What is Healthy Sleep?

You know what sleep is, right? Sure you do, because all of us sleep.  Actually, most of us sleep. There are people who don’t sleep, and those people are aging faster. They’re dying faster than the rest of us. What’s really sad is that they feel like they’re dying. They’ve asked for help, but we don’t really know why they don’t sleep, so we can’t help them. There are also people who sleep but stop breathing. Those people have “sleep apnea”. Most of us have heard of them, and the “masks” they wear at night. We’re either related to them, sleep next to them, or are wearing one of those ourselves. The masks do help but they don’t really cure the  problem; we’re not supposed to stop breathing while we’re asleep. That’s a big problem!

There are also lots of people with sleep difficulties that have been completely ignored.  “I sleep fine but I’m still tired in the morning”, “I sleep fine” but “my memory is lousy”,  “ I sleep fine but I have a headache every day”, “I’m in a bad mood every day”. They’ve been ignored because we have no idea what to do. We focus on the headache, the mood,  the memory,  and make pills for them, but the problem is really the sleep. A healthy, happy person has healthy sleep every night. That healthy sleep means no medical problems and no pain. Take a pill for a medical problem? You’ve  had to start relying on outside help. That means your repair last night was not normal. It’s not that using outside help is wrong, but it is a message; “You’re not sleeping normally.”

We’re all miraculous “self-repairing beings”. Every night we’re supposed to get into deep sleep and repair everything. All the tools our cells use to do their individual jobs for us are made at night and stored. And, they  have to make enough stuff to last 18 hours! We need enough insulin to match the sugar we eat, enough serotonin to keep us content and curious, enough adrenaline to keep us alert and safe on the drive home. If we run out of insulin by 10:00 am we need a doctor to give us insulin, because we’re “diabetic”, if we run out of serotonin we’re given an antidepressant. They’re all just replacements for the chemicals we used to be able to make ourselves.

While we’re sleeping all the moving parts of our body get repaired too! Tendon fibers that broke when you lifted that suitcase re-make themselves. Lubricants in your joints get topped-up. Muscles that you ripped mend themselves. In order to make those repairs all of our moving parts have to get paralyzed. If you get paralyzed just right, every night, the repairs get done and you wake feeling great, physically and mentally! But what if we are unable to enter into and stay in deep sleep? What if the paralysis gets goofed up and we get “too paralyzed”, what happens then?

Sleep apnea is not due to being fat or having a fat neck. It is the result of being “too paralyzed” during deep sleep. Sleep apnea was first noticed in fat men.  We really had no idea why it was happening, but it seemed logical that it might be their “fat necks” getting in the way. Now we know that obesity and sleep apnea may come together, but fat is really not the cause of the apnea.  Both problems started to show up a lot more frequently in the early 1980’s as air conditioning and sunscreen changed us from “outside humans” into “inside humans”. Over the last forty years sleep disorders  are everywhere! They’re just as common in children as they are in adults, and they’re all over the world.

We have always lived outside, in the sun. We rely on the sun as much as plants do. Turns out we need the sun to have healthy sleep.  I will teach you how to use the hormone, vitamin D, that comes from the sun, to go back to repairing normally. RightSleep^® is what I’ve called it. It’s a process that includes both advice and vitamins to get you back to sleeping normally. You can learn about RightSleep^® on this site and you can schedule an informational session with me if you still have questions. Read further at: What if Your Poor Sleep is Not Really Your Fault?