Prioritize Your Sleep
Sleep is described in the Mandukya Upanishad as a state where the mind transcends physical consciousness, finding rest and rejuvenation by connecting with the deeper layers of the self. In the "waking" state, we interact with the world through our sensory perceptions. Our understanding of the world around us may be limited by the range and scope of our senses. In the "dreaming" state, the mind is active. We are not interacting with the world around us not through our senses but through our imaginations, feelings, and experiences of the awake state, building transient pictures about the world. Beyond the dream state comes the state of "deep sleep" when the mind and the body are inactive. There is no thought, emotion, imagination, or creation. It's a state of complete void - blank, dark, and empty. It is after deep sleep that you feel truly rested, ready to start the cycle of perception, experience, integration, and creation.
Modern Science on the study of sleep offers the mechanism of sleep and four theories - Inactivity theory, Energy Conservation theory, Restorative theory, and the Brain Plasticity theory - to explain why we sleep. Habitual short sleep duration affects appetite-regulating hormones and is associated with increased Body Mass Index. The association of adequate sleep with emotional well-being is well-researched. Healthy sleep repairs adaptive processing, functional brain activity, and integrity of the medial prefrontal cortex-amygdala connections, and thus improves the capacity to regulate emotions as well as an individual's well-being.
The 2017 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms are driven by an internal biological clock that anticipates day/night cycles to optimize the physiology and behavior of organisms. Their research identified the gene that encodes certain proteins to build up in a cell at night and is broken down the following day. Each cell carries these light-dark cycle genes. In the late evening, our master clock, which is set by the light-dark cycle, is cuing all the other clocks in the body that it’s time to rest. “The clock in the brain is sending signals saying: Do not eat, do not eat!” When we override this signal and eat anyway, the clock in your pancreas, for instance, is forced to start releasing insulin to deal with the meal. Research suggests that this late-night munching may start to actually reset the clock in the organ. The result? Competing time cues. “The pancreas is listening for signals related to food intake. But that’s out of sync with what the brain is telling it to do,” says Turek. “So, if we’re sending signals to those organs at the wrong time of day, we’re upsetting the balance.”
The findings of the Nobel Laureates validates Ayruvedic thought of living in harmony with the rhythms of Nature. When we are in harmony with our external ecosystem, internal health is more readily available, If we step out of the daily and seasonal rhythms of nature, imbalances might begin to appear in our internal ecosystem.
It is recommended to eat your last meal at least 2 hours before bedtime. If your meal is heavy and spicy, then a gap of 3 hours between the last meal and sleep time is recommended. This allows enough time for food to be digested before you go to bed. During sleep, the muscle activity that moves food through the digestive tract slows down. A balanced meal - whole grains, vegetables & fruit, protein sources like lean meat, fish, nuts and seeds, and healthy oils - gives enough nutrients (macro- and micro-) to help the body produce serotonin which is essential to produce melatonin, the hormone responsible for good sleep.
The four most important vitamins and minerals that are required to promote sleep are tryptophan, magnesium, calcium, and Vitamin B6. While tryptophan is an amino acid that gets converted into the neurotransmitter serotonin and then into the hormone melatonin (a hormone responsible for regulating your sleep/wake patterns), magnesium is a powerful mineral that aids in getting sleep. Calcium-rich foods help the brain make melatonin and Vitamin B6 converts tryptophan into melatonin
