Sleeping In The Woods May Reset Body Clock

[maverick]

http://www.google.com/url?url=http://ww ... iiXJqFFQdw

[Tom_H]

Even if we haven't thought about it, most of us intuitively already knew that is true. Edison thought he was doing everyone a favor, making them more productive and eliminating wasted time sleeping in the dark.

Strenuous exercise in the natural environment, followed by refreshing sleep in cool clean air, bathed in a sky only with stars and moon as the only light and no noises other than nature's own music of streams, owls, crickets, etc. That is healthy sleep and healthy living!

[Wandering Daisy]

Well count me in as the contrary experience. For all the nights I have spent backpacking, most, I do not sleep as well as at home. This is ever more so as I get older. Harder to warm up the sleeping bag, then come the aches and pains, then have to get up and pee, then my hip is too sore to side-sleep so I fitfully get on my back. Then the morning when I am quite cold. In fact, I actually sleep better on a backpack trip if I take it easy walking (not exactly my style). Years ago I quit worrying about sleeping or not. I just "rest" and get up regardless and keep going. Also, I have never used an alarm clock, Even when I worked. I am a natural born early riser. Rarely sleep past 5AM and never feel groggy in the AM.

I think my biological clock is set just fine, both in town and in the woods. Now if I could get everything else working so I could sleep better.

[Tom_H]

Yea, I was waxing nostalgic about my youth. Way too many things don't work right now. I do have amazing backpacking trips in my dreams sometimes though!

[longri]

I don't believe the study said that people slept any better while camping. The point was that natural lighting affected the timing of their sleep cycles as measured after they returned home.

[Wandering Daisy]

I think it was a stupid study. Not enough sample size. No control group. Looks like one of those studies that is simply trying prove what someone wants to prove. Exercise and controlling light in your bedroom can do the same thing. You do not have to go backpacking. You just have to unglue yourself from artificial light. What if they had gone out during a full moon? Lot of light at night then.

[longri]

Daisy, they didn't say you had to go backpacking or camping. That's just the thread title.

You're right though, it was not a perfect study. The authors took pains to admit that.


Full moons bug me sometimes camping. But it's such a weak light source compared to the sun or an indoor light, or even this computer monitor I'm looking at right now instead of sleeping.

[zacjust32]

Full moons bug me sometimes camping. But it's such a weak light source compared to the sun or an indoor light, or even this computer monitor I'm looking at right now instead of sleeping.

At Guitar Lake last summer I couldn't sleep with the full moon until my beanie was completely over my eyes and the mummy hood drawn tight around. That was the brightest moon I've ever seen.

[SSSdave]

Too many factors are involved in sleeping well so any conclusions are suspect though it is worth speculating about.

For instance one issue with comparing sleeping at home versus camping is there are far more distractions at home to defer even turning out the lights where as out camping if one does not have a group watching a fire going, just sitting around in dim surroundings is enough to make many drousy. Also sleeping in unfamiliar places like a motel even if quiet is enough to gnaw at many people's ability to go to sleep, much less outside in nature that humans have a natural ancient instinct to feel creepy about. Obviously regardless of where one is trying to sleep, a change from light and darkness has impact. Thus if someone was outdoors under bright artificial lights, they may be more affected by that.

On other boards there have been threads about the difficulty some people have sleeping in the backcountry. In the summer we generally are asleep within an hour of dusk and awake at dawn. Regularity helps both out there and at home. I'm generally a light sleeper anywhere, easily roused awake by external noises even while deeply asleep. Very unusually I tend to dream 100% of the time while sleeping and wake up several times each night. Out in the backcountry, I almost always get up at least once a night to p.

The worst issue for people out in the backcountry is that excessive strenuous activity during a day takes a toll on micromuscle tears and other tissues like joints in one's body that though subtle individually add up to an overall heightened unpleasant body awareness that detracts from the quiet lack of sensory input we fall asleep most easily with. Reading WD's comment is exactly true, thus backing off on strenuous effort can help, especially as one gets older.

[longri]

The paper wasn't about sleeping well.

It was about the way one's biological clock -- as measured by melatonin onset/offset -- shifts in response to either natural lighting versus electrical lighting.

Does the light from a full moon affect melatonin in humans? In that paper they didn't specify the moon phase, but the illuminance graphs showed a very low nighttime light level (~0.1 lux) for the winter campers in the first study. Light intensity is correlated with melatonin suppression.