AWeber - FOHAC News Power of Sleep #292a

Published: Wed, 03/11/15

Fair Oaks Health News

Welcome

March 11, 2015

Power of Sleep

Hi ,

When you end up in a hospital, do you stop to wonder how much sleep your attending physician got last night? Your life is in their hands and you would like them to have their wits about them. I mean, if they were obviously drunk, would you let them make life and death decisions for you? I think you might have a problem with that. Yet are you aware that functioning on only five to six hours of sleep leaves you functioning as well, cognitively, as someone who is drunk? You don’t see the staggering or smell the alcohol on their breath, but the impact on their ability to think and problem solve is the same. And yet it is common for hospitals to schedule their doctors to work 24-hour shifts.

How about that truck driver in the lane next to you that got to bed at midnight and had to be back at work by 6 am the next morning for an early load? At best he has had maybe 5 hours of sleep. Yet we want to believe that he or she is safe on the road. This is common in the trucking industry.

Lack of sleep makes you stupid. It slows your reaction times. It interferes with your ability to form memories, process information, and act rationally. Sleep deprivation amps up your emotions by making you more reactive, experience more fear and more anger. And these are just the cognitive effects. The physical impact on the body is immense. Getting only 6 hours of sleep per night triples your risk of high blood pressure and doubles your chances of having a heart attack. Poor sleep shuts down your immune system, messes up your metabolism, and sets you up for such lovely diseases as diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. A lack of sleep will even make you fat.

Now here is the scary part – at any one moment it is estimated that 40% of Americans are sleep deprived. That means that two of the five cars around you on the freeway have people driving them that are functionally drunk without ever having taken a drink. Or worse, you might be one of those two out of five people.

The average person needs 8 to 9 hours of sleep every night to be functioning at their best. Some people do ok with only 7 hours and others need 10 or 11 hours to function well. But everyone needs more than 6 hours. Part of the problem is that, just like the drunk person, when our thinking ability is compromised by a lack of sleep, our ability to be aware that we are compromised is lost. We think we are normal, but we are not. We are operating at a diminished capacity. Our reactions are slowed and our thinking is less perceptive and more reactively emotional.

Why is sleep so important?

Lots of stuff is happening while we are asleep. While we are awake the brain is working at a furious pace thinking, imagining, planning, feeling, learning, and so on. This pace produces a lot of garbage in the brain – literally scrap materials. Like a busy woodworking shop or craft studio, the process of creating and working produces unwanted trash in the form of clumps of proteins and reactive waste products. When we sleep, the brain slows down and the cleanup crew comes in to take out the trash to get us ready for the new day. If we don’t get enough sleep, the brain never gets cleaned out and the trash starts building up. Before long, the trash starts compromising the function of the brain. Alzheimer’s is an example of too much trash in the brain; it’s usually 20 years worth of trash before the diagnosis is made. Every year of that 20 years the brain was functioning a little worse each day.

Sleep time is when the brain takes the memories and learning from the day and encodes them for long term memory. If you are not getting enough sleep, you don’t form the solid long-term memories that create your history. How well do you remember last week or last month? Can you recall the details of your life? If not, lack of sleep may be the problem.

One reason we may not be getting the restful and restorative sleep we need is not surprising. It’s (drum roll please) … our lifestyle. One major factor affecting our sleep has to do with the time of day we choose to sleep relative to actual daylight hours. Other factors include the time of day we eat, our level of stress and the use of artificial lighting - especially from computers.

Our body was designed to get up with the sun and go to bed when the sun goes down. This natural rhythm is built into our brain in the pineal gland. This gland registers the amount of sunlight we are seeing and controls the output of the sleep hormone Melatonin. This gland is especially sensitive to the wavelengths of light at the higher end of the spectrum; the blue colors. It tends to ignore the deep reds and oranges, like in a sunset or the colors given off by a campfire. The blue light tells the pineal gland that it is time to wake up and get busy. Artificial lighting, especially that coming from a computer is high in the blue end of the spectrum. When we look at computer screens and similar devices late at night, our production of the sleep hormone gets delayed by several hours making it harder for us to get a full restful night’s sleep.

Stress is an obvious cause of poor sleep, so it is vital for us to de-stress during each day. Physical exercise is one of the most reliable methods of de-stressing as long as we don’t over train. Meditation, yoga, positive family and friend time, dancing, singing, and quite-alone-time are all good at helping us reduce the stress from the day. Unfortunately activities like watching television and cruising the internet do not lower our stress levels.

Meal timing is an interesting tool for setting our sleep-wake cycle. A lot of research is being done in this area, but unfortunately most of it is being done on mice, not humans. Mice are naturally nocturnal so the results may not apply to us. But the main finding from this research is that our main or largest meal of the day is best eaten mid-day and not late at night. I would say to experiment for yourself to see if shifting your meal timing around changes your sleep quality.

The big point here is that sleep is vital to health for everyone. We all need 7 to 9 hours of restful sleep each night. There is no such thing as being able to learn how to function without enough sleep, it only seems that way because our ability to discern how well we are functioning becomes impaired. Seriously, not enough sleep sets you up for early brain degeneration and lots of nasty diseases. So get a good night’s sleep. It is important

enough to make sleep a priority over the things that might currently be keeping you from getting the sleep you need.

Take care,

David

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Re: Ellen

Ellen is into her last week at Mercy acute Rehab. She is set to be discharged Thursday March 12th. They have been working her hard and I am seeing good improvements. Her speech is greatly improved and she is now able to eat normal food and drink. Her left side is still paralyzed so the arm and leg are limp, but she is getting function back in the trunk muscles and a bit in the hip. She is so dedicated to her clients that she has started seeing clients in the afternoon right there in the hospital room after her therapy sessions are finished. I am building her a wheelchair ramp into the house today. At her current speed I expect she will want to spend a few hours in the office each day seeing folks before too long.

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Colloidal

Silver

The flu and cold season is upon us and the best remedy I know is a couple ounces of colloidal silver every hour till it dissipates. Usually for me that is about four hours. We have new 8 ounce bottles of colloidal silver in the office for only $8 - a tiny fraction

of the price elsewhere. Plus refills are only $4. Or if you have a large crew to care for we have a limited number of one gallon containers for only $30.
Pick some up today.

Ultrasound Physical Therapy

Cancelled

We have lost our ultrasound therapist, Hyla, so we are discontinuing offering this therapy in the office at this time. Our condolences to her family at her untimely death.

On the Wire

Coffee May Lower Risk of Heart Attacks

36 previous studies and now a huge study of 25,000 Koreans has shown that moderate coffee consumption of 3 to 5 cups a day lowers your risk of heart disease. This is the exact opposite of what the government has been telling us for years. Coffee beans, like so many herbs and berries, is very high in anti-oxidants, which helps decrease inflammation in the artery walls. The caution is primarily the caffeine, as too much caffeine can increase blood pressure and interfere with sleep.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/3-5-cups-coffee-day-may-lower-risk-000914245.html#iTh8W7N

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"Sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together."

- Thomas Dekker

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Science Behind Anti-Depressants May Be Completely Backwards

Anti-depressants are the most widely prescribed drugs in America, yet the entire theory their use is based on may be wrong. The theory says that depression is caused by not enough of the transmitter serotonin in the brain. Yet 13 of the 15 studies on serotonin production in the brain show that depression is in fact associated with too much serotonin production, not too little. This combined with the fact that the drugs like prozac and paxil actually raise serotonin levels in just a few minutes, yet it takes weeks for patients to notice any effects from these drugs points to the conclusion that the mood improvements some people get from the drugs is in spite of the drugs, not because of the drugs.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/28/how-anti-depressants-work_n_6707272.html

"I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"

-Ernest Hemingway
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Vitamin D deficiency may be the prime cause of diabetes type 2

For many years the established view has been that the primary cause of type 2 diabetes is obesity. That view may need to be revised with this new study that shows a higher correlation between low vitamin D levels than obesity. This makes sense to me because vitamin D is actually a hormone that regulates our immune system, and most new diabetes these days is actually caused by the immune system attacking our own pancreas cells.

http://news.yahoo.com/common-vitamin-deficiency-may-raise-diabetes-risk-more-201937441.html

"The nicest thing for me is sleep, then at least I can dream."

- Marilyn Monroe

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Our address is 9725 Fair Oaks Blvd.

Finding the new location is very easy. Coming from highway 50 up Sunrise Blvd, you turn left and go up a block. We are on the right hand side - the building just past the Subway Sandwich shop. If you are coming down Sunrise from the Mall area then just turn right on Fair Oaks Blvd and up a block on the right.

If you are coming from the Roseville area you could come down Sunrise Blvd, but that is a long trek. It is probably shorter time wise to come down Auburn Blvd - San Juan Ave like you have been for the Sunset office, but instead of turning left at Sunset, keep going straight 3 more lights to Fair Oaks Blvd and turn left. Go down 2 lights to New York Ave, go through the intersection, and immediately turn into the turn lane once the center divider ends. We are on the left.

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visit http://www.fairoakshealth.com"

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About Dr. DeLapp

Dr. DeLapp has been a philosopher, non-force Chiropractor, medical intuitive, and health innovator for over 30 years. He began experimenting with medical intuition in 1972 while studying physics at UC Davis. In addition to physics he designed and completed an individual major in the philosophy and psychology of education. Shortly after he choose to pursue a career in the only truly health oriented profession available at that time, Chiropractic. He graduated with honors in 1981 with his doctorate and opened a private practice.
Since that time he has continued his research into the effects of consciousness and learning on health.
He developed the Biomagnetic Retraining system for correcting movement abnormalities.
Since 1991 he has focused on developing a powerful system for uncovering and assisting the mind-body connection in health and personal growth. The in-depth coaching, guided by the subconscious direction from the body, is called Heartflow and the simpler mind-body retraining for health and unfoldment he has named Gracework. Both are available at Fair Oaks Health.

Fair Oaks Healing
& Arts Center
Staff