Heal yourself with sleep

When you are in deep sleep, the body gets a cleanse, hormones help us to repair and rejuvenate and our energy gets renewed

Image used for representational purpose

KOCHI:  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, to grow, to 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 very important to allow our body’s intelligence to work for us and this happens when we follow a body clock or circadian rhythm. Fix a proper sleep and wake-up time and try to sleep as well as wake up at that selected time for two to three weeks at a stretch. In the initial few days, you’re going to feel tired, you’re going to feel sleep deprived, but still do not sleep in the afternoon. Once your body settles into this time, you will automatically feel sleepy around the same time and wake up at the same time as well, without any alarm. Set your circadian rhythm correctly and everything else will follow.
• 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 affect 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 sleep. 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 in the mind, it helps you in calming down your mind and body which further helps in getting a better and deeper sleep cycle. We can focus on left nostril deep breathing at bedtime for five to 10 mins to get into the routine gradually.

Deepika Rathod
Chief Nutrition Officer, 
Luke Coutinho Holistic Healing Systems. The writer is a clinical nutritionist with a focus on healthy lifestyle choices.