My sister, the beautiful & talented Brodie Welch, LAc. of Corvallis, Oregon, had this facebook entry today: “could it be that the difference between enduring my life and celebrating it moment by moment is as simple as getting enough sleep?”
When I used to have a busy private practice, I would be struck by this phenomenon: patient conditions or epiphanies that would gather in one wave and careen through my office. In the last couple weeks, sleep has been such a wave.
While it is possible to get too much sleep and suffer side effects of that, today I will be focusing on those of us who may be getting too little. Of the recent wave of sleep-related observations and experiences and stories, here are two.
One dear friend in her early-mid 30s complained that her menstrual cycle had gone from a normal 28 day cycle to getting it 40+ days late over the last bunch of months.
Upon consideration, we concluded that her system was requiring more nourishment than her healthy diet was affording her, and that one way she could receive more was to increase her sleep. She did. Her cycle began immediately to head in the right direction.
Another dear friend, in her early-mid 40s told me she had started to get her period every other week. Also overworked. Also undersleeped. (I am aware that is not a word. Mark Twain said, “I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.” I apply this general philosophy slightly more widely).
This friend had been in the habit of staying up after putting her 5 year old to bed, in order to experience some quiet, grown-up time. She’d go to bed late, expecting that the fatigue she would feel the next day (which starts early w/ 5 yr olds) would be offset by the experience of “having a life” between 9pm and midnight. Reasonable.
We conferred and it was decided that, at least for a while (couple months?), she should simply fall asleep with the 5 yr old and sleep through the night. She was already eating well and she wasn’t exercising so much that she was using up too much of her nourishment, so increasing her sleep was the fastest way to increase her balance.
Within a month her cycle was back to normal. And she began, like Brodie, to feel celebratory about her life.
No change in diet. No herbs. No supplements. Just a few extra hours of sleep every night.
We spend nourishment on moving around, working, thinking, worrying, being awake. We receive it through food, drink, fresh air and SLEEP. It doesn’t work well for our bodies or minds to outspend our resources. So it's kind of simple. We have 2 choices: spend less of our resources or get more. When we have trouble finding ways to spend less—that is, slow down & relax, we can increase our resources by eating or drinking more nourishing food or (non-alcoholic) drink (which is sometimes hard to digest), breathing more fresh air or sleeping more. There are other options too, but these are the basics.
Both of my friends had different manifestations of the same root cause: outspending their resources. They could have risked the side effects of the Pill to “regulate” their periods, but all they needed was to balance their input with their output.
By Claudia Welch.
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