Your Body by the Numbers, in Three Minutes
Three minutes is not long enough to feel anything in particular about your body, and instructions to appreciate it tend to produce the opposite. So this uses numbers instead — specific rates of ongoing work, each followed by what it actually means while you are sitting there.
About 100,000 beats a day
At a resting rate somewhere between sixty and a hundred, the arithmetic lands near a hundred thousand contractions in twenty-four hours. Roughly forty million a year.
What that means right now: it has not stopped since before you were born, and it will not pause during these three minutes. You can feel it if you put a hand somewhere it is close to the surface — the side of the neck, the inside of the wrist. Most people go weeks without doing that.
Around 20,000 breaths
At twelve to twenty a minute, a day comes to somewhere near twenty thousand. Each one moves about half a litre at rest.
What that means right now: almost all of them are unattended. Breathing is unusual among bodily processes in being both automatic and voluntary — you can take one over, and the moment you stop, the automatic system resumes without comment. That handover happens seamlessly, thousands of times, and it is genuinely strange.
Three to five days for the gut lining
The epithelial layer of the small intestine is among the fastest-renewing tissue in the body. The cells doing the work of absorbing what you drink are replaced entirely within a few days.
What that means right now: the surface currently absorbing this cacao did not exist last week, and will be gone next week. It is a wearing part, replaced continuously, in a location subject to more chemical insult than any external surface.
About a month for skin
The outer layer of skin turns over on the order of a month — cells generated at the base, migrating upward, flattening, dying, and being shed.
What that means right now: the surface of the hand around the cup is entirely new since roughly this time last month. The boundary you experience as the edge of yourself is a rolling replacement rather than a fixed thing.
About 120 days for a red blood cell
Each red blood cell circulates for roughly four months before being removed and recycled, having made the full circuit of the body many thousands of times.
What that means right now: the warmth you feel from the cup is being distributed by cells that will all be gone by the summer, and replaced at a rate of millions per second. Not one of them will still be in service a year from now.
Roughly a decade for the skeleton
Bone is not inert. It is continuously resorbed and rebuilt, and the commonly quoted figure for substantial turnover of the adult skeleton is on the order of ten years.
What that means right now: the frame holding you upright in the chair is being demolished and rebuilt on a rolling basis, adapting to load as it goes. The part of you that seems most permanent is also being replaced, just slowly enough to feel otherwise.
Around 30 trillion cells, and more bacteria than that
Current estimates put the number of human cells in an adult body somewhere around thirty trillion, and the number of bacterial cells carried alongside them at a similar or slightly higher figure.
What that means right now: a substantial fraction of the organism drinking this cup is not, genetically speaking, you. The microbial population in the gut is doing part of the digestive work on what you are drinking, and it is more populous than the body it lives in.
The three minutes
Make a cup and sit down with it. Then, holding it:
- Find the pulse. Neck or wrist, and count ten beats. That is roughly ten seconds of the hundred thousand.
- Take over one breath, then release it. Notice the handover in both directions.
- Drink, and follow it. The warmth reaching the stomach, then dispersing. The lining it meets is days old; the cells carrying the warmth outward will be gone in four months.
- Notice the hand on the cup. New skin since last month. Bone underneath being rebuilt on a decade-long cycle.
That is the whole of it, and three minutes is enough because the numbers are doing the work rather than any attempt to summon a feeling.
The reason to use figures rather than affirmations is that they are checkable and they do not habituate. "I am grateful for my body" produces less each time it is repeated. The fact that the gut lining currently absorbing your drink is three days old remains as strange on the fortieth reading as on the first, because it is a fact about the world rather than a statement about your attitude.
If the numbers above interest you, the Mushroom Vitality blend publishes its own — eight fruiting-body extracts with quantities stated per serving, which is rarer on a label than it should be.
