Dr. Curtis McElroy

Tag: insomnia

  • 3 Ways to Make Sure You Get All the Sleep Your Brain Needs to Stay Healthy

    3 Ways to Make Sure You Get All the Sleep Your Brain Needs to Stay Healthy

    3 Ways to Make Sure You Get All the Sleep Your Brain Needs to Stay Healthy

    It seems like insomnia is a modern epidemic. Whether you deal with insomnia or you are chronically sleep-deprived, it’s likely that poor sleep is affecting your performance.

    Sleep deprivation feels terrible. You will have noticed that if you’ve had a bad night’s sleep, you feel sluggish, heavy, and slow, as though you’re trying to walk through syrup. You’re clumsy and confused, you drop things, and nothing seems to go right.

    As well as making you feel bad, a chronic lack of sleep can have physical effects on your brain.

    Sleep deprivation impairs your ability to process and store memories and can even increase your risk of Alzheimer’s disease.

    Two proteins associated with Alzheimer’s, beta amyloid, and the tau protein, increase with chronic poor sleep. There is some evidence in laboratory tests on mice that sleep helps to clear these proteins from the brain.

    The good news is that there are things you can do to improve your sleep health to keep your brain in tip-top shape.

    Find Out Your Own Best Sleep Levels

    Everyone has their own individual sleep needs. Famously, British politicians Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher needed very little sleep, but only getting four or five hours a night is not recommended for most people. Whether you need seven hours or ten, find out what is enough sleep for you.

    Enough sleep means waking up without needing an alarm, feeling rested and energetic, and not needing coffee to get you through the day.

    Improve your Sleep Hygiene

    Studies have shown that the hour or two before bedtime has a powerful effect on the quality of your sleep. Schedule in some proper downtime, and stop using blue light-emitting devices like smartphones, computers, tablets, and television an hour or so before you plan to go to bed. Read a book, take a relaxing bath, or listen to calming music instead.

    Don’t Lie There Trying to Sleep

    If you can’t sleep after ten minutes, get out of bed and do something else. Lying in bed, getting stressed because you can’t sleep is a recipe for poor sleep and insomnia. You’re also likely to start brooding, mulling over problems or running over the events of the day.

    Get up do something relaxing like reading or meditating until you feel sleepy. It’s okay to do this more than once, even multiple times.

    You’re trying to train your brain to think of bed as a sleeping place, not a thinking place.

    Improving your sleep will help you to feel calmer, be more productive, and may lower your risk of Alzheimer’s later in life.

  • Dealing With Insomnia Naturally

    10 Natural Ways To Deal With Insomnia

    Almost all of us suffer from insomnia at some point in time.

    Insomnia can be transient and related to everyday stressors. It can also become chronic, so that nearly every night you have problems getting to sleep or staying asleep throughout the night.

    6 to 10% of the US population suffers from some type of insomnia.

    Women experience this condition two times more than men do.

    sleepdisorders

    Lack of sleep can lead to serious health problems and consequences including, heart disease and diabetes. It is also a contributing factor to obesity and can increase chances of work and driving related accidents.

    Anyone who has ever experienced insomnia or even poor sleep knows that the day after can be pure misery and can affect work, relationships, and social life.

    The following are ten ways to help yourself get some sleep and avoid the long-term consequences of sleep deprivation brought on by too many nights without proper sleep:

    1. Set a sleep ritual. This means you go through the same behaviors before going to sleep at the same time of night. Rituals train the mind, which regulates the body, and a nightly ritual can go a long way to facilitating a healthy sleep cycle. Your sleep ritual can involve self-care like brushing your hair and teeth, putting on some soothing music, taking a bath with aromatherapy candles, and reading by candle light or even fluffing your pillows before sleeping.

    2. Use a white noise machine. White noise machines are all natural methods to elicit sleep and to ensure a healthy sleep pattern. These machines emit white noise to block out extraneous noises that might interfere with your sleep. There are also those that offer the sound of waterfalls, the ocean, or a babbling brook. Choose a sound that appeals to you and go to sleep with that sound playing all night long or just for a half hour to 90 minutes, depending on whether or not your machine has an automatic stop timer.

    3. Practice meditation. Many people meditate before going to sleep. Meditation involves having a strong mind-body connection, focusing on your breath, relaxing all of your muscles and calming the mind. When your muscles are relaxed completely, you will have less musculoskeletal pain and will sleep better. Meditation is very effective for reducing anxiety, which is a major contributor to insomnia.

    4. Practice hypnosis. Self-hypnosis is similar to meditation except that with self-hypnosis, you will focus on a specific goal, such as getting a calm night’s sleep. You work with your subconscious in order to bring about a state of relaxation conducive to sleep.

    5. Drink lavender or chamomile tea. Both of these herbal remedies can help you feel more rested and ready to sleep. Lavender can be drank in tea form, taken as a capsule containing the dried plant components, or used in essential oil form in an aromatherapy diffuser.

    6. Try qi gong. Qi gong is an ancient Chinese martial art that involves gentle and graceful movements attached to deep meditation and breathing. This can be learned at a health club or from a home DVD. Just about everyone has the skill it takes to do this soothing form of exercise right before bedtime.

    7. Avoid large meals before bedtime. Eating too much before you go to bed can make it uncomfortable to get a full night’s rest. Eat at least 3-4 hours before bedtime, reserving nighttime for a small pre-sleep snack.

    8. Practice Tai chi. Tai chi is an ancient Chinese martial art form that has become a popular exercise for better health. It is a bit more stimulating when compared to qi gong but involves similar movements. Tai chi should probably not be done right before bedtime, instead, do tai chi about 4 hours or more before going to sleep.

    9. Try passion flower. Passion flower is a well-known herbal sleep aid that can be taken alone or used with other herbal sleep aids. It relaxes the mind and frees it from anxieties that plague your nighttime hours. Take it as a tea or use standardized capsules containing dried passionflower.

    10. Practice yoga. Yoga can be a good exercise to do right before bedtime. Yoga involves various poses while concentrating on breathing and mindfulness.

    treatinginsomniawithyoga
                   Treating Insomnia With Yoga

    There are several poses, which specifically help to induce sleep and aid with insomnia:

    • Utthan Pristhasana (Lizard Pose)
    • Salabhasana (Locust Pose)
    • Uttanasana (Standing Forward Bend)
    • Prasarita Padottanasana (Wide-Legged Standing Forward Bend)
    • Janu Sirsasana (Head-of-the-Knee Pose)
    • Savasana (Corpse Pose)
    • Paschimottanasana (Seated Forward Bend)
    • Supta Baddha Konasana (Reclining Bound Angle Pose)
    • Parsva Upavistha Konasana (Side Seated Wide Angle Pose)
    • Supta Virasana (Reclining Hero Pose)
    • Supta Padangusthasana (Reclining Big Toe Pose)
    • Savasana (Corpse Pose)
    • Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose)
    • Viparita Karani (Legs-up-the-Wall Pose)
    • Siddhasana (Adept’s Pose)

    Take a yoga class to see if you like it or purchase a yoga DVD. Establish a routine that you can implement as a nightly ritual before retiring to sleep.

  • Is Stress Keeping You Up At Night

    What to Do When Stress Keeps You Up at Night

    Do you know what to do when stress keeps you up at night?

    A lack of sleep can have adverse effects on your productivity, health, and relationships. Inadequate sleep has even been found to impair weight loss.

    It’s annoying to think that the loud music your neighbor plays is what keeps you up until the wee hours of the morning. But when it’s you who is sabotaging your own chances to sleep and rest, it is somewhat more frustrating.

    The fact is, stress-induced insomnia runs rampant these days because of hectic social schedules and mind-numbing responsibilities.

    Instead of just going to bed to doze the night away, your mind goes haywire. You end up tense and anxious, thus overriding any ability to go into dreamland. And when you do get to sleep, it’s still a fitful kind of rest. You don’t wake up feeling refreshed, and instead go back to contemplating about what has been bothering you.

    If this didn’t happen so often, it wouldn’t have been such an issue. If, however, it happens regularly or too often, then the whole thing makes sleeplessness s

    Besides waking up cranky and tired, you also risk your health in the long run. A lack of sleep may effect your immune system and may cause you to become forgetful.

    If that isn’t enough, your bodies metabolism will begin to slow resulting in weight gain or inability to lose weight.

    What can you do to avoid this?

    First, you need to get a handle on whatever issues you have.

    Try to make a list of your priorities and tick off what has been done. Seeing that you have accomplished something immensely helps in reducing your stress level.

    Moreover, the list will remind you that you are still in control of your life.

    If you are still bothered by the number of things that you haven’t done yet, take the time to complete them at night. Instead of tossing and turning on your bed and forcing yourself to sleep when you know it is just not going to happen, use this time to do some work.

    This may be your chance to shorten your list even further.

    When you feel that you have finally done something worthwhile, help your body further by doing these time-tested methods:

    1. Warm shower or bath before bed-This helps lower your body temperature, thus preparing you to get into the hibernation mode.

    2. Try a little warm milk- If most parents have said this, then there must be some semblance of truth to it. Facts have proven that milk contains a certain acid called tryptophan. This is an amino acid that converts itself to serotonin, a chemical that makes you drowsy.

    3. Exercise in the morning- As you work out, you release adrenaline which gives you energy to go through your daily activities. As the day progresses, this subsides, thus making you eventually tired.

    4. Stop looking at the clock- This will only agitate you as you see time tick by.

    Try dwelling on the issues in your life during the day and set them on the shelf during the night.

    Sleep is what makes you function because this is your way of recharging your body with the energy it needs. You may not be aware of it, but you may be lengthening your life when you get into the habit of sleeping right.

    If you plan to live a longer and healthier life, start making adequate sleep a priority in your long list of daily activities.

Copyright @ 2017 DrCurtisMcElroy