Natural Health Help

Sleep is basic, essential to life. Sleep deprivation is always damaging to your health. A daily rhythm of sleep and wake cycles is hard-wired into your brain. Your body’s biochemistry depends on the different states your brain activity enters during sleep in order to perform optimally. Long term sleep deprivation will damage your organ function. Prioritize good quality sleep as essential to you well-being.

What helps:

• Make your bedroom sleep friendly- cool, dark, quiet and uncluttered. Go there only for sleep or sex. Most people do not enter deep sleep states with a TV, radio or computer on in the room. Studies suggest cell phones interfere with sleep especially if there is a habitual sense of anticipation about middle-of-the-night calls. Other research suggests not reading while in bed. Cover the LED lights on your clock and block any light coming from outside with window coverings.

• Listen to calming music or a relaxing tape or CD before bed.

• Indulge in caffeine only in the morning. Caffeine is active in some people’s system for up to 20 hours. The way to determine how it effects you is to clear your system with a week of no caffeine at all. Drink lots of water and chamomile tea to help you through the inevitable detoxification process. Then if you want to resume caffeine, drink a cup of coffee or tea as you like it with breakfast, just one, and observe how your day and you sleep is effected. Continue as your body indicates, to use caffeine- or, not- as it impacts your sleep.

• Make sure any medications you take are not affecting your sleep. Some heart drugs, those for high blood pressure, depression and asthma, can make you too alert at bedtime. Over the counter cold and allergy medications can also prevent good sleep. If drugs trouble our sleep, ask your prescriber about other options.

• Sleeping aids- there are a number of drugs as well as hormones and supplements like herbs, amino acids and vitamins or minerals that are excellent for helping normalize your sleep cycle.

• Exercise- regular aerobic exercise preferably early in the day, is required for the best quality sleep. It also helps address some issues related to being overweight- like snoring and sleep apnea- that prevent good sleep.

What doesn’t help:

• Alcohol before bed may seem to make you sleepy at first but can cause you to wake up later in the night.

• Over the counter antihistamines can make you drowsy but also give you dry mouth and daytime drowsiness.

Reset your body rhythm:

What helps:

• Light therapy -studies show that an hour of exposure to bright light early in the day- from either the sun or a 10,000-lux light box- may help bring on sleep earlier in the night. And bright light later in the day may put off sleepiness by helping to suppress the production of the sleep producing hormone melatonin.

What doesn’t help :

• Sleeping late to catch up. Oversleeping just continues to throw off the rhythm of your sleep hormones.

Fix your snoring

What helps:

• Lose weight; just 5 to 10 pounds can really improve the snoring related to extra weight around your neck and jaw tat is responsible for snoring.

What doesn’t help:

• Sleeping on your back- this causes your tongue to fall back in your throat, partially or even fully blocking your airway.

• Sleep medications and anti-histamines that make your muscles slack and dry out your mouth and throat can aggravate snoring.

Daytime energy lifters

What helps:

• A Power Nap. research shows that a 10 to 30 minute nap really refreshes and restores alertness. Longer than that will put you in a different part of a sleep cycle and only make you drowsier when you do wake up.

• A brisk walk outdoors. The sun really helps but even on a cloudy day there is more ambient light that helps recharge your brain, than indoor lighting. Revving up your circulation, delivering oxygen to your brain helps tremendously too.

What doesn’t help:

• Toughing it out. Humans do not adapt to sleep deprivation; it always hurts you, it always takes a toll. Prioritize sleep and you will have more of yourself to give to everything else that matters in your life.

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