by evanengelstad

Free Healthcare Series: Sleep

This article is part of a series on free healthcare tools that you can use to increase your well-being, your resilience, and your ability to recover from life’s challenges.

 

In our society today many unhealthy behaviors have become completely normalized. It is not strange to eat fast food every day, to experience anger or fear more than just occasionally, or to sacrifice sleep to try to be more productive (see a larger list below). If we don’t think about it and simply do the conventional things that are advertised to us and considered “normal,” we run the high risk of having “normal” health too: being stressed out or depressed, sick often, and fatigued; having heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and/or digestive issues; weighing more than we want; etc. If we want to achieve vibrant health, we need to start questioning what is normal. How do we feel as we go through life? Can we start looking after ourselves and our well-being with more care? While doctors, health coaches, nutritional specialists, and other practitioners can help support us, the ultimate accountability for our own health lies within each of us individually. We suffer from lifestyle-based health issues and we have the power to change our lifestyle! I like Paul Chek’s simple definition of “health:” taking responsibility for oneself.

 

Our bodies are actually extremely strong and resilient if we let them be. Our natural state is vibrant health. Unfortunately in today’s society we are bombarded with forces that lead us away from, rather than toward, our natural state of health. But if we get rid of just a few of these forces – and better yet crowd them out with some simple nourishing tools that I’ll explain in this series – then our health will be able to shine through!

 

Luckily, taking care of ourselves does not necessarily need to involve restrictive diets, expensive supplement regimens, and spending hours upon hours exercising every week. There are actually a lot of steps we can take to support our health that do not cost any money! These include sleep, sun exposure, exercise and movement, breathing, fasting, forest bathing, meditation, grounding, cold exposure, laughing, and much more.

 

You might be wondering why someone with training in nutrition is writing about all these other non-food “nutrients” we need for health. Well, it turns out that chronic stress trumps diet. We can eat the best quality foods, but if we are stressed out all the time we aren’t going to be digesting very well, we are going to have excess inflammation despite eating anti-inflammatory foods, and we can still experience health problems. Most of these tools will reduce the amount of chronic stress we experience in our lives so that we can we get the full benefit of a delicious and nutritious diet. In the first part of this series, let’s go into more detail about sleep.

 

Sleep

Getting enough good quality sleep is essential for health. It is a time for rest and rejuvenation, brain cleaning, immune enhancement, and dreaming! (And much more…) Getting less than 6 hours a night on a regular basis increases your risk of cancer, messes up your blood sugar, makes you more susceptible to poor food choices, is bad for your heart and brain, and in general is a complete drag. Sleep requirements and timing are somewhat individual characteristics, but most everyone needs at least seven hours of good sleep a night. Your optimal sleep schedule can be more individualized. Dr. Michael Breus came up with the following four sleep chronotypes and you can find out which category you align with the most using his questionnaire.

  • Bear – most common, tends to follow the sun, able to work well within normal office hours and also can socialize in the evening
  • Lion – the early bird, most productive in morning, has a harder time with later evening socialization
  • Wolf – the night owl, most productive later in the day and evening, has a hard time waking up early in the morning
  • Dolphin – the insomniac, has trouble sleeping, racing mind

 

Your optimal sleep schedule can also change depending on your age. Children and teenagers tend to need more sleep and to sleep later than adults, which is why it is a travesty (and biologically inappropriate) to make kids go to school and expect them to learn any earlier than about 8:30am!

 

If you are having trouble sleeping, try the following tips for improving your sleep hygiene before resorting to sleeping pills (which unfortunately tend to only produce a sleep-like state and not the deep sleep important for healing and immune enhancement). In addition to strategies that have helped me to sleep better, this list draws from SuperWellness by Dr. Edith Ubuntu Chan, Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker, and this MedlinePlus article.

  • Get enough sunlight exposure during the morning and throughout the day (an hour or more if you are having sleep problems) by being outside as much as possible. Even overcast days send the proper signals to your body. Then at night, turn down the lights an hour before bed (and/or wear blue-blocking glasses or use apps like f.lux).
  • Stick to a sleep schedule and go to bed and get up at the same times every day (even weekends!) It is preferable to get a few hours of sleep in before midnight to maximize deep sleep, although we each have our unique chronotype.
  • Avoid caffeine (especially later in the day) and nicotine. Caffeine has a half-life in your body of around 6 hours and as Dr. Walker says, drinking a cup of coffee at 4:00pm is the same as chugging a half cup of coffee at 10:00pm and then expecting to go to sleep without problem!
  • Avoid alcohol before bed, since it tends to rob you of REM sleep, impair your breathing, and cause disruptive excessive urination.
  • Exercise regularly but not too close to bedtime.
  • Don’t eat a large meal too close to bedtime. Ideally you should stop eating three or more hours before you go to sleep.
  • Investigate if any prescription drugs you are taking might disrupt your sleep.
  • Avoid napping after 3:00pm.
  • Relax before bedtime – meditate, listen to calming music, read, but for God’s sake don’t check your email one last time – it can wait! 4-7-8 breathing is a great way to relax – breath in for 4 seconds, hold your breath for 7 seconds, breath out over 8 seconds, and repeat this pattern for several minutes.
  • Take a hot bath/shower before bed. The cooling of your body after you get out can help induce sleepiness. Also, keep your bedroom at a cooler temperature if possible.
  • Make sure your bedroom is very dark and free of any electronics and anything else that could distract you from sleep. Unplug your wi-fi router if possible and turn your phone off or to airplane mode. Sleeping in complete darkness (using a face mask if necessary) makes sure you are getting all the benefits from melatonin production as possible. These include boosting immunity, lowering inflammation, reducing cancer risk, protecting your neurons, preventing cardiovascular events and type 2 diabetes, and relieving heartburn/GERD symptoms.
  • Don’t lie in bed awake for hours. If you can’t sleep, get up and do something relaxing until you get sleepy. This helps to avoid setting up an association between being in bed and not being able to sleep. Just be careful not to expose yourself to any bright lights or electronic screens, since this can lower beneficial melatonin production.

 

Sleep is one part of the many rhythms of life. It syncs up with the day and night rhythms of the sun. Getting natural sunlight exposure in the morning and throughout the day not only tells your body that it is time to be awake and productive, but is critically important for your sleep later that night when the sun goes down. Indoor lighting doesn’t quite cut it – you need the real thing, the sun! (One second-best option to look into if needed is a sunrise alarm clock that uses a full spectrum light bulb to simulate the sunrise in your bedroom to wake you up gently.) And sleeping in complete darkness tells your body it is time to rest, regenerate, and recover from the stresses of the day. I wish you restful and satisfying sleep. Sweet dreams!

 

 

 

List of Normalized Unhealthy Behaviors (too many of these in combination will go against your health!)

  • eating huge amounts of processed junk food and drinking huge amounts of soda(pop)
  • wearing thick rubber-soled shoes at all times when outdoors
  • driving to work every day
  • staying out of the sun at all times
  • regularly sacrificing sleep to get more done
  • eating and snacking at all hours of the day and night
  • using air conditioning and heating to continuously maintain comfortable environments within a narrow temperature range regardless of the outside weather
  • being serious all the time
  • watching a lot of TV every day
  • always hiring people to do our hard labor for us
  • constantly judging or hating people that have different opinions than we do
  • using harsh chemicals to “solve” countless “problems”
  • drinking alcoholic beverages often
  • using coffee to get going every morning
  • spending most of our living time inside rectangular cuboid enclosures
  • washing our bodies every day with strong, oil-stripping soaps and shampoos
  • breathing through our mouths a lot
  • being connected to email and texts through constant smartphone use
  • looking at screens incessantly
  • habitually suppressing our emotions and our creativity
  • bathing in non-native electromagnetic fields 24 hours a day
  • taking antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals at the drop of a hat
  • giving birth in hospitals
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