30-40% of adults experience one of several types of sleep disorders. Much of the industrialized world toils away with an oppressive and mounting sleep debt that rivals the burden on people’s health and life expectancy that the national debt exacts on people’s livelihoods. Disturbances of sleep include insomnia, or the inability to fall asleep and stay asleep when you want and for as long as you need. Read on to learn NATURAL steps to restore sleep's rhythms and to revitalize your days...
Sleep is a Waste of Time, Right?
By the time we are 50, we will, on average, have devoted about 5,110 nights (7.5 hours nightly) to sleep, or at least attempting to get enough of it in a way that leaves us feeling rested, refreshed and with sufficient energy to engage our daily routines. In my last blog (http://bit.ly/SleepingTime), I introduced information that invites us to question conventional folk wisdom about what good sleep is “supposed” to look like. While it is clear that the form sleep takes each night can and often does vary from person to person, or even the same person over time. Still, despite this variability, there is little question of what happens when we don’t get what our body needs in the way of sufficient sleep.
What is a "Good Night's Sleep" Anyway?
Is our 8-hour work day responsible for the explosion of sleep-related problems that have contributed to the meteoric rise of thousands of sleep clinics and sleep medicine professionals around the country that track the electrical firing patterns arising in our brains in a desperate nightly search to diagnose the cause of sleep disturbances? What is driving the expanding menagerie of devices and treatment protocols promising to restore “natural” sleep patterns? What is the link between the surging numbers of people suffering from obesity, depression, and memory disturbance and a chronically sleep deprived population? Read on to learn the answers to these questions...and more.