This one powerful habit is a superb medicine that’s available free of cost and it’s nothing but a sound, deep, restorative ‘sleep’. Sleep is important because it’s only when we sleep that our body goes through multiple functions. This starts from hormonal balance to the production of growth hormones that help us to repair, grow, rejuvenate, etc. There’s a detoxification process that happens while you sleep, plus our brain detoxifies itself only while we sleep through the glymphatic system, our energy gets renewed, and ailments like chronic fatigue start to get better. So it’s understood that our body basically uses sleep or deep rest as a way of resetting itself. On the outside you may be feeding yourself organic food, you may be working out, you may be meditating, and all of that stuff, but for these practices to work, the body needs sleep. When you wake up in the morning, you have dirt between your eyes, your mouth smells, the first urine is warmer as well as darker, and most people will have the urge to go to the bathroom and pass a motion, this signifies that there was an accumulation of waste and while you were sleeping, the body’s detoxification process was working.
So let’s discuss a few powerful tips to help us sleep better when our body goes into a deep mode of rest and heals itself.
It’s always better to keep your room as dark as possible when you are about to sleep. A lot of rooms have small LED lights and that can disrupt the melatonin production in our body, which can further disrupt the circadian rhythm. Keep your room dark as much as possible and consistency is everything for better results.
Not just the light in our room, but light-emitting gadgets also affects melatonin production which further doesn’t allow the body and brain to get deep sleep. Try to keep your screens off one hour before bedtime, because the more blue light you expose yourself to, the more you suppress your melatonin. The latter is the hormone that is responsible for putting you to sleep, or rather, into deep asleep. When we say we’re using sleep as medicine, it is not the quantity but we’re looking at the quality and the depth of sleep. The deeper your sleep, the stronger sleep acts as a medicine because there are people who enjoy five hours of deep sleep and then wake up fresh, and then there are people who sleep nine hours and wake up tired. Quality always!
Deep breathing is very important at bedtime to fill in your body with oxygen and to disconnect from various thoughts running through the mind, helps you in calming down your mind and body which further helps in getting a better and deeper sleep cycle. We can focus on the left nostril deep breathing at bedtime for five to 10 mins to get into the routine gradually. Sleep is that charge that the human body needs, the brain needs, and trillions of cells need to sustain life, survive, and thrive. Your relationships get better when you sleep well. When you’re constantly sleep-deprived, you’re disgruntled, frustrated, snappy, angry, hangry, etc that’s why sleep is everything, so invest in it!