Recently Dr Mark Bartlett was in town and I attended his 2 hours lecture on sleep and how the brain works during then. If you’re a person who loves this geeky brain science stuff like I do or you struggle with sleep, this could be fascinating for you.
What’s important to know:
- According to Dr Mark who has been working in the pharma industry for a while before realising and believing that natural solutions are better, he states that any sleep products will only work for 30% of the population. This applies to both synthetic sleeping pills by the pharma industry AND also to natural solutions such as by Young Living
- The reason why he advocated going for natural solutions is because he has found disturbing research that using pharmaceutical solutions may have increase the risk of having dementia, brain degeneration and Alzheimer’s disease for people.
- That’s partially because drugs doesn’t quite fit the human receptor sites perfectly as the natural solutions do. Secondly all such drugs do have side effects. So sleeping pills and the like from the pharma does stuff like affects brain function and changes the structure of sleep and create co dependency on them, which is not ideal for us
- Note that sleep and brain research was only started in 2015 so all information known as far are pretty recent such as 👇 (please see below)
- The lymphatic system covers the body but not the brain. It was found out that during sleep, the brain clears out the toxins, housekeep the information needed, sync them to muscle and long term memory, and discard learnings not needed (like hello, algebra) so it can release more space for future learnings. Feels like we are defragging our brain ya like a computer hard disk for efficient storage and access!
- During sleep the brain shrinks and the glymphatic system (only the brain) flushes the toxins out thru the fluid (Cerebrospinal fluid) that’s surrounding the brain as a cushion
- The brain does the flushing during the NREM 3 (non Rapid Eye Movement) phases of our sleep. In healthy sleep periods of 8 hours, there would be about 6 flushes. Imagine you’ve just emptied out a cup of poison and you wanted to drink some clean water with it. Sounds icky right? But that cup is your brain. And the flushes is how the brain washes itself out repeatedly so that the “cup” gets cleaner and cleaner as more flushes are done.
Remember when I mentioned that the sleep solutions only work for about 30% of the population? Now this is where your sleep hygiene habits play a huge part too to help increase the possibility of great sleep. Such as…
- Keeping to regular routines for winding down and going to sleep
- Limiting your screen time before bed as the lighting keeps the brain awake. Incidentally do you know how our brains wake our bodies up? Firstly it is through light, like when we first open our eyes and we see light coming into our rooms. Secondly the intake of food also rev our bodies up.
- You can also diffuse or apply an essential oil like Lavender, Peace and Calming, Vetiver, Rutavala or Cedarwood to help with sleep too
- For those who have irregular sleep routines such as folks who work shifts, they do have the highest risk of suffering thru the downsides of poor / insufficient sleep. However for those who are perpetually sleeping at the same time even if it’s not the night hours are not so affected if they can still adhere to the same sleep hygiene habits + keeping the room dark during their sleep
So here are the Young Living products that can help with your sleep:
- Deep Night Essence (there is no melatonin in this so 0 risk of creating co dependency!)
- Super Magnesium
For more information on these products, you can check them out here. Search “Deep Night Essence” or “Super Magnesium” if they’re not at the top of the page.
You can purchase them through your Young Living account. Please note that they’re on limited supply now. If you’re unsure how to purchase, drop me a message and I’ll help ya.
