Tired—But Unable to Sleep?

You know that certain people, no matter how worn out they become, are actually unable to sleep and rest.

It takes a healthy amount of energy in your energy factories, called the mitochondria, to be able to have this really wonderful sleep. So today we're going to talk about three things that you can do to improve not just sleeping, but also resting.

Some people just can't get into the deep sleep state because their bodies simply won't allow it, while others have way too much energy and can't sleep because they have too much adrenaline or nervous energy flowing through their bloodstream.

The organs with the most mitochondria are the heart and the brain; as a result, both of these organs require a lot of oxygen, and when they don't get enough oxygen, they become dysfunctional. There are several things you can do to increase oxygen into the mitochondria in order to heal or support the mitochondria in the brain.

Okay, so let's start by talking about energy. Exercise is the number one recommendation because it increases oxygen levels in the body. We prefer to do two types of exercise each day: weight training and higher intensity exercise. With the higher intensity exercise, we do really short durations. However, we always go on long walks or go hiking or do other low-intensity walking that is great for sleep. So exercise is at the top of the list.

What's called the stress reflex—and try to sleep when you're stressed and you can't. So it's all about increasing the amount of O2 in the mitochondria and B1 before bed. This is a great way to do that. The next thing is to open your windows. If you can at night when you're sleeping that is going to give you more oxygen than trying to recirculate some of this kind of stale air that's in your room.

Having plants in your room also will increase the oxygen because they give off oxygen and they take in CO2.

Another thing that increases oxygen is coenzyme Q10. And then another great remedy is called methylene blue. This was the first drug that medicine ever introduced in their health care system. Methylene blue has been around since the 1800s. Methylene blue will make your urine green because the blue mixes with the yellow, and it turns out green. But there are a lot of interesting positive effects when you take it in small or diluted amounts.

Let's talk about that circadian rhythm controlled by the supra chiasmatic nucleus. How do you get that to work correctly? It's controlled by light in dark cycles.

When you are in your house at night with the lights on all the way up until the time you go to bed, that is going to be very dysfunctional because it's going to work against that rhythm. The ideal situation is to work with this light and dark cycle and this rhythm with nature, which means that you would want to start turning down the lights at sunset.

Now that's really difficult in the winter, isn't it? When it gets dark out at 4:30 p.m., but typically in the summertime it starts to get dark at nine p.m., if you were to be in your house and start to use dim lights, that would be a really good thing. So your body's starting to get used to this decrease in light and you can even replace certain lights in your house with incandescent lights, which give off more infrared which is very good for your sleep cycle.

With infrared, you can also avoid blue lights from your computer. Now, that's hard for some people, but not for extremely healthy people, because they’re not on their computer at night. They’re on the computer in the morning, but the blue light that's emanating from your electrical devices can definitely worsen your melatonin.

The thing that helps you sleep at night is that you can get some infrared lights. You can start dimming your lights, get some incandescent lights, and not be around the LEDs. If you had the light from your fireplace, or even a campfire, that yellow golden light that's giving off a lot of infrared and very low blue light,if any, is very therapeutic for sleeping.

You get the blue light blocker glasses and you can filter out that blue light. That's beneficial. But the point is that if you're going to start watching TV, turn off the lights in the room. It's really dark, so you have just smaller amounts of light, that is going to be very therapeutic for your circadian rhythms. You can even wear an eye mask when you go to sleep because you have to have it in the pitch black room.

You can sleep if the lights are on. You can time your eating. You're going to find that if you don't eat too late, you're going to sleep better. If you can really do this, if you, let's say you ate one meal a day and that last meal was right around three o'clock, that would be the ideal situation to eat to improve your circadian rhythms, but it might interfere with your social life. This is because a lot of people don't eat at that time, so you might be eating by yourself, or if you're doing two meals a day.

Maybe you do the first meal in the morning, and the second meal at three, that would be the ideal situation. If you can't do that then, do something that's related to that, and just avoid eating five hours before you go to bed. So if you go to bed at 10 p.m., consume your food at five p.m. That will at least give you five hours for your system to kind of get settled in to start aligning with the circadian wave.

If you're traveling, even in the same time zone, this will interfere with your brain's internal clock and the GPS system that allows it to determine where you are in space. So a good way to deal with jet lag when you travel, is to take a lot more vitamin D. I mean, just doing an experiment, eating a very heavy meal before you go to bed and then seeing how you sleep just doesn't work. So just experiment with it and see if it doesn't help you.

You should do this often. So you might take, say, 30-40-50,000 units as the main vitamin that helps reset those systems to really help you get on track a lot faster. When traveling to two separate countries, utilize vitamin D. What time should you go to bed? Usually, 10 o'clock is the ideal time to do so. You should go to bed between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., but some people find that difficult since there is simply too much going on.

You should avoid going to bed before 12 a.m. because there is undoubtedly a problem. If you stay up past 12, your body will start to wake up suddenly, and you'll miss that wave. As a result, you'll have to wait for your body to get tired—about 90 minutes—which has occurred several times with many people, leaving them exhausted at 9:30 p.m.

You want to work with your body's waves and catch them so you can enter a deep sleep. This is the experiment with what works for you, but generally, 10 o'clock would be the best for most people. When awake, you need to wait for a while until tired again.

People should work out a little earlier and then go to bed around seven or seven and a half hours after. However, some individuals require eight hours. The ideal sleeping time is between seven and eight hours. You should support the adrenals with specific types of adaptogens and take desiccated adrenal supplements. If you wake up in the middle of the night, say at 2 a.m., or even one, and if you're getting up frequently to urinate, this indicates that you still have insulin resistance to deal with. Currently, we believe sleep is so crucial for so many things, and if a muscular spasm wakes you up, you may need additional magnesium, potassium, or calcium.