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votes
What's your quirk?
I'll go first. I don't like to sleep in the dark, even though it's considered normal. I usually fall asleep with the lights on and either the computer/tv still on as well. This mostly came about because as a night owl, I would often just pass out and incidentally not turn the lights off. Now I've grown so accustomed to it that attempting to sleep in darkness feels strange and uncomfortable. I used to feel a bit guilty about 'wasting electricity,' but since the advent of LED lightbulbs and low-powered computers, I no longer do.
That's my quirk, what's yours?
I go to sleep with an audiobook in my ear every night, and I keep it in throughout the night.
Before I started this habit, it used to be that I would wake up and lay awake, panicking about all the things I was doing wrong or failing to do in my life, and I'd lay awake for two, three hours, unable to shut my mind off. But with audiobooks, I can just (de)focus on what I'm listening to, and I fall back to sleep within minutes.
It's generally a book I've listened to a dozen times, not something I'm actually trying to take in. Right now, for example, it's Bryson's Short History of Nearly Everything. It's my bedtime book. It quiets the mind.
I also can’t sleep without listening to things.
Most often it’s YouTube videos and it basically rotates between:
Gaming, space documentaries, chess videos
What a great book for that! I enjoyed it so much the first time I listened to it.
Exactly. I suspect in twenty years I'll pull random geological facts out of my subconscious and impress everyone at the Christmas party.
Do you not find it uncomfortable to wear earbuds to sleep? I guess I wear earplugs to sleep often, but they have more give to them. Do you sleep on your back?
I do the same thing (on a 15 minute sleep timer), but my method is to put my phone under my pillow with the volume on low. With my head directly on the pillow, I can just barely hear what I am listening to. No headphones needed and my wife doesn't hear on her side of the bed.
I discovered that when my kids were infants and I used that method to listen to their monitor and give myself white noise at the same time.
Makes me wonder if there is a product out there for this.
I sleep on my side, but I only use an earbud in the ear not on the pillow. It tends to fall out in the night, so if I find myself awake and unable to fall back asleep, I just pop it back in.
I use neckband earbuds - the Sony WI-C400, no longer in production. I'm on my third pair in 12 years. The battery life on them is crazy. They're light; I don't even notice them around my neck, day or night. But they're always right there, easy to find, even when I'm mostly asleeep. I don't know what I'm going to do when I can't find them on eBay anymore.
The only thing I'd change about them is the flashing blue LED, and I can't really find a solution. Duct tape covering it doesn't last very long, acrylic paint either goes on too thin or, with a big glob, eventually pops off.
Maybe try nail polish?
Same problem as the acrylic: either it's too thin to block the light or it's enough of a glob to popped off.
I am, to be clear, very rough on these headphones.
OK, last thought: what about sugru. Stuff seems to be pretty indestructible one it's cured (24 hrs).
Heeeey, that's a thing to try. Thanks!
I have these earbuds and they work pretty well. I use them with a Bluetooth receiver to avoid keeping the phone in the bed. (The receiver I linked is mediocre but fine, as are others I have tested)
My spouse has a sleeping mask that is soft with built in speakers. It’s pretty clever actually. You would not know it had headphones if no one told you. Musicozy I think.
I listen to a sleep podcast every night, a guy who reads public domain works in a low key kind of way. Fairly flat tone, a little peaceful intro music and none for the outro. I started when I was going through a fairly high stress time in my life, to keep me from thinking and overthinking. The stress stuff is over but I got used to it, so I'm still doing it.
To continue the sleep theme of the thread so far: I don't sleep with a traditional pillow and alternate plushies to do the job instead. I know most folks think plushies are childish let alone a collection that takes over most of my bed but I just don't take myself that seriously. Plus, I'm in a long distance relationship and the plushies are like a reassuring presence to sleep with. Maybe I'm crazy and unserious but my neck can't survive traditional pillows. A plushie fits perfectly into your neck and has just the right amount of support. Disclaimer: I don't sleep on my back. I might change my tune if I ever decide to roll over in my sleep.
I also don't use a traditional one, mine is filled with buckwheat husks. It's a bit like a beanbag but you can "mould" it into a particular shape so I can get my neck support just perfect.
I've dialled-in the right amount of filling too, now normal pillows are either too low or high and I can't sleep properly on them.
Do you stuff it yourself or did you purchase it that way? That sounds like an intriguing alternative to buying a synthetic filling to restuff my more worn out plushies in the future.
I bought a pre-stuffed one but it has a zip to add/remove as preference and came with a small bag of extra husks.
It's pretty cheap to buy a bag of them for other purposes though, if that's what you're looking for.
There is a mild earthy smell when you first get them (which I quite like) which does fade after a few months.
I sleep cuddling my blåhaj shark while using its tail as a leg pillow
What kind of plushies do you use? Like what animals and sizes? Curious since I'm a side/stomach sleeper, and I have many plushies...
I almost exclusively use a Psyduck which was a Pokemon Center Limited Edition from 2018. I sort of use its neck and head as a support for my own so my head is resting on the back of its head? I added a little drawing to my link which hopefully shows it better than I'm explaining. I think what helps is that the spot where the Psyduck's head is sewn to the body is very soft and malleable so I'm able to tuck my neck in and adjust where my cheek is resting. I am able to sleep on just my arms if I don't have a plushie around but I definitely prefer the additional neck support it provides. I've had success with smaller plushies like the Samezu sharks (added an additional image to the same link above) but those are a bit firmer than the Psyduck.
I think the main thing for me is that a traditional pillow is just too big for the position I sleep in and doesn't provide the type of neck support I prefer. If you're looking for something more "normal" than a plushie then a cylindrical bolster pillow might be good especially for side sleeping.
Do you carry them with you while traveling?
The hotel pillows are the death of me...
Mega agree. I have a particular plushie I take for traveling (as I type this I am realizing I have no idea where it is so I'll need to find it, eek). It's actually basically a small pillow (maybe 10-12 inches across) and has a hole through the center of it which I think is meant so that you can pull a bag's strap through it? I prefer to pack it in a suitcase so it's not touching everything while on-the-go. If I can't find my designated traveler, I'd probably substitute one of my Samezu sharks (third image) because the shape and size is very similar but I'm much more attached to those and would worry about losing them...
I don’t understand hire most hotel pillows are too flat to use one, but too puffy to use two. It’s like they did it on purpose.
I have a "mental parasite" or ingrained meme generator that causes me to hear word pairings and automatically make a Spoonerism out of it. It's distracting, especially when I find a good one and either say it out loud (interrupting and derailing the conversation) or laugh to myself.
Some examples: dutch bikes, cunning stunts (not mine), Boar's Head, triple nickles, shower part.
I'm a big fan of word-play and puns and stuff like that.
I was tickled to hear "cunning stunts" pop up during a cutscene in Final Fantasy 16. I gotta say, though, you made me say the "shower part" Spoonerism in my head to see what it was and got a solid laugh out of me.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who compulsively Spoonerizes things. My dad used to do it a lot when I was a kid to make me laugh (and still does to this day) and it became a habit.
Most of the word pairs I end up making are nonsensical, but there's a playful whimsy to it that I enjoy.
Completely agree. I can get chuckles out of my family, but usually it's eyerolls.
And if you allow the swap across separated words, "starting up a form" is a good one too
When I put on my socks, I always put them on my left foot first. Trying to do it the opposite way makes me feel uncomfortable, and I have to start over. The left shoe has to go on first also.
Yes, I know, a little weird.
I'm 41 and your comment just made me realize I do the same thing. Must be left foot first.
Right sock, left shoe for me. Never realized, TIL.
No! Left then right!
51 and TIL I've probably been doing this for most of my and didn't even occur to me to notice.
What bothers me the most is if I need to take them off and out them back on for some reason. If I get them mixed up, my feet will feel weird for the rest of the day. Switching back Forest help because now they’re stretched all wrong.
Something that until recently I thought was completely normal, an acquaintance pointed out to me is “abnormal” (according to her anyway):
For at least since 2017, I’ve had almost the exact same breakfast, almost every day.
It’s nothing special or anything: a smoothie and two slices of bread with toppings.
I have a particular anxiety about stumbling as I climb a flight of stairs. The thing is, I often fixate on the anxiety to the extent that I actually do stumble about 3 stairs from the top. This only reinforces the anxiety, and thus the cycle continues.
Bonus sleep related quirk: I am afflicted with Exploding Head Syndrome. For the longest time I had no idea that anyone else experienced it, let alone that it had a name.
I watch/listen to Eric Rosen, a chess streamer with a very calm voice to go to sleep. Based on the comments on many of his videos, it seems like I'm far from the only one.
This is very nearly an episode of the Japanese series Midnight Diner!
He is so calm while crushing 2300s with the most dubious openings
I love watching him untangle the weird positions he forces his opponents into
I know people who fall asleep to Kripp and ZFG as well lol
I watch at least some anime every single day before I go to sleep. Before I started this streak, I could count on two hands the number of TV shows that I'd watched through to the end. Now I've seen somewhere between 66–76 shows and 8–23 movies (depending on how you count them) since June 5th, 2021. I will maintain this streak, even if it ruins my life.
Another quirk is that I can still count this high on two hands, because I count with binary. For example, 🤘 is 18, 👋 is 31, and 👐 is 1023
Since you watch so much anime, I have to ask: when you heard the question about quirks, did you immediately think of superpowers? :P
It was the first thing that came to mind, and I haven't even seen the show yet lmao
... which show?
My Hero Academia, a show about superheros whose powers are called "quirks"
Binary counters unite! 132!
I don't usually count binary this way (I do dozenal [base 12] with right hand for ones and left hand for 12s), so I had to count it up to figure out the coded message. You got me to flip myself a double bird. And that's terrible. (But funny)
I don't do binary but also grew up with weird finger counting. In my case, my right hand is ones and left hand is tens, with the thumb representing 5 (or 50) being added to the other fingers. So two thumbs up is 55, left index finger by itself is 10, double finger guns is 66 (10 + 50 + 1 + 5), etc. up to 99.
Also nice job with the anime, any standouts that you think are less popular? I'm sometimes too busy or not in the mood to watch something every day but occasionally like to see how long I can make a streak of completing entries.
Less popular is most of what I watch. I have a strong preference for shorter shows, and it seems like longer shows are the ones that get super popular. If I had resolved to watch One Piece, Naruto, and Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, I would only have caught up with one or two series so far.
For standouts, first place goes to Haibane Renmei. 13 episodes long, sort of a slice of life show about a girl who arrives in a strange walled town with no memories of her past life. Not a particularly sad show, but very emotionally heavy. Being that it came out in 2002 and wasn't incredibly popular at the time, there are not a whole lot of fans of it left
The least popular show I'm a fan of would be Key the Metal Idol, an OVA from the 90's about a robot who wants to become human. It's definitely flawed—my biggest gripe is the very occasional nudity, which is off-putting and irrelevant to the plot. Aside from that, I really liked it. Some 80's and 90's OVAs had a lot of production value, and this one was up there
I wrote more in a comment last month,, and have a MAL list, so in the interest of saving time, I'm just going to link to those instead of writing a wall of text
Just started watching Haibane Renmei, thanks for the recommendation, it seems so unique just from the first episode!
Many things. I'll choose one.
I don't like the idea of eating something with saliva on it. I won't eat from anyone's plate and I won't let anyone eat from mine. I won't share cutlery either, and if you cut communal meat with the knife from your plate, well, I won't like it. I also dislike my own saliva. I understand that I am always in contact with my own saliva, but the issue is the saliva accumulated on the food. If I wish to repeat some food, I will either swap or wash my own plate and cutlery. If someome gets a piece of communal dessert with the same spoon that was in their mouth, I may sometimes eat if I can manage to get a piece from the opposing side. If that is not possible, or if the food is by its very nature creamy or liquid in such a way that no isolation is possible, I will no longer eat from that food. I do not share food with anyone, and that includes my wife and my 18-months-old son.
Before anyone asks, no I am not autistic. I'm just weird.
Nah that sounds very hygienic
How do you feel about people blowing out candles on birthday cakes?
If they didn't hate it before, I'm sure they will now. :)
I don't really like most cakes. So it's no big deal.
That said, birthday cakes can be pretty big, and it's easy to find a saliva-free spot. Most people don't shoot a lot of saliva when they're blowing.
That seems pretty normal aside from the own-saliva thing. Most people are a little grossed out by the idea of the idea of being served with utensils that have been in other people's mouths.
About the own saliva thing, does that mean that ice cream cones and lollipops are a complete nonstarter for you?
Sweets are pleasurable enough to allow for an exception. But I will eat them in a way that reduces the amount of saliva exchange. Preferably with a sharp metal spoon. I would never just lick ice cream directly.
You'll fit right in with Brahmins from India.
Sleep-related quirk: Pressing my fist against my lips helps me fall asleep. Imagine someone sucking their thumb but without their thumb in their mouth.
Not sleep-related quirk: When trying to remember something (like why did I open the fridge) I give myself gentle slaps on either side of my face. This is my fidget-spinner
Body horror quirk: I can pull my shoulders out of their sockets. I can also crack them (and my sternum, and wrists)
Even though it's physically benign or even beneficial, I believe that coffee is a dangerous narcotic due to its psychological effects, and the only reason people think it's benign is because everyone drinks it all the time.
I drink about 2 cups a day, and it took some effort to get my dose that low.
With my ADHD and caffeine being a stimulant… I have never experienced what most people experience with it - the wakefulness and energy or whatever. Although I have gotten bursts of energy from ritalin, stimulants mostly calm me down. But I have never noticed the effects of caffeine specifically.
I can agree to disagree with you on whether caffeine is dangerous, but it's just factually untrue that it's a narcotic. "Narcotic" has a definition beyond just "addictive drug." Medically it refers specifically to opiates afaik (or at least to other drugs that behave similarly, which stimulants like caffeine do not). While the way "narcotic" is used in a legal context is broader, it's not that broad -- even amphetamines aren't classified as narcotics (as opposed to cocaine, which is).
I believe that caffeine is a mostly harmless narcotic due to its psychological effects, including withdrawal, and people who drink it are (perhaps unconsciously) negotiating between short term benefits against furthering their addiction.
I do use it sometimes if I have a long drive with less than totally adequate sleep. But I'm also convinced this only works because I'm not a habitual user and the act of stoping the car, buying a beverage and walking back into the car probably is doing 80% of the work. (I dont drive sleep deprived, I stay overnight when I am expecting less than 6ish hours, but I function better with a full 8+)
Funnily, I've never experienced the whole caffeine addiction thing even as someone who semi-regularly (ab-)uses caffeine in fairly high doses to manage my chronic pain and migraines.
The psychoactive effects are barely there for me most of the time, unless I am very stressed to begin with, so what really ends up happening basically is a cycle of:
It's not a narcotic, but it is definitely a drug. As far as danger goes, I don't really understand that point of view.
Raw caffeine is extremely dangerous; a few grams of it are enough to kill you. Coffee only has about a tenth of a gram though. Most people would have to drink almost 100 cups to get to that level, and I doubt you even could if you tried; you'd be confined to the toilet pretty quickly.
What makes you say it's dangerous?
My sleep-related quirk: I have a subconscious preference to sleeping under a blanket without sheets in between. I know the blanket can be washed less frequently with a bedsheet under it, but every time I try to sleep with a bedsheet between me and a blanket, even at hotels, I wake up and I've kicked off the sheets and had thrown the blanket back over myself in the night.
My solution to that "problem" is to have a much lighter blanket that's easier to wash between me and the sheet. It does get kicked off sometimes, and sometimes both the sheet and the blanket get kicked off, but less often than I kick the sheet off on its own. Though, I live in a somewhat chilly climate, and someone else often decides the AC needs to be blasting when it starts to get a little warm, so stacking up a mountain of blankets may not be a great solution for others.
Eh, the strategic blanket stockpile was needing an increase anyways.
I'm your opposite. We should never co-sleep.
I always, always need a sheet in between me and the blanket. Especially my feet. I hate the feeling of the blanket on my feet. If the sheet gets pulled up too far and my feet touch the blanket, I sometimes even startle, and have to fix it immediately. It bemuses and amuses my husband in equal amounts.
I also hate the feeling of air on my feet while sleeping. I need a sheet pulled up over them, even during the summer, even if it's hot. This is mostly because my feet are always ice blocks, so they need some insulation.
My feet are pretty good at staying uncovered to boot, we would have to have bunk beds if we co-slept lol.
I'm often the same way, but I moved to Europe where it's normal to have a quilt cover that's zipped or snapped closed over a separate quilt that contains the filling, rather than a blanket where the filling is sewn in as is common in the States. This more or less gets rid of the issue with washing a blanket -- with the caveat that I'm apparently quite good at getting the quilt bunched up within the cover or partially pulling it out of the cover in my sleep!
Maybe it's mild OCD, maybe it's that 4 is more beautiful somehow. I'm very partial to the number 5 and pentagons and square of 5 etc. I think it's just perfection.
Here I am, picturing you adjusting TV to a one-and-two-and three-and-four-and lol
I think for it to actually be OCD, it would need to be causing you distress. For something to count as a compulsion in the OCD sense, it generally needs to be disruptive to your life and precipitated by an obsession of some kind -- the way compulsions work in OCD is that they relieve the distress and anxiety caused by the obsessions. Without these things, it's at most a tic, and if it's not hurting you, there's nothing wrong with having it as a quirk. We're all allowed our fair share of idiosyncrasies.
Fair enough -- whether these things disrupt your life enough to be something that needs treatment is really something only you can decide, since it's your experience!
While not in such specific groupings, I tend to do things in "patterns". Turn volume up twice then down twice, have to sometimes press other buttons on my phone's navbar after pressing the home button... While playing a game where the gameplay isn't super intensive, I basically have to press each button in a certain pattern or my brain will feel like something's missing. Probably added an extra 10-15 minutes overall to a recent game I played since the Y button was basically a pause button. I also need to eat grapes and certain snacks in pairs, preferably groups of four.
It was way worse as a little kid, when I'd be literally counting steps in my school's hallway. I don't think it's OCD either, seems to just be a weird autism or ADHD quirk for me. Doesn't stress me out, but my brain just feels like it's not "even" if I don't do those little patterns.
To continue the sleep-related quirk trend, because I find it funny: I read really dark, intense fan fiction before bed. Somehow tense situations where characters have limited autonomy or are just arguing make my brain more settled for some reason? Though I try to avoid stories with characters dying, that's too depressing. Since blue light doesn't help with sleep though, I use Twilight on my phone. And the settings I use are... Well... Here's a screenshot with my sleep settings. It's perfectly visible in my pitch-black bedroom (because another quirk is I can't have any light in my room), but in regular light? Yeah, the phone might as well be off unless the screen brightness is set very high.
Then for some non-sleep quirks: I am an immersive daydreamer (I like to describe it as I basically never outgrew playing pretend), and I always have a green whistle lanyard. It's the best fiddle toy I've found over a lifetime of fiddle toys. I cut off the sharp metal clip for a whistle, wrap the remaining metal bit with soft tape, and voila! A fiddle toy I can wear like a bracelet and take everywhere, and which won't dent the walls or chip paint like Mardi Gras beads or Yoyo Balls since the one hard part is safely secured in tape!
And one which I will gradually go stir crazy if I can't locate. Which happens a lot because as part of my immersive daydreaming I like to spin it while walking (which, fun fact: we had to take into account when house shopping), and that thing can go flying out of my hand easily. I have torn apart the house on multiple occasions when I failed to locate the lanyard, even searching floors and rooms I knew I hadn't been in. Seriously, my brain does not like losing track of the lanyard, once I realize it's MIA I have to drop everything until I find it.
Hence why I settled specifically on green lanyards after much actual, serious testing: none of our furniture or rugs are that shade of bright green, so it stands out wherever it lands. Settled on it after a yellow lanyard camouflaged against a beige/tan rug because it was 1 am in a dark room, and I woke up my dad during the following frantic house-wide search.
Our Twilight settings are very close!
https://i.postimg.cc/13s6JPjv/Screenshot-20250426-134848.png
Idk how people can look at a normal phone display in bed and then just set it down and go to sleep.
Wow, yours is even darker than mine!
Same. I've had to share a bed or room with my mom on vacation a few times, and she'd get out her phone and it would be like the room was flooded with blinding light. Just boggles my mind.
A lot of the time when watching tv and movies, I match the upper line of subtitle to the lower one. I count the words to see if there are an equal amount, and if there aren't, I will move them around so that they match. I will also try to make sure to pick the words in a way that makes it line up with the width of each line. Take this as an example. It fits with 6 on top and bottom, (the 's counts as a word), but he width is not correct. So I'll move the up and a down, and then that ought to fit. I'll also sometimes do it with single lines that have punctuation in them, and move it around to have an equal amount of words on each side of the punctuation, like this one, no and here would have to get moved to the other side of the comma.
yeah..
How are you adjusting subs as you watch? Does it take a long time to watch a movie then?
Oh, no I don't adjust anything, it's just in my head. Can't imagine how long it would take to watch a movie that way 😅
I'm very aware of my feet and can't stand having uncomfortable feet. If I haven't just showered, then I'll always wash my feet before sleeping. I wash my feet before changing shoes, after swimming, and sometimes just for the heck of it. A stubbed toe, ingrown toenail or even a simple itch is enough to ruin my focus compeltely. I use footwear that doesn't make my feet sweaty to begin with (no sneakers). I can't sleep if my feet aren't warm and cozy though.
I tend to structure my media consumption in a very bottom up way. Consuming a franchise from the smallest entry and preparing to go bigger by reading TV Tropes pages and franchise wikis. For example the first Fallout game I played was Fallout Shelter and I still haven't played Cyberpunk 2077 and may never, despite having watched Edgerunners and read tie in novels and original tabletop rule books.
If I had to guess at my own motivations I would say I get overwhelmed with informational very easily so its easier to experience something in bits and pieces. I think my ideal is having someone else tackle the big main items in a franchise but not the side stuff so we can discuss and make connections.
While I have sheets and blankets on my bed, I rarely use them. I tend to use pillows as my "cover." I usually have 4 pillows on my bed, but I've sometimes I had like 6. I'm one of those people who likes one foot or leg covered, while the other is uncovered. So using pillows as my sheets/blanket effectively allows the same thing.
Of course this only works because I don't normally toss and turn when sleeping. If I fall asleep on my back, on one side of my bed, I'm going to wake up in the same place and position.
I'm your mirror opposite. I need to have my entire body except, grudgingly, my face covered, and I must not have moving air across my face or body. If it's very very hot I'd still want a very thin sheet. I sleep so much better with a sleep hat that has ear flaps.
OMG, same! I had some friends in college that had an oscillating fan pointed at their bed for sleeping (even in winter), and I will never understand it. That would be like some form of low level torture to me.
*whispers Airplane cold jet air on your face
Shudders >..<
I fly wearing oversized hoodies, an N95 mask with a front filter, and a sleep mask for my eyes. Basically covers up my entire face.
A fan is fine for me, I don't really care either way, and for some reason most people I've dated have insisted on having the fan on at night, so whatever. But an oscillating fan? That sounds insane. Getting blasted by air, but only every 20 seconds or so seems like a great way to intentionally not fall asleep.
It's kind of like the Chinese water torture but in gas form instead of liquid.
Autistic and so I am quirk central!
I'll need to start writing these down as they come up.
I almost never reheat my food. If I'm going eat leftovers, I'll just eat them cold, nearly 100% of the time. This has been going on since childhood and it drives my wife crazy.
I only do this with pizza and fried chicken. For some reason I got the idea that the texture of these particular foods when cold must approximate what it's like to eat cartoon pizza and chicken. I think I got the idea in my head watching Looney Tunes as a kid and it just stuck.
I go barefoot, or wear soleless footwear, as much as I can manage. With Barebottoms I'm pretty much never stopped by people who believe I need to be shod. Even when, for example, the pavement is hot; you don't get stronger without challenging yourself.
slight rant
I believe the human foot evolved, or was designed, either way, to be more than just an insert for a shoe. I also suspect that last bit is what a depressing amount of people believe, even if a good amount of them don't quite realize it themselves. How else could you consider wrapping and binding oodles of muscle, tendon and bone in stiff coverings all day, every day of your life in any way "healthy"? No, really, think about it if you haven't before.
Hey! Yay! Another barefooter! High five!
The other day someone tried to tell me about the trend of being barefoot in ones shoes (a.k.a not wearing socks) as a way to find similarities to bond over. I said that makes as much sense as me saying I'm naked right now, cause under my clothes I'm naked.
As for the injury risk being talked about in a sibling-thread I'd like to add the perspective of someone that seems to be a bit less good at not hurting myself (like I bump into stuff daily, almost always cut myself a tiny bit when cooking, etc): it's just a small wound, at worst I'll wear shoes for a couple weeks (to keep the bandages clean and in place). If it would have been a large wound "normal" shoes would not have helped anyway.
I'm trying to strengthen my pinky toes (and the whole outer part of my feet), but I'm not very consistent so it's a slow process. I would also love to twist them back, but I fear I'm too old for that and that I started too late with being barefoot. I also don't go barefoot long on snow/ice or when it's too cold so 2-3 months a year I wear shoes outside.
I started to help with back pain and that has been great but the best parts are:
Are you really asking how protecting and padding your feet could be healthy? Shards of glass, athlete's foot, etc.
No, I'm not asking. I know otherwise. I have seen comments about glass and pathogens many, many times. It's very tiresome, if I may say so.
For athlete's foot and its ilk, perhaps ironically, you pretty much need less protection. Yes, really, if you think about it: in what kind of environment does fungus actually grow in? Dark and moist, or dry and sun-exposed? Cool vs. warm isn't really a thing here in Florida, but that's still only 1 out of 3.
As for glass, I've stepped on it several times, but the vast majority of the time, the pieces have been so miniscule they drew no blood, and every single remainder only drew the barest hint. That's how it goes when you watch where you're stepping. Plus, when you can actually feel what you're stepping on, (assuming even a little practice/familiarity) you'll react quicker if something might be sharp enough to injure. I say this from experience.
The risks you present technically do exist, yes, but after mitigating factors are way, way less likely than you make them out to be. Far too unlikely to justify, in my mind, letting the musculature of a key body part atrophy. The mindset I perceive you coming from would dictate that one wear a helmet, at all times, just in case an object came flying at one's head.
Why do you need strong foot muscles? And what makes you think shoes cause feet to atrophy, rather than simply being less strong?
Additionally, what makes you think having strong feet is inherently good? People who run barefoot or in barefoot shoes have the highest injury risk, despite having the strongest feet.
I fail to see why the foot-shoe system being stronger than the foot alone is a bad thing.
I think responding to the rest of your comment is just likely to lead to us disagreeing without end.
This question is so painfully fundamental to me I was almost at a loss for how to respond, wondering if you were still asking in good faith. It seriously reads to me like asking "why would you want to get all the recommended micro-nutrients daily?" or even "why would you want the windows of your car to be unbroken?" But then I realized "strong" has some room for flexibility, and admittedly my definition of "atrophy" might have been looser than what a medical text's would be.
It ties into this inherent idea of good condition for me, that is based in no small part, for the human body at least, on what might ultimately be an Appeal to Nature. I can't imagine not at least wanting one's body to be in "proper" form, every part of it. As someone else here previously pointed out though, this one particular issue has a lot more going for it than a mere fallacy if one can approach it fairly.
It is my understanding that unshod communities, rare as they may be in the modern(izing) world, experience dramatically less foot and back problems than shod ones. Intuitively, this makes sense, given the gait differences in shod vs. habitually unshod people - the latter would clearly be the anatomical design's "intent" inasmuch as intent could be ascribed, but even if not it's clearly the setup humanity evolved into (consider that hominids have been walking upright for, what, 2 million years? Meanwhile, the oldest shoes on record date to only 40,000 years old. So naturally the design favors an unshod gait, which given the distance of 0.00 between skin and ground, would just not be possible in anything with a sole. Wouldn't throwing a mechanical action off at the fulcrum have rippling consequences everywhere else? But also, have you ever observed the shape of totally natural human feet? The ratio of length to width, and how the toes splay outward? I cannot for the life of me accept the idea that forcibly deviating from that design has no consequences. Everything similar I can think of does - Chinese foot binding, forehead sloping, tightlacing corsets. Also, that difference in foot shape is demonstrably not genetic, though I'd have to dig to find the article that handily proved it.
Tying into this, I also recall seeing evidence that kids that spend most or all of their time out of shoes grew up to demonstrate better balance than those that spent a lot in them, carrying on well into adulthood. But also, it's just... not. Not enough for it to be a net positive, anyhow. If one is acclimated to going unshod, not only does the skin of the sole thicken considerably, but it develops significant fatty padding that helps with shock absorption, and even the vasculature improves. I'm probably screaming into the void at this point, so I'll wrap up with this next point:
This is fair enough, but the problem arises when I am ordered by others of your school of thought to wear the shoes. Even I find it tough to really argue against an establishment's rights to set rules, but 1) an incredible amount of the time, that's not an actual policy of the business, 2) your policy is really to restrict the natural motion of a key body part of all your customers?, and 3) why do you believe aesthetics trump anatomical function, or at least someone else's hardly-uninformed conception of such? This is not to berate you into adopting my viewpoint, but to proclaim that people should be allowed to be barefoot in their daily lives. And not in the technical way they are now, where every business in a quasi-NIMBY fashion demands shoes, but actually, truly, culturally allowed.
EDIT: oh right, this part:
Again, while not quite untrue, this one also misses the mark. The vast majority of these injuries came from overtraining and/or failing to properly adjust one's gait. As a result, most of them actually did not have the strongest feet.
Assuming that's true, they live dramatically different lives. I suspect that they actually have many times more issues because they live so differently, regardless of if it has anything to do with shoes, so I wouldn't consider that to be any indication. Way too many confounding variables.
Humans didn't evolve walking on concrete and asphalt. They evolved in forests and savannahs. We do not live in a natural world.
Consequences don't have to be bad. I think shoes themselves make up for anything less physically advantageous about our feet.
Your arguments seem to be "shoes mess up your feet so that when you're not wearing shoes, your feet work less efficiently."
But if you're basically always wearing shoes, I don't see why that matters if the shoes exceed what you lose from being shod. Also, being less "perfect" doesn't necessarily make things functionally worse if you no longer need to be perfect. We don't need to run from predators and chase prey through jungles. We sit at desks, walk around town, and go for jogs. I like to make my feet and ankles stronger and more agile, but that's for injury reduction when trail running, for example. I don't think it makes a difference in most scenarios for the vast, vast majority of people.
It's for hygiene, not aesthetics. We don't need people's parasites, blood, and foot goo mixing together on business floors.
I tend to read lists bottom up. I have to put in a concerted effort to start at the top and go downwards, often times having to try again if (when) I jump ahead in the list. I'm not sure when this habit started, but I've been doing it for as long as I can remember.
Undiagnosed Tourette's lol.
So many quirks. All the time.
Since this has become a sleep quirks thread I'll throw my hat in the ring. Occasionally when falling asleep I experience something akin to Alice in Wonderland syndrome. It's like I become hyper-aware of the empty space in the room around me, and it's simultaneously vast and miniscule, and I am simultaneously vast and miniscule. It's slightly anxiety-inducing but not terrible. None of the associations mentioned in the wiki article apply to me, except I did get some migraines before puberty. Guess it's just some weird misfire of my size-perception brain circuits. Don't think I've ever tried to explain this to anyone before.
The way the brain can work at the edges of sleep is really fascinating. Never had one like that, but sometimes I've felt my thoughts "shrink". Like, every mental image would just shrink down/minimize. Best comparison I have (and what always pops into my head when it happens) is how when starting a new game on Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal, the character shrinks from the trainer sprite to the overworld sprite.