Last night at nearly 2:00 AM, I found myself wide awake as if the bright light of morning had already arrived. After looking at my phone for the time, a disappointment which spurned anxiety shot through my body like a shot of ink dropped into a bottle of clear water. “This is going to mess up my day.” I thought, lying there in my bed. There was no way I could sleep soundly for the required hours to be fully rested when I was this awake at 2:00AM. Now what?
The age old dilemma of do I try to begin my day now and get some things accomplished early’ or try to reacquire the ability to fall asleep and try to start my day at a more normal time. But I was wide awake, since we have been on the road traveling I thought that a bit of fresh air may help so I stepped out of the RV and took a bit of a stroll around the RV park. To my surprise a few other people were also up and several lights were on in other RVs around me.
Upon returning to my RV, I found that my counterpart on the trip with me was also up and wide awake. It hit me then, as I smiled thinking about my days operating engineering plants in the Navy. Something that I had noticed way back then came into mind, something regarding our bodies inadvertent reactions to our surroundings. The truth is that our bodies are much like an engineering system. We change and react to our environment in ways that our conscious minds are often not aware of.
I laughed with my wide awake counterpart and mentioned that the atmospheric pressure must have made a drastic change from low-to-high in the recent hours. Why would I make this assumption? Operations of engineering plants onboard ships out at sea are based on fluid flow, and each aspect of these entire self-contained systems are based on relation to atmospheric pressure. Any time pressure changes occurred the entire plant changed enough that minor adjustments needed to be made to countless systems meters, valves, and other engineering components. Why would I bring this up for this situation? I bring it up not because of the effect on the operation of the engineering systems, but because of the effect on the people onboard the ship. The days on which major atmospheric pressure changes occurred, everyone was at their worst. We all seemed to be grumpy, irritable, and tired. We had all seemed to have a restless night of sleep or miserable day at the same time. Our bodies had felt the change to our physical environment; but we did not consciously know this, we were all just in a terrible mood.
A quick look online at the atmospheric pressure trend over the same period of time showed exactly what my assumption had gathered. Not only did we all wake up in the middle of the pressure change, but everywhere I went in the same morning, people were late for engagement, poorly dressed, and extremely moody. Today was one of those days when everyone just seems to be off.
We can all take a lesson from paying attention to our body’s natural queues. Many negative interactions, delays, and accidents occur on times where we all can expect to be a little under the weather based on our changes to the environment that affect our body. Sometimes pressure change will stem the feeling or dreams of pushing on us from all sides; adding pressure to our thoughts regarding life which we just can’t seem to explain. Most people associate this explainable condition to anxiety or stress, and become the bearer of negative energy, lashing out all day.
Know yourself, and listen to your body.