Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Behind the Scenes Minis: Fitz Hugh and Sleepytime About this episode Holly talks about gaining compassion for Fitz Hugh Ludlow through reading his work. Tracy discusses her training in massage school.
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0:00 Holly Frey? This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argonix. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do
0:43 Holly Frey? we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts.
1:07 Tracy V. Wilson? The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs, and quick hellos are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations
1:51 Tracy V. Wilson? start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting Changes Everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.
2:10 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:20 Holly Frey? Hello and happy Friday. I'm Holly Frey.
2:24 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. You paused and I was like, is it my turn?
2:28 Holly Frey? I don't, I don't know how to do my, my talkies some days. We talked about Fitz Hugh Ludlow this week. I have so much compassion for him. And at the same time, I also have a funny thing that's kind of, um, my initial thoughts on him were less kind than they became, became during the research.
2:47 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
2:48 Holly Frey? Because part of it is that his writing of his first book about his use of hashish kind of struck me the way like a trust fund baby will do something for the first time and think they invented it. And like, they're the only person that's ever experienced this. But then reading it, when I actually started reading more of it, and I was like, oh, he's really being very frank about the ups and downs of, of using mind altering substances and being very honest and not as ebullient as I had initially anticipated. I really came to respect a lot of his work. And then the fact that while he was dealing with his
3:30 Holly Frey? own problems and his own difficulties of trying to get over his opium addiction, that he was trying to advocate and help as many other people, even though he probably knew he was not long for this earth. I just kind of now have a soft spot for him.
3:46 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
3:46 Holly Frey? There's a weird thing I did not include. It gets referenced in some of his obituaries. And it's because several of them mentioned that his last public appearance was as a witness in a weird trial. And I was trying to figure this whole thing out because it seems like there was a Mr. McFarland who was in some. Trouble for various fraudulent activities. And then at some point Fitzhugh Ludlow had basically ghostwritten a thing for him and allowed him to say he had written it and he sold that piece.
4:31 Holly Frey? Okay. And so that was the only connection of the two of them. But once Fitzhugh Ludlow said in court, no, I actually wrote that. It shifted how some of the other evidence was perceived because that had been used of a thing of like, this man who can write like this and do this. And it's like, no, he actually can't write like that. I Fitzhugh Ludlow wrote, uh, which was just weird. Uh, we mentioned briefly in the episode that his father, Henry, after losing his first daughter, Maria, he loved his kids, but he, in his private writings noted that he could, he could never love a child the way that he had loved Maria.
5:15 Holly Frey? Like nothing could ever fill that vacancy in his heart that he felt that he had after Maria died. Until, and this makes this whole marriage thing super weird. When Fitzhugh met Rosalie, Henry's writing was like, Rosalie is the thing that will fix my sorrow over Mary. I love her so much. She's the daughter that I lost. And it's really, really odd. Yikes. So then for that person who your father adores more than you, to be the person that also cheats on you and leaves with your friend. Listen, there was a lot going on in this young man's life that was not What a mess.
6:00 Holly Frey? Yeah, super messy, not great. I also saw a thing and I couldn't ever figure out.
6:09 Holly Frey? Where this came from, or connect the dots to what they were talking about. There was an exhibit done at Union College about Fitzhugh Ludlow, because that's his alma mater.
6:22 Holly Frey? And in one of like, the plaques about him, it suggested that his sister Helen was gay and that he knew, even if other people did not, and that he had written a short story that was like a thinly veiled way of talking about her and that he loved her and, you know, wanted her to be happy. But I could never figure out which one of his short stories it was, and I will confess to you, I, I did not read all of his short stories to find it because Fitzhugh Ludlow had a busy pen. Like, he was a writer's writer. He never stopped producing. So I'm not sure which that was, if that's true.
7:04 Holly Frey? I would love to do some more research or find it in some way, but it's an interesting thing. Because it's one more way in which he seemed really progressive about a lot of things that
7:18 Holly Frey? modern society took a lot longer to catch up to. Like, the way he talks about treatment for addiction is so different than anything else. And there's also, he's sometimes credited with like, kind of inventing the concept of a halfway house in, in the way he describes his treatment center ideal of like, being a place where people can live and kind of like, be living their lives, but also have the support that they need even after they've gotten over the initial difficulty of recovery from addiction.
7:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, like the acute withdrawal symptom phase.
7:56 Holly Frey? Yeah, and it's interesting because I didn't go into all of it. We read so much of his writing, and there was so much that I had to strike because it was getting long, but he had this idea about it that you should do a period of acute withdrawal and then get the person kind of back on at a lower dose and progress the step down from there. Hmm. Uh, because he felt like if you just do the acute withdrawal and then leave them hanging, people are more likely to have a serious relapse. Whereas if they're, I don't, I don't know the science behind this. I'm not an expert in this space. I don't know if that's supported by any other actual like medical or scientific studies, but this was just from his own experience. That's how he felt. And that if you could then
8:37 Holly Frey? reintroduce it in a very controlled way and step down from there, by the time you get to the lowest dosages, people will naturally just stop taking it almost without thinking because it's not impacting them in any kind of positive way anymore. And you're offering up these other activities and things to engage them in a way that they just won't, they will have broken their reliance on it, both emotionally and physically at that point, which is a very interesting idea. So yeah, I kind of, I kind of love him. Yeah. There's another unsubstantiated, again, it might be in his writings, but I did not get to read the entirety of his work. Uh huh. When he was doing his cross-country travel with Bierstadt,
9:20 Holly Frey? he talks about how hard it was to sleep because in a lot of cases, they were in like a stagecoach with other people and you were expected to sleep sitting up, which he could not do. And I'm like, brother, I feel you. Uh huh. So I read this in one biography, but it wasn't sourced and I wasn't sure what it came from. So I didn't want to include it in the episode, but there is a, um, piece of writing that suggests that he borrowed like 10 yards of rope and then he tied it around the top of the coach in a way that he could wiggle under the rope, like one, one loop of it was at his feet, one was up at his shoulders and he would stick his coat
10:05 Holly Frey? behind his head and he would ride on top of the stagecoach.
10:10 Holly Frey? As a bed so that he could get some real sleep because he couldn't
10:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Okay.
10:13 Holly Frey? Sitting up. I don't know if that's true, but I am kind of charmed by it.
10:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. As a person who really struggles to, like, I used to take overnight trains from Atlanta to Washington DC and back. When we were owned by Discovery and I also had a phobia of getting on an airplane. And attempting to sit, like, attempting to get any sleep like that was incredibly hard. And I would say a modern Amtrak train is way more comfortable than a stagecoach.
10:45 Holly Frey? Yeah.
10:46 Tracy V. Wilson? And like those seats have more legroom and recline more than airplane seats. Anytime I'm on a red eye flight now, probably not sleeping much there either. And if I could rig up some kind of something to suspend my legs from.
11:03 Holly Frey? Right?
11:04 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Yeah.
11:06 Holly Frey? I'm the same. I am international flight. If it's an overnighter, like going from here to, to Europe is usually an overnighter.
11:14 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
11:15 Holly Frey? I'm not sleeping. Period. End of. I don't even try anymore.
11:19 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
11:19 Holly Frey? Because I can't sleep sitting up. I'm gonna walk up and down the aisles. Even if I have a very nice seat, I can't sleep.
11:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. I think well-meaning people might send links to some of the various things that are supposed to loop over the tray table or whatever.
11:33 Holly Frey? No.
11:33 Tracy V. Wilson? And please do not, for many reasons, one of them being, I am too tall for any of those devices.
11:40 Holly Frey? I just find them all very claustrophobic.
11:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, like, a lot of things that are made to kind of give your foot a place to, to rest or hang on a plane. Do not, they do not do that for people who are as tall as me.
11:59 Holly Frey? Yeah, they, well, and they don't work for people as short as me because I can't always reach them anyway.
12:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
12:06 Holly Frey? But I do sort of love this idea that he's like, I'm going to solve this problem. I have gone days without sleep. My body will not allow me to sleep sitting up in a stagecoach. So can I just tie myself to the roof? And it seemed to work for him. If, if indeed that's correct, like I said, I didn't find the source, but he wrote so prolifically that I did not read all of his accounts. Sure, sure. But I'd like to, I really do like the way he writes. It is very florid, but his turns of phrase are quite fun. And aside from the gross surprise racism, I just like his writing style.
12:43 Holly Frey? I think that was most of what I had on Fitzhugh Ludlow. Really surprisingly progressive advocate in, in the realm of addiction and treatment. And I just think like, I'm sure there are others, but I don't remember ever having read another account of withdrawal that is so frank. Outside of a medical text that will literally tell you the horrible things your body is going to do. So I appreciate his, his openness. I wish he had stayed around longer because maybe he could have continued to advocate and we would have gotten farther ahead in the, you know, de-stigmatization of these issues. And maybe actually gotten more people help sooner.
13:27 Holly Frey? So Fitzhugh Ludlow, I hope wherever you are, you see that we're trying.
13:35 Speaker 02 First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?
13:38 Holly Frey? Hey everybody, it's Tracy from Stuff You Missed in History Class. That's Alan Goya, a planning engineer at AT&T. He's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, defining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.
13:58 Speaker 02 It was going to rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.
14:06 Holly Frey? That includes field services manager, Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.
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14:18 Tracy V. Wilson? And after years of hard work and collaboration, it was opening night.
14:22 Speaker 03 To actually see the whole stadium light up and data is flowing is a beautiful thing. What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.
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15:42 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
16:27 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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17:20 Speaker 04 good at your hobby, you just have to enjoy it. So carve out that time, tune out the noise, and do something that's just for you. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
17:37 Holly Frey? We talked about Paracelsus and the doctrine of signatures this week.
17:40 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
17:41 Holly Frey? That man loved mercury.
17:42 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
17:42 Holly Frey? He loved it for everything.
17:43 Tracy V. Wilson? I've had him on my list for an episode for a really long time. And I think at one point, I also had the doctrine of signatures on my list. And I was like, I don't really feel like there's enough here to have a whole episode. There would have been enough for a whole episode if it had focused, if I had combined the two, which is what
18:01 Holly Frey? Which is exactly what happened.
18:02 Tracy V. Wilson? You did.
18:04 Holly Frey? Yes. Yeah, I find the whole thing really fascinating, and also horrifying, and also fascinating.
18:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
18:10 Holly Frey? But I made myself laugh, or the internet made me laugh, with my he really loved mercury thing. First of all, I think that's probably, he probably just poured mercury on that dude's leg.
18:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
18:23 Holly Frey? And I don't know if it really healed it or not. Or maybe his body just healed on its own and he took credit. But you know how if you're on, like, in many, many search setups will work this way, but if you're on, like, an Internet Archive full textbook page, and you search for a word? You'll get little yellow bars at the side of the scroll bar that show where it shows up in the document. If you go into almost any of his books and search mercury, it's almost a solid line.
18:58 Tracy V. Wilson? Everywhere.
18:58 Holly Frey? He's just like mercury, mercury, I heart mercury. Like, he loves it so much.
19:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Hey, man, that's poison.
19:06 Holly Frey? Yeah. Yo, you're killing people. Your mention of poison, though, it brings up a quote from him. And of course, all of these are translated, but I really like this because it may not be the first, but it's the earliest instance I have stumbled across of this now pretty famously used idea. Right? We always hear the dose makes the poison. And he wrote, quote, "What is there that is not a poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not poison." It's like, oh, you kind of understand. Maybe he thinks he's using mercury judiciously all the time.
19:50 Tracy V. Wilson? I think I've seen the, like, the dose determines the poison, like, attributed to him as the originator of it. I don't know if that's actually the case or not.
19:59 Holly Frey? Yeah, I don't know if it's true.
20:01 Tracy V. Wilson? It's really, it's so hard to say for sure that any particular person originated.
20:07 Holly Frey? Was the first to do a thing, yeah.
20:08 Tracy V. Wilson? And sometimes we will have said for a long time that so and so coined such and such, and then, you know, somebody digs up something from 15 years previously and goes, oh, here is the same thing, though.
20:22 Holly Frey? Oh, paracelsus.
20:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
20:25 Holly Frey? You were gonna, I think, share your stories of the doctrine of signatures being invoked in your professional work.
20:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, so.
20:34 Holly Frey? The pre sigh.
20:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, so many, many years ago, I had had a couple of writing jobs that were really unsatisfying. They all involved basically business to business writing work. And there were a lot of things that I found it, I found difficult and uninteresting. And I said I should learn to do something else. But I did not have the money or the time to go back to college and start over. And I could get a massage therapy certification in six months. And still work part time during that six months. Yeah. So that's what I did. And at that time, North Carolina was just at the beginning of licensing massage therapists.
21:17 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of states were like, this was sort of at the beginning of the movement to license and regulate massage. I went to this massage school and one of the classes that we had to take was an herbal medicine part of the curriculum. My personal feeling is that this does not actually belong in massage therapy, that herbal medicine is not in a massage therapist's scope of practice. And we had this herbal medicine instructor who brought various things into the classroom and was passing them around and like she would, she was passing around one of them and she was like, yes, I'm not even going to say what it is because I, like you said in the episode, I don't want to like have some scraping of our
22:03 Tracy V. Wilson? episode, turn this into advice for people, but it was a, it was a root that she was passing around and talking about how good it was as a quote, immune tonic, which is not really a thing. And she was like, feel how sturdy this is, how strong it makes me think of how, you know, strengthening your body and strengthening your immune system. Remember the doctrine of signatures? I don't think I would have been able to stop laughing. That honestly, the, the two biggest frustrations that I had working as a massage therapist. One was that the places that I was able to get a job were mostly day spas and resort spas.
22:44 Tracy V. Wilson? And I was working every weekend and in the case of the resorts, every holiday. And that was hard. But then also my professional colleagues would say nonsense and I, it, I was like, that's, that's not a real thing. The microwave is not spinning the molecules of your food backward.
23:08 Tracy V. Wilson? That's just not, it's not how it works. That's a real thing somebody said to me one time, so.
23:16 Holly Frey? You were reminding me of a wackadoo thing a coworker said to me once, but we'll finish yours.
23:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah. So that, yeah, just this whole, this whole herbal medicine class, like it came up repeatedly. And sometimes I was like, yes, that root kind of does look like a man, but it also looks like a nerve and it also looks like a tree and it also looks like, uh, I don't know, the, the branches of your lung anatomy, like this, this could look like so many different things. And yeah, we do know for sure that there are various herbs that do have some kind of medicinal use.
24:01 Tracy V. Wilson? Also, like there are whole indigenous traditions involving food and medicine and, you know, botany and, and the environment that are not really what we were talking about in this episode. Like we were talking about like a very European medical tradition. And one of the things that I found frustrating is that sometimes the folks who are sort of operating in this space today will kind of latch on to indigenous traditions or traditions from other parts of the world that they, that they're not part of and that they don't have a connection to. And they kind of use it to back up what's basically a remnant of 16th and 17th century
24:44 Tracy V. Wilson? European medical, medical in quotation marks, uh, nonsense.
24:50 Holly Frey? Yeah, yeah. It's one of those things too, where like there are, like you said, indigenous oral traditions, but you can't cherry pick them out of context to justify kind of operating on vibes.
25:03 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
25:04 Holly Frey? When it comes to science.
25:05 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Vibes is really what I think of a lot with the doctrine of signatures.
25:12 Holly Frey? Yes, it's very much vibes. You made me laugh thinking about a colleague who once was marveling at the way salt would help with icy sidewalks.
25:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Uh huh.
25:23 Holly Frey? And she just said so earnestly and so sweetly, she was a lovely human. I just don't understand it. It's the molecules. And I have used the phrase, it's the molecules.
25:34 Tracy V. Wilson? So many times.
25:35 Holly Frey? So many times throughout my life since then. It's the molecules.
25:43 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
26:27 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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28:42 Tracy V. Wilson? My massage therapist education also included a unit on nutrition. Nutrition is also not within the scope of practice of a massage therapist. And our nutrition teacher told us that if your nutrition was perfect, that you would never become ill in your life. You just wouldn't. You would have perfect nutrition and you would never have any kind of illness and you would never get any kind of chronic illness. You would never develop cancer and...
29:10 Holly Frey? And then one day you just stop being, I guess.
29:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, so a lot of the things that she talked about, like this was just a very time-consuming, labor-intensive approach to food that she was kind of advocating in the classroom. And one of my classmates offhandedly said, oh, so does your husband help you with all of this cooking? And she said, no, he had a massive stroke. And we all just... Yeah, we all just sort of stared stunned and nobody wanted to say, so were you not feeding him correctly? But that, like, I don't know, that's just the kind of stuff that came up.
29:54 Tracy V. Wilson? The parts of my massage therapy education that were about anatomy and physiology and kinesiology and massaging people, those were great.
30:02 Holly Frey? Yeah.
30:03 Tracy V. Wilson? And then there were other parts where I was like, I'm not sure why we need to learn this to get licensed and also some of this is not real.
30:12 Holly Frey? Yeah, I have definitely heard many people invoke that idea of like, sometimes the old ways are best. And I'm like...
30:21 Holly Frey? Please go to a doctor. Like, I'm not, I'm not gonna say nothing ever was discovered that was helpful, but also, please go to a doctor.
30:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, and especially now that we're living in the era of RFK Jr. being the Secretary of Health and Services, like.
30:35 Holly Frey? Yeah. Please go to a doctor. There was a passage that I found in the writings of Paracelsus that I actually quite liked. I don't necessarily agree with exactly what he is saying, but it has a lovely concept to it.
30:52 Holly Frey? Read it. And it's about sleep, because as we know, I have a fraught relationship with sleep, but I like this one. "Natural sleep is the rest of the body, which recuperates its wasted energies. Now, the day pertains to bodies, night to spirits. Bodies work in the day, spirits at night. The sleep of the body is the waking time of the spirit, for the two cannot operate together, being contraries and mutually incompatible things. Whatsoever is done by the body during sleep is really performed by the spirit." Okay, I don't think that there are two parts of me that cannot exist at the same time, but I do like the idea that sleep is restorative, you will wake up with your body having done things that seem almost miraculous. That's
31:37 Holly Frey? all. I don't really think that a spirit takes over and massages my body.
31:43 Tracy V. Wilson? What if it did, though?
31:45 Holly Frey? Oh, it'd be great. That's probably why I can't sleep. The spirit keeps waking me up. I'm like, stop, stop. The spirit is a large cat sometimes.
31:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. I had a bad night of sleep the other night, and I, like, I just, I was, I kept waking up and I was having trouble settling back down. And then one of the cats came over, and they normally curl up next to me, and it's very cute and comforting. But what she decided to do in that moment was to get on the side of my body and make her paws into just little pokers that poked me in the ribs, in the hip bone. And I was like, why? You could be here, and I would be comfortable, but now you're here and you're disrupting the spirit of my sleep.
32:32 Holly Frey? Yeah. I don't mind when the cats walk all over me, because I'm probably awake anyway.
32:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
32:38 Holly Frey? Yeah. I've just never had a, all of the, like, practice good sleep hygiene stuff doesn't really help me very much. I wake up 16 times a night, usually.
32:50 Holly Frey? And not just like random stirrings, but like I'm awake for a while.
32:56 Holly Frey? And I will say it's genetic. Throughout my family, a lot of people with the same sleep weirdness. It's fine. I'm fine. I've operated this way since a childhood. I remember there being almost an argument with my kindergarten teacher. Because I said something about being able to stay up as late as I wanted. And my parents having to explain like, we all kind of have some sleep problems. And she can go to bed, but if she's awake, she can read a book because she's, it's torture to sit there and lie awake with nothing.
33:33 Holly Frey? It was just a thing, you know, they were worried that I lived in some sort of wild stable where I was just running free and doing whatever a five year old wanted to do. But in fact, my parents knew we all had sleep disorders.
33:49 Holly Frey? Probably also easily cultivate. I don't know. I've tried all the sleep tricks. They don't work for me. They may work great for other people. I'm not going on vibes. I've seen doctors about it.
33:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah. Yeah, I'm sort of imagining the well meaning emails that we may get advising you to see a doctor about your sleep.
34:06 Holly Frey? Yeah, no, I have.
34:06 Tracy V. Wilson? That's the thing. It's already happened.
34:08 Holly Frey? Yeah. It's also weird to me though, because the flip is that it doesn't bother me at all to be awakened in the night. Like I don't.
34:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, yeah.
34:17 Holly Frey? I don't care if somebody, if I'm sharing a hotel room with somebody that's not my beloved and they're snoring and it wakes me up. I'm like, cool, they're snoring. That's fine. If I'm, you know, if an animal is on me, if the phone rang, none of that bothers me.
34:30 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
34:31 Holly Frey? My beloved is not the same. He likes to sleep.
34:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
34:36 Holly Frey? It's a, it can be a little challenging, especially when you do have cats that are rude.
34:41 Tracy V. Wilson? For a number of years, stretching back a while, I have generally woken up. Sometime in the two or three o'clock in the morning range. And then I'm awake for a bit.
34:52 Holly Frey? Yeah.
34:53 Tracy V. Wilson? And then I go back to sleep and just accepting that that's how it works for me. Made that a lot better because when I was like stressing out about the fact that I was awake.
35:07 Holly Frey? That did not help at all. And similarly, I've also, it's a thing that I've discussed with my doctor, all of that, but just sort of being like, all right, it's, it's 3:30, I'm awake, I'm probably going to be awake for at least an hour. And if I'm just chill about it, probably I'm going to go back to sleep. That was not the case this past weekend, in part because I took a very long hike for the first time in a very long time, and my whole body hurt.
35:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
35:32 Holly Frey? And then a cat was putting her paws into like, the most uncomfortable parts of me possible.
35:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, kitties.
35:40 Holly Frey? Yeah, if I, my 2:30 ish wake up is my longest one.
35:45 Tracy V. Wilson? Mm hmm.
35:46 Holly Frey? And I sometimes will just get out of bed and go sit in the living room and like, mess around on my phone till my brain goes, you're sleepy again, and then I'll go back to bed. Because if I just sit in bed, I will make Brian's night horrible.
35:58 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
35:58 Holly Frey? Or in some cases, the bad cat is so bad that we are invited to move to the guest room by my beloved. Because she is the cat that is very bonded to me.
36:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
36:10 Holly Frey? And the two of us will have a slumber party every night chatting and meowing, but it's very funny. In any case, if this is your weekend coming up, I hope you get great sleep. If you can, if you can't, I hope you have figured out a system that works best for you, so that you do, your spirit is doing the, the things it needs to do to recover. If you do not have a weekend coming up, I still hope you get great sleep. I hope everyone is kind to each other. I hope you have fun things. I hope you eat the most delicious things, and that you feel restored in whatever way makes the most sense to you. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday with something brand new.
36:53 Holly Frey? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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