health – We need new stories…

One of the biggest differences I’ve experienced so far in the move from work world to a PhD is having more time to do things.

In previous roles I was used to covering lots of vacant posts, having work plans for the days and weeks of myself and my team that I would constantly juggle as new ‘urgent’ things came in which meant re- and de-prioritising things. Whether it was true or not, and I definitely feel there’s been an outbreak of busy-ness amongst people that even as I try not to feed into myself, either in terms of talking to myself or presenting my workload to others, I always felt like there wasn’t enough time to do things properly.

I think I was good at coaching other people to accept that not everything needs to be gold-plated, and good enough is great most of the time. Even within that, it often felt like myself and my team were being asked to do pieces of work without much time to really explore the subject, consider options, understand the wider landscape or even just have time to think or proof-read things.

Now though, thoughts which I am sure I’ll look back on and shake my head at, I find myself looking at the timelines for a PhD and thinking it seems improbable to have so long to do one overall piece of work. Even thinking about it as multiple workstreams for different research activities, it seems like a really long time relative to the kinds of timings I’ve had before. The fact I’m the only one doing the work, whereas in work world the project plan would be capturing activity for the whole team I was managing, is obviously a big difference.

Things can take longer than I think they will take and one of the things that I have been noticing as my PhD unfolds, is a tension between expecting or being used to doing things quickly, and having the time to be more considered or thorough. Often when working on something now I have a voice in my head that has checked how long it’s taken me to do something and thinks I’ve been too slow. I then chastise myself for being slow and get into a back and forth discussion with myself about if or how I’m being slow. Taking turns to prosecute or defend myself.

Looking more widely, beyond an immediate task to the list of things I’d love to do, then more widely still to issues and challenges in the world, such as climate change, there’s a sense of urgency. A want and need for things to be moving more quickly. A sense of the impacts building up, spiralling out in time and place to this and future generations, all affected by our slowness and inaction. Or back to myself, thinking about all of the things I’m not doing, can’t do, will never do. That suffocating sense of it, rage and fury and want and need.

Then as I’m writing this, I see a man walk past my window, or in truth, very slowly shuffle past my window. I’m distracted from writing this piece, exploring my own sense of frustration and astonishment at the opportunities I have by him. It takes him, relatively or comparably, longer to pass through my line of sight than I would expect it to take me. For him, on the basis of the times I’ve seen him go by, that seems to be his normal, glacial pace. Everything he does or plans to do must presumably be calibrated to how long it takes him to get places. The actual him, not the him he perhaps used to be or wants to be. Maybe he and I might make the same journey but his expectation of timings might be double what mine would be.

As I look back to a screen full of news reports about how climate change has likely made Hurricane Melissa four times more likely, the fraying consensus around the need to act on climate change, slow progress ahead of the upcoming COP30, it all feels so very slow. Too slow. The urgency not matched with action.

I try to soothe myself with thoughts of the man shuffling past my window, telling myself that sometimes things just take longer than it seems they should take. That he might not want things to take so long either, might also be furious and frustrated but that doesn’t make things faster, probably the opposite.

I stretch and play with the analogy, coming back to it over and over to see if it can help me think differently. To find a way to translate the dignity of the man shuffling by, still trying and doing, into something that makes sense of what I see around the action on climate. For now at least I just have to hold those different things in the same view because they don’t feel like they can easily be reconciled. Things can take too long, longer than we want or need and things flow from that – sometimes good, sometimes bad, often unclear at the time or changing in hindsight. Back to the same message, over and over, to just start from where I am and do what I can. Sometimes that feels enough and sometimes it doesn’t.

Beds have come to seem so normal but for most people in time and space, the kinds of mattresses we think of as standard in the UK just aren’t. Sleeping on bare earth – or at least, earth covered with grass and herbs to provide some kind of matting for people to walk around and sleep on. Hammocks and boxes, benches and coffin-like beds. Mattresses made of linen, feathers or straw, beds have been through lots of iterations.

My bed, I’m so happy and lucky to say, is very much not like sleeping on bare earth. It is so comfortable and either explicitly or implicitly I register that each time I get in. A daily joy and privilege. It’s quite firm but not too firm. There’s some give in it but it doesn’t feel squashed or like I’m suffocating or being swallowed up by the bed.

Yet I wonder what it would feel like for people who are used to sleeping on rolled up plant materials if they were to magically be able to try out my bed. Whether they would lie down on it and be blown away by the comfort levels, see their own situation differently. Wish for something else. Or whether it would just feel too uncomfortable. Too much. Or perhaps too little. Missing that connection with the ground. Feeling a bit unmoored from their life and homesick for something that felt more natural, rather than being on some complicated set-up.

Shove suggests that so much of what we experience as comfort is set by wider expectations. With the availability of technologies which allow us to control the temperature in rooms and buildings more easily there was a need for designers to have an understanding of what temperature range they should be aiming for. This has led to the development of a norm around temperatures in buildings which then creates a feedback loop, or ratchet as Shove describes it, which leads to increases in usage more widely. Somewhat terrifyingly, Walker, Simcock and Day found the temperatures people prefer in their bedrooms are generally lower than the 18 degrees recommended by the energy sector. This guidance can help to reset expectations and could lead to further increases in energy consumption.

So perhaps those mythical time travellers who get to test my bed might not like it if they just gave it a one-time try. Their expectations would still be with their own beds and perhaps mine wouldn’t feel right for them.

A really big shift, perhaps bigger than the actual bed technology, is the one from sleeping being a more communal activity to sleep as something private. There is a wider move to more privacy at home, and beds are just part of that. Until around the Victorian times in the UK, sleep was a much more shared experience. It used to be common for all the members of a household to bed down together. Halls were multi-purpose rooms where people would eat, work, hang out and sleep. Servants and masters, young and old sharing beds or a room. Hard to imagine that being the norm for most people in space and time, yet there was considered to be an intimacy to sharing that space. For many members of the nobility, inviting people into their bedchamber was considered to be offering or getting a huge privilege. A much more communal existence than most people have now.

This shift by the Victorians was driven partly by increased concerns around the moral implications of people sharing beds, and partly because of hygiene considerations. There became more awareness of how infectious diseases could be spread, and therefore more of a drive for people to have their own space to try and reduce that risk.

That seems impossible for most of us to imagine. A tangible way in which people from previous generations lived lives that are very different to our own.

Of course, there are now hundreds of thousands of people around the country, one of the richest in the world, for whom imagining that is easy because it is their reality today too. Families or groups of individuals sharing one room. That room becoming like the Hall of old – with one room also becoming the living, working and eating space. Sometimes the room they have to use for cooking too. Living rooms in rental places increasingly getting used as living rooms, either by the people renting having to make that decision to be able to afford the space, or landlords making that decision for people.

As with other changing expectations, the gap between expectation and reality means what once might have made a home feel communal and normal, now feels like a lack of care or respect. This creates a sense of emotional discomfort which can be just as unpleasant to live with, and in, as physical discomfort can be. Much has changed with beds and how we sleep but until we have more of a shared agreement, and actions to match, we’ll continue to have people living amongst us who have beds and sleeping arrangements that seem like time travel to most of us.

Tag: health

It takes how long?

Bedding down