SLEEP THERAPIST DR. RUBIN NAIMAN EXPLAINS THE TRUE CAUSES OF SLEEP DISORDERS, CAFFEINE CRAVINGS AND SLEEP HORMONE IMBALANCES
By Dani Veracity
News Target
Monday, January 16, 2006
http://www.newstarget.com/016768.html
Seventy-six percent of Americans are lacking something right now. No, it's
not the latest fad fashion, electronic device or even money in the bank.
It's sleep. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb so that people could work
at night, and there are now 25 million night shift workers in U.S.-occupied
territory. Thanks to the light bulb and the later invention of television,
sleep quantity (per person) has decreased by about 20 percent since 1900.
Furthermore, 76 percent of Americans have a sleeping disorder at least a few
days per week, contributing to our society's epidemic of daytime sleepiness,
depression and adrenal fatigue, sleep therapist Dr. Rubin Naiman said in his
November lecture at the 2005 Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Conference (CAMCON) in Tucson, Ariz.
Modern Western society doesn't comply with our natural biorhythms. Humans
are built to nap, according to Dr. Naiman. When we override our natural
desire for midday rest, the conflict carries over to sleep disturbances at
night. Furthermore, similar to the problem of our junk food-laden diets,
we're overfed yet undernourished when it comes to light. During the day, we
receive dampened light from fluorescent bulbs rather than the vitamin D-rich
sunlight that our bodies need. Then, during the night when we need the dark
to trigger essential melatonin production, excessive light at night (LAN)
erodes our "lunar consciousness" and throws our body rhythms out of balance.
In short, we have too much light when we don't need it (at night) and too
little when we do (during the day).
Melatonin, a neurochemical released from the pineal gland, is as essential
to the human body today as it was during our evolution. Accordingly, Dr.
Naiman talks in great detail about this product of serotonin, even looking
back into the ancient Greco-Roman perspective of it and sleep in general.
From a purely biological standpoint, melatonin, which is produced during
absence of light, communicates the fact that it is night to our bodies,
triggering the release of GABA, our bodies' natural tranquilizer. LAN
suppresses melatonin production, hindering this entire process and setting
the stage for a phenomenon many of us know all too well: Daytime sleepiness.
Even though we're tired during the day, rest is somewhat of a taboo topic in
modern society. We tend to associate it with laziness and, as Dr. Naiman
points out, "When we rest, we experience the opportunistic emergence of our
shadow issues." In other words, resting often gives us time to think about
everything we'd rather forget, which is one of the reasons why many people
don't like to rest. It's the common "I-don't-have-time-to-think" phenomenon.
Unfortunately, as adrenal fatigue expert Dr. James Wilson explains in his
November lecture at the 2005 First Arizona Choices Exposition in Tucson,
Ariz., "Our lifestyles have changed, but our bodies haven't." We may not
like to rest, or perhaps have time for it, but our bodies still desire it.
In fact, napping can provide amazing health benefits. It lowers diastolic
blood pressure, improves mood, improves work and school performance (bosses
and educators take note) and helps readjust our nighttime sleep patterns
back to the way our ancestors slept before the Industrial Age and, according
to some experts, the way our bodies were designed to sleep at night.
Historian A. Roger Ekirch of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute found that,
before the Industrial Age changed everything, people slept in two phases:
"First sleep," a period of being awake shortly after midnight, and "second
sleep."
Using this historical data as his guide, National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH) psychiatrist Dr. Thomas A. Wehr set out to learn if the human body
would revert back to this segmented sleep pattern, given natural,
pre-Industrial conditions. In Dr. Wehr's study, 15 healthy adults were
prohibited from using any artificial light from dusk to dawn and given 14
hours (6 p.m. to 8 a.m.) for sleep. They slept 11 hours each the first few
nights to presumably catch up on lost sleep, but then eventually settled
into a pattern beginning with a few hours of nighttime rest.
This nighttime rest is "an essential bridge to night consciousness,"
according to Dr. Naiman. We have to slow down before we can fall asleep and
experience hypnagogia, a sleep-onset dream. Unfortunately, many of us don't
take the time to pursue nighttime rest for psychological and sociological
reasons.
After a few hours of nighttime rest, Dr. Wehr's volunteers then fell into
REM asleep for three to five hours ("first sleep") before awakening. During
REM sleep, the brain is as active as when it is awake. Due to this alertness
without daytime constraints, regularly awakening from REM sleep is
significant in itself, as it allows people to remember and reflect on their
dreams in a semiconscious state, according to Dr. Wehr. In fact, he
attributes modern society's disconnection with dreams, myths and fantasies
to our lack of midnight reflection.
Following this hour or so of quiet time, the volunteers then slept for about
four more hours before finally awakening. In conclusion, the NIMH study
reinforced Ekirch's historical data, making it seem likely that the human
body would naturally like to sleep as it did before artificial lighting, and
that waking up midway through the night is innate, rather than a disease
meant to be treated with sleeping pills.
Given that most of us are not getting the quality or quantity of sleep our
bodies require, and that our schedules often don't allow time for naps, what
are we supposed to do about our daytime sleepiness? Many of us turn to
high-glycemic carbohydrates like white flour or refined sugar as the answer,
putting our bodies at risk for obesity and type 2 diabetes. We also mask our
sleepiness with caffeine, making it what Dr. Naiman calls the "fuel of
industrialized culture."
Three hundred million cups of coffee are consumed in the United States each
day and it is the second-most commonly traded commodity in the world.
Unfortunately, our misguided "solution" to daytime sleepiness only adds to
the sleep disorders we experience at night, as caffeine's half-life is 7.5
hours, meaning that you still have half the amount of caffeine in your
bloodstream more than seven hours after you drink or eat a caffeinated
product. No wonder we can't fall asleep at night, or even get a "good
night's sleep" when we do.
Lack of sleep eventually leads to fatigue, which is much more serious than
everyday drowsiness. By Dr. Naiman's definition, fatigue is a "sustained
state of exhaustion, a lack of physical or mental energy." As you might
imagine, fatigue is all too common today, accounting for 10 million
outpatient physician visits in the United States per year, mostly associated
with depression. Ironically, Big Pharma's answers to depression, SSRI drugs,
actually worsen the sleep-related problems they were designed to relieve.
Pharmaceuticals like Prozac cause reduced REM latency, which actually
promotes depression, Dr. Naiman explains.
The real solution to fatigue is easy enough: Make time to rest. Taking a
break from time to time doesn't mean that you're lazy; it means that you
want to be healthy. Plus, keep in mind that attaining healthy sleep will
actually increase your overall productivity and your enjoyment of life.
The above is proof that being tired is not laziness--it's an indicator of an unhealthy lifestyle.
Right now it's 4am and I'm up, in flourescent light, doing stuff when I should be sleeping so I can call bill collectors early in the morning. Living example of the above. And the living dead.
