Hello, this is Margo Rose of Body Aware Grieving. And I’d like to talk today about what I think is the biggest thing, we’re missing out on an opportunity to reduce healthcare costs in particular in this country. And that is that people are chronically going around sleep-deprived, we have so many people who just start sleeping deeply enough and enough hours. And they tend to run a deficit if they’re dealing with children or raising families, people who are just having sleeping disorders and have a hard time sleeping, and people who are just scheduled too tightly, and they’re not leaving enough time for high-quality rest. And I think this drives the cost of health care up in ways that we don’t even know how to calculate the fact that so many people are having car accidents due to having slower reflexes if they’re tired or actually falling asleep at the job. road rage, people having short tempers, and irritable reactions that are a little bit overblown, because they’re not well enough rested.
We’ve got truck drivers, air traffic controllers, pilots, people on the water, having problems if they’re not well enough, able to take care of their health. I wonder how many just personal disputes and domestic problems could be going better if everyone was well enough rested, how many of those fights would become as inflamed as they might, if people were, you know, running around on fumes. We look at our health care costs in terms of how well people are healing, I think sleep is one of the best forms of medicine and certainly a whole lot cheaper than a lot of the other forms of medicine, medicine out there. He’s just looking at people not getting sick.
If we slept well enough, I think fewer of us would fall prey to that, you know, cold and flu season that tends to take people out, I think the amount of miss work would go down. If people were well enough rested. And the other thing people do is they do get off work because they’re sick and they keep coming back to work before they’re well enough healed. And those people actually when they do get sick with a cold or flu or PMS or whatever are dragging them down. If people just stay down long enough to get fully rejuvenated and fully re-energized by some time just relaxing and sleeping. I think we’d have fewer people coming back and forth to work as they don’t let themselves fully heal. Even hospitals, theoretically we’re spending so much time and money helping people heal in hospitals. It’s got to be the least restful most hospitals seem like the least restful place a person can imagine.
Have you visited anyone in a hospital recently there are like 10 different televisions going full volume in 10 different rooms and people are sharing rooms where someone else has a different television on or different visitors coming or different doctors and nurses coming at all times of day or night? I mean, how we can how can we how we can spend that much money on the hospital medical system of trying to get better and not think a little more deeply about how can we actually have these people who are in the hospital to get better from whatever their ailments, sleep better and relax more I just think it’s kind of a ridiculous oversight. I think we could be producing a lot more I think people when they do go to their jobs if they had enough energy and were able to concentrate I think our general productivity could go up in this culture and in cultures around the world, perhaps I’m not as familiar I know in North America, we tend to run a lot of people not having enough sleep. Certainly, for body aware grieving,
I would say that grieving goes better when people have slept enough I think when people are sad or people are in mourning, that just giving in to this natural impulse to spend a little bit more time relaxing and making sure you’re fully rested would help people get over shock, stress, grief, sadness. I think it would go a long way for a lot of these kinds of mood phases that people are going through and have them get back into some of the brighter, more energetic moods a little bit quicker. So that’s just my little public service announcement. I think we should just try it. What would it take for more of us to figure out how to sleep as much as we need to. Just some form of national hibernation system. What if we didn’t experiment like that? What do we have to lose? What’s the negative consequence of people having enough rest?
It doesn’t seem like it has very many side effects compared to other things we could be doing with our time so let’s try to find some ways to be relaxed and energetic and to look all radiant relaxed because we’ve been taking care of this very simple basic human need. I’m going to work on that for myself, I might give you some updates and in the meanwhile, I wish you all the best and would love to hear your ideas.
This is Margo Rose of Body Aware Grieving. Take Care.
