Are you compromising your health with your sleep pattern?

 

In this day and age, people are working, studying, and staying up late into late hours of the night and even into the wee hours of the A.M. The perception or belief is that as long as you get 8 hours of sleep, it's all the same. Unfortunately, it is not the same.

 

Nature's rhythm is quite intelligent. As the sun begins to rise, the birds start to wake up and sing. As the moon begins to rise, the birds start heading to their nests for the night. We are made from nature, meaning we have the elements of earth, water, fire, air & space that make up our mind-body system, making sense that we are also connected to nature's rhythm.

 

From Ayurveda's ancient wisdom, our balanced nature is to wake with the morning sun and sleep during the night. The natural elements of nature have times where they are at an increase, e.g., the sun is strongest around midday. In the same way, some times promote sleep, which is closer to the later evening time around 9 to 10 pm.

 

Sleep is the mind as rest, which means that the mind cannot digest everything it has learned and experienced from the day without sleep. The time for mental digestion happens to be from 10 pm to 2 am (Pitta time of night), which is supportive of the natural sleep cycle time.

 

When you miss this window of sleep and mental digestion doesn't happen, you get your second wind with a burst of energy, which is why many people consider themselves night owls. This feeling comes because the energy of digestion is supportive of transformation and energy, which is excellent when understood. In this case, that burst of energy comes at a cost to your health. The mental digestion was missed, and if allowed to go on, the mind will become sluggish, irritable, tired, and weak leading to mental imbalances. In long term cases, this has lead to more severe health problems.

 

Health & disease have two locations: the physical body and the mind. There is also a mental imbalance in physical ailments, and mental imbalances also affect the physical body.

Check out the How to Change Your Sleep pattern in the next blog post.

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