"Sleeping directly on the earth with no or only natural padding is the gold standard – equivalent to barefoot walking in nature and still a luxury for some cultures around the world and a few hard-core westerners. The closest most people will come in their daily lives, however, will be sleeping on hard flat floors with minimal non-natural padding. All the same, the benefits over sleeping on a modern mattress with a pillow are significant. The forces of a minimally padded floor provide a variety of loads to your body’s tissue that don’t occur on soft-casting mattresses, because you move more without external resistance inherent in a body-conforming mattress. This results in greater ranges of motion for joints that are underused at best, or completely immobile on a mattress. The pressure of a hard surface provides a passive massage to your muscles each time you move, thereby causing mechanotransduction of your cells that facilitates circulation, electricity, and waste removal. In addition to facilitating your body’s natural geometry (positioning of your parts to each other and to the floor) and providing a nightly tissue regenerating massage, sleeping on the floor allows gravity to traction those parts of you, like your neck, helping to restore your muscles to their optimal resting length. Just as sitting on the floor provides yin yoga style benefits of naturally stretching and tractioning muscles and connective tissues in your hips, sleeping on an unyielding surface is where natural neck stretching occurs. An additional benefit of floor sleeping is that it gives you at least one opportunity, and probably more, to get down onto the floor and up again.

If you go from sleeping on a bed one night to sleeping on the floor the next, without a transitional ramping down period, it’s going to be quite uncomfortable and may undermine your success. This could happen not because the floor is too hard, but because your body is “out of shape” for floor sleeping. You wouldn’t start a running program by doing a half-marathon. You would train by slowly increasing your miles, speed, and frequency, with plenty of rest days. Same with moving to the floor. If you exceed the boundaries of your tissues’ ability to adapt; and create loads that are more than what you body is used to, you may suffer. By transitioning slowly and systematically towards progressively more minimal sleeping surfaces, you will gradually load your tissues so that they can adapt to your new sleeping routine.

Katy Bowman writes about transitioning away from a mattress. I’ve distilled her suggestions, and added a few of my own. You’ve been sleeping on a mattress all of your life, so take time – weeks, months – to transition to the floor.

Try these steps:

• remove pillow topper from your current mattress
• place mattress directly on ground (yes, removing box springs changes the * forces of a mattress)
• replace mattress with futon
• replace futon with a thick rug/carpeting and some blankets
• remove the blankets one at a time
• replace carpeting with Tatami mat (Japanese sleeping mat)

You can follow a similar transition pattern for your pillow, going from thick and dense to thin and feathery to a folded towel, etc."

"Sleeping on a mattress is the new sitting"
https://web.archive.org/web/20200928062555/https://footloveyoga.com/2015/04/24/sleeping-on-a-mattress-is-the-new-sitting/

#Sleeping #FloorSleeping #Sleep #Body #Health

"What happens if instead of slumping onto the couch, you choose instead to sit on the floor? When you sit on the floor, with your back unsupported by anything other than your own musculature, you in fact strengthen that supporting musculature otherwise known as the postural muscles of your trunk aka your core. A daily practice of sitting on the floor with your back unsupported (this means you don’t sit against a wall or couch) strengthens the stabilizer muscles that protect your spine, as well as trims your waist in a natural, functional way. I would put my money on floor sitting over abdominal crunches as the optimal way to strengthen my core ANY DAY. When your postural muscles are firing at their optimal lengths, you become strong enough to align or stack your vertebra, bringing back the natural, compression reducing, curves of your spine. When you sit on the floor, you are more likely to be on your sitting bones rather than on your tailbone, which is better for your pelvic floor musculature and your low back. Hanging out in seated postures on the floor increases your tolerance to greater ranges of motion in your joints, which results in a sensual experience of more flexibility. You feel less stiff, less tight.

When you sit on the floor supporting your own spine, you squirm. You don’t sit still. You move about. Frequently changing positions articulates your joints into many different angles, causing a seemingly infinite variety of loads to the tissues of your spine, pelvis, hips, groin, and legs. Different loads stimulate different muscles which, through the process of mechanotransduction, pushes blood into the smallest of blood vessels, innervates the tissues, and removes waste products.

When you sit on the floor, you do something you almost never do on furniture – you stretch. Just sitting on the floor in a cross-legged position provides passive tensile and compressive loads to your connective tissues, increasing strength and suppleness. But active stretching is likely to happen as well. Once you’ve shifted your position a dozen times to get comfortable, you’ll usually give in and just begin actively stretching your muscles! This would not happen if you were in a chair. Just sayin."

Sitting on the Floor…A Proposal https://web.archive.org/web/20200928060514/https://footloveyoga.com/2015/03/10/sitting-on-the-floor-a-proposal/

#FloorSitting #FloorLiving #Sitting #Body #Health

@xenotar @santiago@mastodon.uy
Sem falar dos factos evidentes de clima.
Eletrico pode ser muito bom em paises quentes, mas aqui, faz frio.
Nem sequer vou falar dos efectos do frio em baterias.
Eu ainda estou esperando que alguem me explicasse como fazemos durante o inverno num certo punto da rodoviaria que vai pra baixo onde sempre ha caminhões que ficam glissando e parados no meio do rodoviaria, blocando o transito durante horas.
Tudo bem se vc pode esperar no carro com um minimo de aquecimento. (Eu e tudo o mundo aqui sempre tem cobertures no carro anyway).
Com carro eletrico, isto quer dizer que vc nunca mais vai sair.
E 20 carros eletricos blocando a rodoviaria...
Carros eletricos na cidade, sim, claro. mas carro eletricos pra tudo o mundo ? in your dreams...
(acabo de ver que eso deberia ser español - lo siento. Juro que mi proxima intervención lo sera pero no voy a re-escribirlo 😃 )

My reading seems to suggest that I have a serious obstacle to self-hosting on my own hardware:

CGNAT

I really do live in Bumblefuck—I love it here—and Starlink is my only option for a high-speed ISP. I hate that, but I need a high-speed connection for work and I don't want to move. Not many other options for work out here, so for now: Starlink.

It looks like I can maybe get around some CGNAT issues with a VPN that includes port forwarding…but now I'm wondering if maybe I should just consider self-hosting from a VPS instead.

Anyone else on the Fedi have any experience with self-hosting with Starlink as an ISP? What's that been like for you? Have any tips or suggestions?

@homelab@fedigroups.social
#Homelab #SelfHosting #AskFedi