Campfire Chronicles: Sleep, Stars, and Storytelling 5/10: The Curious Clinic

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Transcript

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Episode five Campfire Chronicles Sleep Stars and Storytelling. Welcome back. Today we're leaving the clinic, heading into the woods and asking, why does a campfire calm us down? For my high achieving entrepreneurs burnout is real and the woods might just hold the cure. First, let's rethink our biological clocks. Remember, we're talking about that a few times. If you listen to the past episodes, we have a circadian rhythm, we have a biological clock. We have, I should say, many biological clocks. But when we look at the circadian rhythm and we look at the blue lights in our life and the busy, fast-paced living, how much melatonin is really being produced? And what is melatonin for? Why is that so important and why are we even going there? What does that mean about having a campfire and sleeping outside in a tent or lamping, I guess, in an RV? What does that mean? Why is that important? How can that even help me? Well, our body needs to reset, it needs time away from the lights, meaning the blue lights, right? Blue lights decrease melatonin production. If you decrease melatonin production, you don't sleep as well at night. You don't get tired at night. That's one of the first things that Alzheimer patients will talk about is, and dementia patients, um, the first signs is my sleep is disrupted. I can't fall asleep, or I can't stay asleep, I don't feel rested. Why is that? Right? So our biological clock, our circadian rhythm, gets disrupted when we have blue light. It gets disrupted when we're always busy. So melatonin production, if you listen to um a previous episode about, I think it was the first one even, going to the beach in the sunlight. When you get to the beach and you activate your receptors before 10 a.m., what happens is our circadian rhythm, the clock begins about a 14-hour span to produce melatonin in 14 hours from that initial light experience. And and the brighter the light, that's why we tell you to go into the sun, don't look at the sun, but go into the sun. The importance of that is to start that clock. So if you go into the sun at 7 o'clock a.m. and you're out there for 10 minutes, and your receptors in the back of your eyeball are like, hey, this is great. Let's start our clock for melatonin. That is gonna be a number one thing to help that. But this getting rid of blue light, that's gonna help the actual increase of producing melatonin. Melatonin is our sleepy time, it's our repair system. You know, we have in the daytime we break down. It's called um anab an abolism. I always can say that right. You know what I'm saying? So you break down during the day, and then so catabolism, sorry, catabolism, you catabolize, that's the breakdown during the day, and at night we're gonna go to anabolism, so not cannibalism, right? We're not gonna eat humans, we are going to sleep and repair what we broke down during the day, and that is where melatonin comes in. So when we go camping, you don't bring your electronics to the campfire, you leave them, you detox from them, right? It gets rid of the blue light, which helps melatonin produce. And when you look at the studies, if you go camping for just a weekend, it completely resets our circadian rhythm to solar time. That is so important. Your wake sleep cycle then gets solidified, reset. You can start sleeping again. So that's why detox from blue lights, detox from things that can disrupt our melatonin production or throw us off with stress and production of our um opposite, which is cortisol. What happens to our solar time or circadian rhythm is it flip-flops, it shifts, it doesn't give you um the spike in the morning to wake you up to say, hey, you're hungry, you need to wake up, it's time to wake up, get up, and then you don't have that spike of melatonin at night that says it's time to go to bed, your body should be sleeping. Um, let's start building everything back up. And when it doesn't do that properly, that's when you she see chronic fatigue, weight gain, um, you see a whole lot of symptoms happening. You're not you're not rested when you wake, your thyroid starts, you know, having issues, you might lose some hair where you shouldn't, or you know, just a whole lot of stuff will happen. So camping alone for a weekend without any electronics completely resets the circadian rhythm to solar time that makes you sleep deeper than you have in months, maybe years. So remember, this is something that is going to be a biohack, it's going to be a life-changing situation for you. That will be the most bang for your buck. Secondly, the art of storytelling. Humans evolved around campfires. Tonight, ask your kids this prompt. Tell me a time you failed at something and what you did next. This will help build growth mindset for them. It opens up amazing vulnerability in your conversations for adults. Think about it. If you were asked that, tell me about a time you failed, and what did you do about it? That gives you an opportunity to really go, hmm, well, maybe I actually should have done something different, but that's not what I did. But it's a learning experience, it's a it's a topic of conversation that you can actually bring to your family, to your friends, to your spouse, to yourself, right? And that is super, super important to start reflecting and seeing where you're gonna project into the future, right? Okay, curious facts. Staring at a fire lowers your blood pressure. Oh, I love staring at fires. I love fires. I mean the contained ones. I don't like house fires and forest fires, but the contained fires, there's just something about it. You know, I grew up in Minnesota and we would have campfires all the time at our house, up north, when we'd go on our camping trips, um, or glamping trips, as you would call them. Oh man, that was so much fun. Our whole family I have a very large family. I don't know if you have a large family, but I have a very large family. Um, and so all the cousins would get together, and the aunts and uncles, and the grandparents, and once a year they would rent out a cabin for all the kids and the grandkids, and we would go, and it was awesome. Some of the best memories that we have are that I have are from those experiences. So thanks, mom and dad, grandma, if you guys are listening. Um, anyways, so when we think about looking at fires, it does physiological changes to our body. It puts us into rest and digest, it lowers your blood pressure, it calms your nervous system, um, and also looking at the stars. When you look up at the stars, you know, I am Christian, so when I look up, it talks about when you look up at God, when you look up at his creation, when you look up, you are actually going to decrease inflammation. It puts you in a in a psychological state of awe. So when you decrease inflammation from looking up and pondering and enjoying all of these things, that is what camping and looking at the stars and watching the fire. It's not just a camping trip. It's a detox, it's a it's a major biohack all wrapped in a package in a weekend. And it's so amazing. So turn off your Wi Fi, light a fire, and stay curious until our next episode.