Fighting Holiday Fatigue: How to make it to Midnight

The holidays can be rough on your body. Between dinners, parties, eating insane amounts of cookies, and travelling, by the time you make it to New Year’s Eve you may find yourself teetering on your feet like a character in Mortal Combat with “Finish Him!” flashing over your head. The most obvious manifestation of the holiday grind is fatigue. As you struggle to get all your shopping done and make it to the necessary relatives’ houses at the same time that you constantly adjust your sleep schedule, it is totally understandable to end up extremely tired. However, understandable as it may be, December shows no mercy. We cap off this exhausting time of year by ritualistically staying up until midnight. Fortunately, a keen understanding of science can help you boost your energy and make it to the ball drop alert and possibly even in a good mood.

Food

The first key to the energy puzzle is eating the right foods. While you may be tempted to load up on sugar to propel you into the night, holiday favourites like cookies and chocolates are a bad idea. Sure, they will give you a boost immediately after you eat them as your blood sugar spikes, but empty calories burn through quickly, after which you will be saddled with a sugar crash. Likewise, you’ll want to take it easy on any leftover Christmas turkey, as the natural tryptophan will make you groggy and longing for a nap. Instead you’ll want to reach for foods that will provide you with stable energy over the long haul. Foods that take longer to digest and that are rich in nutrients are your best bets. WebMD recommends peanut butter on whole wheat crackers, yoghurt, nuts, and carrots with low-fat cream cheese.

Water

With all the running around and socializing you’re bound to do at the New Year’s Eve party of your choosing, it is easy to forget to drink water. To make things worse, there will likely be a steady flow of wine, champagne, eggnog, and other festive libations at hand which will drain your body of water even more (alcohol is a diuretic, which makes you pee a lot), while the depressive effects make you want to sleep. But when you want to stay awake, water is your friend. Keeping properly hydrated allows all your body’s systems to function more efficiently so you waste less energy. Staying hydrated also keeps your body temperature more stable. Predictable metabolism is the key to your body making effective use of the fuel you provide it with. All great reasons to keep a glass of nature’s magic elixir close by on your way to the countdown.

Shelter

Another important factor in fighting fatigue is arranging your surroundings to promote energy. Your body naturally picks up on a lot of external cues, including temperature and light exposure, and adjusts your internal clock accordingly. Anyone who has ever heard of Seasonal Affective Disorder understands that as the days get shorter and light gets more scarce, it is natural to feel less energetic and even depressed. If you are hosting a New Year’s Eve party and want to keep your guests awake and engaged, make sure the room is well lit. You may also want to invite a lot of people to keep conversations dynamic and ongoing. Experts agree that engaging in mentally stimulating activities – like talking to other people – can help keep energy levels high.

Sweat

Finally, and somewhat confusingly if you read our article last week about how to make yourself fall asleep, exercise is a great way to moderate your energy levels. While working out at high intensity can definitely exhaust you, working out at a moderate level for 20 to 30 minutes can actually give you an energy boost. Doing so regularly can also help with that whole efficiency thing we’ve been talking about. Keeping your body in tip-top shape will make the most of the energy you already have.

When you have the energy to make it through the party without fixating on getting to sleep, New Year’s Eve can potentially be one of the highlights of your holiday season. If you plan ahead and avoid leaning on shortcuts like caffeine (or PCP), you will find yourself happy, healthy, and awake right up until the clock strikes midnight.

Sketchy Fact #109: Family Feasts

Sharing a meal with family around the holidays is an evolutionary instinct to build strong bonds by
offering your most valuable food stuffs. Anthropologists believe that even 2 million years ago, Homo ergaster (an ancestor of modern humans) gathered food for feasts.

Chasing Z’s: How to Fall Asleep on Christmas Eve

It is the eve of Christmas Eve (December 23) and around the world children are on their best behaviours in anticipation of the night that Santa will travel to every house on the planet, delivering gifts using his advanced stealth technology and potentially a super-fleet of military aircraft. However, the anticipation of Christmas morning is counterproductive to the means by which we bring it closer. Put simply, we can all relate to getting so damn excited about the holidays that it becomes impossible to sleep the night before. Not only does this make the time pass more slowly; it prohibits Santa from working his techno-magic and breaking into our houses undetected. With that in mind, we have four methods you can use to get yourself to sleep and out of the fat man’s way:

Drugs!

The most obvious solution to the problem is to pop a few sleeping pills or down a bottle of Nyquil. Sleep medications work in a few different ways. For some medications (allergy meds in particular), drowsiness is just a side effect of their main purpose. These medications are appealing because they are easy to acquire and are generally less dangerous than prescription sleep aids. The drugs that are harder to get, however, tend to be more targeted in their strategies. Most sleeping pills bind to your brain’s GABA receptors. GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. In layman’s terms, it is a chemical produced naturally in your brain that dials down activity.  Some prescription sleep aids are able to bind to GABA receptors in regions of the brain specifically associated with sleep, leaving other areas unaffected. Other, newer medications can even target the part of your brain that produces your body’s natural sleep-wake rhythms (the hypothalamus). These solutions aren’t perfect, though. They can lead to memory loss, hallucinations, and even instances of sleep-walking. Also, some people have an “issue” drugging their kids for something as trivial as getting them to sleep on a non-school night, so let’s explore some other options and try to find a kid-friendly one.

Booze!

When in doubt, break out the eggnog. Truly, words to live by. As many of us are aware, part of the process of gradually poisoning yourself with alcohol is that, at some point, you might pass out. Alcohol is a depressant, meaning that it impairs function in certain parts of your brain. We all know the impact this can have on coordinated motor functions like walking and talking, but it also applies to the deeper, more primal regions of your brain that control very basic things like keeping you conscious. As alcohol spreads through your brain it naturally wants to equally disperse itself. That means, while you may only want to turn off the parts of your brain that are preventing you from talking to the attractive intern at the office Christmas party, eventually the booze will work its way into your brain’s alertness centre. When that happens, your body will basically shut down. This may be a good thing if your goal is to suddenly find yourself waking up in a bathtub on Christmas morning, but it does have its drawbacks. Completely ignoring the prospect of an absolutely epic hangover (turn down the Christmas carols, please) you may overshoot your target level of intoxication and end up dead from alcohol poisoning. Sorry, kids.

Trauma!

Simple and to the point, a well-placed blow to the head will send you off to dreamland in a snap. Ask any boxer to describe getting knocked out and you will quickly understand the process. Over the course of a fight, as punches pile up, boxers often describe feelings of numbness, stumbling, loss of coordination, trouble thinking and eventually total collapse. Basically what is happening is that as your head snaps around in response to impact, your brain smashes up against your skull. When that happens, normal function gets scrambled in the same way it does when you drop your cell phone from an uncomfortable height. This is potentially the worst way to put yourself to sleep. First off, if Santa finds you unconscious and bloody, he might infer reasons to put you on the naughty list. Second, concussions are damaging and – given enough of them – fatal. Definitely not worth the risk.

Exercise!

In the end, the best solution to our sleep dilemma is the one you least want to hear at this relaxing time of year. As it is for basically every other physical problem, exercise is the safest answer. Exercise fatigues your body and mind at the same time that it produces melatonin, a neuro-chemical that controls sleep and repairs muscles. For the average person, regular aerobic exercise is one of the simplest ways to ensure a better, more restful night’s sleep. Even people with insomnia benefit from exercise, albeit at a slower pace. Research has shown that regular exercise over a period of four months can begin to restore normal sleep cycles in even the most sleep deprived people. So if you routinely have trouble sleeping and want to be prepared for Christmas, start running on Labour Day.

So there you have it! Plenty of options to help you get to sleep. This list isn’t exhaustive, though. There are many other ways to overcome the urge to stay up all night, including not ingesting sugar or caffeine before bed (lay off the cocoa), and lowering the temperature of your room (crack the window, it’s only a minor blizzard). See you on Christmas morning. Sweet dreams!

Sketchy Fact #107: Bombs Away

The word "mistletoe" comes from an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning "little dung twig" because the seeds are spread through bird droppings. How romantic...

Burn Baby Burn: The Science of a Perfect Yule-time Fire

The holidays are about ambiance. If you can’t surround yourself with the right festive atmosphere, then it will take much more of an effort to get into the spirit of the season. Obviously, decorations and a Christmas tree (or menorah or Festivus pole, depending on your leanings) go a long way to setting the mood; but nothing quite matches a crackling fire for creating warm and cozy feelings in the cockles of your heart.

The problem with fire is that it is difficult to manage and generally a pain in the butt. If you don’t keep it under control, it will burn up your presents and send you to the hospital. If you don’t constantly stock it, your fire will burn itself out and leave you shivering in the cold. That is probably why as human civilization has developed, we’ve outsourced our fire-making to power plants. But even if we are a lazy bunch of spoiled brats, we’ve never lost our love for just being in the presence of flames. Why else would they have an endless loop of a burning log on Netflix during December?

Streaming may be more convenient, but starting your own fire brings a sense of accomplishment and the effect is much more authentic. With that in mind, let’s dive into what makes a good fire.

First, most of us know that fire needs three elements: heat, fuel, and oxygen.

The interesting thing about fire is that it is not a thing by itself; rather, it’s more of an event. It is the outcome of taking a piece of matter containing compounds that react with oxygen and then heating them up enough so that they can combust. These compounds generally include hydrogen and carbon. Flames themselves are just super-heated carbon atoms that give off light as they rise away from the base of the blaze.

For our purposes, a fire starts when you heat up a piece of wood to a temperature where cellulose (the stuff wood is made of) begins to break down. As it does so, it releases gases containing reactive compounds. As heated molecules in cellulose are exposed to the oxygen in the surrounding air, they break apart and create new bonds, generally producing water and carbon dioxide. As atoms recombine, they rise and give off heat. The reason flames taper off into a point is that as the gases in the fire rise, they gradually spread out and begin to cool down. The tip of a flame is the last point at which they are close enough together for some atoms to still glow (incandesce).

Okay, so now we know what fire is, but how to we get one started? First, you have to pick the kind of wood you want to burn, as not all woods are created equal. Hardwoods like ash, oak, beech, and apple are dense, so they burn hot and last a long time; however, they are tough to heat to ignition temperature and they lack the satisfying crackle that a good Christmas fire needs. The reason they are dense is because the trees from which these woods come grow slowly with few air or water pockets between the wood fibers. By contrast, softwoods like pine, light easier and crackle like a cereal elf, but they burn quickly and the liquid sap they contain can create a flammable build-up in your chimney. The best choice for Christmas, then, is fir. Woods like Douglas fir are moderately dense, they crackle, and they have less sap.

The key to getting your fire going is in the shape of the wood, and the key factor in shape is surface area. To heat up enough cellulose to start the self-perpetuating chemical reaction we’re going for, we’ll want to start with pieces of wood with a larger surface area. This means that as much of their mass as possible is exposed to the oxygen with which we are trying to get it to react. To help you visualize what I’m talking about, imagine a piece of paper so large that it weighs 10 lbs (4.5 kg). It has a large surface area and will burn much faster and light much easier than a block of wood that weighs 10 lbs.

Once you get your fire going and it is generating enough heat on its own, you can throw in pieces with decreasing surface areas until eventually you can burn a big yule log. A big, slow burning piece of dense wood will keep you warm and entertained for hours as you drink your eggnog and revel in holiday cheer.

Now, get to roasting those chestnuts.