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Improve Your Sleep Schedule? Go Camping

I read a great article in Popular Science (Feb 2017) about how going camping can improve your sleep.

Yes, camping! 

We know that modern environments with all their electronic gadgets (and bright screens) hurt sleep patterns. When we look at bright lights, our bodies stay in “daytime” mode, so we stay up later and wake up groggier.  

If we get away from those bright lights (e.g. when camping), our melatonin levels rise when the sun goes down which signals it’s time for sleep. When the sun rises, the melatonin levels fall which signals our body that it’s time to wake up. Additional exposure to natural light throughout the day reinforces the “daytime” mode. The study showed that even a short weekend camping can “largely reset a person’s internal clock”.

Read more: Camping to Improve Sleep

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Health Benefits of Massage

Massage is great for helping you relax, but it also has more therapeutic benefits:

  • Relieve back/neck pain
  • Boost focus
  • Reduce stress
  • Relieve depression and anxiety
  • Help osteoarthritis
  • Sleep more soundly
  • Heal injuries
  • Improve circulation
  • Fight fatigue
  • Manage pain
  • Improve flexibility

How can massage do all that?

“The skin is moved during a moderate pressure massage, which results in a calming and slowing of the nervous system,” says Tiffany Field, PhD at the University of Miami School of Medicine. “And that slowing of the nervous system leads to other physiological effects too, like a decrease in heart rate, lowered blood pressure, and changes in EEG patterns (electrical activity in your brain)”, says Field. And you can get these great effects after only 20 minutes!

Treat yourself to a massage & improve your health!