The use of sleeping pills has been growing steadily in America since 2005, with a correlation between the TV ads the increase of prescriptions according to consumer affairs: Americans May Be Relying Too Heavily on Sleeping Pills.
There is no doubt that sleep is extremely important, and while experts can disagree about the amount of sleep needed, getting 8-9 hours of sleep is the ideal.
Long-term sleep loss can become a serious medical difficulty because the body regenerates itself and builds other hormones during the night increasing immunity.
What is important with sleep is to be able to sleep deeply and wake up refreshed. Waking up refreshed is called restorative sleep. It is equally disturbing to optimal health if not more so, than getting inadequate sleep due to anxiety, or work life, or family responsibilities.
When you sleep the body can detoxify chemicals inhaled, or you are exposed to every day. This detoxification is one of the reasons for getting up at night to urinate, and waking up at night at organs hours (will be explained shortly below).
Although some people may not be aware of it, you are detoxifying the clean smelling pajamas, and the sheets which you have laundered in some kind of detergent. The smell is something your body needs to detoxify. Some detergents have a very strong. It is better to use detergents that lack scents, and that are hypoallergenic.
Some people also work in banks, and in malls during the day, and are exposed to some kind of mall chemical.
At night when you are in bed is the time, if your bedroom has enough fresh air and your body has enough nutrients that some of these chemicals are excreted from your body. If you are in good health and have enough nutrients in your body, and also if your adrenals are strong enough, you will stay healthy.
However, as soon as the adrenals become weakened, and begin needing support, your sleep can be disturbed.
Sometimes because the body is toxic, or the lymph system is toxic, there is tossing and turning at night. You could have developed allergies to foods which disturb your sleep. The disturbance to your sleep is the first indication of toxicities.
For example, some people have difficulty digesting milk products and this shows up more obviously as disturbed sleep.
When you do not enjoy your job, and your life is not going like you want it to, then you have emotional congestion. This is especially true when you are repressing your emotions, or have repressed your emotions. Emotional repression is a serious cause of disease, because it causes congestion in the acupuncture meridians. It can take some time to develop disease from this, but it does affect your health. Congestion is one of the 7 Physical Causes of Ill Health.
According to Traditional Chinese Medicine, there exists a perfectly ordinary rhythm of the energy circulation in the human body. The energy or chi (chee) as it is pronounced runs through these invisible meridian channels, and through the organs. Note this is not related to the circadian rhythm, which also has a profound effect on our ability to sleep.
For example, between 11pm and 1am, the gall-bladder meridian is activated. Energy circulates through this meridian at that time. So trouble falling asleep at this time is caused by gall-bladder malfunction, poor or weak tone, congestion, or eating a meal too high in fats close to bed time. People who have gall-bladder energy imbalance often have brooding thoughts before going to bed, and can't turn them off.
Another time often extremely important is the liver-time, when the liver energy gets recharged. This is from 1am to 3am. So, any time you can wake up between these two times indicates some difficulty with your liver. It could be 1:30am, 2:00am, 2:30am, even just 15 minutes before the end of the period.
In general the earlier you wake up in this period the more work will need to be done for the liver. However, this could be a single one time episode as well that could be related to indigestion.
Again, waking up during this time could indicate liver-congestion, or some dietary indiscretion, or even bowel difficulties which can cause your liver to let you know. People who have liver-difficulties, and by that is meant non-diagnosable difficulties can also have heartburn, or night-time heartburn.
Milk thistle, a liver-herb, often in extract form, in powder in capsules can help. It increases the level of protective L-Glutathione in the liver -- a master antioxidant of the body.
Eating greens, and eating almonds can help circumvent the liver difficulty.
Another cause for the liver-disturbance is the use of other pharmaceutical medications, heavy metal poisoning, insufficient exercise, and poor air quality in the bedroom, i.e. insufficient fresh air and pollutants from furniture, new clothing, new shoes, dry cleaned clothing.
The Lung regenerates during this time, from 3am to 5am. Hence anytime you wake up during this time could indicate a disturbance of your lungs. You could have been exposed to some chemical which irritated your lungs, or your could have lung weakness.
It is important to understand that these energy disturbances are not diagnosable medical disease. The energetic disturbance of the organ however, can occur before any medical diagnosable disease.
There are various herbals which can help tranquilize and calm the nervous system, and help with insomnia. In general multi-herbal formulas are much better, and stronger than single herbals when in tincture form. Please note that herbal tinctures recommended here contain alcohol often in the form of grain alcohol.
Prairie Doctor Brand Valerian Skullcap and St. John's Wort - 50mL Liquid. A Canadian Brand made on Vancouver.
Nervine Formulas in Herbal Tincture Form
Sleep-Ease by Blessed Herbs available in 1oz, 2oz, 4oz, 8oz glass bottles. Scroll down to the bottom 3 for this formula. An American Brand which uses organic and wild-crafted herbs. Highly recommended.
St. Francis Herb Farm ValeriCalm®
If you are taking sleeping pills because of chronic insomnia, talk to your doctor, and pharmacist about weaning off of the medications.
You may be able to use the herbal tinctures recommended above during the middle of the night, or a few hours before the sleeping pill whilst at the same time weaning yourself off it.
While these formulas are used for helping sleep better, their herbal components are often used to help the nerves, and their connection to the bowels on a long-term basis, i.e. to help relax the bowel wall. This is a concept most Professional Iridologists know. Iridology is the science of reading the health of the tissues, and glands in the body by examining the color, structure, and markings of the Iris, that part of the eye that gives you color.
Although not well known the heating aspects of foods can play a vital role in causing insomnia. Usually this is the case when there is an overindulgence of onions, garlic, cinnamon, beef, without any balanced cooling items. If the body is low in yin-energy, the cooling energy, the yang energy would dominate, and result in decreased ability to fall asleep at normal times such as before 11pm.
The indications of this excess yang energy not balanced with yin energy are many red dots on the tip of the tongue.
Short Sleep Increases Risk of Death and Over-Long Sleep Can Indicate Serious Illness