Why is rocking back and forth soothing

Rocking is also a substitute for the loss of physical motion because of modernity: the life sentence of a sedentary existence. There seem to be more of us these days, the people who need physical motion and outlets to cope. As recently as one hundred years ago, people spent their days physically working. Whether in rural areas on farms where regardless of gender there was physical labor for most of the day, or in the cities with industrialization, manufacturing, and presumably progress.

The spouse at home worked all day long, scrubbing, cleaning, cooking, mending, and making, while the spouse who left labored long shifts that paid the bills. People lived lives of motion, not fixed to a chair or glued to a device. Is it any wonder our bodies scream for input, demand stimulation, ache for life? The standardization is a sufficient minimum requirement for optimal wellness, they claim.

The sense of stillness and decay that comes from a modern life saps the energy out of me even after the lunch break workout. Even after the early morning walk. Even after being a weekend warrior. Eight-plus hours a day, five to six days a week, I am still trapped. Most insidious, though, is the joy that also comes with a sedentary life. The neverending supply of books and content compete with time spent absorbed in writing, crafts, and art.

My mind is readily lost to the hours of activity found in sitting at a desk. And so, I rock. My kid rocks, and many, many others, they also rock.

We rock and soothe, rock and comfort, rock and escape. Tara L. Campbell is a speculative fiction and creative nonfiction science writer with a professional background in computer science.

She enjoys writing at the intersection of science, technology, and disability. Yet it was previously unknown whether or not the same is true in other species. The second study found that, at least in mice, it is. Like in the human study, rocking shortened the time it took the mice to fall asleep and increased the amount of sleep time, as measured by EEG recordings.

Unlike humans, however, rocking did not seem to induce deeper sleep in the rodents. The authors suspected rocking might exert its influence on sleep by stimulating the vestibular system, the sensory organs in the inner ears of mammals that control our sense of balance and spatial orientation. Using a strain of mice with impaired vestibular function, they showed this is indeed the case.

Mice without these otolithic organs showed none of benefits of rocking during sleep. Kompotis says the two studies could lead to improved treatments for people who have trouble falling asleep as well as for those with inner ear defects. But for those hankering to add rocking to their fitness routines, he urges patience. He graduated from the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Already a subscriber?

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