August 2009
Monthly Archive
Healthy Sleep
Welcome back to this healthy place where I want to look at the importance of that part of your day that you spend doing nothing much at all. I’m talking about the end of the day when you go to bed and hopefully drift off into peaceful slumber.
You see, one of the most important things you can do for yourself is not to forget to sleep!
Sleep is the body’s repair time, when it goes into it’s own self-replenishment period each day. Old, damaged cells are replaced with new healthy cells, tired muscle relax and repair any minor damage and the organs rest from the daily bombardment of toxins that we throw at them while we’re awake.
But a lot of us are simply not getting enough quality sleep for our bodies to do their full repair workouts at night, which leaves us feeling tired and listless during the day. In fact new research has shown that women are up to twenty percent more likely to come up short with the sleep than men.
Insomnia hits everyone at some stage in their lives, but some people are more prone to suffering than others. If that includes you, there are some simple things you can do to help prevent those sleepless nights becoming a real health problem.
You could try clearing out your bedside table so that it’s not piled high with books, notepads, diaries and puzzles etc. These things send out distracting signals and messages to your unconscious, so by keeping this area clear you ensure that it and your bedroom is reserved only for sleeping.
If you lay awake at night worrying about work-related thoughts, then you can try a re-focusing technique. This works by making yourself consciously remember what you were doing this time last year. As soon as you settle on a memory, run through it in more detail in your mind. Think about how you were feeling then, what you were wearing, what the weather was like – that sort of thing.
By running calming thoughts and happy memories through your mind you create a calmness that you can enhance by then running calming words through and listening to the soothing sound of them. Words like “soothe”; “calm”; “relax”; “breathe”. They will relax you further and help you to drift off to sleep naturally.
So you see anyone can relax themselves enough to let go of the day’s troubles and enjoy a peaceful, revitalizing and natural sleep.
For more information on maintaining a healthy body, there is an older post that covers being healthy from the inside out and is a good addition to this post.
