The most important building block for your health
A friend suggested I should listen to a podcast by a renowned ‘Podcaster’ called Joe Rogan. If you do not know what podcasts are, in a nutshell, they are more often than not audio documentaries. You can listen to about just about any subject under the sun.
Some are made by experts and some are made by interested amateurs. I have dabbled and have made a series of five podcasts called ‘Working with nature’. What is great about Joe Rogan is that he doesn’t know lots but is curious. So he gets experts on and asks them all the questions that you and I may well have.
This particular podcast saw him interview a sleep expert, Matthew Walker. It was fascinating and as the interview continued my jaw just about dropped to the floor and continued to drop throughout. Sleep is an astounding thing. A miracle that many of us neglect and it will have profound effects upon our future health.
Mr Walker suggested that if you go in for any kind of elective surgery the first question you should ask your surgeon is, “How much sleep have you had in the last 24 hours?”
Why?
Lack of sleep reduces your performance
Losing just one hour of sleep from the optimum of 7-9 hours makes you as impaired in your thinking ability and motor skills as being over the alcohol limit when driving a car!
Did you know that the best sleep experiment we have occurs twice a year when the clocks go forward or back? 1.8 billion people take part in this experiment. In March as we lose an hour of sleep, every single year, consistently on that day, heart attacks increase by 21%. In the Autumn, when we gain an hour, heart attacks drop by 24%.
There is a culture of sleep machismo where people claim they can get by on just a few hours sleep each day. Famously both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan spoke about this. What happened to them both? They got dementia diseases. Of course there are other factors but sleep deprivation is a very important one.
The modern world is at odds with our body's needs.
With the advent of electric lights we have gradually lost our quality of sleep and the time we should be sleeping. Midnight is called that because it should be the middle of the night. For most of us it is perhaps an hour or so after we have gone to bed. Whether we like it or not our body has natural rhythms more in tune with sunlight and darkness than the world we have created. This is making us all tired and sick.
Night shifts contribute to cancer
The link between night shift work and cancer is well established and there is no way to escape this issue with good sleep during the day.
I could go on but would urge you to listen to this remarkable discussion on ‘The Joe Rogan Podcast’.
What can we do to help ourselves? Firstly, go to bed and read a book. Do not read from a kindle, a phone or any tech. We now know that reading a real book calms your system but using tech does not. So no screens an hour before sleep. Got it?
Ensure you are going to bed at a time that allows you to rest and sleep for between 7 and 9 hours. You cannot cheat your way out of sleep deprivation.
Do not use sleeping pills. You may think you have slept but your body has not been able to go through the appropriate natural processes to repair and renew.
Natural sleep remedies
We have had lots of people report better quality sleep using CBD One Release patches which do not have the chemical cosh effects of pharmaceuticals.
Having a drink of chamomile, valerian or melissa tea is also useful to calm your system. There are lots of lovely sleepy teas available. Celestial Seasonings, Dr Stuarts and Yogi teas are all excellent.
Passiflora from A.Vogel is a great herbal sleep tincture.
There is also the rather lovely Melissa Dream supplement from Nordic Labs that we have on our shelves.
Alcohol disrupts sleep so the ‘night cap’ idea simply does not stand up to scrutiny. In fact, scientists found that alcohol stops the deep sleep you require. When it wears off your body goes into a burst of intense dream activity to try to make up for the lost time from having used alcohol.
Truly sleep is your best companion for a long healthy life. Embrace it!
