i’m only sleeping

I ain’t no doctor

a weekly column by charles faris, hhc

Chas,
How much sleep is enough? I feel like I  am never getting enough, even when i am getting 8 hours in each night…I eat well, exercise daily with yoga and other, but sometimes feel like i am not getting the right amount of rest for my body.
Clueless in zzzzz-land 

Dear Clueless,
As father to a three and a half year old I can certainly sympathize with the feeling of sleep deprivation. A year after Rowan has begun consistently sleeping through the night and I can still feel the effects of his earlier years, when 2-3 wake ups and 5-6 hours a night was par for the course.

Truth tell, the whole sleep thing is often a challenge to me even now, as my previous lifestyle of sleeping and waking according to my own inner promptings has been forever vanquished I fear. So I am tremendously grateful for the opportunity to share with you some of my thoughts surrounding getting enough sleep.

What’s up with the magic 8?

First off let’s look at that 8 hours thing. Actually I should just refer you to my thoughts on the 8 glasses of water thing. Apply all of those thoughts to sleeping (i know it’s not usually a good idea to mix sleep with thoughts of water…and let’s live dangerously, shall we) and then come right back here.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way

So let’s just say that we’ve established the relativity of sleeping and time. Different stokes for different folks. Numbers are irrelevant, it’s all about how you feel. And then setting aside the magic 8, we can look at the issue of how to get a better nights sleep (which i suspect you are looking for), and how to feel well rested and vital throughout your day.

First things first

So getting a better nights sleep. there are a lot of ideas about this and none is right for everyone. Here are a few that make sense to may and may work for you.

• early to bed and early to rise
• sleep in the dark
• avoid strong electro-magnetic fields
• develop regular bed time habits
• move your body during the day
• avoid food and water before bed time

So let’s take those ideas on one at a time.

Ben Franklin was a Yogi

Well, he understood a little something about the Ayurvedic body clock at least. Now, without getting all wordy on you about Ayurveda, let’s just call it Yogic Health Care. Let’s just say it’s thousands of years old. Let’s just leave it at that.

According to these old wise yogis, the body follows the clock of night and day, and when you get in tune with the sun, life begins to shine, and when you get out of tune…you start asking various non-docs how to improve the quality of your sleep!

So according to the old school healing yogis, getting to sleep by 10pm is imperative, and every hour you get to sleep earlier than that is worth 2 hours of sleep. Like if you crash at 9 you could sleep to 4 and still get the equivalent of 8 hours sleep. And if you start banging zzz’s at 8 you could get up at 2 and dive right into a heavy schedule of meditation and breathing exercises feeling totally rested and ready to go.

The basic idea behind this is that your various internal organs have a daily maintenance schedule programmed in, and if you are awake when the janitors come in to sweep the floors and empty the waste baskets, then they’ll just skip you ’til the next day. The body temple could get awfully messy with a steady diet of dave letterman and craig ferguson.

Of course, the Yogic Lifestyle isn’t accessible or desirable to all of us, and it’s nice to keep it in mind.

Dancing in the dark

Brought to you by the same fine folks who popularized Seasonal Affective Disorder (tune in next week), we have the idea that in order to get a truly deep sleep we need to shut out all possible sources of light. Doors closed, dark shades drawn tight, night lights off…even the faint glow of an alarm clock is hazardous when we get to the extremes of light management.

Scientifically fascinating and too much for me to want to get into here, the basic idea is that complicated hormonal systems are regulated by light entering the retina of the eye, and smooth hormonal regulation of the sleep response requires absolute dark.

Tied in this this is that if you do get up in the middle of the night, for a snack or a pee, opening the fridge or eying a night light may reset your sleep system and diminish the actual rest that you get for the rest of the night.

do androids dream of electric sheep?

That’s a good question. And we’ll have to wait a week to get the definitive non-doc answer, because it is getting late and i’ve got to turn down the lights, get my eyes out of this screen, finish up with the food and water so i can get to sleep by 10!

Have a good week and remember, health is a vehicle, how and where you drive it is the most important thing!

Charles Faris, hhc

“i ain’t no doctor”

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