The simple answer to this question is: it’s not simple. The relationship between sleep and weight loss is, in fact, wrapped up in both our mental and physical health processes. It’s true that you do burn off a small number of calories as you sleep, due to something called your basal metabolic rate — which is the number of calories it takes for basic human processes like breathing and blood circulation. But that doesn’t burn enough fat to allow you to lose weight.
It’s also not accurate to say that getting a good night’s sleep boosts your metabolism higher, helping you to lose more calories. That’s a common myth, but it’s not true.
But what IS true, paradoxically, is that getting inadequate amounts of sleep can lead to an increased risk for obesity in many age groups. A 2020 meta-analysis published in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice clearly indicated that short sleep duration was “significantly associated with the risk of future obesity”
ANXIETY has become the defining mental health issue of our time, with women affected at twice the rate of men, and children, teens and young adults now more stressed and anxious than ever.
Join us to learn about gut-brain connections, the amazing amino acids and other nutritional solutions for anxiety and digestive distress.
Dr. Eva Detko has put some amazing work into the Mind, Body & the Vagus Nerve Connection Summit, which starts this Monday with 44 nervous system health experts –> Join me when you register now!
Many people overstimulate their nervous systems and become desensitized to chronic stress. Over time, this can lead to low vagal tone, which has been linked to a variety of mental and physical health issues, including chronic inflammation, neurodegeneration, poor gut function, autoimmunity and cancer. And we know this to be true: you cannot FULLY heal leaky gut, microbiome function or brain issues WITHOUT optimizing your vagus function. Learn how you can improve vagus nerve function and restore balance to your autonomic nervous system. Enjoy learning from Mind, Body & the Vagus Nerve Connection Summit from August 16-22, 2021. It’s free and online!
On August 15, celebrate a day dedicated to chilling out. With these relaxation tips, you might be surprised how much you benefit from some me-time.
National Relaxation Day was created in 1985 by a 9-year-old Michigan boy who believed people “think too much about working” and that “people don’t think enough about relaxing.” For the past 35 years, August 15 has marked this celebration of leisure. For the upcoming 36th anniversary of the holiday, let’s take a closer look at why relaxation is not just fun, but fundamental to your overall wellbeing. Then, you can turn this once-a-year event into a daily routine.
Mental and physical health benefits of relaxation
Taking a step away from the rigors and demands of your everyday life can have a profoundly positive effect on your mood, energy, and stability. In fact, Mayo Clinic suggests regularly engaging in a relaxing activity as one of their six top strategies for avoiding job burnout, one of the most common and most difficult mental health struggles that working people face.
Limiting your stress through practicing intentional relaxation can also help you:
Manage your blood pressure
Fall asleep more easily
Avoid stress-related afflictions like ulcers
Have a decreased likelihood of smoking or obesity
Improve your immune system
Three tips to help you actively de-stress
So you’ve decided to incorporate a little more relaxation into your life. Okay, what next?
Getting to a relaxed state of mind isn’t something that just happens to you. Paradoxically, learning to appreciate relaxation can actually take a little bit of work. These three tips will make that effort easier and help you incorporate de-stressing techniques into your daily routine.
1. Remember that relaxation is me-time
Me-time doesn’t actually have to do with being alone versus in a group of people; you can definitely relax with partners, friends, and families! Instead, me-time is an important descriptor that helps you identify why you’re doing something, not just who you’re doing it with.
However you choose to relax, make sure you’re pursuing that activity purely for your own enjoyment. Something that seems relaxing on the outside can still be stress-inducing if you have ulterior motives to worry about. For example, writing music won’t be relaxing if you’re doing it on a tight deadline as part of your job. Me-time activities shouldn’t be strongly linked to your career goals or daily responsibilities.
2. Go in with a plan
Do you know what definitely won’t help you de-stress? Frantically trying to figure out how you should relax during your lunch hour, after work, or on the weekend. Thinking forward to your free time, consider some methods for relaxing that you might enjoy. This will help you take full advantage of the moment when it arrives.
There are an infinite number of ways to relax because everyone has different interests and skills. Here just a few that you might enjoy:
Meditation – Whether it’s a guided group class or a solo session out in nature, meditation can help you achieve a relaxing reset.
Yoga – Establish a strong mind-body connection by combining inner focus with physical stamina.
Exercise – Getting active will help you feel happier, more energetic, and less stressed. It’s a fun way to challenge yourself and build discipline.
Reading – A great story can transport you from your current reality and let you explore someone else’s for a while. You might even learn something incredibly valuable along the way. Plus, it’s always fun to read books that are being adapted into film this summer.
3. Join a community that will help you relax year-round
Who you choose to relax with is just as important as the activity you pursue. Often, friendships and relaxation go hand-in-hand. Finding groups to share your hobbies and socialize with will help you achieve a relaxed state of mind more frequently. Carrying those good feelings into your daily life makes it much less difficult to handle your job and other responsibilities.
If you don’t find a group near you engaging in your particular interests, you can easily create your own Meetup group and invite others to actively de-stress together.
Restful, restorative sleep has been shown to increase resilience, making it easier to cope with stress and regulate our emotions. Sleep even impacts how well your brain adapts and how you are able to process emotion.
More specifically, your brain cleans house while you are sleeping. During sleep the metabolic activity of your brain goes up about 10 times. Research shows that the neurons in the brain actually shrink by about 60% to make room for the movement of cerebrospinal fluid through our brain to remove toxins and deliver oxygen and nutrients.
This cleanup function strengthens and recharges your brain’s capacity for resilience, helping you adapt and change by building new connections which enhances your ability to regulate your emotions and behavior.
Sleep deprivation compromises your ability to focus, connect and make thoughtful decisions. Resilience requires energy and poor sleep depletes your energy reserves.
When you don’t get enough sleep, small day-to-day stressors like coping with work pressure or relationship hiccups can feel more overwhelming. Simply put, when you are physically exhausted, you have less capacity for resilience.
How Sleep Makes You More Resilient
Sleep helps to enhance mental strength and resilience. This is one reason it may feel easier to respond to life’s difficult times when you are rested.
Research shows that sleep enhances cognitive function. A study at UCLA has shown that sleep deprivation negatively impacts brain maintenance and repair and compromises mental acuity and optimal brain activity. This impacts your ability to focus, slows your reaction time, compromises your ability to make decisions, to multi-task and store new memories.
The Better Sleep Council found that 79% of people would feel better and more prepared for the day with an extra hour of sleep. Sleeping only 6-7 hours, you are twice as likely to be involved in a car crash, and sleeping less than 5 hours increases your risk 4-5 times.
Additional research has found that continuity of sleep is important for memory consolidation. This study found that during restorative sleep, important memories are consolidated and creativity is boosted as well.
Sleep also appears to restore our emotional brain circuits, supporting healthy levels of mood supporting hormones, including serotonin, dopamine, and cortisol, that affect your tools of resilience, including your thought, mood, and energy.
Your Prefrontal Cortex Needs Sleep to Function
Research correlates poor sleep with diminished function of the prefrontal cortex and finds “the prefrontal cortex is disproportionately negatively influenced when an individual is low in sleep quantity or experiences poor sleep quality.”
Your prefrontal cortex is foundational to resilience. Your prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain located behind your forehead, supports not only your “executive function” and your ability to organize, plan, and make decisions, but also your emotional intelligence, and your ability to understand, engage self-control and manage your emotional response.
Research on emotion and the prefrontal cortex finds that “the prefrontal cortex plays a critical role in the generation and regulation of emotion.” In other words, this region of the brain needs healthy stimulation and blood flow to support healthy emotional regulation and value-based decision making, including the following nine emotionally supportive aspects of the prefrontal cortex identified by Dr. Daniel J. Siegel in his 2007 book The Mindful Brain.
When you are short of sleep, we have less glucose fueling the pre-frontal cortex, enhancing your resilience to handle both the expected and unexpected challenges of daily life.
Neurophysiological research indicates that resilience and self-regulation relies disproportionately on the prefrontal cortex to calm the amygdala ((which controls our perception of threat) regions of the brain.
According to the study: “Glucose fuels such brain activity in general and has been linked specifically to self-regulation. Data indicates that decrements in glucose lead to impaired self-regulation, and restoration of glucose repairs self-regulation. Brain glucose is utilized throughout the day and replenished during sleep, as evidenced by neuro-imagery delineating a decrease in cerebral metabolism during sleep deprivation. Indeed, sleep difficulties have been clearly linked with decrements in activity in the prefrontal cortex.”
Resilience and self-regulation relies disproportionately on the prefrontal cortex and amygdala regions of the brain. If the prefrontal cortex is lacking energy and cannot suppress your perception of threat from the amygdala, your ability to tap into your higher cognitive function and resilience is compromised.
Poor sleep reduces connectivity between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex regions of the brain, resulting in lapses in attention, poor risk assessment, analysis and management (important for self-regulation as you choose among alternative strategies for goal-directed action). The study noted that “avoiding choices where risks are disproportionately higher than rewards requires utilizing the prefrontal cortex.”
The Role of Sleep in Mental Health
Sleep and mental health are closely connected as sleep plays an essential role in helping you regulate your emotions, behavior, and mood.
In fact, it is not uncommon for those who struggle with mental health problems to also suffer from sleep challenges. Sleep deprivation definitely takes its toll on your mental health. For example, research has found that many as two thirds of patients suffering from clinical levels of anxiety or depression also suffer from insomnia.
The correlation between mental health and sleep problems is so common that research actually recognizes sleep challenges as a causal factor in the development of mental health disorders. For example, research found that insomnia more than doubles the risk of future depression and anxiety. Similarly, chronic sleep problems affect 50% to 80% of patients in a typical psychiatric practice, compared with 10% to 18% of adults in the general U.S. population.
This could be attributed to the impact between sleep and resilience and sleep and memory. More specifically, research on sleep-dependent emotional brain processing found that sleep helps with support healthy emotional-memory processing. Poor sleep can contribute to anger, impatience, irritability, and lack of energy. As a result, poor sleep may make you more likely to remember negative events, and less able to focus on the positive.
Healthy sleep patterns are also associated with positive personality characteristics. Research found that those who suffer from sleep challenges also report lower levels of optimism and self- esteem.
Essential Oils for Sleep
Essential Oils can help calm the mind and the body before bed to both fall asleep and stay asleep for 7-8 hours per night. This allows the body to rest, regenerate, repair, detoxify, balance blood sugar levels, burn calories, support immune activity and reset our energy reserves.
Several calming and relaxing essential oils are known for their sedative properties that can help promote restful sleep.
Lavender essential oil is most often correlated with enhanced sleep. Research has shown that lavender may actually be able to alter brain waves and reduce stress. For example, research has found that essential oils, like Lavender™, can bind to the receptors on your cells that receive your body’s calming neurotransmitter, Gamma-Aminobutyric acid (GABA), and help balance your brain’s level of excitation and inhibition which is vital for normal brain function and a healthy nervous system.
Lavender has also been found to relieve anxiety and calm your nerves. One study even suggested that lavender works as well as the anti-anxiety medication Lorazepam for calming anxiety. When your mind and body relax, it allows your pineal gland to release melatonin so you can easily drift off the sleep.
Scientists also concluded that inhaling Lavender essential oil can calm the nervous system and improve brain waves appropriate to a sleep state. “Lavender oil caused significant decreases of blood pressure, heart rate, and skin temperature, which indicated a decrease of autonomic arousal. In terms of mood responses.”
The study also found that lavender oil increased the power of theta (4-8 Hz) and alpha (8-13 Hz) brain activities that help promote sleep – improving sleep quality, and increase time spent in deep, slow-wave sleep.
Researchers monitoring sleep cycles with brain scans found that lavender increased slow-wave sleep, which helps slow your heartbeat and relax your muscles, which allows you to sleep more soundly.
A variety of issues may be impacting your ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. Once you understand the root cause of your sleep challenges, it is easier to resolve them.
For Help Falling Asleep: Our body’s natural sleep/wake cycle known as the circadian rhythms are regulated by the sleep hormone, melatonin which has an antagonistic relationship with the stress hormone, cortisol. Chronic and prolonged stress triggers the release of excess cortisol at night, driving down melatonin and making it difficult to fall asleep. If you struggle to fall asleep due to stress or racing thoughts, consider Circadian Rhythm™, which triggers the pineal gland to naturally release melatonin.
For Help with Night Waking: Waking up in the middle of the night can be attributed to detoxification, blood sugar or hormonal issues.
Blood Sugar Wake Ups: Waking up and feeling so wide awake that you could go clean the kitchen can suggest blood sugar issues. If blood sugar plummets during the night, the adrenal glands release adrenalin as an emergency blood sugar raising tactic. This adrenalin surge is what wakes you up. The pancreas then has to kick into high gear to return blood sugar levels to normal. Supporting the pancreas in this effort with Vibrant Blue Oils Pancreas™ blend helps return the body to balance so you can fall back asleep.
Detoxification Wake Ups: When you wake up between 1 a.m. – 3 a.m. but are still groggy enough to fall back to sleep, that is often because the Liver is overloaded. During the night, the liver is busy rebuilding the body and cleansing it of accumulated toxins. The liver is most active between 1 – 3 AM, often peaking at 3 AM. When you awaken at this time, it is often a signal that the liver needs a little support. Vibrant Blue Oils Liver™ blend applied before bed and during night waking can help you return to a restful slumber.
Other Essential Oils formulations that help support sleep include:
Sleep™ blend contains Spikenard which is known for its relaxing qualities.
The Calm™ blend and Lavender™ are also very relaxing and work well on small children, especially when added to a Healing bath before bed.
Featured Oils:
Ready to get started? Click the links below to order today:
I think of breathing in two different ways, after we acknowledge that breathing is mandatory for life and air always enters into the lungs.
#1: I use breath in a way that helps me to harness my reflexive core in exercise or to manage load.
#2: I use breathing as a practice when lying down or seated to manage my mind/body connection. This is better known as stress management or meditation.
Breathing for Core Strategy or Load Management
Air enters your body automatically because of pressure differences between the atmosphere and your internal body. By virtue of this automatic flow of air into your body, you need to increase volume somewhere to accommodate the incoming air.
This shape change is what we call breathing. We can change shape in our ribs and our chest as well as our stomach. The artful design of our body created the lungs to take in the air and they happen to live in our ribs which are designed to expand.
On the other hand, our stomach expands with increased food content. But if our abdomen expands when we take air into our lungs, it is really a bulge because no air actually changes the volume of the stomach. Think about a water balloon and how if you squeeze it, the rest of the balloon pushes out. Essentially that is what is happening on a belly breath. The ribs tighten so the belly can jut out.
Hopefully, it makes sense now that optimal breathing for movement and exercise utilizes mostly the movement of the ribs, which are designed to expand. The overflow of pressure then moves into the belly.
When you expand your ribs to breathe, you do not push down into your core. Nor into your pelvic floor. However, when you belly breathe, you do push down and out because of simple body mechanics.
Is a yoga belly breath bad? No, I enjoy lying on my back and allowing more shape change in my tummy as part of relaxation. Would I belly breathe when doing a goblet squat? A FIRM NO!
Find out how to assess your breathing and breathe for optimal core and pelvic floor health during Sarah’s free Short and Sweet webinar on July 15, 2021.
Breathing for Meditation or Stress Management
Breath work was my entryway into meditation. I found guided meditations difficult and distracting, but breath work kept my mind on my body and allowed for meditation to occur. There is a lot of good scientific research now on the power of meditation of any kind to lower stress levels and blood pressure levels, in addition to helping patients recover from trauma.
Let’s look at some of my favorite breath work guides.
Ana Lilia
Ana suffered from various stress related symptoms until she discovered breath work. She became a certified breath coach and has guided thousands of people to connect with their breath. Her healing journeys include music and guidance. I have enjoyed her free breath work offers and you may as well. She has been featured on NBC news, BravoTv, the LA Times, and Harpers Bazar.
Tai Hubbart
Tai says “For the majority of my early life I struggled with depression, and for over a decade, I suffered with chronic headaches. While I was able to remain high-functioning professionally in the Advertising & Design industry, I had little capacity to enjoy life, and spent the majority of my resources trying to track down the root of my dis-ease and simply feel better.
“In 2009, I decided to leave my corporate position and take a life/healing sabbatical in which I could listen more deeply and redirect my life’s compass.” She leads group breath work sessions, and one-on-ones. In the breath work section of her website you can enjoy a 28-minute introduction to breath work.
Annalise Sullivan
Annalise Sullivan is a writer, energy reader, and autonomy activist. In addition to her academic achievements in sociology and social work, Annalise has spent over a decade honing her methods as a breath work facilitator, intuitive guide, and NARM trained trauma-informed practitioner.
Annalise offers a breadth of techniques and resources to support you on your healing journey. I appreciate Annalise’s reasonably priced group breath work experiences on Zoom.
Rohi Coustage and Energy of Breath School
I experienced a true breakthrough when I practiced gamma breath with Rohi Coustage. She offers this description: Breathing into Gamma is a great daily practice, from a few one-minute breaths throughout the day to longer practices.
This brings us to a baseline Gamma state and all our life reflects upgrades into a higher energy state with unlimited fulfilling outcomes in whichever area we choose to focus our breath. Cultivating our gamma state leads to the unlocking of our higher sensory abilities, the development of our higher brain processing power, total manifestation power, and the evolution into our Light Bodies as we enter this era of accelerated consciousness evolution and next level awareness.
Two Types of Breaths to Try
A Basic Gamma Breath
Breathe deep – 3 seconds to inhale, 3 seconds to exhale, following this sequence:
IN MOUTH, OUT MOUTH
IN MOUTH, OUT NOSE
IN NOSE, OUT NOSE
IN NOSE, OUT MOUTH
Do 3 sets of the above and finish with:
ONE MORE IN MOUTH, OUT MOUTH
Then relax and tune in for a few moments to the effects.
Square Breath
Advice from Navy Seals: The military has found square breathing to be the best technique for on-the-go stress management. Although they teach many types of breath in the military, the Huberman Lab has worked with the military and revealed in a podcast recently that square breathing is their go-to technique for maintaining equilibrium in stress filled environments.
INHALE FOR 4
HOLD FOR 4
EXHALE FOR 4
HOLD FOR 4
Repeat for at least 3 rounds.
What have you noticed about your breathing? Is it deep or shallow? Belly or ribs? Have you tried doing meditation? Which breathing technique do you use? Please comment below.
But what if there was a simple way to feel more relaxed and rested? According to Dr Andrew Huberman, tenured Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine, the answer could lie in what you do as soon as you wake up.
It’s all to do with the chemical reactions that happen from being exposed to the sun, namely the rise and fall of cortisol and melatonin. “There’s a healthy rising tide of cortisol that happens early in the day… it makes you feel alert, it makes you feel able to move and want to move throughout your day for work for exercise, school, social relations, etc. But it also sets off a timer in your nervous system that dictates when a different hormone, called melatonin, which makes you sleepy, will be secreted,” Dr Huberman explains.
The levels of these hormones are set by neurons in our eyes which are activated by “a particular quality of light and amount of light,” he says. “When we wake up, our eyes open. If we’re in a dark room, there isn’t enough light to trigger the correct timing of this cortisol and melatonin rhythm. [At day break], when the sun is low in the sky, there’s a particular contrast between yellows and blues, [and that] triggers the activation of the [cortisol]. Once the sun is overhead, the quality of life shifts so that you miss this opportunity to time the cortisol pulse.
“Those of you who are night owls, and insist that you’re a night owl, may very well have those genes that make you want to stay up late and wake up late. But chances are, half of you who think that you’re night owls are just not getting enough sunlight early in the day.”
“A late shifted cortisol pulse is a consequence and/or a cause of a lot of anxiety disorders and depression,” says Dr Huberman. While “it’s kind of a chicken egg thing” and researchers can’t be sure on cause and effect, those who have cortisol spikes later in the day, rather in the morning, tend to have poorer mental health.
“Bringing that cortisol pulse earlier in your wakeful period has positive benefits, ranging from [lowering] blood pressure to [improving] mental health,” Dr Huberman explains. “In fact, it’s fair to say that light – particularly sunlight – is 1,000 to 10,000 times more effective than say, getting up in darkness and just exercising.”
That’s not to say that working out in a dark studio in the morning won’t help you feel good – exercise is useful for the body’s circadian rhythm but light still remains the most important factor. Combining the pair can be the best way to improve your wakefulness, which might mean taking your training outside for a morning run, or simply walking to your gym rather than getting the bus so you can take in more light.
Morning sunshine: light and exercising can help your cortisol.
DOES ANY LIGHT COUNT?
“If you can’t see sunlight because of your environment then you are going to have to opt for artificial light,” says Dr Huberman. “In that case, you’re going to want an artificial light that either simulates sunlight, or has a lot of blue light.”
That doesn’t mean just scrolling through Instagram, as your phone and laptop won’t produce enough brightness to be effective. Instead, Dr Huberman suggests a sunlight stimulators or, even better, “the ring lights that people use for selfies” as these generate a lot of blue light.”
He also goes on to advise that it’s “50 times less effective to view the sunlight through a window” and that being outside with no glasses on is important. But, that doesn’t mean you should put your eyesight at risk in the pursuit of sunlight. “You don’t want to gaze at the sun or refuse to blink,” he says. You shouldn’t “find that your eyes are watering or [you’re] having challenges maintaining looking at this something for a while.”
This totally depends on how much light you’re exposed to. For example, if it’s a bright day with no cloud cover you’ll have a lot of “photon light energy arriving on your retina, so it probably only takes 30 to 60 seconds to trigger the central clock and set your cortisol and melatonin rhythms properly.”
However, for those who live in low-light areas or during the UK’s winter, “you probably are not getting enough sunlight in order to set these rhythms, so it will take longer… anywhere from two to 10 minutes of sunlight exposure is going to work well for most people.”
Dr Huberman recommends downloading the app Light Metre, which measures the photon energy in your environment. You should be aiming for anywhere between 10,000 to 50,000 Lux (a unit of light measurement) for the best cortisol spike, he says.
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