If you love sitting, you’re going to love lying down.
Like many of you, I’ve been a fan of sitting down. It’s so much more comfortable than standing up! And for a long time, I’d foolishly assumed that the comfort of sitting upright in a chair was more or less as good as it got.
So imagine how intrigued I was when I heard about the hot new ‘lying down’ trend that’s got millennials talking.
Thought to have been inspired by the planking craze of 2011, lying down is the hip new solution for the stressed out city-dweller. To get started, wherever you are, just gently go limp until your torso is literally ‘lying’ on the floor, or any nearby surface.
Crazy, I know, but give it a moment and…
…holy shit, is that fucking comfortable or WHAT?
Right away, I knew this was something I wanted to do more often, or perhaps, literally all the time, no matter the situation.
Inarguably, there’s just something about being totally horizontal that clears the mind.
On top of which, you can easily combine it with other activities.
Up until now, I used to eat sitting at a table, or perhaps sitting on a couch. (Turns out a couch is also a great place to ‘have a lie down’!) But what if I told you that you could easily eat food lying down? For like, hours? Typically some foods will be easier to eat than others, so you might find yourself eating less soup, and more bite-size morsels like McNuggets or three cans of Pringles. But that’s OK, because both of those things are delicious, and more importantly, you’ll be lying down.
After a few days of experimentation, I wanted to take my horizontal heaven to whole new heights, and turned to members of the ‘lie-down community’ for tips. And hold on to your hats folks, because some clever-clogs has invented a new device SPECIFICALLY to maximise your comfort:
This fancy doo-hicky is known to lie-downers as a ‘bed’, short for ‘Brilliant Everything Device’ because it’s such a brilliant device you’ll want to do pretty much everything there. They aren’t cheap, but when it comes to maximising your lying down game, this bouncy surface really can’t be beaten, and frankly I could (and did) quite literally spend days at a time in one.
‘Bed’ aside, I also found surprising new opportunities to lie down. For instance, in difficult meetings at work, I found I could just slowly slide from my chair onto the floor and just lie there. I usually found that the meeting would end soon after, and often supportive colleagues would even bring me a tea or a glass of water.
Likewise, a long bus journey passes in a jiffy if you just lie down in the aisle. People ask me if I’m OK, and I simply tell them, ‘I love to lie down.’ Lying down is sort of my life now!
There are some nuances to lying down that take a while to grasp. For example, I would sometimes introduce a friend to it, and they would seem enthusiastic at first, but after a few hours they’d say something like, ‘Well, we ought to get up now.’ And I would have to say: ‘Wait, what? No!’
See, the a problem with getting up is this: you’re no longer lying down. It’s a typical rookie mistake I too made at first, but my experience improved ten-fold once I realised where I was going wrong. Now I lie down always.
The health benefits of lying down are incontestable. It might sound crazy, but doctors have been known to recommend ‘bed rest’ to those feeling unwell, and hospitals even provide free beds to the sick or injured! But of course, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so it’s obviously best to lie down as much as possible before you get poorly.
There are a few minor drawbacks to this fantastic bodily position, but they’re more the fault of the outside world rather than it. For instance, I found myself asking why my television was on the wall, and not the ceiling. Also, it is hard to drink liquids, like alcohol, without lifting your head slightly, which really interferes with the whole experience. I have no doubt future versions of lying down will address this problem.
But basically, consider me a TOTAL convert. Now, whenever I’m ‘at places’, or ‘doing things’, I can’t help but notice it would be better if I was just lying down instead.