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.
My beloved and I have both been struggling to get a minimum viable amount of sleep. Our brains betray us. Our backs hurt. Our dog Lucy is hyper vigilant and wants those 4 a.m. snow removal folks to know SHE SEES THEM.
We’ve limited caffeine to the morning. We are abstaining from alcohol. We stick to our wind down routine.
In bed, I pop my bite guard in my mouth and snap my CPAP on. Michel dons his eye mask with earbuds to listen to a bedtime meditation.
We have smart lights that go to warmer hues at night.
We have separate duvets, his is heavy and mine gossamer thin. I still sweat.
And our mattress needs replacing. She’s lumpy. Turns out foam mattresses don’t last longer than 5 years and she’s around 7?
So off we went shopping to find a queen size mattress. Our house is nearly 100 years old and the narrow staircase couldn’t accommodate our queen platform so we have a last minute rickety frame that came in a slim box.
We went in with a plan but somewhere along the line Michel started eyeing split king beds with mechanical frames.
I spoke in French to him cautioning that it would be easily triple the price of just getting a queen mattress.
We had done our research and knew we needed a hybrid mattress with coils and foam so that it would last.
We shared with the sales person that we had an older house.
He showed us some regular mattresses and I knew my budget was gone when we tried a half split king bed. It’s split at the top to allow each person to adjust the upper angle and the bottom moves as one.
I’m promised that the mattress is cooling. I forgot to mention the thrice nightly lather of sweat thanks to hot flashes.
The salesperson promised the mattress arrives in a box no bigger than a twin. The mechanical frame folds up, again into a twin sized package.
We switched to French for honest budget conversations then back to English with the salesperson.
I hope a non-lumpy, bigger bed with better temperature regulation will help me get more than my current average of 6 hours a night.
I go to bed between 9:30 and 10 pm. I get up between 6 and 7 am. I am awake several hours each night.
I will give it a month and let you know how the new bed works out!
A bed with lots of pillows promises a sweet, sweet night of sleep.
My surgery story is much shorter than Sam’s saga of two knee surgeries that were supposed to happen through the COVID years. In fact, not much more than a year after I was diagnosed with a heart murmur, I’m expecting heart valve replacement surgery March 13.
In the past few weeks I have had an angiogram and a CT scan. I have been working on my pre-hab, which mostly means making sure I can get up and down without using my hands. I can do chairs, stairs, and – on a good day – even get down and back up off the floor.
I’m not entirely certain what will happen next. Much will depend on the kind of surgery I get. From what I have read, I could be home in a day or two with a fairly easy recovery. Or I could be looking at 5 days in hospital with at least 4-6 weeks of doing nothing strenuous.
Either way, it’s pretty clear I won’t be lifeguarding again until I get retested and demonstrate I meet the physical requirements. Even though it means I’ll have to give up work for a while, I’m excited!
In March 2018 DAREBEE first launched Girl Power Week. This year I am privileged to be part of the team that is bringing this popular event back to DAREBEE, now with new and expanded content.
“What is Girl Power Week?” you may ask. “What is this ‘DAREBEE’ you write of, Laura?”
DAREBEE is a huge, independent, web-based fitness resource that is 100% ad-free, 100% free of product placement and other forms of corporate sponsorship, and 100% free to use. As of this writing, the DAREBEE resource includes 2670 stand-alone workouts, 92 programs (structured plans of daily workouts that typically run for 30 days each, with a few longer and shorter programs), and 177 challenges (short exercise “snacks” that follow a specific focus for, again, typically 30 days, although some of these are different lengths too). The resource also includes 154 short and easily-digestible written guides on a range of fitness-related topics, all backed up by the latest scientific research, and DAREBEE’s sister site: DAREBEETS, a rapidly-growing nutrition resource which currently features 360 plant-based recipes. All of this content is 100% crowd-funded through DAREBEE’s users. And yet none of it is behind a paywall. Everything is 100% free for anyone to access.
Also free is DAREBEE’s community forum, known as “The Hive”. The Hive is a truly amazing place I have been privileged to be a part of since May 2017.
When I first joined the DAREBEE Hive I was primarily involved in other fitness spaces. But the Hive quickly became my primary fitness community. When another online fitness community I had been actively involved in shut down (so that site’s owners could focus on a new initiative that was 100% behind a paywall), a second community I’d been active in and happy to support financially when it was run by a small, independent company that was responsive to its membership sold out to a large corporation (that immediately switched the site’s access model to a subscription service and then offered me a “lifetime discount” for said subscription if I signed up within 3 weeks and began paying a monthly fee to access content I had already paid for lifetime access to), and the expenses of commuting to participate in a sports league became too much for me to bear, the Hive remained: free, welcoming, and supportive.
During the long years when I lived in a small town (which was a very bad fit for me socio-politically) in which the only fitness-related activities for adults were either uninteresting to me or too expensive for me (or both), and revolved more around drinking beer (which I don’t do) than athleticism, the Hive was both a fitness and a community lifeline for me. The Hive is the reason I was able to remain physically active and fit during years when multiple forces in my life conspired to drive me away from fitness. I have forged real friendships there.
These days I am privileged to live, once again, in a physical community in which I am happy. I have face-to-face conversations almost daily with neighbours who don’t make me want to tear my hair out over how appalling I find their political views. I belong to a fitness club (Aikido) full of wonderful people who I genuinely enjoy being around and training with every week. And yet I am more active in DAREBEE and the Hive now than ever. Which brings us to Girl Power Week.
In addition to the regular workouts, programs, and challenges which one can choose to complete at any time, DAREBEE regularly runs special community events through the Hive in which participants come together to all take on the same challenge at the same time and cheer one another on in these efforts. During the years 2016-18, these events included eight special themed weeks, each of which included one specific workout each day for a week. Community members who completed all seven workouts were able to claim a special digital badge for their Hive profile page.
DAREBEE’s themed weeks were popular events which many DAREBEEs (myself included) loved. Alas, these challenges—along with their associated badges—were lost during a technologically necessary platform migration in 2022. Even so, many DAREBEEs still remember them fondly, and they continue to come up as topics of conversation within the Hive. When I saw one of my DAREBEE friends, Syrius, post recently that she wished the theme week challenges were still available as she would like to do them, I realized there was no reason why she couldn’t. The individual workouts involved in the challenges are still available in DAREBEE’s substantial database.
One of the great things about DAREBEE’s Hive community and the forum that supports it is that community events do not need to be run by the core team that maintains the DAREBEE resource. Any member of the community can organize a community event via the Hive forum. So I messaged Syrius to ask her if she would be interested in doing exactly that. I suggested we could re-run Girl Power Week, as the timing was right to organize our event for the week leading up to and including International Women’s Day on March 8. Syrius immediately jumped on board with the idea.
The impetus behind DAREBEE’s original Girl Power Week was to create a week-long challenge designed to “inspire women of all ages to take a ninja-like approach to fitness and rediscover the warrior within.” It included seven brand new, challenging workouts themed around brave and powerful women. Syrius and I wanted to bring back those original seven workouts but also expand the challenge to make it accessible to more people.
DAREBEE has always advocated for inclusivity within fitness spaces. Indeed, DAREBEE’s insistence on maintaining all aspects of the resource as freely accessible and free from commercial agendas is because DAREBEE believes fitness belongs to everyone, and everyone should have access to quality fitness resources, regardless of their financial means. DAREBEE is also a place where everyone belongs, regardless of their age, their size, their gender, or their current level of physical fitness and ability.
The original Girl Power Week workouts include challenging calisthenics activities such as single-leg squats, full push-ups, and jumping lunges, because DAREBEE knows these exercises are just as accessible to girls and women as to anyone else. Additionally, because DAREBEE workouts are designed for people at all different stages in their individual fitness journeys, it is perfectly acceptable for an individual exerciser to modify any exercises in a DAREBEE workout to make them accessible to their own current level of physical ability on any given day. (Indeed, I often did difficulty level 3 workouts—with modifications—with my octogenarian mother when I was serving as her personal trainer during pandemic lockdowns.) However, it’s not always obvious to a new exerciser how they can modify exercises not currently within their reach to make them accessible. Additionally, current physical ability is not the only constraint on would-be exercisers. With these thoughts in mind, we decided to expand Girl Power Week to include four different tracks:
The original Girl Power Week workouts, suitable for anyone currently able to safely execute high-impact calisthenics exercises and/or folks who know how to modify these exercises to make them safely accessible.
A low-impact, standing exercises only track, suitable for newer exercisers and anyone else not currently practising high impact exercises for any reason.
A track featuring all workouts which can be completed in 10 minutes or less. Because sometimes the biggest constraint on one’s ability to complete a workout is finding the time to fit it into one’s busy day.
A yoga-based track. Because sometimes the best way we can nurture our bodies is to slow down.
With these initial ideas in mind, Syrius and I shared our plan with the team who runs the DAREBEE resource, to ensure planning an event for the March 2-8 week would not conflict with any larger community events they had planned.
The response from the DAREBEE Team was both swift and wonderful: not only was there no conflict with what we wanted to do, but the team offered to help us with the project, including through creating original content, including a challenge badge and, potentially, new workouts!
Saying, “Yes, please!” to the profile badge was a no-brainer. DAREBEEs love our badges! But the offer to help with the creation of new workouts really set my head spinning. I am a long-time yoga practitioner and a certified instructor. The opportunity to create a series of yoga workouts for DAREBEE, all tied to our Girl Power Week theme, was a dream come true! I immediately set to work on the task. Meanwhile, Syrius got to work combing through DAREBEE’s extensive database of existing workouts to curate the perfect collections for our low-impact and 10-minutes-or-less tracks.
Syrius writes:
“Darebee was there when I was in college and struggled to go to the gym. Darebee was there when I was unemployed and looking for my first job, giving me a modicum of control over my life. Darebee was there for me through the pandemic, giving me an outlet for all my worry and stress. Through my ups and downs, the community has been amazingly supportive, and there is always an exercise to fit how I am feeling each day.
“When Laura approached me about Girl Power Week, I loved the idea from the start! Darebee has been such a big part of my life, and this felt like a great way to give back. Low-impact work is near and dear to me as it is sometimes all I can do, and I feel the pressure of time so keenly some days, so I was thrilled to be able to take the time and curate these collections that will fit the needs of all our participants.”
Now the work is complete, and Girl Power Week 2026 is ready to launch. In addition to the four workout tracks detailed above, our event will include one more special treat—which will be revealed on the final day of the event—created with the help of seven additional DAREBEEs and friends. All in all, Girl Power Week 2026 is a joint effort created by a team of 10+ people (the + equals members of the core DAREBEE Team who prefer to work behind the scenes) who currently reside in seven different countries. Fully half of us are immigrants to our current homes from someplace else. Given the state of the world we all live in these days, I think this is a wonderful testament to the power of cooperation and inclusivity!
Girl Power Week begins on March 2 and runs for seven consecutive days. The first day’s workouts will drop by 4:00 PM UTC on March 1. If you’d like to join us for this special event—we’d love to have you!—you can find all of the details on participating at http://darebee.com .
Important note: while this special themed week highlights the power of girls and women, as with all things on DAREBEE, people of all genders are most welcome to join us. Fitness is for everyone!
Laura with rainbow ribbons
Laura Rainbow Dragon is the author of the “Get Fit for the Zombie Apocalypse” choose-your-own-workout stories as well as the novelettes “Chimera Junction” and “Anne & Mary on the Hyperspace Seas”. She lives joyfully in Wortley Village, London, Ontario with her canine master, Shelby, who takes her on hiking adventures every day to visit all of their neighbours who stock dog treats.
