sometimes I need naps, because parenting is hard work.

There are times when it is difficult to get to sleep at night.  There are times when my brain races, planning something for the next day, going over something that happened from all different angles.  For me, sleep requires that I relax the focus.  I have to look at the pretty unfocused ever-shifting pictures.  Focusing on any of it keeps me from sleeping.  Knowing this, I can set up a meditative anchor for going to sleep.  Safe and relaxed, everything can wait until the morning to go over in my mind.

Metaphorically, this means that we need periods of rest to balance the periods of massive productivity.  We need periods of fasting to balance the periods of feasting.  We need periods of stillness to balance the periods of burst training.  We need periods of trash science fiction novels to balance the periods of hard mental thinking work.  We need periods of being warm balanced with periods of being cold.  We need periods of slow breathing balanced with periods of breathing hard.

What do you do to get enough sleep?  How does your sleep get disrupted?  Do you need to go to bed earlier?  How could you stop using stimulants or sedatives to get the restorative sleep you need?  Does your family respect your need to go to bed earlier than them?  Or later?  What about your children?  Do they get enough sleep?

I find it hard to write blog entries in chronic pain, but things are quite a bit better this week than last week.  I was listening to some high octane speculation that the CIA is positioning themselves to take over the US food supply.  Heh.  I do so love my conspiracy theories.  They serve as one of the best pain distraction methods out there for me.

So, let’s work this one through.  If Mr. Global wanted to centralize control over the US food supply, how would the psychopaths handle that?  Oh sure, the first thing that comes to most people’s minds is Monsanto.  Well, that’s a lovely can of worms there, now isn’t it?  Oh, but there’s much more than that.  What is the number one retailer in the US?  I’m not sure, but if you said Amazon, you’d probably be pretty close to the mark, right?  After all, they did just buy Whole Paycheck.

Some people seem to think that Mr. Global wants to poison the population through controlling the food supply, but I’m not so sure.  See, Mr. Global doesn’t need to.  If the Deep State owns the major food corporations, and controls the google algorithms so that if you denigrate Hillary your posts don’t get seen, then they have no need whatsoever to poison the food supply.  They just need to control your access to it.  It is easy.  If they don’t like you, your identity gets stolen, and you can’t purchase things online.  Moving towards a cashless economy also tightens the net and noose.  Your class status symbol becomes whether or not you have a bank account with a chip card.

That way, if you are a food supplier who doesn’t use Monsanto products, well, suddenly Amazon and Whole Paycheck just don’t buy from you anymore, for whatever reason.  Then where are you?  If you are a consumer who doesn’t buy their food at a big box grocery store, but rather from their local farmers’ cooperative using digital or local currencies, you are evil, and must be stopped using every labeling and workplace safety and tracking regulation violation in the book, plus they’ll misplace your permits.  Oops.  They’ll also harass you with as many inspections as possible, with illegal methods used in the inspection process.  You can find those youtube videos if you look.

Then, there is relative pricing.  If I’m correct in my wild speculations, Amazon is perfectly capable of pricing items differently for different purchasers.  Yes, Prime does that, but not just Prime.  The same is true with big box grocery store rewards systems.  I know Safeway has Just4U coupons that are individualized.  You better believe that rewards systems will influence purchasing decisions, the same way that somebody who suddenly watches daytime TV due to an injury will find themselves in need of granite countertops and a bigger flat-bed pickup truck.

If there were at least 100 years of research, funded by the big moneyed elites, into how to shape public decision-making (cough elections cough), don’t you think they would have learned a lot by now on how to manage both sides of the Hegelian dialectic?  It’s why everything is divide and conquer and be labelled.  Are you pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine?  Are you pro-Hillary or pro-Trump?  Are you pro-gay marriage or anti-gay marriage?  Hint: the answer is neither.

To get out of the identity politics trap, the secret is to be an individual.  I am me, not a woman.  Woman is not my identity, just like disabled and in chronic pain is not my identity.  I am me, not a Demoncrat or Rethuglican.  I am me, not cis-gendered or queer.

So very many people want to label everything, to count everything.  How many e coli can fit in the head of a pin?  How many people will be left to be counted after peak oil/climate change/the great EMP depopulation (pick your black swan of choice, plenty to choose from)?  No.  Wrong question.  Why on Earth do we need to count these things?  Why do we need everything and every person to be barcoded and labelled?  No, nobody gets to tell me who I am.  Especially not the government and the deep state which is lying to me about the things happening in Space and Antarctica.

Yet, do you see how your official virtual identity could be used to deny you access to food?  It creates fear.  Fear creates slavery.  At the same time, you are not an individual, because your community also exists in fear.  It doesn’t have to be that way, though.  Communities are still capable of coming together, figuring out how to get their interdependent needs met on a local scale, and cutting a bunch of the dependencies to the parasitic tapeworm economy.  Doing it on your own is not an option unless you live in the wild Alaskan outback or something.  What are the local sources of food around you?  Here, there is not nearly enough on a local scale to even begin to feed the millions of people within 100 miles.  Yet, that doesn’t mean I need to drink soda and eat doughnuts all the time, now does it?

That’s because my identity is not a rebel, nor is it an anarchist, nor is it a government informer.  I am neither a centralizer, nor a decentralizer.  I am just me, and everything is permitted.  Nothing is forbidden.  Not even just plain old following the laws and being really boring.