Your Health Depends Upon Sleep
This article by Ronald G. Gridland, M.D. could be the most important article you read on natural hygiene this year. It is excerpted by Health Science from Dr. Gridland’s powerful lectures at the 1993 ANSHS International Conferences.
Energy is very important it is the key to the healing process, the key to health.We all need energy to function, and that energy, aside from caloric energy that comes from food, is the electrical energy which comes from sleep and only from sleep. Nothing can replace what sleep gives us (and what we need) in the way of energy and healing.
Health can be described in terms of the degree of functional effeciency of the cells that make up the tissues, the organs, the organ systems and the organism itself. The functional effeciency of that cell, that primary essence of health, depends upon energy fundamentally.
The philosophy we operate with as hygienists is that health is the result of healthful living.This is based on the observation that the body heals itself when given the chance.The problem is that we hurt ourselves most often through our living habits-faster than we can heal. That is usually why disease occurs. So the objective of a health-minded person is to identify and remove the factors that interfere with the healing process and allow the body to heal itself.
The Causes of Health
To achieve optimum health, we need to supply the four factors, which predominate in its restoration and/or maintenance. These factors are diet, environment, activity and psychology. But while each of these factors is vitally important, the bottom line is that sleep is when all our healing occurs.
Most people who die in the United States each year kill themselves with their knives and forks. Of the two million Americans who die each year, 76 percent die of potentially preventable causes related to diet, smoking and alcohol. Eating a healthy diet (one that does not hurt us and one which provides all the nutrients we need for growth and health) is very important, but it alone will not make us well.
If we do not live in a healthy environment it does not matter how good our diet, activity and psychology are. Our environment can make us sick, but a healthy environment by itself will not make us well.
Exercise (when we have energy and the health for it) is important to achieve optimum health, well-being and optimum weight. But again, exercise by itself will not make us well. In fact, it can even make us sick.
Psychology is very important, too. But it doesn’t matter how good we are at relaxing, handling stress, getting a good job or developing good relationships. That alone is not enough to make us well.
The Importance of Sleep
Because I am a family physician who follows a healthy lifestyle and who advocates a vegetarian diet, in my practice, I have the opportunity to see many people following healthy lifestyles. Some would come see me because, despite all of what they were doing, they were not feeling well. Unlike other physicians, I wouldn’t blame it on lack of protein in their diets. But I was a bit puzzled by it because they were doing everything they were supposed to be doing in terms of a vegetarian and/or a hygienic approach. Fortunately, a few things started to clue me in.
One of them was a study on fibrositis by Harvey Moldofsky, M.D., a Toronto psychiatrist, published in the late 1970s. Fibrosis, now called fobrornyalgia, is a condition of generalized tender spots on the body, associated with fatigue.There are no real pathological abnormalities that can be detected, no inflammation in the tissue, and no abnormalities seen in the biopsies or blood tests of people suffering, and are often quite debilitated by it.
When Moldofsky did sleep studies on these people (he hooked them up to EEG electrodes and monitored their brain wave activity during sleep) he discovered that they had a deficiency of stage four sleep.
When we sleep, we go through various stages of sleep in certain cycles. A cycle lasts about ninety minutes.We start with stage one, which is very light , then stage two, which is a little deeper, then stage three, which is associated with delta wave brain activity (the slowest, most relaxed brain was activity). Stage four sleep is our deepest stage sleep.We spend anywhere from twenty minutes to forty-five minutes in that level of delta wave, stage four sleep.Then we gradually come back through stage three, stage two, and stage one.Then we have an episode of rapid eye myernent (REM) sleep, where even though our eyes are closed, they are moving under our eyelids,
REM sleep is associated with dreaming and, coincidentally, the resting of the sympathetic nervous system, which secretes adrenaline. (Adrenaline enables you to be alert and respond quickly to environmental changes.) It is worth mentioning that excessive dreaming can be somewhat irritating and can negatively affect the quality of sleep.
Moldofsky noiticed a deficiency of stage four sleep in the individuals suffering from fibrositis. They hardly spent any time at all in stage four sleep. Using this information, he found that he could reproduce fibrositis in healthy individuals. When healthy subjects got down to stage four sleep, he would give them stimuli-sounds or touches- that would wake them out of the deeper stages of sleep, stages four and three, into stages two and one, without waking them completely. Within three or four days all these poeple exhibited signs of fibrositis.
When he stopped interfering with their sleep, he found that they would spend extra time in the deeper stages of sleep for two or three days, until the symptoms of fibromyalgia went away. He concluded that fibromyalgia had a lot to do with deficiency of stage four, and that stage four sleep was important.
Sleep, Healing and Recovery
Delta wave sleep stimulates the body to release the most important healing hormones, like growth hormone and testosterone. If we sleep well and long enough at night, our bodies produce these hormones naturally. Adrenaline, which can come from stress or from pushing ourselves too hard, causes inhibition of the release of the healing hormones.These healing hormones are released only at the deepest levels of sleep. They are inhibited at stage two or stage one sleep, as well as in a wakeful state. When you are in a wakeful state there is a predominance of catabolic hormones, or breaking-down type hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones are inhibited when you get down to the deeper levels of sleep.
Sleep and Recovery
Stress can be a problem. It causes a lot of energy expenditure and wear and tear on the body. We need stress to stimulate us to achieve our optimum potential. But if we don’t allow ourselves the time to get enough sleep to recover from stress, we can overwhelm our capacities for tolerating it.
Sleep enables us to recover from our everyday wear and tear we experience during the day and to heal. But if we don’t get enough sleep, we end up with symptoms of a disease and degenerative change. Examples of this would include degenerative arthritis in the knees, back or hands. We need sleep to function well and maintain our health. Even though we may be functioning well, we may not be reaching our potential for function, let alone our potential for long-lasting health and good energy.
If we do not get enough sleep, we notice a lower energy level. As I mentioned earlier, there are two kinds of energy.The first comes from calories and food. It enables us to run our metabaolism. There is also nerve energy, which is equivalent to the electrical energy from a battery. It becomes depleted during the day and recharges at night. Delta wave deep sleep seems key to that process.
At rest during the day, on average, a person burns about 95 calories an hour. But when sleeping, that same person burns only 80 calories an hour, a decrease of energy expenditure of about 15%. As you can see, sleep restores energy that cannot be saved even while resting.
Low Energy, Low Function
Your nervous system controls every cell and function in your body.When your energy is low, when your nervous system is tired, nothing functions normally. For example, your immune system will not function as well and you will be more prone to infections and allergies. Cognitive function (brain function) is also impaired when your body is fatigued. Emotional function is impaired as well.When you are tired, you don’t have the energy to cope with things that go wrong.You become angry more easily.
A lot of our health problems result from this condition of “low batteries”. If we allow this “low batteries” condition to exist long enough, degenerative effects can start to occur that, if allowed to persist long enough, may become irreversible. Fatigue is often the initial event of a process that eventually leads to permanent destructive change.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
The symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome are decreased immune function, decreased cognitive function, decreased emotional function and decreased bodily functions (digestive, etc.). People who suffer from this affliction are often highly motivated, intelligent, and responsible and tend to be geared toward perfectionism. They often have longstanding sleep problems.These people have depleted their energy by all the responsibilities they put on themselves and the difficulty they have recharging their batteries, due to poor sleep habits. A healthy diet often helps people such as this, but is is not enough. These people often have to get 12 to 16 hours of sleep per day for months in order to recover. It often takes a couple of years for them to feel normal. Pushing yourself, whether by emotional, physical, mental or chemical stimulation, stimulates the release of adrenaline.The more tired you are and the more you push yourself, the more adrenaline you cause to be released. At the end of the day, you are wired. As a result, you have a problem winding down.You have trouble turning your mind off so that you can sleep. Even if you can sleep, you can’t sleep deeply. The adrenaline inhibits the release of the healing hormones. As a result, you wake up tired the next day because you had a poor quality sleep and not enough of it. Then you have to push yourself even harder to get through the next day, causing the release of even more adrenaline.
This cycle ultimately leads to a severe sleeping disorder, where poeple are told they are “overtired”. Actually, they are overstimulated. The way to stop that cycle is to stop pushing, If you wake up in the morning and you are too tired to function, you should not force yourself to function. If you want to get well, you should spend the day catching up on your sleep, even if it means staying home from work. Learning how to stay well by listening to your body will keep you healthier, and thus you’ll spend less time off work in the long run.
Stress and Relaxation
Stress is another factor that causes people to lose sleep at night. They cannot turn their minds off at night. Part of that is from adrenaline or from animal foods. Even mental activity can hinder a person’s ability to fall asleep at night. Therefore, a major point of good hygiene is “cleaning your mind” before you go to bed. Go to sleep with pleasant, relaxing thoughts so that you have a deeper, more healing, quality sleep.
A relaxation technique before going to sleep will not only improve the speed at which you fall asleep and the quality of your sleep, it will also furnish you with a device to use any time relaxation is needed. Going through the exercise of practicing a relaxation skill has a side effect of increasing your awareness. You will develop an increased awareness of what is going on inside you body physically, mentally and emotionally. Then, if you are aware of a problem, you can do something about it by using relaxation.
One of the easiest ways to improve your relaxation skills is to listen to a relaxation tape with step-by-step instructions to guide you through a relaxation exercise to a relaxed state. You cannot, however, play the tape while thinking about something else. You will not become relaxed that way.
Hypoglycemia
The symptoms of hypoglycemia are almost the same as those of chronic fatigue syndrome, except that there is an association with eating sugary foods. Most of those symptoms are not frorn low blood sugar, but from fatigue. If the body is fatigued, the pancreas will not act quicky enough to slow down the elevation of sugar in the bloodstream. As a result, the blood sugar level goes too high.Then the pancreas overreacts, and releases too much insulin, causing the blood sugar to go down too low. That is when people experience the symptoms of hypoglycemia.
Food is stimulating. People use food as a drug, and when the stimulation of a meal wears off, people experience a much lower energy level. People who have to eat every three hours or else they can’t function have a fatigue problem, not a food deficiency. If the pancreas is taxed too much after sugary meals and not given the proper amount of time to recover, it will break down. When people with symptoms of hypoglycemia get enough sleep, the hypoglycemia goes away. A healthy person should be able to go all day without eating if need be and suffer only hunger and a little weight loss.
Environment
People with environmental illness react to things in their environment A lot of their allergies go away with the removal of animal foods from their diets. However, after some time, they been to react to foods that have remained in their diets. These people are not healing their immune systems because actually, they are overstimulated. The way to stop that cycle is to stop pushing, If you wake up in the morning and you are too tired to function, you should not force yourself to function. If you want to get well, you should spend the day catching up on your sleep, even if it means staying home from work. Learning how to stay well by listening to your body will keep you healthier, and thus you’ll spend less time off work in the long run.
Stress and Relaxation
Stress is another factor that causes people to lose sleep at night. They cannot turn their minds off at night. Part of that is from adrenaline or from animal foods. Even mental activity can hinder a person’s ability to fall asleep at night. Therefore, a major point of good hygiene is “cleaning your mind” before you go to bed. Go to sleep with pleasant, relaxing thoughts so that you have a deeper, more healing, quality sleep.
A relaxation technique before going to sleep will not only improve the speed at which you fall asleep and the quality of your sleep, it will also furnish you with a device to use any time relaxation is needed. Going through the exercise of practicing a relaxation skill has a side effect of increasing your awareness. You will develop an increased awareness of what is going on inside you body physically, mentally and emotionally. Then, if you are aware of a problem, you can do something about it. by using relaxation.
One of the easiest ways to improve your relaxation skills is to listen to a relaxation tape with step-by-step instructions to guide you through a relaxation exercise to a relaxed state. You cannot, however, play the tape while thinking about something else.You will not become relaxed that way.
Hypoglycemia
The symptoms of hypoglycemia are almost the same as those of chronic fatigue syndrome, except that there is an association with eating sugary foods. Most of those symptoms are not frorn low blood sugar, but from fatigue. If the body is fatigued, the pancreas will not act quicky enough to slow down the elevation of sugar in the bloodstream. As a result, the blood sugar level goes too high. Then the pancreas overreacts, and releases too much insulin, causing the blood sugar to go down too low. That is when people experience the symptoms of hypoglycemia.
Food is stimulating. People use food as a drug, and when the stimulation of a meal wears off, people experience a much lower energy level. People who have to eat every three hours or else they can’t function have a fatigue problem, not a food deficiency. If the pancreas is taxed too much after sugary meals and not given the proper amount of time to recover, it will break down. When people with symptoms of hypoglycemia get enough sleep, the hypoglycemia goes away. A healthy person should be able to go all day without eating if need be and suffer only hunger and a little weight loss.
Environment
People with environmental illness react to things in their environment A lot of their allergies go away with the removal of animal foods from their diets. However, after some time, they been to react to foods that have remained in their diets. These people are not healing their immune systems because they are not getting enough sleep to heal their immune systems. When they do incorporate sleep back into their lifestyles, the sensitivities decrease or go away.
The most common “difficult to manage” diseases are often related to sleep deficiency. In fact, is you are sick or you are bred, by definition, you have a sleep deficiency. This is true no matter what is going on because, if you accept the concept that healing occurs when you are asleep, if you are sick you have a deficiency of healing, therefore a deficiency of sleep.
Let’s say you get into a motor vehicle accident or your break your leg through some trauma. In these instances, you are injured because of some external cause. If, afterwards, you only get enough sleep to barely maintain status quo, how are you going to heal? The body might make the healing of the bone a priority, as opposed to doing other stuff that is not quite as important, and it will heal gradually. But with additional sleep the process will be better and faster.
The point I am making is, even if you are unwell due to injury, the more extra sleep you get, the quicker you will heal. So it doesn’t matter what your health problem is, whether it is due to lifestyle abuse or whether to external trauma, you need more sleep. And that is the only thing that will make you well.
Sleeping Problems
I have already mentioned some problems with sleeping. I mentioned that if you push yourself too hard, you will cause a release of adrenaline which not only interferes with your ability to sleep properly, but causes a lot of extra energy expenditure that may inhibit the release of the healing hormones. I mentioned that diet can sometimes be stimulating and interfere with healing, even when you are eating a healthy diet.
Another factor that sometimes interferes with sleep is fear. Not everybody, but some people have a component of fear associated with sleeping. They don’t like the concept of “falling” asleep. They don’t like “letting go”. They don’t want to give up the conscious information gathering, the monitoring of the environment, the reliance upon their bodies to keep them functioning and safe.
Maybe these people had a burglary one night and are always fearful of another burglary. Maybe they were molested in some way in the night when they were children, and so they develop some fears associated with sleep. If you have any fear that is interfering with your ability to relax and sleep at night, you need to get it solved.
Another problem you can have getting enough sleep at night is people calling you on the telephone. They are used to you being up until midnight every night so they don’t think anything of calling you at 11:30, even though now you’re trying to go to bed at 10:00. This is a really simple problem to handle. I advise my patients to get a “phoneless cord” (or an answering machine).
Meeting Your Sleep Needs
If you don’t get your needs met, what happens! You get sick or you get tired. If you get tired, you don’t cope as well with everyday stresses and you get irritable.
For example, maybe little Johnny is crayoning on the wall again, for the hundredth time. Instead of helping him rechannel his creative energies into something that’s less destructive, you get angry, scold him and send him to his room. Who created this situation? Was it little Johnny’s fault? He’s just two years old. Crayoning on the wall is what you expect from children. Or was it your fault, because you just didn’t have the energy to be creative anymore?
When they don’t have the energy to tolerate and cope with the inevitable stresses of child raising, otherwise well-meaning parents will become very irritable and will snap at the very people they care most about, their children and spouses for whom they are sacrificing their lives, the people for whom they are staying up until 1 a.m. folding the laundry, bringing home the paycheck, etc.
Setting Priorities
It is important that we don’t let our commitments and responsibilities undermine the very reasons why we undertook them in the first place. We take on these commitments and responsibilities, supposedly, to enhance our lives. We takeon jobs so that we have money to provide security and money so that we and our loved ones can do the things we enjoy. We take on relationships and children because we want to have a happy family life. We take on mortgages and car loans because we want to enhance our lives. But along the way, these things start running our lives. These commitments and responsibilities become the tail that starts wagging the dog, instead of the other way around.
If you wake up one day and you realize that you are not living your life the way you should live it, who is to blame! Granted, life is difficult, there is no question about that, and the sooner we all understand that and accept it the better. But who is in more control of your destiny than you. Even though there are many things that you don’t have control over directly, you are still the only one who can change the situation. So if you recognize that all these things you took on to enhance you life are now running your life, and interfering with your ability to enjoy your life, you, and only you, can charge it.
You must make it a priority to get your needs met. You say: “People will think I’m lazy if I’m napping in the afternoon. They’ll say it’s a waste of time.” Too, bad! That’s what you need if you’re tired. And if you don’t get what you need, what’s going to happen? You’re going to get sick, you going to be irritable, you’re going to start speaking negatively to people you care about or maybe you will become sick and instead of becoming an asset to the people you care about, you will become a burden to them because now they have to take care of you. Is that what you want? I don’t think so.
Health, A Responsibility
Taking care of yourself is not a luxury, it is not an extravagance. It is a responsibility to yourself, in effect you are being irresponsible. So getting enough sleep, for example, is just another one of your responsibilities.You need to recover from everyday wear and tear so that you have energy to function and cope and live life the way you know it should be lived.