Imagine several giraffes standing around discussing what it is that they should eat. Imagine one saying that it thought they should eat plants, and another saying it thinks they should eat meat.
Now imagine a pack of tigers debating how long they should sleep. One tiger says that they need 10-20 hours of sleep each day, yet another says that they can get by on half of that.
The truth is that giraffes are herbivores, they eat only plants. They always have and likely always will. Their bodies are set up for surviving on plants. And the truth is that tigers require 18-20 hours of sleep each day. They perform and function best with that many hours of sleep.
Every species on the planet has a particular set of parameters that it is exquisitely designed to live within. There are specific types of food, a certain number of hours of sleep, and optimal climate conditions within which each species requires to not just live, but to thrive. And each species knows what to eat, how much to sleep, and where to live. They don’t fight it, discuss it, or try to manipulate it.
So, why is it that our species, homo sapien, is so confused about how we should eat, sleep, think, and live? Why do humans have such a hard time figuring out the essentials when it comes to our most basic needs? We argue about everything from whether we should eat meat or plants, sleep six hours, eight hours, or ten hours, and whether we should do high intensity training, slow and steady exercise, or do resistance training.
I’ve talked about this a lot, but imagine finding a baby turtle in a pond and deciding to keep it as a pet. You would need to know how to care for it. Whether you went to Google, or had to figure it out on your own, the answers would come from observations made from turtles living in the wild. Knowing how a turtle lives in the wild would help you care for the baby turtle at home. The closer you make the environment at home like the one in the wild, the healthier, happier, and more optimal life would be for your new pet turtle.
I’m baffled at how complicated we humans have made things for ourselves. We think that somehow we are going to answer all of our health and happiness problems in a lab, with a pill, or cracking some hidden code. We thought decoding the human genome was going to be the breakthrough we needed to answer all of our health-related problems. Oops! It turns out, that wasn’t the answer. But that’s okay. Why? Because every other species continues to thrive (other than those we have disrupted), and none of them even knows what DNA is.
If we take a quick and simple look at wild homo sapiens, those remote, indigenous tribes who share the same genes, yet do not struggle with our most common chronic illnesses (diabetes, obesity, depression, auto-immune conditions, cancers, etc.), we can tease out some basic, simple, and unbelievably powerful rules by which we can start with.
Here are four… 1. Eat real, whole foods. 2. Get regular movement/exercise every single day. 3. Get outside in the sunlight and fresh air often. And 4. Make time for rest and relaxation to unwind each day.
As humans, we have a tendency to complicate almost everything we do. We overthink everything. And it has cost us dearly. Start by listening to and modeling the true experts… wild humans. They hold the answers… the same answers that have worked for generations… and those answers are simple.
