Sleep is Fundamental to Wellness
There’s a lot more to sleep than just getting 7 hours within 24.
Check out where to start and where good sleep can take you.
Good quality sleep is crucial to your health. Good sleep gives your body the time and quiet to heal what has come up that day and on past days. It’s important to allow for deep rest including at least 7 hours overnight. If you recall from childhood, your body healed itself consistently and rapidly. It was so fast you may have not even noticed. Our bodies are actually designed to be self healing. As we age, we get farther and farther away from that stem cell rich environment, but it is possible to get back to a state of self healing. Our society does not message this because money can not be made from this truth: you were born to heal when you rest. Just because you could drink until midnight and be at work the next day at 9am when you were 25, does not mean it was a good idea. If your in your 40s or 50s and you keep doing that, you’ll find yourself in a state of disease. Some of our most chronically ill people are forced to work at night. While we all know people who do this and it is in fact humanly possible to work at night, no one ever has proven that night shift work is a good idea.
I’ve ‘always been a night owl’. How can I change?
Changing your sleep habits can be hard to do, but it’s really important work. We all know children who had a hard time going to sleep at bed time, but we prioritized supporting them and they sleep fine now. You might need to make a few changes, but it will pay you back. Start by stopping yourself when you say I’ve always been a night owl, my mom and I both have sleep issues, or it runs in my family. Are these good reasons for self harm, in the name of carrying on an unhealthy tradition? Are you saying because you’ve always done it and been fine, that it’s a good thing? If you said I come from a family of cookie bakers so I accept that I’m going to be obese, is that reasonable? If so, know that when the liver cannot detox you overnight, that can actually lead to weight gain. This is because the liver will store the toxins in fat tissue, which to the liver is a safe place because it’s fairly stable. The reason people experience weight gain rebound when going off a diet is because the toxins that were being stored in the fat are still present, and the liver will bring the fat back so it has a place to store them.
Why is our sleep schedule so important?
When you are asleep your liver and kidney are cleaning up your blood and insterslitial fluids; analyzing, prioritizing, straining, filtering, and cleaning house to prepare you for the next day. The Chinese medicine clock tells us that the time of the Liver and Gallbladder to do it’s daily work is 11pm-3am. During that time, toxins which the liver is screening for are safely contained and packaged for removal with your other excreted substances. Toxins are a natural by product of living life. We create toxicity inside and are exposed to toxins from the outside as well in the form of chemicals and non-foods which we comsume. The liver’s hundreds of processes can not be completed if you’re up worrying about the future, working late at night, or demanding ‘me time’ in the form of watching a screen or scrolling social media. Nothing at that hour of the day matters as much as tomorrow. Do the work now to teach yourself to go to bed by 10pm. The potential upsides are nearly infinite.
In another post we will go deep into the topic of Rest and Digest vs. Fight, Flight, or Hide. We can’t live with the switch in the Fight or Flight position. Many things happen better when we are resting. As we age we need to relearn the power of rest. If we never learned to relax and rest, there will never be a better time to do that than now.