|
|
|
.
|
 |
According to William Dement, MD, PhD who is the world’s foremost authority on the physiological properties of sleep, “Healthful sleep has been empirically proven to be the single most important factor in predicting longevity. More influential than diet, exercise, or heredity.”
Sleep deprivation shortens your life. It increases the likelihood of contracting a variety of diseases or unhealthy conditions including cancer, obesity, and diabetes. Sleep deprivation decreases coordination, reaction time, and judgment.
Eve Van Cauter, a sleep researcher at the University of Chicago, published a study in The Lancet in 1999, in which six young men were allowed only 4 hours of sleep each night for a week. During that week these men were showing impaired glucose tolerance, and were essentially in a pre-diabetic state.
This lead Van Cauter to conclude that sleep loss is one of the reasons for the epidemic in obesity seen in this country. Paradoxically, obesity itself impairs sleep significantly setting the stage for a very scary vicious cycle.
Van Cauter also points out that two very important hormones, growth hormone and leptin are secreted primarily during the sleep hours.
Leptin is a hormone that signals the body to stop eating, and Van Cauter points out, AWith the low leptin levels of sleep debt, your body will crave carbohydrates even though you have had enough calories. Dr. Shallenberger has often commented that those patients who are the healthiest are the ones who sleep the best.
Your Two Phase Body
Your body runs on two twelve-hour phases: the catabolic and the anabolic phases.
During the catabolic phase, which occurs between 6AM and 6PM, your body is willing to do pretty much anything to keep you up and running, damaging certain tissues in order to keep other tissues with a higher priority running efficiently.
If your heart needs some raw material more urgently than your adrenal glands, your adrenal glands will have to make due. Thus, the catabolic phase results in damage to certain tissues in order to keep others with a higher priority running efficiently.
But not to worry. Enter phase two: the anabolic phase. In this phase your body is going to repair all the damage that was caused during the catabolic phase. This part of the cycle occurs between 6 PM and 6 AM.
Notice that the anabolic phase occurs primarily when we are sleeping (or should be). This is a key observation, because the body repairs itself using rather subtle energy fields which it cannot create during the active part of the day. These energy fields are what organizes the repair effort, and they can only reach their maximum potential during sleep, particularly the deeper levels of sleep.
This is precisely why sleep is so important. Without an adequate sleep period we will be unable to fully repair the damage that we created during the day. Thus, persistent lack of sleep results in dramatically decreased energy production, leading us faster down the path to aging and disease.
Here are some good tips to help insure adequate sleep:
· If you don't snooze, you really lose. Many people sacrifice sleep for activities which they consider more important. Only water and breathing are more important than sleep. Forget the late night show; go to sleep.
· Make sure that you get at least 6-8 hours of good solid uninterrupted sleep in a fully darkened room.
· Insomnia is not just an aggravation. Chronic insomnia is a serious health problem. If you have this problem, don't "solve" it by taking drugs, instead, treat the problem. Studies have repeatedly shown that sleeping medications interfere with the development of the deeper levels of sleep.
· Having lights on in the room also interferes with sleep. The production of melatonin, perhaps the single most important hormone for the immune system, which occurs only during sleep is immediately cut off by exposure to light. Studies of blind people suggest that decreased melatonin production is one of the factors in the current breast cancer epidemic.
· If you have to get up in the night for a bathroom run, please don't turn on the lights. Instead use a red colored night light. Red light does not seem to curtail melatonin production.
· If you find yourself routinely having to get up to go to the bathroom, restrict your fluids before bedtime so that this doesn't occur.
· If your schedule requires you to sleep when the sun is up, use opaque curtains like those found in hotels, to completely darken the room.
· One more thing. Please don't use anything electric on your bed, like electric blankets or heating pads. These devices create an electrical field that may interfere with the anabolic repair system. Even when they are turned off, electric heating systems still maintain an electric field because they all have transformers. That's right. Even when they're off, they're on!! Just get rid of them, and get a good comforter. You'll like it better anyway.
|
|
|
|
