How To Be Well: Sleep

Let's dive right into what I consider the second pillar of being well and having a healthy body, and that is sleep. I have spent a lot of time researching sleep. I will tell you that sleep has not come easy to me most of my life. I actually was a challenging sleeper as a child. I just sleep lightly, even to this day.

The biggest issues I've dealt with were actual insomnia, where for many years, most of my childhood all the way through adolescence, in my teenage years, even into my late twenties, I suffered from terrible insomnia where it would take me hours to fall asleep, and if I woke up in the middle of the night, it would take me another one to two hours to fall back asleep. I went through long phases of my life where I would get two to three hours of sleep per night. I feel like I handled it better as a teen where I was able to get going on little sleep. I probably just had so much energy as a young person that I was able to get up and get to school and get through my classes just fine. I've never really been big on napping.

I would not be able to fall asleep if I had the opportunity to try to take a nap. As an adult and starting a career, that was where it really seemed to challenge me because many times I wouldn't fall into a deep sleep until five or six o'clock in the morning. This is something that I battled pretty much all the way through my twenties. It wasn't until I started acupuncture school and actually started getting regular acupuncture in the student clinic that my insomnia finally went away. I have studied sleep hygiene to the max. I cannot tell you how many things I've tried and that I continue to try even to this day because I'm still a light sleeper.

If I can get into that delta sleep mode (the delta brainwaves) where I'm really getting deep restful sleep, I will do everything I can to achieve that more and achieve it more often. Here are my tips on getting a good night's sleep, especially if you are like me, where you sometimes have a difficult time turning your brain off or you just lay there looking at the clock and you start doing the math, “Okay, I've got to get up at six and now it's 11. I've got seven more hours. Now it's midnight, now I’ve got six more hours.” You get into that math game, doing the math on how many hours you can get to sleep.  

Number one, eliminate and I mean, eliminate technology from your bedroom. I will confess that I still sleep next to my Kindle, however it is turned on airplane ALWAYS. Those EMFs, the electromagnetic fields are not emitting from the device when it’s in airplane mode. Get rid of technology: Do not watch TV before you go to bed. Do not play on your iPad or your phone or your computer. Give yourself at least 60 minutes before you want to go to sleep where you get technology away from your eyes. The reason for this is because all of these technologies emit a blue light and it actually tricks our pineal gland, this tiny little gland inside of our brain, which regulates our sleep cycles. Among other things, it tricks our pineal gland into thinking that it is daytime. If you really, really suffer from insomnia, you can alter the types of light that you have in your house, getting softer, yellow lights, dimmer lights, definitely getting rid of fluorescent lights. The bluer the light that’s emitted, the worse it's going to be in tricking your pineal gland that it's daytime.

I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but I'm an avid camper. I love to go camping. Especially when we camp in the later part of the year after daylight savings time has ended. I know that when the sun goes down around 5:00 PM and we eat dinner around 5:30 or 6:00 PM, I'm usually very sleepy at seven, about two hours after the sun has gone down. That's just a natural cycle because especially in the wintertime in that yin season, when you think about it in Chinese medicine terms, the yin versus the yang, the yin is rest. It's restoring. It's that wintertime where the darkness and the nights are longer than the days, you want to be getting more sleep during that time.

Like I said, I don't know if you've ever experienced that same phenomenon, but I know when I go camping, especially in those winter months, I feel very sleepy very early in the night. That's because my pineal gland is on a natural circadian rhythm with the sunshine. You should be having your evening meal shortly after dark. You should also be having your sleep cycle start earlier in the night so that you can sleep longer and have that rest and that restoration in the middle of the night. That is tip number one. Absolutely 100% no technology an hour before you plan to go to bed. If your bedtime is 10, technology stops by nine, and that is to get rid of the blue light. Now, like I confessed earlier, I do keep my Kindle by my bedside. I do read my Kindle before I go to bed. It's one of the ways that I'm able to shut my brain off and kind of wind down and I can get the ideas out of my head by kind of absorbing myself into a book. What I've done, even though most Kindles do not emit very much blue light, they still emit some. I have gone ahead and gotten myself some blue blocking glasses. I do not have vision issues. I do not need to wear reading glasses or distance glasses, but I still got myself a pair of blue blocking glasses. There are many companies out there that do them. If you do wear reading glasses or glasses to see far away, you can ask your optometrist to add the blue blocking coating to your glasses. That will help protect your pineal gland and prevent that blue light from seeping into your brain and tricking your brain into thinking it's time.

Those are a couple of tips just to handle some basic sleep hygiene. Now, if you're still laying there and you're still struggling to fall asleep, or perhaps you wake up in the middle of the night and you are struggling to fall back asleep, this is where I want you to do a couple of tricks. You can do some deep breathing exercises. There are many, many out there that you can play with. You can inhale for a count of four, hold it for a count of seven at the top of the inhale, and then exhale for a count of eight. If you're not ready for that, if your lung capacity is not strong enough yet, you can breathe in for two out for four, and then you can increase it to inhale for three, out for six, and ultimately inhale for four out for eight. When you’re able to hold for seven counts in the middle, that will help calm your nervous system, calm your brain, and get you back into the parasympathetic nervous system where you can rest, digest, and restore.

These tips have worked really well for me.

The last thing I do, if I'm still struggling for a couple days at a time, perhaps, where I'm just not getting to sleep easily, or I'm not staying asleep easily, that's when I choose supplements. The best supplement that I've found that's on the market is called Sleep. It's by a company called Vasayo. Now, this sleep product, very aptly named Sleep contains Melatonin and GABA.

Melatonin and GABA are both natural things, neurotransmitters actually, that are created in our brain, and they do different things. Melatonin, I'm sure you've heard of before, is a natural substance to help us get sleepy. This is also something that the pineal gland helps with, it helps trigger melatonin to start kicking in when it recognizes that it's nighttime. Naturally, this is part of our body's normal function, but there are so many things that can go wrong in the production or the triggering of melatonin. Sometimes we need a little assistance. This sleep product called Sleep by Vasayo is infused with melatonin as well as GABA. GABA really helps to calm the mind, it helps calm anxiety, and it just helps get that mental chatter to calm down, and quiet down, so that you can easily and effortlessly fall asleep and stay asleep.

So, like I said, my last choice, when I am getting to a point where I need a little assistance getting to sleep or staying asleep, is to use this product called Sleep by Vasayo. You can order directly from the links in this post.

Wrapping up the second pillar of being well and having health and vitality is sleep. Getting good quality, deep sleep every single day of the week is so important. If we could all just sleep a little bit better, we would have more energy, we would get everything done, we would feel so accomplished, and the world would be a better place.

Thank you so much for joining me, until next time, be well!