The health benefits of deep restful sleep

On July 9, 2021 By queeenvkIn Environment, Health, Help, Inspiration, self helpLeave a comment

Sleep is linked to multiple aspects of our health because it affects different organs and hormone levels throughout the body. Deep restful sleep is also known as slow wave sleep and occurs as the third stage of non-REM sleep. The REM stage of sleep comes after this deep sleep stage. During deep sleep the brain detoxifies itself from harmful proteins that build up during the day and sorts out your recent memories. We cycle through the stages of sleep multiple times during the night. However, people who snore or have sleep apnea are less likely to reach the deeper stages of sleep as they are waking themselves up multiple times during the night.

For the adults, you want to make sure you’re having 7 – 9 hours of sleep each night. Everything is better in moderation. Teens and babies need different amounts of sleep depending on their age.

Less than 7 hours of sleep or poor quality sleep can cause:

Your blood to thin leading to an increased risk of low blood pressure and dizziness. Fewer red blood cells are made so your blood ends up being thinner than it should be.

Reduced cognitive abilities. Lack of sleep can affect you in the same way as too much alcohol. Don’t drive while sleepy, it’s as bad as drunk driving!

Poor memory recall as your recent memories aren’t effectively processed by the brain.

Difficulty in maintaining weight due to disruption of levels of hormones involved in hunger (ghrelin) and feeling full (leptin). Studies have shown that less than 5 hours sleep cause a decrease in leptin levels. This is probably because your body wants to make sure you last the fast of the night but if you have a shorter sleep then your body thinks you need less leptin to keep you feeling full. Unfortunately ghrelin then comes in and makes you feel hungry before a meal. It isn’t affected by your sleep but I have noticed that if I’m not asleep by midnight I get those hunger pains that make it difficult to get to sleep without having a snack first. In the long run it becomes harder to maintain your weight if you’re always eating a second dinner before bed (which was me back in the day when I was up late studying for uni exams).

Lack of deep restful sleep to clear the build up of toxic proteins in the brain that cause Alzheimer’s. Current research indicates that Alzheimer’s might be caused due to build up of tau and amyloid-beta proteins in the brain that are created during the daytime. These proteins are cleared from the brain during deep sleep so it’s very important to deal with insomnia if you can.

Life span can be affected by poor quality sleep. Studies have shown that shift workers may have a decreased life span. Disruption to sleep patterns can cause insomnia as our circadian rhythm is a daily cycle consisting of different hormones released during certain times of the day.

Too much sleep can lead to:

Thicker blood which leads to increased risk of stroke and high blood pressure. More sleep doesn’t necessarily make you feel more refreshed. It can leave you feeling more drowsy if you sleep longer than around 9 hours.

Tricks to beat insomnia:

I know everyone says this one but it’s absolutely true: AVOID CAFFEINE. Caffeine has a lasting effect in the body so limit your intake to the morning and no more than one cup of coffee per day. Black tea contains less caffeine but it’s still there so limit cups of tea or make them weaker.

Blue light filter: Exposure to blue light suppresses your body’s natural melatonin levels. Melatonin is the hormone that increases in your body during the evening, telling your body that it’s time to go to sleep and recharge. The release of melatonin helps to regulate your body’s circadian rhythm and sleep cycles. Blue light is emitted from your TV, computer and smartphone screens. Use the blue light filter function on your smart phone after the sun goes down. You can set them to turn on and off at your chosen times. Personally, my smartphone’s blue light filter is set to switch on at 9 pm and off at 6 am. If your TV, computer or laptop doesnt have a blue light filter function you can purchase blue light filter glasses that look just like regular reading glasses. Search for them online. There are specialty online stores that focus on these light filtering glasses.

Meditations: Yoga nidra for sleep and mindfulness meditation. These types of meditation are like a brain training exercise to keep your thoughts on the present moment. Insomnia can sometimes be caused by us dwelling on the past or worrying about the future. When we’re in the present moment we’re free to control our thoughts into something more productive. Specifically with yoga nidra mediation you will focus on each part of your body individually, making sure it is totally relaxed and ready for sleep. You willl often find that you’re only a quarter of the way through before you fall asleep, it’s surprisingly effective! Give it a go, there are guided meditation tracks online or in my favourite free meditation app Insight Timer.

Supplements: There are some supplements you can purchase from your pharmacy off the shelf. I like velarian root supplements. I’ve also tried melatonin with some success. Personally I haven’t experienced any side effects of using these but ask your doctor for more advice on these supplements and if they’re right for you.

Thank you so much for joining me today. Visit my Youtube channel, QueeenVK, for more Full Cup Wellness.

Keep your cup full!

What’s the purpose of thinking positively?

On June 2, 2021July 9, 2021 By queeenvkIn Help, Inspiration, self helpLeave a comment

**Click here to listen to me read out this post on my Podcast instead**

The title is a little dramatic. But sometimes our existence in our surrounding environment can feel awful.

Think about how perspective can make things seem more awful on one day compared with the next. Swing that perspective in another direction and things don’t seem so bad. Your boss was piling on the work without acknowledging your amazing report? You are affected by the person’s behaviour but you aren’t the cause of it. Perspective. It’s not your fault, you are amazing. Now you can communicate this with your boss or you can use the extra work to show that you deserve a promotion. You are in control of your present. See my previous post for why the present moment is so powerful and how to get there.

You are in control of your happiness if you want it. Hear me out. Happiness isn’t a destination, it’s a temporary feeling you can choose to enjoy. All emotions are temporary. Even anger and sadness. Yes, I suffer from depression and I’m going to share a brain training exercise that anyone with any level of mental heath can utilise. It takes pratice and won’t be easy to begin with. Your mind is so powerful that it can make new pathways when you keep pratising a skill until you master it.

Let’s practise right now.

Do a body scan and check in with yourself on how you’re feeling right now. If your shoulders are tensed and you’re biting your nails you might be feeling stressed or anxious. Relax your tense muscles and breathe deeply. Shallow breaths are a sign that you are not relaxed. You’re allowed to feel any emotions or think any thoughts but when any of them come into your mind imagine them floating back out of your mind. They can float down a stream as a leaf floating on the water’s surface, they can flow out of your body as you exhale. When you’re just noticing your breath or the sounds around you or just enjoying being in your body, that’s when you are in the present moment. You have found it! Well done.

Now that you have found the present you can choose your next thought or action or your next feeling. Feel happiness if you want to. Be without fear or pain if you want to.

The next part is a little more advanced but give it a go.

Look at the present you as though you are looking at yourself, a step away from yourself and outside of your own mind. Without your emotions. Look at yourself with kindness, as though you’re looking at your best friend. You want that person to be happy, content and safe.

Of course this all helps if you don’t struggle with self hatred…actually I do experience that myself so this is a helpful tool to get perspective on how I am treating myself. This tool can help you too. I have also felt the benefits of doing, what some people call, loving kindness meditation. Basically you send love and gratitude to yourself, your friends and family, then to your enemies and finally to everyone in the world. It’s a bit challenging when you’re mad at some people but to let go of that and feel gratitude and kindness towards those people is incredibly therapeutic. It’s easier if you remember that all people are like us in that they are also searching to be without pain or fear in each moment.

Surround yourself with positive thoughts and the positive things will continue to happen to you. It’s not that the number of positive situations increases but your perception of each situation changes the outcome. Perspective. It’s all perspective.

How thankful are you?

On August 23, 2018 By queeenvkIn Health, Help, Inspiration1 Comment

Practicing gratitude can be challenging on those days you want to curl up and completely shun the world. Sometimes it takes a boost of gratitude to help you get out of a slump. Gratitude for yourself, for others, for the world. Yes, even gratitude for your enemies.

Gratitude meditation can be considered one of the most simple ways to meditate. You can try it at any time and anywhere. All you need to do is reflect on all of the people and things that you are grateful for.

As Jack Kornfield says:

Open the meditation to include neutral people, difficult people, and even enemies- until you extend sympathetic joy to all beings everywhere, young and old, near and far.”

Benefits of Gratitude Meditation

You may be skeptical but there are many benefits to invoking feelings of gratitude.

Decreased levels of depression(Sirois, 2017 Gratitude Uniquely Predicts Lower Depression in Chronic Illness Populations)
Greater feelings of well-being (Nezlek, 2017 A daily diary study of relationships between feelings of gratitude and well-being)
Trust in social situations with strangers (Drążkowski, 2017 Gratitude pays: A weekly gratitude intervention influences monetary decisions, physiological responses, and emotional experiences during a trust-related social interaction)
Greater sleep quality (Jackowska, 2016: The impact of a brief gratitude intervention on subjective well-being, biology, and sleep)
Reduced levels of stress and increased happiness (Kyeong, 2018 Effects of Gratitude Meditation on Neural Network Functional Connectivity and Brain-Heart Coupling)

Here is an easy 10 minute meditation to wake up with which will help you start your day in a more positive way.

This guided gratitude meditation is just over 10 minutes long and you can listen to it wherever you like whether you’re on the train or bus on the way to work or just beginning your day.

How are gratitude and mindfulness linked?

Mindfulness is all about being aware without judgement of your thoughts. Try to observe your surroundings and also your internal mental state with compassion, without judgement.

I found it very useful to treat mindfulness as brain training. You can train your brain to stop reacting to negative situations with irritation and frustration. Expressing irritation and frustration will always lead to negative outcomes. Consider all of the times you showed irritation and how it worsened the situation. If we train ourselves to react with compassion and acceptance those negative moments become so much more bearable.

As written by Williams and Penman (2012), mindfulness can prevent the relapse of depression and I have definitely felt this in my personal experience. My depression and anxiety has become manageable and bearable thanks to the brain training towards a mindfulness mentality.

Feelings of sadness and pain are part of the normal human experience. However, our mental health is affected by the frustration with which we reaction to that sadness and pain. Sadness can cause a person to react with frustration. That frustration leads to more sadness. That sadness brings about more feelings of frustration that feeds the negative spiral downwards into depression.

The downward depression spiral can be stopped! There is hope. If we don’t react to negative emotions with irritation and frustration, but instead with compassion and acceptance, we can stop spiralling and become more productive.

“Once you’ve felt [negative emotions], acknowledge their existence and let go of the tendency to explain or get rid of them, they are much more likely to vanish naturally, like the mist on a spring morning.” -Williams and Penman, 2012

Acknowledge and accept the existence of your sadness and anger; then let them fade away. It’s just a moment in the span of your existence. Moments of pleasure don’t last just as moments of sadness don’t last. As long as you don’t feed them.

Happiness isn’t a life free of irritation and negativity. Happiness is a life where negativity and irritation aren’t fed and strengthened, they are acknowledged and accepted with humility.

“You can’t stop the triggering of unhappy memories, negative self-talk and judgmental ways of thinking -but what you can stop is what happens next. You can stop the vicious circle from feeding off itself and triggering the next spiral of negative thoughts.” -Williams and Penman, 2012

The next time you feel negativity bubbling up during a moment of vulnerability or desperation, do not get frustrated at yourself or at external factors, just take a deep breath and patiently acknowledge the experience, observe it as it simply fades away.

Gratitude makes it possible to notice the positive blessings around us and removes our thoughts from the difficulties we’re facing in this life. Mindfulness helps us react to our misfortunes with acceptance and humility.

Life is difficult enough for all of us, let’s not make it harder.

The positive potential

On August 6, 2018August 7, 2018 By queeenvkIn Health, Help, InspirationLeave a comment

The potential for meditation to assist people with many different ailments is enormous. People can turn to meditation for respite from anything including insomnia, anxiety, depression, chronic pain and addiction.

The positive mindset that meditation can bring seems to do so much good when we are experiencing such difficulty. Practising mindfulness through meditation has helped so many people move forward through the lowest points in their life in order to find the strength to carry on.

I’d love to share with you the experience of a friend who suffers from Crohn’s Disease, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that affects the lining of the digestive tract. It’s very painful and like many chronic illnesses it can prevent the person from working, or working as much as someone without a chronic illness which, as most of you know, can have a negative impact on every aspect of a person’s life (depression, stress, financial burden).

Here is Stuart’s story in his own words:

My life with mediation

My stress levels have been the biggest change with reducing stress due to the help of meditating…

Meditation has also changed the way I look at life as well the surroundings around me and understanding my own body…

My life has been a roller coaster since dignosed with a chronic illness which had taken over my self esteem but a close friend suggested to try meditation. After 8 months of self meditation my self confidence has been at a high and this helped me to deal with a chronic illness, Crohn’s Disease.

To control the mind and body through meditation and to do deal with the outcomes crohns throws at myself well it’s helped with the changes my body develops on a scale where its believed hard but mediation can bring happiness, self belief and self confidence.

If you have used meditation to help you through any difficulty in your life please comment below and tell us your story.

The Full Cup Wellness

Tag: Meditation