If you are someone suffering from a sleeping problem you know only too well how not getting enough, or good quality, sleep can impact your life. It impacts your mood, your appetite, your emotional and physical reactions, and your ability to think. Did you know that depriving yourself of just a few hours of sleep can have the same impact on your driving as being over the legal limit for alcohol?
I recently read Matthew Walker's book Why We Sleep, and found it a fascinating insight into the science behind sleep. He explained the different phases of sleep, and the importance of each for the various mental and psychological functions they perform. For example, if you are someone who has to get up early, but goes to bed late, this will impact your creativity, as towards the end of your sleep cycle is your dream-time when the logical brain switches off, and your creativity sparks.
As a homeopath, I am often able to help people both in the early stages of disease, long before pathology develops, or once it has. I sometimes have patients come to me with insomnia following a profound grief, as I can stimulate their body's own healing of the grief enabling them to sleep well again as an alternative to them using sleeping tablets, that don't give a good sleep quality.
For any illness, I work with the client to uncover the source of their issue. I also listen to the changes they have noticed in their mind, body, and emotions since its onset, and use these symptoms to match to a remedy based on the principle of like cures like, i.e., using a minute amount of a substance to cure symptoms that the same substance would cause in large doses. For example, I might prescribe homeopathic coffee if they are sleepless from mental excitement, waking with many thoughts and ideas, or from the slightest noise.
Insomnia is a symptom for which people sometimes seek my help, however the importance of sleep in homeopathy is much deeper. Sleep is one of the indicators a homeopath looks at to determine whether the remedy prescribed has had a positive effect. Even if the presenting complaint has not yet moved, if a client is getting better sleep, we know they are on the mend.
What Walker's book did remind me of, was what we can each do to improve the amount, and quality, of sleep we get.
DO
Go to sleep at a regular time each evening when you are not too tired, but tired enough to fall asleep. Allow yourself a good 7-8 hours of sleep time, it will be the best investment in time you make.
Consider going to bed an hour earlier each night, if you are waking tired, until you find your optimum duration for sleep that allows you time to dream and wake up feeling refreshed.
Ensure the room you sleep in is dark. Buy some blackout blinds or line your curtains with blackout fabric so that you spend the night in the dark. Our bodies use light as one of the indicators to wake up.
Expose yourself to daylight early in the day and eat meals at regular times, as your body uses these indicators to reset its own internal clock, which in turn helps you produce the necessary hormones to sleep at night.
Reduce the room, and your body, temperature in bed. Our core body temperature drops a few degrees during optimal sleep.
Experiment with pre-bedtime rituals that help you wind-down mentally and physically.
DON'T
Don't expose yourself to harmful LED light for the last few hours before you go to bed. That means don't use your laptop, phone or tablet. Or, if you must, then turn down the brightness setting to a minimum, or consider using a filter that eliminates the blue light.
Don't sleep with your phone switched on, or charging, by your bedside. Charge your phone before you go to bed, and unplug it - it's better for you, and makes your phone battery last longer. Consider switching it off completely (again better for the phone), or putting it on sleep mode so you are not disturbed. Better still, put it in another room overnight.
Don't eat too late in the evening. Our body's have a natural clock, and digestion is part of that. If you are suffering heartburn at night it is probably because you are overeating at your last meal straining the muscle closing the top of your stomach, or eating too late, asking your stomach to work the night shift.
Don't regularly drink too much alcohol in the evening. You may think that it helps you drop off to sleep, but the quality of that sleep is poor, and when the alcohol works its way out of your system it wakes you up.
Don't drink coffee, or limit it to one cup in the morning. Coffee has the ability to block our adenosine receptors, one of the things that helps the body fall asleep. And coffee takes a long time to be eliminated by our body, using up valuable processing capacity that it should be using for getting rid of other naturally produced toxins, such as cholesterol.
And finally, if you are having sleep problems, and none of the above changes help, consider working with me as a homeopath to redress the problem.
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