Three health things I recently learned

Saturday 2/7/26

When an interesting looking health article pops up--usually one about a study--I'll often read it. I might learn something that would be smart to do--as I recently did about the benefits of having a spoonful of extra virgin olive oil each day--and sometimes it's just nice to see that a practice I regularly employ has benefits.

My life borders on the unendurable at this juncture, so I'll take a little thing--just a little bump--when one is available. I try to string things together such that I do keep going, creating, enduring, fighting, in the seemingly miracle-of-miracles chance that anything changes to the good.

I've learned three new things in the last week.

One is that people who arise early are less likely to have heart issues than so-called "night owls."

It's currently 2:21 AM as I write this, so maybe my status is...cloudy. I don't think so, though. I have slept and am now awake for my day. I arise anywhere from midnight to four in the morning. Usually it's closer to two. I go to bed early--but not as early as one might think at times--and I believe I get enough sleep. I look forward to waking up and being done with sleep so that I can keep trying and hopefully do better than I did the day before. That is a goal I have every day.

I believe I used to be what one would call a night owl. I had a hard time sleeping for a long time. When I drank, and tried to give it up, and/or would have three, five, ten day periods or whatever they might be of abstinence, I would experience total wakefulness. This is common with heavy drinkers.

I'll hear people bemoan how the person who is this will always be so, like the night owl thing is in your DNA. It isn't and is instead like many things. Retrain your body--and your mind--and get into a routine and the routine becomes easier and then the norm. You don't want to live a routine life, but routine can be like scaffolding, a framework, on which other things--fresh, surprising, evolving things--are draped.

Attempting to go to bed at nine o'clock, say, won't prove an immediate success, but eventually you'll be able to do it if that's what you're trying for. And then you'll get up earlier. I will take Melatonin two or three hours before I'm ready to go to sleep. That's how it works best for me. It isn't some sleeping pill that you swallow and then you're out. It's more like an easy-in part of a process.

I also learned that if you go extended periods without eating, then the body starts consuming the cells that make you age and cause disease.

I never eat before two in the afternoon. Anything. I think eating makes one complacent, and I don't want to be complacent as I'm creating, fighting, doing, etc. Rarely will I eat after five o'clock, and virtually never after six o'clock, and often not after three or four.

In other words, I will go twenty to twenty-four hours without any intake of food every day, in a sense. I've done this for many years now.

This just seemed like what was best for me personally, but it was nice to read about the benefits after the fact, and what I read gibes with my personal experience.

Then this morning I learned that lemon water helps with blood pressure. I have four water bottles that are always filled and from which I drink out of in a kind of rotation. Two of them always contain pieces of lemon. These large pieces float in the water, and then I dump them out and replace them.

I know lemons are good for you and I have always liked their taste. If I was in Radiohead's "Everything In Its Right Place" and woke up sucking a lemon I wouldn't think that was bad at all. So, why not multitask, health-wise, as it were? Can't hurt, right?

I didn't know about the blood pressure thing--and, to be honest, a lot of it sounded like it had more to do with hydration and the lemons were a sort of excuse for a new article--but I like knowing that now. With my life being as hard as it is, I have to find these little psychological techniques to keep going and even just stay alive/not make myself not alive. That's how hard it is right now. For me. Anyone else would be dead because they could not handle this. Can I handle it? How much longer can I handle it? The territory is uncharted. One person can exist in it but I don't know for how long/how much longer.

I can put up the entry on here that says things well that no one else has or can say, and that will be a something. The stairs I run will be a something. Drinking the bottle of lemon water can be a something. A positive, a part of a cause, a step in an undertaking. A portion.

Writing the best thing anyone has ever written--which to me is a limiting description because it is more than and beyond writing--is a step, but I don't include that as readily as those other things because there is no worse feeling for me than knowing that's what I have done and that's what that work is and yet there is nothing I can do with it right now save have it sit here with me, unseen by the world, or anyone even.

I didn't run stairs yesterday so I need to do a better job this weekend despite the cold and snow. I really got it going yesterday on the writing front and cranked some excellent work, only half of which will be published at present, but I knew that was the likely outcome before I started. I need to keep that going now and start stacking some newly finished works.