Mangoes + Sleep
“Food is data. Food is light.”
A few weeks ago, I found myself suffering from a terrible case of prolonged insomnia.
You can hear me talk about it more in my recent podcast episode with Kate Kavanaugh, on Work + Rest, but for more than a month, I couldn't seem to sleep past three or four in the morning.
Short of taking standard sleep medication, which I hate, I tried a lot of different things to "solve the problem" (more on why this is in quotes, below). Typically averse to consuming "pills"—given my lifelong battle with chronic illness and the failings of Western "medicine" to cure it—I generally reach for homeopathic, functional, or similar health options before anything else.
That being the case, I started by simply waiting past midnight to lie down, interested in whether the later bedtime would trick my body into pushing through the twilight hour. No matter how late I fell asleep, though, I still woke up around three or four. Then, reversing the experiment, I tried going to sleep super early, only to find myself waking at 1am. Many nights, I could fall back asleep, but not for another two or three hours, which left me feeling profoundly groggy every morning, no matter when or for how long the broken sleep occurred.
Without any success in my initial methods, a slew of other curiosities came to mind.
Years ago, I remember hearing that, when humans lived more in tune with the rhythms of the sun, many people often woke between 2-4am, experiencing massive bursts of creative energy. Perhaps my mid-morning wake-ups were actually a good thing if I stopped resisting and let my creativity run amok in the middle of the night.
The hours of 2-4am are also, apparently, when our lungs and liver do their heaviest detox work, typically associated in Chinese medicine with the emotions of grief and anger, respectively. Perhaps, and likely, my body had begun to tell me something: Finally process all the negative emotions trapped in your body, or continue to suffer. I told my new friend, Angela, that my lack of sleep had made my daily life unmanageable, and her response was, "Maybe your life being 'manageable' is the problem. Maybe your body is making life 'unmanageable' so you finally stop and pay attention to what it's trying to tell you."
She was right, of course.
The "Wise Woman" tradition of healing tells us that our bodies are never "wrong." When something is "off," they do exactly what they're designed to do: Alert us to what is out of alignment individually or collectively (usually both), presented as a symptom, so that we might pay attention to and heal the underlying, root cause by coming back into greater alignment. Symptoms are not problems, then; they are signals. Ignore those signals, and risk serious, catastrophic damage. Cover them up with temporary fixes and not only resign yourself to a lifetime of medication, but risk never healing the deeper wound—again, likely both individual and collective or cultural.
Still, sometimes you just have to sleep. So, eventually, when I was exhausted enough to feel just shy of losing my mind, I caved and took an over-the-counter sleep medication. While the Western medical model might be terrible at finding long-term, root causes, it is pretty damn great at putting Band-Aids over bullet holes. And, when you're stuck right in the middle of an acute issue that makes the rest of your life untenable, Band-Aids suit just fine for the time being.
In any case, guided by the advice of a practitioner friend with some alternative views, I was told to—temporarily, but in no uncertain terms—"take as much medication as I could, just short of what I felt might put me in a hospital."
I still find this hysterical, but it got the job done. For about a week, I went hard on a combination of melatonin gummies, a 1:1 CBD:CBN tincture, Unisom, and magnesium glycinate, combined. Though still largely homeopathic, it wasn't exactly a cocktail I was used to taking.
But finally, after several weeks of struggle, I began to regain my mental sanity and physical acuity. Basically, with enough real sleep, I was functional again.
In the midst of all my issues, though, some unexpected findings occurred. At some point, I was introduced to the work of Carrie Bennett via Kate's podcast. Carrie speaks primarily about the role of sunlight in our circadian and circannual rhythms, and what's called "quantum biology," a growing field of research that applies quantum theory to the processes of living organisms.
What she had to say in that episode resonated so deeply with me that I began implementing a lot of her suggestions. I started waking up to see sunrise every morning, started going on morning walks without sunglasses so my eyes and skin could take in as much UVA light as possible, took my laptop outside to work in natural light whenever I could, began implementing some "safe" sun practices like briefly sitting out on my balcony nearly every day around solar noon, caught sunset each night, purchased a pair of pretty legit (if pricey) blue-light blockers, and covered all sources of artificial light in my home so that my eyes were in true darkness heading into bedtime.
It seems like a lot but, all in all, these new behaviors were just a handful of relatively minor and mostly free or very cheap habit shifts. Even Carrie's own podcast is called "2% Better," so it's not like I expected myself to do everything all at once or completely change overnight.
Still, I felt compelled to invest energy into all of these lifestyle changes because I saw nearly immediate evidence of their benefits. Only a few days into morning walks around the time when UVA light is most prevalent and briefly staying out until UVB light became available, my energy level turned into what felt like a combustible engine. As someone who has struggled with chronic fatigue for longer than I can recall, that was no small improvement. It was like the sun was, indeed, an energy source. Like someone had literally flipped on a light.
Carrie's Instagram page does an incredible job of talking about why this is the case, as well as all of the other connections between sunlight and our health, with a lot of added and necessary nuance. But it wasn't until downloading an app mentioned by her suggested blue-light-blocking glasses company that a wild and unexpected connection happened for me.
You guessed it: The intersection of mangoes and sleep.
The app tells you when sunrise and sunset occur, when UVA and UVB light are present, when you should consider eating, working, or exercising during the day, and all kinds of other things that are not only directly connected to our sleep, but that dramatically affect our hormones.
It also cites a ton of additional references to back up recommendations so you can dig in even further, which I did. At some point, while combing through all of this extra material, I read a few lines I'm pretty sure made me scream, "WHAT?!" out loud to myself, alone on my couch—
"When you eat, your mitochondria decode that information and turn the food into cellular energy. If the environmental cues in your food don't match your environment, it creates a mismatch between what your gut absorbs and what your eyes and skin perceive. In other words, you create circadian disruption" (reference below).
In all of the work I've done on my health and for all my passion for food, I'd never before considered this:
What if eating locally and seasonally isn't a moral code created to shame you for being a "good" or "bad" person, but is actually directly tied to our bodies' most innate, natural rhythms? And what if eating locally and seasonally isn't just about supporting your local economy, creating less waste, not participating in the draw-down of precious resources in distant communities, or "saving the environment" because food doesn't have to be transported such long distances? What if eating locally and seasonally also has something to do with our sleep because food has something to do with light? And light, it turns out, massively impacts our health?
Are you now screaming "WHAT?!" out loud to yourself?
Because what if, by eating a mango—or any food that doesn't grow where you live—you're telling your body it's THIS time, all while your actual body exists in ANOTHER time, and that disconnect in light data between where you live and where your food comes from is throwing off your circadian rhythm and therefore your sleep?
ISN'T THAT WILD?!
For months now, in the podcast and in my writing, I've been somewhat asserting that the root of every "sickness" or dis-ease is "separation." We are so often separated from ourselves, each other, the land, and so much else. But what if we can also foster separation by telling our bodies it's one time while eating as though it's another?
And what if separation is another way of saying we're "out of resonance?" Applying the idea of "separation" to sound, is eating food grown and raised outside of our local time zone a type of "dissonance" or "dis-cord" we introduce in our bodies?
It's no coincidence that our natural sleep and wake patterns are called a "rhythm." Operate in tune with it, and produce a state of internal harmony. Operate out of sync and, perhaps, find your health struggling.
The etymology of the word "health," after all, derives from the idea of "wholeness," or "holiness." "Separate," meanwhile, means "disjoined" or "divided."
Holiness, then, isn't what it means to attain some pious level of perfection or contrived morality. It's to practice living in greater and greater alignment with the universe. To not be "apart" from nature, but to be "one" with it.
It stands to reason, then, that to be most alive—physically, spiritually, relationally, and otherwise—means to be in connection, resonance, and alignment, in as many ways as we can, individually and communally.
To be otherwise is to be sick.
Everything I write here is anecdotal and what has helped in my own life. Please consult a medical professional to make your own health decisions.
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