Mars: it's humanity's next big goal in space, with plans by NASA to put people on its surface
sometime in the next two decades.
As part of its preparations for a Mars mission, NASA wanted to find out what the effects of
extended exposure to microgravity would do to the human body.
In order to explore the issue, NASA paid several people thousands of dollars to lay around
in bed for several weeks- studying how their muscles atrophied and weakened from a lack
of exercise.
Today, NASA is definitely not as inspiring as it was in the Apollo era, but we're still
inspired to go ahead and find out what a whole week of being a couch- err, bed- potato would
do to the human body.
So once more we're putting our finest scientists and engineers on the question- and since we
have literally none of that, we're just going to go ahead and have our resident lab rat
earn his cheddar by laying up in bed for a week straight!
Day 1: I'm a big fan of NASA, and anything space related really.
I think there's nothing humanity does that's nobler than our quest to understand and explore
space, so imagine my excitement when The Infographics Show told me that they had a challenge for
me straight from NASA!
I've been forced to live in the wild for three days straight, be homeless for another three
days, move in with my parents for a whole month!
When I heard that this next challenge involved NASA, the possibilities were endless!
Would I be going to space camp?!
Maybe to a real-live rocket launch?
Would I get to meet an astronaut?
Nope.
I get to lay in bed for seven days straight, all because somebody over at the office read
an article about a NASA bed study and thought, “Hmm, this sounds horrible- let's get the
challenge guy to do it!”
It was probably the narrator, sometimes in my scripts I force him to pronounce really
terrible words and I think he has it in for me.
Check out our Lightning + Volcano video where I forced him to pronounce the name of every
major Icelandic volcano.
Alright, so as usual let's go over the rules.
Rule number one: No leaving the bed except for bathroom breaks.
This does not include a shower by the way, which means I'm going to have to resort to
the old baby wipe shower from my days in the military.
Rule number two is I can't move around, I have to replicate the NASA study as closely
as possible.
I headed on over to nasa.gov and read up on the study, and participants were encouraged
to move their upper bodies around but not their lower bodies.
Apparently astronauts in space mostly use their upper bodies which kind of makes sense-
there's no walking in zero g and in space you can use hands for grabbing on to stuff
and pushing off, but legs are kind of useless.
Unlike the NASA participants though, I am doing this challenge alone.
I mean the girlfriend will be around, but she's got her own life and no way in hell
could Infographics pay her enough to lay down for a week straight.
I'm pretty sure she would go criminally insane if she wasn't allowed to jog and exercise
for seven days in a row.
The NASA subjects had other people in the room with them, and I guess that helped pass
the time.
I even saw a photo of two of the participants playing Connect Four together, with the game
on a small table between their beds.
I did some research on what happens to your body when you're stuck in bed, and well, it's
mostly not good.
Back in the 1900s and earlier doctors prescribed bed rest for everything from the common cold
to decapitation, because you know, medical science still thought that blowing smoke up
someone's bum could help resuscitate them from drowning- that's a fact and you should
look it up.
Turns out though that getting fresh air and sunshine isn't just something your mother
used to say to get you to stop playing video games, but is actually healthy and beneficial
for a body that's recuperating from injury or illness.
Obviously your muscles deteriorate from a lack of activity- gravity constantly forces
your muscles to keep you upright so they're always getting a work out every time you stand
up.
Did you know though that long bed rest can even affect your bones?
Without the stress of keeping you upright bones lose density and become more prone to
breaking.
Blood can also pool in your legs, which can potentially lead to things such as blood clots.
While immobile your heart actually beats quicker and pumps blood around the body at lower volumes,
which means less oxygen.
This is why you can actually feel more tired after loafing around then if you were just
engaging in normal activity.
There's literally a laundry list of bad stuff that can happen from laying in bed for a week
straight, and I don't feel like scaring myself anymore than I already have so I'm just going
to end right there.
I do need to mention bed sores though, which typically affects older people who are stuck
in bed for months at a time.
They are caused by blood pooling and the body not being moved around, and you should absolutely
go and do a google image search of bed sores right now.
Or not if you like to keep your lunch down.
Alright, I've got my tv, laptop, tablet, playstation and cell phone along with several books.
I think I'm ready for this.
See you guys in a few days.
Day 3: I gotta say, I'm not exactly thrilled with this challenge.
I remember about a year and a half ago I was approached with the idea of doing crazy challenges
for The Infographics Show.
I thought it sounded exciting, even if my very first one- eat the hottest pepper- was
extremely painful and almost sent me to the emergency room.
I never really mind the danger or discomfort, as long as I'm doing something new and weird
and out of the ordinary.
Laying in my bed for three days though has been the single most boring challenge in the
history of challenges.
My days typically start in the morning with the girlfriend getting up to go work out,
come back to shower and get ready for work.
I have nothing to do so I stay awake to kiss her goodbye for the day, then I just kind
of go back to sleep.
I've noticed I sleep a lot more now by the way, I guess it's a side effect of laying
around all day.
Now I obviously can't leave the bed for food or to walk the dog, but that's ok because
modern life has a solution to such trivial problems.
I signed up for a dog walking service and I use both UberEats and Postmates for food
delivery, and well, ok, remember my challenge where I stayed in a bathtub for a day straight?
Obviously I needed to sort the issue out with not being able to answer the door.
We have a small one bedroom apartment, and our bedroom's doors are huge and open right
up into the living room.
With the doors open I can literally lay in bed and see the front door, which I have the
girlfriend leave unlocked.
Then to explain why I can't go to the door to pick up my food or answer it for the dogwalker
myself, well, I'm not super proud of this, but I had the girlfriend borrow the bottom
half of a body cast from the props department of the show she's on.
Basically I can throw this thing on in a hurry and it looks like I have two broken legs.
Don't judge me, judge The Infographics Show.
I always make sure to send my delivery person or dogwalker a note and explain the situation
so there's as little weirdness as possible.
I still very much remember Susan from my don't leave the bathtub for 24 hours challenge,
so I'm really trying to not freak anymore delivery drivers out.
Susan, if you're out there in internet land- I'm still sorry, I swear I'm not a creepy
weirdo!
Alright, so food and dog walking isn't a problem and you know what?
Everyone so far has been pretty cool about it.
They come to the door and bring me my food to my bed, typically say something like “Hope
you feel better soon!”, and I mumble something like “yeah, thanks” because I feel like
a terrible person for pretending to be disabled.
At night the girlfriend is in charge of cooking, which is a total disaster because she may
be a modern independent woman that don't need no man, but she's a terrible cook.
While other little girls were pretending to be princesses, having tea parties, and learning
to bake cookies, she was doing martial arts and basically training to be a secret government
assassin.
I'm not gonna pretend like that's not kind of really hot, but man, I really wish I could
leave the bed to cook.
Food though is its own problem.
You know what's really hard?
To eat every meal lying down.
You feel like you're halfway to choking every time you swallow, and eating something like
soup is a disaster in the making.
The girlfriend actually banned me from eating liquid food because twice now I've made a
mess on myself and the sheets trying to slurp down some soup.
She does after all still have to sleep on this bed at night.
My hygiene has definitely taken a bit of a dive, but the baby wipes help a lot.
I know I've said this before, but if you know anyone deployed overseas, send them baby wipes
in your care package.
Baby wipes are a godsend for anyone downrange.
I totally forgot about brushing my teeth though, because as the girlfriend loves to point out
I often miss the most completely obvious details.
I just tell her that's because I'm a big picture kind of guy, to which she shakes her head
and mutters under her breath.
I mean, she's not wrong, when I planned our trip to Bahamas a few years ago I planned
literally everything we'd do and totally forgot to book a hotel.
I only remembered when we landed and were standing in front of the passenger pick-up
area and she asked me which hotel shuttle was ours.
I told her that well, any of them could be ours if we wanted them to be, and that's the
story of how we almost ended up sleeping in the streets of the Bahamas and why I'm no
longer in charge of planning trips.
Anyways, so I have a bowl and a bottle of water for brushing my teeth, which the girlfriend
has to dump after every time I use it.
I reminded her that one day when I'm old and decrepit she would have to do this for me
every day, and she kind of just stared at me for a moment.
I swear I could see her doing the mental math and calculating if I was worth the investment...
I might seriously need to look into this marriage thing.
Nothing else to report.
Just a lot of boredom and weirdness trying to do everyday tasks when you're stuck in
bed.
Zero out of ten, would not recommend.
See you at the end of this.
Day 7: Well, I feel like I've been saying this more lately but I'm glad that challenge
is over.
I literally leapt for joy when my final hour was up- and then because I hadn't used my
legs for a week I immediately fell over and twisted my ankle.
On the way down, I knocked my head against the night stand, hard enough to get a bit
dizzy.
Because I have a history of concussions from my years overseas, the girlfriend insisted
on taking me to the ER, so I hobbled to the car leaning on her the entire way.
Not only was my ankle pretty sprained, but I could barely keep myself upright due to
my legs being so weak.
Also the fact that blood now had to go uphill to get to my brain for the first time in seven
days forced my heart to work harder, and it felt like a racehorse in my chest.
I honestly thought for a little bit that I'd have a heart attack.
I really did not expect the impact that laying in bed for seven days would have on me physically-
I thought at best I'd just be a bit weak, but I was having serious issues.
At the ER, the doctor said my blood pressure was way over and he was seriously concerned
by how weak I was.
I really, really didn't want to tell him about what I'd done for a week, or why I did it,
but the girlfriend was so concerned she basically fessed up to the whole thing.
So, great, I'm basically now a weird story the doctors and nurses at my local hospital
tell each other every day now- “Hey, remember that guy that came in with the busted head
and twisted ankle?
Yeah, he's some sort of youtube weirdo or something!”
Honestly, dignity does not come high on the list of employee benefits you get working
for The Infographics Show.
Alright, my ankle's going to take a while to heal and my head will be fine eventually.
The doctor warned me against any more laying in bed though, and recommended I slowly start
to exercise again starting with things like walking around the block.
He also basically gave me the spiel on the same warnings of what laying all day could
do to your body that I had already read online, but he was familiar with the NASA study and
pointed out that they had trained medical professionals on hand during the entire length
of the study.
Geez, point taken.
Other than my very inglorious ending to this challenge though, how was the rest of my week?
Well, in a word, boring.
In several more words: the most boring week of my life.
I remember years ago on a deployment me and a partner laid under a camo net on the side
of a hill for thirty six hours straight, just watching the backside of a remote village.
All we did was watch and count the number of people in the village, taking careful notes
of who went where and for how long.
Just hours and hours and hours of watching- and you know what, that was more exciting
than laying in bed for seven freaking days in a row.
You'd think with access to the internet, video games, and food on delivery laying around
wouldn't be that hard- but let me tell you, there's only so many consecutive games of
Xcom 2 Long War you can play before you're begging for an actual alien invasion so you
have a reason to run out of your bed.
There's only so many cat videos, meme videos, and old Star Trek the Next Generation episodes
you can watch before you are just aching for something physical to do.
At one point I was fantasizing about a burglar breaking into the house- practically wishing
for it to happen- just so I had an excuse to leave the bed.
My bed, which I normally have an excellent relationship with because it's warm, cozy,
and just the right level of both firmness and softness, became my prison.
I yearned to feel the cool wooden floor of our apartment under my feet.
I even envied the girlfriend every time she went outside to go for a jog- and if you've
been following these challenge episodes then I've already made my position on running very
clear to you.
In short, spending a week in bed laying down the entire time is a different type of hell.
Eating became a weird, very stressful activity and you always feel like you might choke.
Forget about soup or anything 'saucy', unless you want to make a mess all over yourself.
The physical effects were probably the worst though.
I felt fatigued all the time, and after the week was up I could barely walk and keep myself
up.
I could literally feel the blood pumping in my head and my heart felt like it was going
to call it quits just from the stress of having to pump blood against the force of gravity
again.
I applaud the brave men and women who laid in bed for 90 days so NASA could study the
effects of microgravity on the human body, and I see why they got paid so well for it
too.
For me though, I'm happy with my eight hours every night, though I think I'm going to give
the couch a try for a few days- me and my bed need a break from each other right now.
I know it was you that did this to me, narrator.
This isn't over by a long shot.
You know I heard there's a town in Wales by the name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwsllllantysiliogogogoch,
and I think we should do an entire episode on it.
If you liked this video and want to see more, and let's face it, of course you did!
Then click on this video which is funny and entertaining OR this video which is entertaining
and funny.
We'll leave the choice of which up to you, since we know you're smart and clever enough
to make the right decision.