Freedom to Function as a Human

Your body needs food, rest, sleep, etc. – but is often prevented by others

Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash

A search on Google or other search engines for “hormones” will display a lot of articles and photos related to female hormonal cycles, and also some about LGBTQ+.

But make no mistake about it: both men and women, children and adults, in fact, most animals and even vegetables have hormones – and we need them! They regulate several things in our bodies, and without the right hormones at the right time and place, we all malfunction.

Hormones make you fall asleep, and wake up. They make you feel hungry, or full. And they do many subtle tasks in the background that you don’t even think about, possibly don’t even know about.

I think it’s safe to claim that a human body has some needs. For that reason, most workplaces are equipped with toilets. And even though some employers feel that they should decide how often and how long you’re allowed to use these toilets, they do at least recognize that toilets are needed.

So far, so good. Other needs of the body are less appreciated, probably because they are less understood.

For instance sleep.

Sleep is by many considered a waste of time. You are doing nothing when sleeping, is the common belief. But that is very wrong. You may not do things consciously in your sleep, but your body is busy with all kinds of things in the category of repair and maintenance.

If you don’t sleep enough, your body will break.

Hormones are in place to help you understand when it’s time to sleep. Because, the body, biologically, knows when it’s time. You, consciously, must then decide on the exact right time and place (to not fall asleep behind the wheels, for instance, or when being chased by a bear), and that’s probably the reason for the body not just insisting, or even switching you off the hard way – you must listen, plan, and do, consciously.

The hormones, however, will make you feel sleepy, so that you know that it’s time. Or physically tired, even if they brain isn’t sleepy. Whatever such signals you get from your body, you are supposed to listen and obey.

It is common, for instance, to feel sleepy shortly after having eaten. All of us who have tried to arrange meetings or courses at work, just after the lunch break, know that people may be happy for having eaten, but they are not exactly full of energy at that time. That’s because their bodies actually try to tell them that they really should rest now, perhaps even sleep a bit.

We also have nerves and other mechanisms that will help us maintain the body and fulfill its needs. A hurting back, for instance, means that you should sit or lie down. Not in the upcoming weekend, or during your vacation in several months, but right now, when it hurts.

Since we got steam machines, we have been told to stay up and running at work from we check in until we check out, often, nowadays, during eight hours straight.

That was implemented for the sake of the machines, not the humans. A steam machine was so expensive that it should be utilized all the time to be feasible, and it also had so many contact points where different people needed to do something, which often depended on what others had just done before them, that it was the most convenient for the machine owners to simply demand from the workers to be on their post non-stop during their shift.

This, however, doesn’t correspond to the way a human body is constructed to work. We can do short periods of activities, but if they last longer, the body starts demanding that we stop and rest. That makes us lose concentration, for instance, and makes the muscles less controllable, so that we make more mistakes – and next to a big and powerful machine, such mistakes could easily lead to physical injure.

The mind also suffers injure under such circumstances, but we have, in the industrialized world, a tendency to dismiss the requirements of the mind even more than we dismiss those of the body.

Our hormones are trying to signal all kinds of things to us, but they are all routinely ignored – in part due to demands from a boss or other people around us. We are simply not allowed to act as humans upon our human needs. Maybe we’ll be allowed to go to the toilet, but even that is often seen as some kind of betrayal to the hard-working colleagues, or even as a breach of the employment contract.

My spell-checker now insists on calling the toilet a “restroom”, and that somehow explains what people have against that place: you are seen as resting when going there, i.e., not working hard, as you were supposed to.

Rest is such a thing we often don’t allow ourselves. But it is part of human functionality. We can use the muscles or the brain for something heavy for some time, but then we need to rest for some time in order for the body to recover and get ready for more bursts of activities.

Machines are often constructed to work non-stop for many hours, but humans are not.

As we saw above, the steam machine introduced such a requirement on humans, but long after the steam machines have been retired, we still maintain that same kind of thinking.

In fact, it has become a lot worse during recent years, where optimizations at the workplace have led to a severe reduction of the number of people. Where it was considered normal some years ago to have various competencies and job specifications around, allowing some people to rest at times, when there wasn’t much to do of the kind of work they were hired in to do, it is now more common to see broad job descriptions that effectively demand from all employees to do something all the time, because “there’s always something to do” – and there are too few people to do it, so no excuse to rest.

Now, people are active all eight hours of their shift, even limiting the time spent on going to the toilet, and omitting the other needs of the body, such as resting after lunch or sitting down when their back or feet start hurting after walking around for hours.

Freedom and work are contradictions, as it looks today. You are not only giving up some of your time by having a job, you are also giving up your natural bodily functions to become a machine, working under conditions that are out of sync with the nature of the human body.

You are giving up listening to your hormones. They are there to tell you what to do, but you won’t listen, because your boss shouts louder, I suppose. Or the bank, or the electronic gadget pusher, or whoever seems to be more important to you than your own body.

As a result, you develop all kinds of “life-style conditions”, like diabetes, eczema, allergies, migraine, and obesity. You become anxious, feel not to fit in, and are diagnosed to be on some kind of “spectrum”, again indicating that you do not fit in, that you are not normal.

The missing fit is not on you, though, because all the illnesses show, and all that is complained about in this society is, effectively, that you are not fit for neglecting the needs of the human body.

Most of these problems could be avoided if you could safely listen to your body and its hormones, when they told you to eat, stop eating, sleep, wake up, rest, run, sit, whatever.

Freedom is health, when thinking about it. Freedom is to do what is needed to stay healthy. At work or at home.

Freedom to listen – to your hormones, your nerves – to your own body, to yourself.