I blogged about my purchase of an eye mask for sleeping here.
I like it. No more being bothered by the hall light, the bathroom light, and the lights in other family members’ bedrooms when their doors are left open.
But it turns out that I’m not just doing this for the sake of family harmony. Sleeping in the dark is also good for my cardiovascular health. This week, I read that nighttime artificial light exposure is a big risk factor for developing cardiovascular diseases among adults older than 40 years.
Nearly 890,000 women and men wore wrist bands that collected data on light for more than a decade. Compared with the half with fairly to very dark nights, the 10% with the brightest nights had nearly a third higher risks of developing coronary artery disease.
This risk of heart attack, stroke and other heart failures, including atrial fibrillation, was high even after adjusting for the well-established cardiovascular risk factors. These include physical activity, smoking, alcohol, diet, socioeconomic status, polygenic risk and even sleep hours/interuptions. The women studied were slightly more prone to the effect than men.
Published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, the study strongly suggests that, in addition to current preventive advice for heart health, getting a good night’s sleep with no light at night is a useful strategy for reducing cardiac and vascular diseases.
This is an anecdote, not a study result so take it for what it’s worth to you.
I needed some prescriptions refilled so I went to my doctor to get the annual testing done to confirm I still had the correct dose. He sent me a message saying that he recommended doubling my cholesterol medication because I am pre-diabetic (I am not) and have a history of heart disease.
I pushed back, pointing out that similar testing had been done at the heart institute three months prior, and the results were well within normal ranges for fasting blood tests. While my non-fasting results at the clinic were a little higher, they were still normal. This led to some back-and-forth about risk factors as a heart patient.
I wasn’t happy with what I was hearing so booked another appointment to discuss in person. I am “lucky” enough to have results of a recent CT scan on my femoral arteries, an angiogram, and a carotid ultrasound. All showed that my arteries are very clear. My heart disease is a mechanical thing that will be fixed with surgery. He admitted he doesn’t normally have access to that level of information so started to shift his approach.
He moved on to lifestyle and how I was possibly still high risk. Eating patterns: near-vegetarian who pays close attention to fibre intake. Exercise: at least 5 hours of moderate to intense movement each week. Weight: yup, it’s heavier than BMI recommendations, but it’s also mostly solid muscle (see previous note on exercise) and it has remained unchanged for over 30 years.
Diane in one of her favourite fat athlete photos. She is wearing a colourful bikini and blue cap. She is holding her orange float for open water swims and posing in the Ottawa River on a grey and cloudy day.
In short, I am a case study on why medical professionals should not rely on weight to judge overall health.
In the end, he agreed that my risk assessment should drop from high to low. My medication will not be changing.
Thanks fellow bloggers, especially Sam and Catherine, for writing so often about this issue and giving me the courage to speak up.
I can’t even remember exactly when I started meditating. It was somewhere in the early 2000s. I had a ghost-writing client who had a meditation practice and was writing about it. Or rather, I was writing about it for him. As him. That is, after all, what ghost writing is. So, in the spirit of understanding the mind from which I was supposed to be writing (that is, the mind of my client), I thought, I ought to meditate a little, to see what it’s all about.
At first, I meditated fitfully. There was no regularity in my practice and when I sat, my mind could not even grasp itself. The whole idea of watching my thoughts like so many passing clouds, as some meditation teachers proposed, was an image that did not speak to me. My thoughts were more like a rickety wagon, piled precariously high with junk, under constant threat of toppling, if the wheels didn’t just fall off first.
I found a low-key meditation center in New York City and went from time to time. Mostly with a friend. Every once in a while, on my own. Sometime before 2009, I recall doing a walking meditation on a misty summer day, during which I walked around the house my then-partner and I had in Vermont. Passing barefoot over grass and our pebbly driveway and flagstones. I might have done that meditation more than once. Not often enough that it rose to the level of ritual. I know it was before 2009, because we sold the house that year.
Still fitful, my practice was deepened by three silent meditation retreats and a vision quest. Again, I can’t quite remember when the first retreat was, possibly 2012. I do recall that after a retreat in October 2014, I joined the Insight Timer meditation app, which I’ve been on ever since. I remember the timing, because on my way home from the airport after the retreat, I had the conversation with my father in which he told me that he had decided to stop radiation treatment for his skin cancer. He died 6 months later.
At this point, my meditation was far from daily. Now and then, I would set myself a goal of 10 days in a row, which felt heroic. Then, at the end of 2018, following a teaching session about meditation with a group of friends (an experience we’d bid on at a gala), I set myself the goal of 30 days in a row. Never done before.
Now that I’m writing this down here, I see that was a step change moment in my practice. Since then, my meditation practice has been a succession of long periods of daily sitting, followed by no more than a month of not-quite-daily, then a return to daily practice.
Two shifts happened. I became conscious of whether I had meditated on any particular day. And, after much self-testing, I realized that, for me, longer than 10 minutes was not necessarily better and something was better than nothing. With these two shifts, meditation has become part of my daily routine, akin to drinking water, sleeping and brushing my teeth. A third and more recent shift, since I started living alone, is that I allow myself to meditate in bed first thing in the morning (or, if I’m not sleeping, sometime in the wee hours to help myself get back to sleep), instead of always getting up to sit on my cushion.
Here’s what has happened when I meditate almost daily. I’ve become more aware of my thoughts as they are arising. I can even find that sacred pause between thinking a thought and acting on that thought. Less often than I’d like. Which is okay, because the sacred pause is a lifelong practice.
Here’s what has not happened. The rickety wagon of junk is still there. Except now, I notice more of the distinct thoughts on the pile. Which means it is less precarious. Just noticing increases my capacity to be with uncomfortable thoughts without descending into self-laceration or lashing out at others.
Recently, I’ve been engaging even more specifically in the practice of noticing. My only goal in my meditation is to notice my thoughts. I’m listening to the same 20-minute meditation every morning, which begins with a body scan. This makes it easy to notice when my mind has wandered away and when it comes back.
On Monday, for example, I breathed in and said to myself, I am aware and breathed out and said to myself, I am aware of my feet. As instructed. My attention stayed enough in the meditation to get to breathing in and out and being aware of my thighs. But then I totally missed my pelvis, belly and heart, my attention returning to the meditation as I was being guided to breathe in and say to myself, I am aware and breathe out and say to myself, I am aware of my nose. What was I thinking when I should have been breathing in and out awareness of my midsection?
Here’s a random sampling of thoughts: My legs are tired. I don’t want to take the day off, because I only have a few days left before I leave the mountains and won’t be able to cross-country ski. I need to get caught up on email. My heart feels squeezed. I should have looked at email on the weekend. But it was so nice to read Greenwood instead. Do I love trees enough? Am I being genuine when I hug my tree at home? Did I miss the pelvis in this meditation? I still feel put off by how sharp M was with me on the phone. When will I mend the holes in my cross-country ski long johns? I don’t want to spend money on new ones. Why does my thumbnail grow back faster in that corner? Don’t forget to cut your nails today. I’m running short on tahini, so I’ll have hazelnut butter by itself on my toast and save the tahini for my roasted vegetables. Are we already at the nose? I miss my matcha. I’m lonely. How great is that bran muffin without raisins at Blondies? Why do people like raisins in muffins and other things, like cinnamon bread? Tragic. I miss my mother, even though she would never leave the raisins out. Should I wear the green sweater today? Why have I never heard that line before in this meditation?
And on and on it goes. Incredibly rarely I’ll have a moment, a glimpse, a nano-awakening to something important or simply touch a state of open awareness and connection with all that is. Mostly it’s about bran muffins and fingernails and emails.
So why do I meditate? Because of this: The practice of noticing that meditation enables creates space between thought and action. Even if that space is only infinitesimally larger than it was before, that space, that sacred pause, is the moment where I expand my self-compassion and my compassion for others.
That’s why I meditate.
Oh, and, also for the gold stars from Insight Timer. Tomorrow, all going well, I will hit a nice milestone of days in a row, which I won’t mention, because I don’t want to jinx my little dopamine hit.
Of course, I would rather that human beings needed less sleep. Life is really short and there’s so much I want to do. It just seems like bad design that we spend a third of our lives asleep. But given that we need sleep and I’m healthier and happier with enough sleep, I’m glad I’m mostly able to get it.
Here’s a year of sleep in review thanks to my Garmin. Just over eight hours a night, on average.
Pretty good. I had some rough years with knee surgeries and the pain that led up to the surgeries, or more recently with stomach woes, but I’m back to sleeping well again and that feels so good.
Except some nights aren’t great. I think that’s true for most of us, even us sleep rock stars.
Occasionally, I try to get by on as little as five hours when work is super busy.
When that happens, I tend to be sleepy in meetings, and I also fret about the lack of sleep. I have a hard time reading. I look at my Garmin a lot. I complain about my “body battery” score. How can I be expected to put in a full workday and walk the dog when my body battery score is 12/100?
“A wave of new research is suggesting that, in many cases, the way we think about sleep matters more than the hours we get. Simply believing you are well-rested can be enough to create the positive mental and physical benefits of a peaceful slumber. The question then becomes, how do you trick yourself into thinking you have slept better than you have? The answer may be easier than you think.”
The study found that people who were told they’d had good sleep performed significantly better on cognitive tests — even when they hadn’t.
Someone should market a Garmin that lies to you and always tells you you had a good night’s sleep. But since not getting enough sleep is bad for you, maybe every once in a while it could let you in on the secret.
Want to dig deeper? The research on placebo sleep was conducted by Christina Draganich and Kristi Erdal at Colorado College. Their findings have been widely discussed in the context of sleep psychology and the mind-body connection.
“So, how can we apply this to our lives? When you don’t get enough sleep, what can you do to function as if you slept really well? One big suggestion is to switch up your daily routine and do something you believe will make you feel more rested. Here’s where the coffee comes in. If you believe that drinking an extra cup of coffee will make you feel wide awake, it probably will. You could also try doing some stretches, exercise or meditation that you believe will wake you up. This isn’t backed by research, but one thing I do to trick my mind into not believing I’m tired it not to look at the clock before I go to sleep, especially if I know I’m not going to get as much sleep as I need. If I don’t know exactly what time it is, I won’t know how little sleep I got, so I can let myself believe that I got more sleep than I probably did.”
I’m sure I have mentioned it before but when I first started taking my ADHD meds, I immediately noticed an increase in my ability to pause before doing something.
Previous to that I didn’t exactly jump into every single task, but I would often find myself in the middle of doing something without having thought it through clearly.
After 10 years on medication, I am used to a certain capacity to pause and choose a response.
But I have noticed an increase in that capacity when I am practising mindfulness on a regular basis.
And, of course, I have also noticed that it is really tricky for me to practice consistently. (It’s like I have ADHD or something. 😉 )
Small, daily activities like the ones on the ‘Mindful March’ calendar from Action for Happiness really help me to keep practicing and to keep seeking that extra mental space.
Here’s what the calendar looks like. (You can also download your own copy from the website or add it to your own Google Calendar.)
The calendar for Mindful March from Action for Happiness. Image description: each block of the calendar is brightly coloured in shades of green or yellow, and there is a type written mindfulness tip in each one. The edges of the calendar are decorated with cartoon images of things related to the tips like someone playing with a dog or waiting for the kettle to boil to have a cup of tea.
And here’s a YouTube video about Mindful March from Vanessa King, Head of Psychology from Action for Happiness.
Finally, I took the photo below after a mindful experience I had one morning when the dog decided we were getting up at 5:30. I was annoyed at being up before I was ready and at having to open the door and let cold air in. But when I looked out at the moon and how it was shining on the snow and just felt how crisp everything was, I actually took a couple of deep breaths of that cold air and felt pretty good.
Paying attention to where I was, actually being there instead of moving on to the next thing, made a big difference to that moment, to the overall feeling of the start of my day, and to my day as a whole.
Every mindful moment doesn’t reverberate that way but that one certainly did.
Now, I’m not necessarily recommending getting up too early and being quite chilly as a mindfulness practice but you could do worse.
A photo taken of the corner of my patio, my neighbor’s fence and our leafless tree, one very early dark morning when the moon was bright. In front of me, the moon is shining on the snow and casting shadows of the trees and the fence and light from a streetlight is adding to the glow. Everything looks crisp and still and peaceful.
Today I turn 65. I already belong to a Facebook group called Senior Lifeguards.
I just finished my skills of the month which are basically the same as the fitness tests for my National Lifeguard certification. I redid that qualification a month ago.
It sometimes seems like a crazy thing to do this job, but I love it. Happy birthday though me!
The back of my red pinny folded to show the words lifeguard/sauveteur in whire, with my green whistle attached by a cord so it’s handy in case of emergencies.
Back in March 2025, I wrote a post called “Why the conversation about trans women in sports isn’t about sports.” The TLDR version is that the “fairness in sports” angle is actually a wedge issue — a way for people to feel comfortable with one form of “justifiable” discrimination, so that the wider discrimination that follows is tolerable.
Kansas is the first US state to move into the next phase of active assault on trans rights. Read the story in the Guardian here.
The TLDR version of that is that anyone with a driver’s license with a gender marker different from the marker they were assigned at birth no longer has a valid driver’s license. People are also banned from using bathrooms that don’t match their birth assignments, and — here’s the kicker — gives people the right to sue trans people for $1000 for being “in the wrong washroom.” For “damages.” To their purity, I guess?
The language of the notification from the state is chilling to anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the language of authoritarianism: “Pursuant to the new law, if the gender/sex indication on the face of your current credential does not match your sex assigned at birth, you are directed to surrender your current credential to the Kansas Division of Vehicles.”
In other words, a subset of citizens are having their basic rights revoked.
So yeah, getting everyone all riled up about the very very very few trans people competing in sports? That’s not about sports. And if you truly believe your beliefs are “only about sports”? Speak out about what’s happening in Kansas. Because it won’t stay in Kansas.
And everyone? Your trans friends are not okay. Be present, be gentle with them. And be loud with your politicians. And if you think “oh, I’m Canadian, that’s the US” — well, have a look at what’s happening in Alberta.
Now is not the time to waffle.
Fieldpoppy is Cate Creede-Desmarais, who hasn’t crossed the border to the US since 2016.
I did book and pay for travel, but that explicitly didn’t count.
Ditto food which also didn’t count. 🥦
But I broke my no physical stuff rule a few times too. What did I buy?
💵 A lint brush for my office to remove dog fur from work clothes. Caught a glimpse of a black jacket across my office covered in fur while in a virtual meeting. Decided that the home lint brush isn’t good enough and began browsing. A new lint brush is now on its way to me. Not a ridiculous purchase, but still.
💵An audiobook on my wishlist went on sale for $7.99.
But overall, I’m calling it a success.
Here’s just some of things I didn’t buy.
🐖 🪙 I resisted trying a Muji notebook, John Gushue recommended them in his blog post, A thought on why you should always but always have a notebook. I’m a huge notebook fan. I often get them as gifts, and I have my own favourites. I might even have enough to make it through until the end of my term as dean.
🐖 🪙I also like this bracelet which I didn’t buy.
🐖 🪙And I spent some time browsing swimsuits, two-piece bathing suits with shorts. Mallory and I both like them but we didn’t buy them.
Is there anything I’m on the verge of buying, maybe waiting for the end of the month to come?
More importantly, how did not shopping feel? Whenever I do this, I become aware of how much I shop online to relieve stress and boredom. And if it worked, that would be okay.
The thing is it doesn’t work really and it adds stress about spending money and about having more stuff in my house. I don’t want either of those things. Also, other kinds of stress relief work better. Step away from the screens–big and little–and pick up a book, cook a meal, tidy, or walk the dog. All of those things help meet other goals, and they’re better at relieving stress. Win win!
For me, January and February of this year have been busy and productive work and social months. I’ve hosted people at my house, gone out to social events, and done fun extra-curricular things at school with students. I’ve also written some conference abstracts, made progress on a newish research project and had meetings with my friend and research partner Norah.
But movement? Not so much. Yes, I’ve done a little walking, a little yoga, and went swimming with a friend and her toddler. But I haven’t established, much less adhered to, any sort of schedule or regular plan. And, I fell off the radar of my 226 in 2026 Facebook group.
Well, it’s March 1. What better time to start afresh with a plan for movement momentum?
And I have a plan. Well, rather my local yoga studio Artemis has a plan. It’s March momentum time!
What does this mean for them and me? Well, it’s simple: you just take classes, and with each class you take, you get an entry ticket into a raffle for yoga swag. Check it out below.
Yes, I would love a new yoga mat or other prizes, but the main thing here is it’s getting my attention with a fun challenge to restart my yoga practice. And I’m starting TODAY with a sound journey yoga thing for members only. My goal is to do two classes a week for the month of March– one in person and one synchronous online.
Like any good challenge program, there are also extra little incentives. Some classes are designated bonus classes, for which you get TWO raffle entries. I’m going to try to do at least two of those this month.
The last time Artemis ran this challenge, Norah threw herself into it, and she ended up winning a sweatshirt. Imma see if I can score something for myself this time.
What I really want to score, though, is an easier yoga habit. We’ll see how it goes, and I’ll report back in April.
Readers, are you feeling winter sluggishness or in a rut? Are you humming along with your activity schedule? How are your plans going? I’d love to hear from you.
