Deep Sleep
It seems like nobody has time to sleep anymore, like it’s the last thing on the list of priorities. Occasionally, I will catch my dad or my partners parents dozing off on the sofa or looking exhausted whilst cooking in the kitchen. They don’t seem to care about sleeping, everything else comes first until the point of severe fatigue.
Very few people realize that the most strenuous activities on the body for people over the age of 25 is either physical activity or learning something new. It takes up incredible amounts of energy and afterwards, we need to repair ourselves. The time to repair is during sleep. During our slumbers, we release a variety of hormones for growth, tissue repair and protein synthesis. Without sleep, we will not release these hormones and our bodies struggle to cope. This will effect your day to day life and can cause serious life threatening illnesses.
So you start prioritizing sleep and you still feel like you could fall asleep on your keyboard? Well, that may have something to do with the disruption of your cycadean rhythm. The cycadean rhythm is our own personalized routine and schedule, including when your body goes in to different stages of sleep. When this routine is disrupted, it can frustratingly diminish all the effort you have put in to getting extra sleep. One of the most important stages of sleep, is deep sleep. This is when your most vital organs work together in intricate harmony; your heart starts to beat slower, your brain starts behaving like a hard drive, storing as many memories as possible, your muscles are regenerating tissue and growing. Most importantly, your happy hormones increase whilst lowering cortisol levels (stress).
The more deep sleep we have, the healthier our mind and body becomes, the less likely we are to cause DNA damage, the better our moods are and the more we hold on to our youthful undamaged cells.
Since birth, I have been a keen sleeper. I was a very content baby that just ate and slept and in all honesty, not much has changed. Even though I would get between 9-10 hours sleep per night, it never felt like enough. This wasn’t to do with any illnesses, overworking, poor nutrition, or even waking up in the middle of my second sleep cycle. My constant state of exhaustion was because my deep sleep was next to none. I was walking in to rooms forgetting why I was there, leaving objects in stupid places, zoning out during important conversation and I felt completely disorientated. It wasn’t until I started using a fitness watch that it was brough to my attention, I was only getting 10-20 minutes of deep sleep per night. We should be getting 2 hours.
I tried so many different ways to improve my deep sleep; CBD oil, not eating 3 hours before getting in to bed, blue light filters, excessive reading, exercise, diet changes, the list goes on. All of these changes only added an extra 15 minutes, tops. I was getting desperate. These methods are all extremely affective and they do work wonders but not if you are taking medication that nullifies the benefits; unfortunately, I am. It took me a year to discover that I should have been taking my anxiety medication in the morning instead of at night. Please learn from my mistake and check the side effects of any supplements or prescriptions you take, it can be the difference between misery and bliss.
I can earnestly confirm that now my cycadean rhythm has gotten back on track, all aspects of my life are improving. This is the happiest I have ever been and it’s only going to get better. I am not saying that increasing your deep sleep is the solution to all of your problems but it is a good place to start.
