Not All Sleep Time is Equal
The Chinese were the first to realize that not all of our sleep time is the same. Many of us assume that if we don’t get enough sleep at night, we can make up for it on with a nap during the day. Or if we are working far into our normal sleep time during the week, we can make up for it on the weekend. This is especially an issue for kids in school. In order to catch the bus, many kids have to get up very early, but then with homework, dinner, after school activities and cool stuff to watch on TV, kids are under-rested to the point that weekends are often spent sleeping until late in the morning or they end up skipping planned activities.
Sleep is not just about rest, it’s about healing and restoration. It’s about processing and creating emotional balance. It’s about giving each organ of the body time off. It’s unfair for our stomach to work through half the night digesting our late night indulgence just as it’s unfair for us to have to work overtime (often unpaid) to finish the piles of work left on our desk because another person quit.
During the night the body fluids, blood and especially lymph, have the chance to reach more tissues and body organs because we are relaxed. There is no muscle contraction, no conscious thought, nothing we have to process through our senses. This is the only time our brain actually is able to receive complete nourishment and be able to release toxins to be removed. Think of it as the only time your body is able to gather its forces for a well-deserved break and a much-needed meeting to discuss the challenges of the day and share information about your health.
In order for this essential time to happen, you need to not just be asleep, you need to be in deep sleep. This is very difficult to achieve when there is background noise, movement, light, temperature variation or any type of influence that your body must process in a conscious state. You can still be asleep, but not as deeply as you would need to be for true restoration to take place.
There is a saying in Britain that cheese before bed bodes nightmares ahead. That is because nightmares are your brain’s way of processing when you are unable to achieve deep sleep. This is why nightmares often bring on the sensations of movement and why you often wake during the nightmare. Cheese is an especially dense food that requires a lengthier digestive process. It wakes up the liver because it requires bile to process the fat in cheese. Wonder why you sleep so poorly after that holiday bar crawl? It’s because the liver is working overtime to manage the alcohol consumption so there is no rest for the wicked, as they say.
The Body Clock
Our body clock has a specific waking time and a sleeping time. This is based on the activity of our pineal gland which sits in the center of the head and uses the eyes to detect light. The more light you see, the more awake the pineal gland thinks we need to be. The darker it is, the more sleepy we become because of the release of the pineal hormone known as melatonin. So many people take melatonin for sleep without connecting the dots of light vs. dark. Sitting up with a screen in your lap, or the TV on, or streetlights streaming through the window will all disrupt sleep, even if your pineal gland has plenty of melatonin on hand.
Also, your sleep time means much more than whether you see the Late Show or not. Each two hour period of our 24 hour day is dominated by the activity or rest of a particular organ. (You can read more about this in my article on the Chinese Horary Cycle) So if you are awake during the time that the liver is supposed to be restoring itself, that won’t happen. It’s rather like your phone always wanting to install updates at night. If you forget to plug it in or you turn it off or you don’t have WiFi, the update won’t happen. Eventually your phone will begin to glitch and you will be forced to do the update.
Another issue with our sleep is that we need to be fully relaxed. If our muscles are in spasm or we are tossing and turning, then our bodily fluids will not be able to reach all our cells and tissues. If we are wearing restrictive clothing while we are sleeping such as bras, spandex, tight socks or simply our favorite Christmas PJs that are two sizes too small, then our lymph will congest and it will not provide a slick highway for our immune cells, nor a pathway for elimination of toxins.
“Let me sleep on it”
That phrase is a great representation of how our sleep affects our mood. I’m sure each of us have experienced how much calmer and optimistic we feel after a good night’s sleep. That is not a coincidence. The brain is not the only area of our body to control our emotions. Our glands will respond to many different stimuli coming from the gut, the liver and even the lungs. Having the opportunity for a night of restoration our mood will lift and we will often have an easier time finding compromises and solutions to the thorny problems we went to bed with.
This also explains how important sleep is for those suffering from mental and emotional challenges. Insomnia is always one of the issues with every new client that comes in with emotional burdens. Without the essential depth of sleep, emotions can be raw and overwhelming. I’ve often mentioned the episode of Star Trek called Night Terrors where the crew are unable to reach deep sleep and experience increasing levels of paranoia, fear, hallucinations and emotional ourbursts. That episode presented every mental diagnosis known, all because of lack of sleep.
Neuroinflammation and Brain Disorders
During sleep I’ve mentioned that lymph movement through the brain (as craniosacral fluid) is essential in removing toxins, providing immune cell presence and maintaining pH of the brain cells. It is this critical time that conditions and elements that promote inflammation can be subdued and resolved. But again, lack of deep sleep prevents this important process from occurring, leading to ever-increasing chronic inflammation of the delicate nerves of the brain. This is a sub-clinical issue that can be the reason for headaches, seizures, learning disorders, dementia and even chronic body pain.
Recently there has been quite a few studies that point to unresolved neuroinflammation as the underlying issue for hundreds of conditions. Many of these conditions are currently being treated with drug therapy, psycho-emotional pharmaceuticals and even surgeries.
Maybe we all just need sufficient and nightly deep restorative sleep.