HOW TO IMPROVE SLEEP?

Sleep Faster, Deeper and Longer.

It is a common practice among highly conscientious and intelligent individuals to short-change their sleep for success. To do so, many tricks have been advised by sleep wizards and gurus alike, ranging from supplements to green teas that claim to seduce the brain into falling asleep faster.

Among all the cacophony espoused, from the social media moguls to peer reviewed papers published by the leading experts in the stem field, the words, Magnesium and Melatonin have been etched in our brains so deep that we brandish any new research that crops up.

To hit the point home, let me break down the dyad and discuss how these are only misnomers, failing to do any real good for one who is genuinely trying to sleep better.

• Magnesium- The most venerated supplement, actively used in multivitamins and sleep supplements however people fail to realise that not all magnesium salts are the same. For instance, the body absorbs both Magnesium Malate and Citrate through our gut and its bioavailability for our brain is so puny that it fails to get across the blood-brain barrier. On top of that, most of the masses are already deficient in the said mineral, because of their poor lifestyle and an unbalanced diet, that the maximum amount is absorbed for the biological processes rather than the neurotropic cascade needed for the brain to shut off its motor neuron activity.
  Since our brain is a non-generative tissue, it impedes anything and everything that does not have a high affinity to the neuro-receptors in the brain. It is only the Magnesium-Threonate that is readily absorbed by the brain which is the most advantageous to the brain and switching off the motor neurons firing rate.Epsom salt or Magnesium Sulphate applied epidermally can have the same benefits as the exogenous magnesium-threonate. The former is the most used in sensory deprivation tanks, which are actively used to therapize people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder -PTSD and Anxiety.
• Melatonin- the second weapon in the sleep arsenal is a highly misunderstood supplement that does more harm than good to the human endocrine system. It works paradoxically with the suprachiasmatic nucleus that reads the photonic signals from morning break and tells it to drop the core temperature as well as testosterone which keeps the body temperature low till its effects wear off in the bloodstream.
  The second compounding effect that never blunts the potency of the supplement is the doses that us humans take. It has been deeply concerning to find that due to the lack of standardization in the supplement manufacturing industry, many a manufacturer lace their produce up to 80x the dose of the competitor next door, i.e., people end up consuming more than they should to maintain the homeostasis of their testosterone, growth hormone and the melatonin the body naturally produces.A peer reviewed study in the Stanford University School of Medicine, proved that melatonin decreases both oestrogen and testosterone in females and males respectively. The study showed that the testicular size of the Siberian Hamster reduced to a grain of rice and the size of the females’ ovaries to nothing but a spec in just 7 days of administration.To those who say humans are titans next to puny hamsters, please remember humans are taking copious doses to avail the empty promises of sound sleep at the expense of one’s hormones health. The maxim, “More is better” sounds familiar now, doesn’t it?

Let me show the greener grass over the fence, there are things that one does, and take that genuinely help to get into a deeper state of repose leading to a deeper slumber. The first being,

• Magnesium Threonate- the form of magnesium that crosses the blood-brain barrier and works to slow down the rate of coding and neural activity thereby rendering the body is an atonic state that helps one sleep deeper, unencumbered by any noise and changes in body position due to posture or by the consort sharing the bed with you.
• Apigenin and Theanine- work as calming agents that slow down neural activity and helps the brain to doze off deeper into REM sleep. I would not recommend these compounds to sleepwalkers or who have night terrors as the brain would not be able to easily snap out of the atonic state.
• Maintain a cooler temperature at nights to help the glabrous skin to maintain cooler core temperature of the vital organs that will not disturb your slumber once dawn breaks. Sleeping in a dark, cool room will guarantee a deeper sleep, take my word for it.

All the compounds cited in the article are well studied in peer reviewed studies, however individual reactions are subjective, meaning the effects of the same will vary vastly as people have different lifestyles. Drinking coffee, drinking alcohol, smoking, eating chocolates, will mar all the efforts one makes as per my anecdotal advice on the subject matter.

As a sleep advocate, I would, for the lack of a better word, advocate sleeping for a minimum of 7.5 hours a night. The question here is, how much of those 7.5 hours are you in fact sleeping and recovering?

From one knowledge hungry fitness enthusiast to those who are reading this, I hope my two cents are worth the salt.

If you are falling asleep reading this article for its length is too long or you lost track of time having splashed deeper into the science of sleep, either way I was successful in improving your sleep both in the moment and long term.

Thank you for reading and sleep-well my friends.
Goodnight.

Reference

Muscat L, Huberman AD, Jordan CL, Morin LP. Crossed and uncrossed retinal projections to the hamster circadian system. The Journal of Comparative Neurology. 466: 513-24. PMID 14566946 DOI: 10.1002/cne.10894