Natural Light: What affects it and how does it affect us?
This week we look at how Coulthard explains the effect of the colour of light. The nature of sunlight is affected by our location, the time of year, and the time of day. White light boosts alertness and mood during the day, blue light can make it difficult to sleep, while red light has no effect on our body clock so can be used at night.
The World Upon Your Shoulders - The Effect of Stress on Your Traps
Stress can result in us holding our shoulders is a partially ‘shrugged’ position which activates our trapezius muscles. Day after day the traps can become shorter and shorter. often resulting in soreness and even headaches. Try these mobility exercises, self-massage techniques and yoga poses to help lengthen a loosen these stressed-out muscle.
Short- and Long-Term Memory – The Odd Couple
The short-term and long-term memory systems are very different but work together. The short-term memory has limited capacity, is easy to get information from and acts as a gateway to our long-term memory. Meanwhile our long-term memory is thought to have unlimited capacity but takes longer to get information from.
Agonists and Antagonists – How we move
Muscles can only pull not push so therefore must work in pairs. While one contracts (agonist), the other lengthens (antagonist). Meanwhile others help the agonist (synergists). By knowing which muscles are do which roles we can look for imbalances and know when synergists have taken over and are causing issues.
Light and Rhythm
This week we are going to look at how light and rhythms affects us. Before artificial lighting, we lived according to the sun. We woke when it rose and slept when it was dark. As it got cooler we slept. As you can imagine, our artificial lighting and heated houses can interfere with these cues and affect our body clock. Here are some ways biophilia suggests we can help us get our rhythm back.