Sleeping with Wool: Toxic Free Talk Radio

My guest today is Patrick Clark, creator of Lucky Sheep, the world’s first lightweight wool sleeping bag. We’ll be talking about how wool can improve the quality of your sleep and his new wool sleeping bag that can be used indoors or outdoors.

Patrick graduated from University of Kansas with a major in Outdoor Recreation. He spent a few years in Wilderness Leadership work and then moved into the Organic Bedding industry.

He loved to invent and he saw a wide open field of opportunity. He also saw a huge riff in principles in the Outdoor Industry. People are going outside to enjoy nature but they are bringing their plastic with them.

Patrick wanted to make a dent in the burgeoning plastic burden that was afflicting the planet.

He then proceeded to research, invent and blog until he created a mini-revolution in the Paleo Diet and Lifestyle movement with his research on minimalist sleeping.

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Improve Your Quality of Sleep with the World’s First Lightweight Wool Sleeping Bag

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Patrick Clark

Date of Broadcast: December 08, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world and live toxic-free. It’s Tuesday, December 8th 2015. I’m here in Clearwater, Florida where it’s finally cold today! It’s cold. It’s 68°. But when I went outside, it felt really cold after 85° for months and months.

Anyway, I’m so glad it’s getting to be winter. I’m so glad it’s getting to be the holiday season. And today, we’re going to be talking about something that relates to winter and the whole idea of hibernating and getting good sleep and rest.

We’re going to be talking with the inventor of the world’s first lightweight wool sleeping bag, 100% wool sleeping bag. He’s going to tell us about sleep and about wool. I just can’t wait to hear all of this.

Hi Patrick! His name is Patrick Clark. He’s the creator of Lucky Sheep Sleeping Bag. Hi Patrick.

PATRICK CLARK: Hi Debra. How are you doing?

DEBRA: I’m good. How are you?

PATRICK CLARK: I’m doing great. It’s good to be here.

DEBRA: Good! Good. Thank you. Thank you for being here.

First, I’d like you to tell us how you thought about of this. But before you even do that, tell us. I know that you have a Paleo viewpoint. And it’s not just Paleo food, but a whole Paleo lifestyle. Why don’t you tell us about that first and then you can tell us how the sleeping bag fits into that.

DEBRA: Yeah, that’s a great idea because that’s actually where it started. So, they call it Paleo diet and lifestyle because diet is too simplistic. Diet alone doesn’t do anything really. Let’s just call it ‘ancestral’, an ancestral approach to health. I like that.

PATRICK CLARK: What that is, that is how humans lived before we had civilization. There are certain things about civilization that take us away from the health-enhancing qualities of nature and the earth from where we evolved or from where we came before there was civilization.

DEBRA: I’m totally in agreement with that. There was a time back in 1987 to be exact where in 1985, I was looking around at the world that we live in and I was saying, “Wait a minute! This doesn’t work.” I really found out about toxics and I said there has to be some other model besides industrialism. I went to live out in a forest for two years (it turned out to be two years) and I came to the same conclusion. We’re alive, we’re part of nature.

And I say “part of nature” because it’s not like nature is nature and we’re something separate. It’s not as “and nature.” We’re an integral part of the whole natural world. We have forgotten that.

And as I started looking at, “Well, how did people live before there was industrialization?” they lived very much as nature is.

And that’s the context that this wool sleeping bag that we’re talking about fits into.

DEBRA: Exactly, exactly. And the thing that we didn’t realize until recently (that science and medicine didn’t think about), we didn’t think about certain things like sunlight, like earthing and grounding, like water. Water gets destroyed by civilization basically, all the important things that we used to be connected to and now, we’re separated from.

DEBRA: Right, exactly. And all those things (the sun, the water, the earth, the food and everything) all contribute to our health. Now, we have this idea of health that is completely separated from that.

PATRICK CLARK: Exactly!

DEBRA: So within that context, what led you to the sleeping bag?

PATRICK CLARK: I was actually working in an organic bedding company called Carolina Morning Designs. I had multiple chemical sensitivities. This is about 10 years ago or so. I was detoxing my home environment and my work environment, getting rid of all the plastic and cleansers, everything. I was rebuilding an entire house that had only natural ingredients in it.

So I got all that figured out. I knew all about organic bedding from working in the industry and engineering and manufacturing. But the thing is, I’ve always been an outdoor adventurist. I have a major in outdoor recreation and I spent just lots and lots of my life backpacking and camping and exploring nature. I couldn’t do it anymore because there was nothing organic, there was nothing non-toxic.

DEBRA: Right, right. I know! If you want to go outdoors, then you wrap yourself in a plastic sleeping bag and put yourself in a plastic tent. And that’s not being connected to nature.

PATRICK CLARK: Exactly! And it’s almost worse than a toxic – it is, it’s worth than a toxic house. The chemicals that are on those materials are more volatile than in a solid material.

DEBRA: So tell us something about those materials that are in a sleeping bag and a tent.

PATRICK CLARK: The toxic kinds?

DEBRA: The toxic kinds, yeah.

PATRICK CLARK: Okay. They have to make light and water proof. Let’s just go with sleeping bags. Tents are pretty obvious because they just spray them with crap. They just coat them with the most toxic, volatile things. It’s almost like paint.

It’s so volatile, most of it.

DEBRA: Well, it’s a waterproofing agent. A lot of those are very toxic.

PATRICK CLARK: Exactly! And flame retardant. They’re very strict on that because of the fire that you might be around when you’re camping.

DEBRA: I was going to ask you about that because it seemed to me that they would be – and then, oh, my God! I haven’t been camping in a long time. But as a child, I was a girl scout and I had spent many times sleeping in a tent. You zip yourself in this plastic tent. There are no open windows or ventilation. You go out into the wild where the air is clean. And then, you zip yourself into this plastic bag.

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah! You get it, you get it. It’s a real contradiction. It’s like we have this phobia to nature. We don’t want a bug in or this or that. Yeah, we go out there and we put ourselves in the same bubble we were already in.

DEBRA: Yeah, a fire retardant plastic bag. Oh, my God! Anyway, I was just looking at the clock and I thought we were almost on the break and we aren’t. Go ahead, keep going.

PATRICK CLARK: So, as far as the sleeping bag, you’ve got your plastic fabric, then you’ve got your inside insulation material. So those, they’re usually not as toxic as the tent. But the problem is your skin is right next to them and they stop your skin from breathing and they collect moisture. And when they collect moisture, they do two things. They become moist, so they hold moisture right near your skin. And they also stop the electrical flow along your skin called hypo electricity. They short circuit that electrical flow.

But between those two factors, they’re interrupting your sleep quality, so you can’t even have a natural sleep.

So you’re going out into nature on the ground. You could have fresh air, you could have grounding, you could have non-toxic things and you can’t even go into a natural sleep. That’s exactly what ancestral health is, trying to put us into the natural environment so our body can go through its natural rhythms and processes so it can achieve health.

DEBRA: Wow! When you say that, it so resonates with me that I want that for my body. When I think about times that I’ve attempted to do just that, it’s like sorting that out and figuring it out as something separate and different from our industrial way of thinking. It requires some research and some understanding of what that might be.

But we’re going to talk about that today on this show when we come back. We just need to go to break in just a few seconds. But when we come back, Patrick, let’s just start with talking about the sleeping bag. And then we can move in to all those other things that are so important that it fits into. We’ll find out what is a sleeping bag and why should you sleep in one.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Patrick Clark. He’s the creator of Lucky Sheep, the world’s first lightweight wool sleeping bag. You can go to his website, WoolSleepingBag.com and find out more.

He’s got a great video there where he’s in the sleeping bag and you can see it out in nature. He explains how it works. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Patrick Clark, creator of Lucky Sheep Wool Sleeping Bag. He’s at WoolSleepingBag.com.So Patrick, tell us what a sleeping bag is. How is it different from a blanket? I think we should probably say that we’re talking about sleeping outdoors, but you could sleep in a wool sleeping bag indoors as well.

PATRICK CLARK: Yes. Yes, you certainly can. And it has a big advantage. First, I want to talk about that. It has a big advantage sleeping indoors because basically, you could save on your heat. We heat our houses at night. It’s really not necessary. It’s a huge design flaw in basically our mentality. We think we have to have the air warm. Well, we don’t. We just have to have enough insulation around our body and our body can generate enough heat. I actually thought about that a lot before I designed the sleeping bag. I was asking that, “Why am I heating the house at night? I’m not using the air.”

DEBRA: I actually agree with that. I actually sleep in wool. Obviously, you’ve just invented the sleeping bag, so I don’t have one. But I have a wool mattress. I have a wool comforter. I have wool blankets. I have a wool pillow. It’s all wool. And so I can get nice and cozy in my bed and have it be – well, it doesn’t get that cold here in Florida, but it could be like 50°.

I like it cold outside. I know that when we go to my in-laws house at Christmas time and I’d stay overnight and they’ve got the whole house heated (and I don’t), it would just be too hot.

DEBRA: Yes, exactly. It’s stuffy.

PATRICK CLARK: I couldn’t sleep. It’s stuffy.

DEBRA: We know! You’re good. I know you love wool and you know wool. And that’s the thing. It’s a huge design flaw. If you’re saying, “How can we create the best sleep?” well, science knows that you sleep better when it’s cold. It’s part of this whole ancestral approach. You sleep better when it’s cold.

So if you can get inside something warm, a blanket or a sleeping bag, and have the air cold, you’re breathing the cold air and you’re letting your body generate heat instead of allowing the air to be hot or warm and your body doesn’t have to work against it, first off, it increases your quality of sleep even indoors because you can cool the air down and you save on energy.

But as far as why a sleeping bag versus a blanket, a sleeping bag, there are two things to it that make it a sleeping bag.

One is that it’s not a blanket. There’s a difference between a blanket and a comforter. It’s a comforter, it’s not a blanket. A blanket is denser and it’s not as warm as a comforter. We know that, you know that. That’s an everday kind of thing. So it’s got to be a comforter to be a true sleeping bag.

And then, the shape of it, it needs to be something that you seal up in so that there are no drafts. There’s no place that the air can come in. One little, tiny draft is going to affect the performance.

So the reason you would want a sleeping bag indoors instead of a comforter indoors is because you can get the air even colder than you could. You could be warmer. A sleeping bag is going to be warmer than a comforter any day because of the draft issue, the draft coming in.

DEBRA: Right! I was noticing that usually when you make your bed really carefully the way you’re taught, you tuck in the sheets and blankets all very carefully around all the edges and then you put the [inaudible 00:17:51] and stuff. I was noticing when I took my comforter out this year that I just kind of threw it on the bed and then I snuggled it around my body. I really noticed that it was like I was wrapping myself in it instead of having all these cold air in the bed. You know what I’m talking about? I think you know what I’m talking about.

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah, exactly. Exactly! That’s what you want in a sleeping bag. And yeah, you naturally tend to try to make a blanket through that, which you can do.

DEBRA: Yeah, but a sleeping bag just wraps around you.

Now, here’s a question that I have for you because I have slept in a fair amount of sleeping bags of different types. Yours doesn’t have a zipper. Am I correct? Yours doesn’t have a zipper?

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah, exactly.

DEBRA: And so I’m asking that because the worst part of sleeping in a sleeping bag is the cold zipper.

PATRICK CLARK: Oh, yeah.

DEBRA: So tell us about your design with the sleeping bag.

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good point. Once I figured out how to make it out of wool and then before I put it on the market, I tried different designs. I tried the zippered one, the traditional zippered with the hood and then I found out about this way of doing it where you can just wrap it around you and it doesn’t have to have a zipper. But the funny thing is there’s no draft. There’s absolutely no draft coming in.

It has these flaps on the side that you tuck underneath you. And when you’ve got them tucked in like that, you’re pulling the bag around you tight and it’s actually less draft than the kind with the zipper.

There’s a whole lot of reasons why this is more comfortable. The main thing is you don’t get trapped. The problem with zippers is you’re like in this straightjacket. You get in there and then you’re in that mummy shape and you can’t move. You can’t even move your legs. You can’t get into a side fetal curl position, which, pretty much, people love to sleep that way.

DEBRA: Yeah. Well, what’s it like to sleep in your sleeping bag?

PATRICK CLARK: It’s delicious. It’s unbelievable. I can’t believe. It’s way better than I’ve even envisioned it was going to be. I can go out, it can be 15° and I could go out, just plop down on the ground and be toasty warm and have that incredible air and not have any worries. It’s so light. You forget that it’s cold outside.

DEBRA: Yeah, I understand what that’s like, yeah.

So when we come back, I know that you have some things you want to tell us about wool. So when we come back, let’s talk about wool and how it helps you sleep.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Patrick Clark. He’s the creator of Lucky Sheep, the world’s first lightweight wool sleeping bag. You could go see it WoolSleepingBag.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Patrick Clark, creator of Lucky Sheep Wool Sleeping Bag. His website is WoolSleepingBag.com.Patrick, tell us why wool.

PATRICK CLARK: Why wool? Wool is the best outdoor fabric. For centuries (more than centuries, I don’t know. Centuries, whatever), people have used wool. It’s the only thing that actually works, period. When it’s cold, if you try cotton, it’s good.

Cotton is good, linen is good. There are other fabrics that are good, but they don’t work when it’s cold. So it has to be wool, period.

And the reason why, looking at the science, is because other fabric pulls moisture. It collects some moisture. And that little bit of moisture causes your skin to be cold right there. So if you have a cotton fabric, you have wool on the other side of the cotton fabric that comes out, it would compromise the warm ability and would actually be dangerous. If you backpackers know that cotton is a big no-no, you can’t wear cotton. Your life will be at risk for hypothermia if you used other fabrics.

DEBRA: One of the questions I was thinking of when I knew we were going to do this show is – again, I’ll say I’ve done a fair amount of camping in the past. I haven’t been camping in maybe 25 years. And one of the reasons being, I didn’t want to wrap myself in plastic. But what I remember is that when you’re sleeping outside (this is one of the reasons why I think that you need to use a tent although I don’t think you’re using a tent, but you’ll explain after I ask the question) is moisture and dew. That’s why you have to have a tarp and put a tarp on the ground and put a tarp over the sleeping bag, so that you don’t wake up sopping wet. So how does this all work with your sleeping bag?

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great question. And that’s something that I had asked that question and I’ve experimented with over decades. I’ve gotten some answers for you there.

The tent, in the old days, people used canvass.

DEBRA: I remember that, yeah.

PATRICK CLARK: Canvass is an excellent tent material for natural camping. And I’ve used it. I actually designed a really nice tent that’s canvass that I can carry in my backpack. I don’t have it. Eventually, I’ll have that available for people too.

But the problem is it’s still actually not quite perfect because it’s a little heavy. It actually could do, but it’s a little heavy. So what I recommend, if it’s raining, you have to have a tarp. I use a tarp or a tent when it’s raining. When it’s not raining, I sleep under the open sky. So you can do that.

So under the open sky and it’s not raining and you have dew, you have fog, the wool sleeping bag, it wicks moisture. It is weird. It’s like magic kinda.

DEBRA: Well, it is. I know that. I know that because that’s part of the point of sleeping on wool indoors like sleeping on a wool mattress or sleeping with my comforter.

I know that my body is perspiring. I’ve read that. You lose a quart of water. I had a doctor, he used to tease about that every morning, he’d down a quart like a car, that the first thing you should do is drink a quart of water because you’ve lost the quart overnight. That’s a lot of water. And yet, my bed is perfectly dry. If you sleep on polyester sheets (as I occassionally do in a hotel), cotton polyester sheets, they get clammy.

So I know that wool has this wicking ability and just breathe. That allows all that moisture to pass through the bag. And so I would imagine that even if it got wet on the outside, then it would still evaporate.

DEBRA: Yes, exactly. That’s exactly what happens. Because the heat of your body is responding to that heat (so it’s going away from the heat source), the dew or even if rain lands on it on the outside, it tends to migrate away from the body.

Just like it does on a sheep.

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah, exactly.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah.

PATRICK CLARK: That’s why I wanted to talk about it. I think of it as fur. It’s like a human’s substitute for fur since we don’t have fur.

DEBRA: Yeah! The sheeps are out in the rain all the time, the rain and the snow. They’re outdoors. And yet their bodies are very protected by the sheep wool. And so when we use wool on our bodies, it has that same protective factor.

And I think that if you do what’s called felting where you put it in water, all the pieces of wool, they’re in little coils. That’s part of what makes it so resilient and to repel things. If you wet it, they come together. That’s called felting. And if you have a felted jacket or something, the rain just won’t go through that. It just won’t go through that.

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah, exactly. And actually, the vikings in the 17th century, they made their sleeping bags out of felted wool. They actually had linen fabric and the inside was felted wool. You can imagine they knew how to stay warm.

Back then, I don’t think they knew how to make batting. The batting is fluffy. It’s the same as felt, only it’s fluffier and it’s also warmer. They have felt.

DEBRA: Yeah. I didn’t know that. Actually, what is the history of sleeping bags? Where do they come from?

PATRICK CLARK: As far as we know, the eskimos invented them. They’re another ‘coldest place in the planet’ type of people. And what it was, it was a full bag. They didn’t have zippers back them. They made a whole bag. It’s like a bagbag.

You crawl into the bag, then you crawl out, you went out.

The fabric they used was seal skin. The seal skins are actually waterproof and breathable, of course. They filled them with fur from an animal hide. They were great. They totally worked if you had a dog sled to carry them because they were…

DEBRA: They’re heavy!

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah.

DEBRA: We need to go to break. But when we come back, Patrick, let’s talk about why sleeping outdoors is good for your health. You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Patrick Clark. He is the creator of Lucky Sheep Wool Sleeping Bag. He’s at WoolSleepingBag.com. We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. My guest today is Patrick Clark, creator of Lucky Sheep, the world’s first lightweight wool sleeping bag. So Patrick, tell us about why we should be sleeping outside. I come from Northern California and as you probably know, there are a lot of forests in Northern California. I particularly live in a forested area.And one of the things that a lot of people have there and maybe in your area too is that they build these outside rooms. It’s like a room with a roof and a floor, and yet it’s open on one side. They have a bed in there and they’re protected from the rain and the elements, but there’s this big open space of a wall missing, so that it’s just like being outside, except that it’s protected.

So that’s not the same as quite sleeping in the ground, but it’s so different than sleeping in a house. So when you talk about sleeping outside, what are the benefits and how exactly do you do that?

PATRICK CLARK: And actually, you’re getting most of the benefits when you do that depending on where you live, of course. Fresh air, you’re getting fresh air. It has way more oxygen, so that’s going to enhance your sleep. We all know that.

It’s just obvious. That’s the first thing. And you’re actually getting cold, you’re getting cooler.

DEBRA: Yeah, especially in Northern California.

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah, exactly. And negative ions is another thing. And then, grounding. I don’t know which type of house you have, but when you’re on earth, of course, you would be getting more grounding if you were on the earth. If you’ve got a room like that, you’re getting some of that grounding effect.

But yeah, as far as getting totally away from the house and civilization, period, a sleeping bag is your ticket to freedom. You can’t really do it without a sleeping bag and it’s just nice to get away from the shackles of modern life sometimes. We know there are tons of toxins in the air. There’s electromagnetic radiation that’s upsetting our bodies. We live indoors. We have an indoor culture. We live indoors. We don’t get exercise. We don’t move. We don’t get the sun on our skin. We don’t get good water, we don’t get good air. You go out on nature, it’s got a built-in health spa.

DEBRA: I love that! Yes, I would agree with you.

PATRICK CLARK: So it’s just a good thing for people.

Most people think if they want to go on a vacation, they go to a warm place where it’s tropic. You have to get on an airplane and go away from home. With getting out and sleeping out in nature, going to some natural air near where you live any time of year, to me, it’s way more comfortable to just learn how to adapt to nature than to try to run away from nature.

DEBRA: Yes. I totally agree with that. I think people, we’re so accustomed, as you said, to being indoors all the time that we don’t even know how to be out in nature.

PATRICK CLARK: Exactly! And it’s been hard. And that’s actually my main mission in life, to be a bridge, to help people learn how to get back to nature.

And some more really powerful things that very few people is that the cold, exposing yourself to cold weather during the winter is extremely health-enhancing. We don’t know that because we’re afraid of the cold. It hurts. At first, it kind of hurts.

And actually, we’re recommended by health care professionals and it’s common. Our assumption in our society is that cold hurts you. It hurts your health and you should stay warm so you can stay healthy. Well, it’s exactly…

DEBRA: Yeah, but every child is taught to “put on your jacket. Stay warm or you’re going to get a cold.”

PATRICK CLARK: Exactly, exactly. And they know, it’s interesting to know, they want to expose themselves to cold.

DEBRA: I love cold.

PATRICK CLARK: They always do that. You think it’s to make you angry, but it’s like children know how to do it. So cold, what it does, here’s a few things it does. It reduces inflammation body-wide, in your whole body.

DEBRA: Really?

PATRICK CLARK: Yes. I’ll try not to get too technical. It burns fat. It burns fat. So if you expose yourself to the cold, it’s just going to burn fat and actually, you get almost all the same benefits you get from exercise.

DEBRA: Wow!

PATRICK CLARK: …just by being cold. It increases your metabolism. And when it burns the fat, it does it really effectively.

And actually, I don’t know if you know, but fat stores toxins.

DEBRA: Yes, it does. It does.

PATRICK CLARK: So you’ve got toxins stored in your fat. So if you’re burning fat, you’re burning toxins. You’re throwing the toxins out of your body at the same time.

DEBRA: Yes, but I would also add that you actually have to be careful of that because you’re releasing the toxins into your body and you can over-release. You also need to be careful about the fact that you might be releasing heavy metals or something and make sure you’re drinking a lot of water and doing things to move those out of your body.

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah, I totally agree with that. There’s more than one step to getting the toxins quickly out of the body.

DEBRA: I just wanted to make sure that people didn’t think that they would just go out in the cold and that’s all they need to do. It’s certainly a step.

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah, yeah.

DEBRA: It’s like if you go in a sauna, you’re going to be releasing toxins. But you have to then drink the water and flush them out. It’s the same thing with cold. You could actually drink some nice, warm fluids.

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah, exactly. You would have to balance out to keep it moving in the right direction.

And the other thing that cold does is it optimizes your circadian rhythm. It lets your body know what time of year, what time of day. So when you’re optimizing your circadian rhythm, you’re in complete synchronization with the way that nature designed your body to work. That alone, the cold alone is going to increase your sleep quality.When you synchronize your circadian rhythm, you also optimize your sleep cycle.

DEBRA: That’s right. I know a lot about circadian rhythms, but why don’t you talk a little bit more about that because I think that most people haven’t a clue what a circadian rhythm is.

PATRICK CLARK: Yeah, that’s a good idea. Circadian rhythm, it’s like your brain is like a microchip and it’s dictating or orchestrating what happens in the rest of your body with all the processes that go on in your body. There’s a neurosignal for everything that happens.

So if you’re out of sync with circadian rhythm, if you’re disconnected from the earth, from nature because you’re exposing yourself to artificial light, electromagnetic field and a diet that’s not appropriate for your climate, then the timing of your circadian rhythms is going to be off. There’sa mismatch between what your brain is programmed to know that that’s the way it needs to be and what’s actually happening.

So people who have problems with sleep, you can actually deal with by looking at circadian rhythms and finding out what’s throwing off their circadian rhythm.

DEBRA: Life is throwing off all of our circadian rhythms. I have been very aware of circadian rhythms for a long time. And yet to completely shut out all the things that affect them and be as if you were in a natural environment so that your body is responding to the light and the temperature and the food that we would be eating in our natural environment and all of that is very difficult. But I think it could be done if one chose to.

You know what we need? We need a retreat where we could go to on a mountaintop and we could handle the circadian rhythms. We could sleep properly. We could eat the food and just know what it’s like to live that way.

PATRICK CLARK: Well, actually, I lead those retreats. I’m also a wilderness guide.

DEBRA: Oh, good! Well, yeah, that’s a good thing to do. We’re almost done with the hour. Is there any final words you’d like to give?

PATRICK CLARK: Let’s see, just one more thing about the cold. The cold, if it’s winter time and you’re putting yourself in a warm house all the time (or office or whatever), then your body is going to think that you’re in the tropics. And that’s an example of how your circadian rhythm gets thrown off because your body needs to match the environment. You need to put yourself in the natural environment so that your brain is synchronized with that environment.

DEBRA: Yeah, yeah, such an important thing.

PATRICK CLARK: Let’s see, just another thing, a couple of cool things. People think sleeping bags, it’s like you’re ticket to freedom. It’s like having a home away from home. You can travel anywhere as long as you have somebody’s porch or yard to sleep in…

DEBRA: But even in a hotel. I mean, one of the worst thing about a hotel is sleeping on those sheets. You can just bring your sleeping bag with you.

Anyway, we only have just a few seconds left. So I want to say thank you and give your website again, which is WoolSleepingBag.com. You can go take a look at these beautiful, wool sleeping bags. You’ve been listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. Be well!