Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hello and welcome. Sorry we're having a giggle here this morning. And why ever not? There's not enough fun in the world.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Why ever not?
[00:00:11] Speaker A: And welcome to humanizing the podcast that looks at what it really is to be human. I'm Ginny Holden. I am either the map holder or the blueprint holder. Depends what I thought about that day. And I have the amazing and wonderful Maheen Mohammed Ali, who is our amazing, wonderful, brilliant Questa because she asks those questions that you lot really want to know the answers to. And today she's got a great question.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Mahin, I want to know, why does the world start at 09:00 a.m.? Ginny, what is this magical hour? 09:00, 09:00 a.m..
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to humanizing the podcast that allows you to understand how you've been programmed by both evolution and culture so you can liberate any behaviour you choose and be who you would like to be. Today. I'm Ginny. I'm the map holder. I'd like to introduce Marhin.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Hello.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Marhin is the explorer and together we will journey through this programming so you can understand through the questions you ask and definitely the questions Mahin asks, how to liberate yourself and be the most amazing person that you choose to be.
What we're diving in to talk about today are the unwritten rules of societies and cultures. And they actually have a name. They're called norms. And they're called norms because they're not written down rules, but we all adhere to them just because we do and everyone else does. It's a bit like, and I'm going to be very London centric here at the moment, not that I live in London anymore. I have to point out the tube, so you have to go down the tube on the right hand side is the thing. And yet I think there are only about six signs in London which say right hand side of the tube, but everyone does it. And more to the point, what I truly like is you've watched those poor people who aren't Londoners and tourists, and they're milling around at the top of those escalators looking and they sort of look at what everyone's doing. God helps the poor one and we've all seen them who decides that they're going to try and do it differently and go on the left. And then everyone, we almost en masse, turn and look at them. No one says a word. We turn and look at them evilly and they all shuffle over to the right.
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Don't stand on the left, you walk on the left. No one says it.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: No one says it. And yet this is what happens. And these are the things we're talking about, the norms about the things that just we do, and they happen in our local.
In your family, you'll have norms.
In our house, we always eat for a particular time because my husband actually gets indigestion if we eat too late. Just happens to be what we always do. Now you'll have local norms. I live in a small village. No, it's not really a village. Is it a small town? It's bigger than village in Devon. And we have a word that we all know what it means for tourists, and we call them grokles.
No one can tell me where this came from or why it exists because there's probably no one old enough in Timmy who remembers. But we're called grokles, and these build up so you can even get global ones. And one of the global ones we seem to all suffer from at the moment is everything starts at 09:00 a.m.
Even, I might point out, during the mass pandemic of COVID still, you were supposed to be plugged in at your laptop at 09:00 a.m.
Even when every other single thing about normal life had disappeared globally. It's 09:00 a.m. If I work in Europe or I go to the US. And even as far as Shanghai, I was trying to remember where Shanghai was at the time. Of course, it's in China. I've worked in Malaysia, I've worked in Indonesia. I've worked in Brazil and Argentina and South America and South Africa. Flipping eck.
[00:04:33] Speaker B: It's always 09:00 a.m.
So we've set the norm. There's now a global norm based on the western start at 09:00 a.m. So it's kind of gone over because that's where we are.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: It would be really interesting.
And I've never done that level of historical research. I've only ever used it as an example. The whole world seems to start at 09:00 a.m.
And yet there's no rule.
You can see why it happens in a lot of places because of when school education and schools start.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: Oh, and banks.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: Banks. Everything opens at the similar time. The stock market doesn't. The stock market opens at eight, I believe.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Open at nine.
We are a financial. Everything about our world comes back down to money. The close of play is based on when they close down. When you've processed all your transactions for.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: That bank closes at four, does its transactions, finishes five. This might be it. But these are the things about choice where we are unconsciously controlled by what's around us.
It's literally we all rock up and we start at 09:00 a.m. And then this has given a rise to a really insidious culture recently. Well, I think it's insidious where a load of people go around telling you you've got to be up at 05:00 a.m. And do these 50 billion teeth wonderful things before you go and do anything else with your day.
Why? I mean, are you a night owl or are you an early bird? See, we even got names.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I'm a gosh, actually, I've noticed a change. I used to be a night owl, and as I've gone into my fourth decade, shock, horror.
I'm as much of a night owl as I am an early riser. So I just need less sleep now. I think I remember a friend of mine describing it as we get older, we're on borrowed time, so we need less sleep. But I will tell you what I have discovered the joy of. It's slightly off topic, but I'll go with it. Naps.
[00:06:43] Speaker A: Naps, yeah. I've never done naps.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: I love a nap.
Absolutely love a nap. I just think babies have got it right.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Well, they nap for a particular reason, which is their brains are, like, trying to build stuff all the time, but it's this, I think, yeah, they could do. But I also think what's interesting about 09:00 a.m. Is no matter which, I was going to say time. Not just time zone, but loads of people do daylight saving. Right. Which is also a really weird thing. But however, of those things, it's always light by 09:00 a.m. In the morning, unless you're in real north Arctic Circle territory, and I have worked in the north of Sweden, it never got light. So I suppose it didn't really matter when it was 09:00 but it's always light by 09:00 a.m.
And that takes us into this really interesting area, which is we've expanded the day because we have artificial daylight.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: Okay, of course.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: But it's still these norms. And I think it's really interesting to look at loads of fun written rules that we do things and we never question why we do it, we just do it because everyone else does, like going down the escalator on the right hand side of the London Underground as it were. There's just hundreds and thousands of them all over the place. We just adhere to one of the global ones. Actually, I really quite like is in practically every country in the world, as long as they've got a functioning type of health service, if you have an accident and you are hurt and you are unconscious, someone calls those people, they come and pick you up and take you to a mean.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: That's fantastic.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: It is.
[00:08:45] Speaker B: I was nodding my head, which is the most useless response for a podcast.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: I'll say. Mahim was nodding really strongly.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: Then bouncing, realized that this is audio.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: Yeah. And there are global ones.
It happens at 09:00 a.m. Happens to be this. What's it happens to be that? And I even remember when I was working in Italy, it was a 09:00 a.m. Start that we used to finish. Lunchtime seemed to change over the world. But 09:00 a.m. Was definitely. What are some of the norms? Actually, I know where we'll go with this now.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Let's have some fun.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: It's both you and I are what we call third culture as children and as adults. And just to general explain what the word and I'm doing now, waving my hands around and doing parentheses in the air, third culture, what does that really mean? It means that as children, our parents hadn't been brought up in the cultural system that we were brought up.
So my parents were from Europe and had both been displaced by the Second World War and then had rocked up as children or babies in England, but still were very fundamentally part of a different culture, which in this respect was jewish. Now, mahin, I know you also arrived here by accident and not design.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Yes. My parents are from Pakistan.
Yeah.
[00:10:20] Speaker A: And what I found, and I remember distinctly when I was little, and this is before I even went to school, is the sort of rules at home were not the rules at my grandma's, all at my nana's, they're completely different.
So I've got one basically Czech Jewish, which was my grandma. And then at Nana's, we had a very english french mix, very strange, but they were entirely different. So I literally used to remember going up to my grandma's porch on Roston Mirror Road and going through the door. And I remember it was literally a glass porch she'd had stuck on the outside of the house. Full of plants. Actually, she's full of plants there and overwintered the geraniums.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: Anyway.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: And then used to remember when I got my hands right, I am different here. I do things differently here. And one of the abiding memories I had is we were allowed dairy lee triangles.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: At my nana's where food had to be created from scratch at home, that was like crack. Okay. And my nana used to think my grandma was the devil incarnate for feeding me.
Derelict they are. And I also then remember always going round on Saturdays and because it would have been because they weren't practicing at all at this stage. It was still a cold table, as in they were all cold meats and cold salads and all of this, that and the other. And dairy lee triangles.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: A whole pile of.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: Yeah, they were mega.
Wow. But it was this thing that they then remember when we were off to school, it was like interfacing again with.
[00:12:10] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Another sodding set of rules I had to learn, which for me, these were all the norms, like derelictly triangles. And that's crack.
You go to school and you're taking a packed lunch because someone loves you. Food is a love language, especially for jewish french people. So you take pack lunch. No one has packed lunch or elite school village.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: So food is a very obvious norm. And what are some of you remember from being a kid?
[00:12:44] Speaker B: I definitely had that experience of having different behaviors in different people's houses. Like, I remember that our house would.
And then my aunt's houses were houses where there was prayers said. Since we're muslim houses and then other houses, that wasn't the case.
The food, again, was completely different. In both the houses we had a lot of fresh, homemade, asian inspired food and all the lovely herbs and spices that go with that. And then coming out into other houses that were completely different.
And I think starting to understand the impact of that post war culture on how food was prepared and what ingredients were used and just quite a different way of eating.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: I remember as well, because we have obviously talked about some of this stuff before, but you were saying as well, when the norms of food and behavior you had in your household growing up were also different. When you went back to Pakistan, it's as though your parents had held in aspect or frozen time what they'd learned and imported it with them. And then even they were surprised at certain things and how they'd changed when you went back. Went back, yeah, definitely they went back. But you went to another country.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I visited another country and they went home, as it were. And, yeah, I think the way that the landscape changed there because obviously they weren't watching the progress of it.
They were held in time from what they left and they would go back and be really confused with how western it was. And actually, sometimes more western than even the west felt.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: Really. Is there anything in particular you remember?
[00:14:36] Speaker B: I think for my parents, it was some of the ways that they were adopting what they felt was western culture.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:14:45] Speaker B: And there was a real shift from everything, from the way that people lived and how they dressed and what they ate and the rise of something as simple as, like, a fast food.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: I'm going to say McDonald's, don't tell.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And KFC. All these sorts of change that came their pizza hut and that sort of stuff, which has just not took away from the stall. The street stallholders, they were still there. It was just that there was also this other thing, and people would have that, and they would feel so excited about eating it, whereas for us, it was, oh, God.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I know.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: They're far too processed. Not allowed at all.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: And what's really interesting about all these norms is, number one, it's how we as individuals, if we're looking at human stuff and human being, human norms are unwritten rules that every single group of people who identify as working together as a culture have. They literally. And us, and the way our brains work is one of the first things we start to look for is things that other people do differently. And there is literally a set of things you look for. You look for how people dress visually, do they look differently? To me?
What's all their sensory environment? Smells?
Do they have signifiers? Do they actually look, sound, and act differently? And there are two others, but we'll dig into those another time because they're quite complicated about how we'll remember who we are. But one of the things I think are really important is how signifiers are actually norms. So the things we like, how someone dresses, right, this is a norm in a particular culture, you might always be going out with a hat on. Is it been freezing? And yet, if I've rocked up from, let's say, the very south of France, and I suddenly go to Finland, I would know I entered a different culture because things just look differently. So norms are one of the ways we identify ourselves as different, which comes to really fascinating when we actually see this rocking up in businesses.
And here's one I love. I was working with Ted Baker once, and I arrived and took my jacket off and put this on the back of my chair.
Immediately I knew I'd done something wrong because the hold of the room went dead quiet.
And then someone got up, picked up my jacket from my back of my chair, and went and hung it up on a hanger, and then the meeting could stop.
And because I know quite a lot about this, I was like, I've got to find out where this comes from. This is really interesting. I've never seen this anywhere before.
So I was working with them for about 612 months, and finally I kept asking people, and they go, oh, no, it's just what we do here.
Okay, just what we do here. Then I actually managed to meet the manufacturing director, who'd been one of the initial people who set it up, and he goes, oh, I can tell you why, Jimmy.
He says, because a jacket for a tailor and someone who knows about clothes construction is one of the most complicated architectural pieces of clothes. So we were going to honor the time, energy, and effort that had gone into that. So you won't put it on your chair. We decided we'd hang our jackets up.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: Tada.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: And yet everyone who'd come into that culture had realized it was something they did, and they never asked once why.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: Which is why we are here, right? Because this is what we're doing. We're asking why about all of these things? And there's usually an answer, and it's usually something that makes sense. Yeah.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: And the thing is, we are hardwired to look for these things. So when we rock up, like you and I did as kids, we go, how do I fit in here? Got to belong. And sort of building on this sort of. Ted Baker, what's it once, because once I was doing to work with KPMG and Ted Baker exactly the same time, and I even changed clothes between meetings, because KPMG, Canary Wharf. You arrive there, you open the door, and it's not only is it like 52,000,000,002 stories high, the entrance hall. So it's a huge space. There is literally, or was at that time, about 40 foot of marble I had to walk across before I got to the desk. So they're already saying things to me. A, it's marble. B, that thing is further out. And when I got to there, I signed in, I left all my bags and did stuff, and was given a card with my name on it, then had to go through another turnstile, up another escalator to the meeting area, reception. So now I've been sort of processed a number of times to be allowed into their system. And, of course, Wharf City had to look like I was working in the city. So you wore a suit in heels. Never been too hot in hills, by the way, then trolling all over the way back to Kings Cross to Ted Baker. I'd get changed because everyone in Ted Baker, no one wore a suit. If you wore a suit, they would think you were really strange. And suits aren't trendy, so I'd literally get changed. And when I arrived at Ted Baker in their old post office building, you'd rock up to the bottom. No signs, nothing. You'd hardly have known it was Ted Baker's head office. You walk in and there's a nice chap sat behind, literally looks like a school desk going, hi, you're Ginny. Yeah, we know you're coming. Go around the corner. Round the corner. You entered a goods lift, you know, with those, with the things you see on american films that jobs that go and they open. You go in there, you come out the next floor, or however many floors it was, you walk out and again, it looks like a good entrance, not marble and glass. And hello, how big and important are we? And you go up to this little door and you literally open the door. And there was a young lady perched on a stool behind quite a high level desk with flowers and plants and biscuits doing an owls. And she goes, hello, Jenny, nice to see you again. Come and sit down. And next to her, their sort of reception welcome area looked like someone's sitting room. And she said, I've got you. Ut you like Elle Grey, don't you?
Fundamentally different. And why we would be changing how we react being presented in that environment, once laid back, once it wants formal and structured and processed. And if anyone was doing that, you'd literally change how you behave in both of those different environments. Because the norms of behavior are different.
[00:21:32] Speaker B: So coming back to our why does the world start at 09:00 a.m. Because we're really good at the big conversations we go round.
And there's cultural norms. Cultural norms, societal norms. There are norms that we bring. There are norms that I've been given, that my parents have given me, that are from where they were born and raised, that I think is stuff that's completely normal.
And there are things that I've inherited from the culture I've been born and raised in, or the society I've been born and raised in. Those are probably two different things. As we said, a culture at home and a culture outside of home.
[00:22:08] Speaker A: Totally. Because every group has its own set of norms, artifacts and institutions. So norms are the unwritten rule that everyone polices institutions, are written rules, like the highway code. And their written rules are always policed by the entire society.
Like I said, like the highway code. And artifacts are things that exist because of those two other things. So take traffic lights, for example.
Traffic lights only exist because we, a, don't usually live where we work anymore, which has only been the past 100 years.
B, drive are in things that are quite dangerous to us and other people.
So we have to stop artifact, stop traffic, and let things happen around us. Very much like crossing the road. Have you ever tried to cross the road in Southeast Asia? Indonesia, China, what's it especially? Indonesia or Vietnam?
[00:23:12] Speaker B: Pakistan. Yeah. It's a take your life into your hands scenario, but it feels like that. However, my mum said, just aim for where you're going, because the path opens up. And she was absolutely right, because it's the norm for everybody else. So they just out of your way.
[00:23:32] Speaker A: And totally that. Because we were in Cambodia and my daughter was like, I can't cross road. I can't trust roads. Can't cross roads. I said, just walk across. Now they'll hit me. Said, no, they know not to do that. Because I remember going to that part of the world when I was about 19 and being completely flawed in Bangkok about how you cross the road, because here's me looking for a Pelican crossing or a zebra crossing, and everyone's just crossing the road. I'm thinking, oh, my God, they're all mad. But the more you what?
[00:23:58] Speaker B: Hooking?
Looking for a pelican crossing, where do we go?
[00:24:04] Speaker A: Because these are the things that control our behaviour. We don't even realize. I remember another time I was in Norway, and the first time I'd worked in Norway, and I was staying in the centre and the office I was going to was further outside. So I rock up at the train station feeling, I can do this. I don't need to take a cat thing.
And I know the stop I got to get off. And all they had across all the top of the screens was, this train goes to the furthest destination right now.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: The end of the light.
[00:24:36] Speaker A: Now, you and I are all familiar that our trains in the UK don't stop at all the.
Yeah, yeah. Doesn't happen in Norway. They stop at all the stops. So when I asked the question, does that train stop at this one? This woman looked at me as I'd lost the plot. She said, yes, of course it does, why wouldn't it?
[00:24:55] Speaker B: Yeah, fair.
[00:24:56] Speaker A: And I was like, cultural norm.
[00:25:00] Speaker B: Cultural norm.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: They don't put the information up because they expect you to know it stops at all the stops.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: So here's the thing that I've noticed when I've traveled or when we've been talking about this and sort of that's going on in the background of my mind, and I think in my childhood actually, was that there are two things that come out of understanding cultural norms and growing up in a culture that you understand. And by that I mean possibly that is the same in your house as outside of your house, right? Is that there's safety.
And with that safety comes confidence, because it's sort of everywhere that you look around you, the same rules are being observed, the same norms are being.
[00:25:52] Speaker A: And they seem to know them.
[00:25:54] Speaker B: Yes, everyone knows them and everyone is doing them.
And when you do something different, there is, in the right environment, curiosity, in the wrong environment, hostility, but there is somebody saying, I don't feel safe totally.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: And that is because what you're doing is the norms are how we identify each other as the same group. As soon as you start doing something that isn't about that group, someone's brain goes, and this is a bias. So norms are based in a cultural algorithm. Hold on, I'm going to sound really weird now, we have been and worked together as groups for probably around 8 million years, and we always have to remember, and we've said it once, and I'll say it again, we've only had language between 52 hundred years, thousand years, which is less than 0.6% of the time we've been alive. So before then we would have had, we do have, and we have programs in our head which go, how do I know this is my group? How do I know how we do things here? Remember, there's no language. So exactly like your brain has worked out how the physical world works and doesn't tell you about it all the time. There's programs, how the social world works, and these wait till you are born and take on the data, information, knowledge about that social world at that particular period in time. Very much like a language, you're predisposed to learn a language, even though it's probably only about 50,000 years old, and yet you will learn the language or languages you're exposed to between zero and nine really easily. And you do that with culture, you realize the rules. So what happens?
And remember, it's only quite recently that we've had, I'd say, mass multicultural migration. We have, over the time, brought in single cultures or had single cultures overtake us, but not 20 or 30 or 40 different cultures all at once, all appearing in a very short space of time in a human thing. So what your brain does is it goes, that's different.
It is a late 20th century thing. Well, 200 years ago, that's different. That's bad. We've been taught to think that different is wrong. Doesn't mean it is.
And therefore you feel unsafe because someone's not doing the rules you're expecting, and your brain goes, that's not something I've seen.
Is this something I should worry about?
[00:28:45] Speaker B: Right. Is this a threat?
[00:28:46] Speaker A: Yes.
And if you've always been, oh, how wonderful. But if you've always been taught it's a threat, then you're going to see it as a threat. If you've always been taught that something new is amazingly interesting, you'd see it that way. But we don't do that. Not all of us.
No.
[00:29:06] Speaker B: Some of us are able to be curious. Some of us are able to live in ourselves, be happy in who we are and in our culture.
And that's usually the people who, I would argue, are in the dominant culture and who feel supported in the dominant culture by the structure of the dominant culture.
They are the confident, safe people in all the areas of their lives. And then when something new comes in, they can, if they want to, feel curious and safe, to explore it.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: I would politely disagree.
I think when something comes into their cultures that they don't know, they try and squash something because it's not the same as everything they know.
And you can see the victors have always written, rewritten history. I do think that the people who are far more open to other cultures or people like our third culture, or have moved or have done something different because we've realized somewhere in our unconscious that this is just a new set of rules. This is not dogma.
[00:30:17] Speaker B: Right.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: And I think sometimes the people in the dominant culture look more confident, comfortable, because it works for them, and those things don't work for people who don't match that.
We could now have a very big conversation about how the dominant culture today in most of the world is only a particular shape.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: I think we all recognize that, don't we? I think we all recognize that there's been sort of a worldwide trying to impose one culture or one set of norms on everybody. Hence, why does the world start at 09:00 a.m. That's right.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: And I think the thing I'd love people to take away from this is culture is an algorithm. If you were used to changing that, repopulating that algorithm an awful lot when you were little, aka people like Marhin and I, then you have been fundamentally used to realizing that it's just a set of rules. Like language.
If you talk to people who are tried by. I can't think of more than three quad lingual. They just go, well, all languages are the same because their brains was exposed to those at such a time that it literally understands the structure of language. Not one particular language, but languages. And they find it easier then to learn far more languages because they go, what's this structure like? I already know. So I think that's the same for us cultural, cross cultural kids is the fact that when we were really little, there were so many knocking around, our brains went, yeah, okay, I get this. That's one. That's another set. That's another set. That's another set.
So we are far more open and curious.
[00:32:04] Speaker B: I think so because we're naturally adaptive. So I do this here and I do that there and I do that there and I do that there. And there's no judgment on any of them. There's no, this is better or this is worse. It's just here, these are the rules, and here these are the rules, and here that's the rules. And so I just follow the rules, give or take, wherever I'm going. And if I don't like the rules, I can deal with that in that area. But what I realize is that it's only for this space that those rules apply. I'm not kind of stuck.
I've got to enforce another set of rules here. I can just question the rules because everything why I've always had is a bit more fluid.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: Completely right. And what I also find fascinating are companies don't realize they're exactly the same.
Two of the ones I happen to have interfaced with joy work. They create their own culture, and the worst thing they can do for their own competitive advantage or survival is have the same people for working there their whole lives, because they'll never question anything. Especially, and I'm going to be. Could be considered pejorative here, but I'm just using it as an example.
If you're white, middle class and male, went to a public school of some sort, then rocked up at a trading house, a bank or a financial institution, and then worked there your whole life, you will be terribly confident with the world. It doesn't mean that that particular organization is going to be any good or consistently competitive in the world.
[00:33:50] Speaker B: We've got a bit of. Now, if I think about the modern climate, this goes back to. Not the modern climate too, but we've got the 05:00 a.m., club, right? We've got the people who are saying, get up earlier. Get up and do things before 09:00 a.m. Like you've actually got many hours before and many hours after 05:00 p.m. That you can do things. It's kind of coming back into culture, I would say. And there are those people who, from a religious perspective, and you may not ascribe to any one particular faith, but you may follow the wake up early and do a dawn meditation, or there are the dawn prayers. I think all three of the monotheistic faiths have dawn prayers. The early bird catches the worm. Like, these are sort of old phrases where it's early to bed, early to.
[00:34:45] Speaker A: Rise makes man getting upset, wealthy and wise. I think it was it.
[00:34:49] Speaker B: There we go. Yeah. And it's about having that balance of sleep, that balance of inertia with Ursha, but getting up and using the sunlight, because we are sunlight animals using the sunlight as our source for energy throughout the day. And yes, when it's winter and it's colder and it's darker for longer, we tend to not want to be out as much, but we still sort of follow that when the sun comes up, we're doing things. So my question is, if we are in this world that we talk about starting at 09:00 a.m.
What's our choice to break out of it? How can we break out of it? Are we a 05:00 a.m.? Clubbers? Are we sunlight risers? Dawn risers?
Do we use those as just our quote unquote, corporate work timings for those who might be in the corporate world and those of us interested.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: For me, this was about structural norms and the things that are all written rules. But if we go back to the 09:00 a.m.. One, what I'd always remind people is the system. You live within the body. If you look at your hands and you look at your body, this system, this organic system has been developed over 8 million years and then billions of years previous to that.
Within that, there was literally the cycles of the seasons and the length of dark and light that is respectful of the day and the seasons, whether wherever you live on the earth. So we live in the 21st century, where we tend to divorce ourselves entirely from the natural world. And yet your body was developed in that world and in that space. So there is a lot of science now and a lot of sense with actually, within a couple of hours of waking up, seeing sunlight, because it impacts into how serotonin works and how melatonin works in your body. Because that's what it was always set up to do.
[00:37:02] Speaker B: Both of which being incredibly important to sleep. Natural things that we have got that keep us awake and put us totally and give us a rhythm.
[00:37:10] Speaker A: It's this. What is the most human thing? Because that's what your body would have been designed around, which is seeing sunlight. And we wouldn't have lived in houses and stuff like this. We'd have been mostly outside, so we would have recognized sunlight, we'd have recognized dawn. And we'd recognize when things get darker and your whole brain and your system starts to quieten down, the worst thing you can do for yourself is stretch out with artificial light, those hours. Because on top of the normal daily light cycles, it would appear now that your body has a yearly rhythms as well.
That it knows that in the winter, when it's lot of dark and lot of cold, you should be out doing a lot of stuff when it's blazing sunshine. Well, not always in England, you can stay out and work for the hours it's got there. But what I would ask people to do is if someone is telling you something because someone else did it or it's popular, might not be right.
[00:38:18] Speaker B: And actually, we're still putting a time.
[00:38:20] Speaker A: We're still using a clock.
[00:38:22] Speaker B: We're talking about the 05:00 a.m.. Club. I'm talking about the dawn chorus. When the birds are singing and we're naturally waking up with the world.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: I said, I live by the sea in Devon, and I've noticed we have a really interesting dawn chorus, as it were, because we have lots of seagulls. And literally 40 minutes before sunrise, seagulls start.
They almost say, get up. Come on. Come on. Let's get out. Come on. Off we go. Not in the evening, only in the morning. They kick off and they like that.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: Yeah, they're waking up. They're telling you to get into the dark.
[00:39:01] Speaker A: That's right. It's just wonderful.
And this is just for me. In the winter, if I have to wake up before dawn, I have one of those light clocks which lights up ever so. And it's revolutionized how shattered I feel when I wake up.
[00:39:20] Speaker B: Changed. Yeah. So you don't feel shattered when you wake up.
[00:39:26] Speaker A: It's one of the most fundamental things about being human is the world and your environment that you've been born into. And it doesn't matter how many things we look at in the end, the original stuff your body was designed to do is really where we should be.
[00:39:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:45] Speaker A: That also doesn't preclude people being night owls, because it is also proof that certain people's sarcadian rhythm is slightly different.
In the end, I'd listen to your own body and not what anyone else told you.
[00:40:06] Speaker B: Right. But I think even, well, I suppose, how much do night owls exist in a world without technology, without the artificial lights, without the computers, without the street lights, without. I do sometimes think street lights are incredibly cruel for birds who are just.
[00:40:25] Speaker A: Trying to get to sleep.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: I love that.
That's a glimpse who I am as a person.
[00:40:35] Speaker A: I'm so confused.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:36] Speaker A: If I was going to follow a theory or look at conjuncture and go, what's really going on? I would have said, no matter when we've been around as human beings, we probably someone stayed awake at night to look after us. We didn't all go to sleep.
[00:40:53] Speaker B: Yes. As a collective, and as we know.
[00:40:56] Speaker A: One of the things that we've lost is how to be collective. And again, it's just a thought, but it would be really interesting to see if those people's way their bodies built that night owls were the people who stayed up at night and made sure we weren't attacked and then went off to sleep.
But all I would say is it's always thinking about what it was then, there and now, and not taking anything that we've been taught today to think about or how to view ourselves.
[00:41:32] Speaker B: So just being open minded.
So my question, how do we break this, or how do we come out of this idea of this cycle? Because this is a slightly different one. Because this, I think, is put in place by our culture, our society, the norms, and we have to adhere to it. If we are working in a certain thing, and we have to work because we do have to earn money, because that's how we exchange for things like food, shelter, safety, electricity, like all the things that we need. So this society has created this thing. So if we want to live differently, if we can make a different choice, if we want to, where does this sit for us in this episode?
[00:42:20] Speaker A: Two things we've discussed. Two different things we've discussed 09:00 a.m. And is it really a good idea? But 09:00 a.m. As a norm, it could be shifted and changed. If we decided, okay, if we decided as a set of cultures that we're all going to start work at ten, we could do then. What's 10:00 I was neatly going to segue into the fact it was only due to the train line system that the UK first developed that you started to have clocks across the whole country which said the same time, and that's how time shifted across the globe, which was because we had to know when the trains were going to arrive.
[00:42:57] Speaker B: Got you.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: And you can blame Isenbard Kingdom, Brunel for that one, and the London to Bristol train to then catch the SS Great Britain. I think it was out to the States, so it all had to start to be timetabled before then.
[00:43:10] Speaker B: No one cared.
[00:43:14] Speaker A: So the structure we have in the 09:00 a.m. Start is very new for most of the pre industrial revolution. Then we've started when the sun got up and we went to bed, or did little after the sun had gone down.
That's probably what we need to remember.
Your body is designed over 8 million plus years just being human and billions of years between that to work in this environment, respect the environment, respect your body.
[00:43:49] Speaker B: I love it. It's really simple.
[00:43:53] Speaker A: And I said, that probably doesn't preclude night owl, so anyone's listening who could. I don't really wake up till 12:00 then that's fine. Oh, God, I'm getting sidetracked now. There's also a thing about teenage brains. Teenage brains do things entirely differently and need to sleep. We're going to talk, but we are, aren't we?
[00:44:11] Speaker B: We're going to talk about that, because I am fascinated about this and I think it's one of those topics that is incredibly interesting to a lot of people, regardless of whether you've got teenagers in your life or not, because we can remember being one and how different we felt. We felt different.
[00:44:28] Speaker A: And this is all to do, again, with being human and how your body's been designed. And the fact that most people around teenagers, if you were anything between 13 and 19, you were probably usually like to take control over the society you lived in, because people didn't live beyond 13. So teenage brains are really unique and they are wonderful, if a bit challenging.
Thank you for listening.
[00:45:07] Speaker B: Thank you for coming on the journey with me, with us.
[00:45:11] Speaker A: Well, you're the explorer, Marheen.
[00:45:14] Speaker B: I'm off. I'm bashing into the undergrowth of our.
[00:45:18] Speaker A: Brains and into all that program prodding around, gallivanting within that programming. What we want to do, as we've always done with this, is help you understand why you feel the thoughts that you do and then the behavior behind that. So you have a choice of how you behave and who profits by it. And if it's not you and it's not humankind, then stop and think and go, who's controlling who's behind my steering wheel.
So I want to invite you back. Whether you're on a walk, going for the train, on that commute, taking a bath, even cooking, driving a car.
Wherever you find yourself, come and find us. We will be waiting.
