Why Do You Need Sufficient Sleep at Night; Especially 2 Hours Sleep Before 12 am
Why Do You Need Sufficient Sleep at Night; Especially 2 Hours Sleep Before 12 am
The liver requires all the energy it can get to fulfill all of its responsibilities.
This can only happen sufficiently, though, if you sleep during this time.
If you use up the night-time energy for eating or mental/physical activities, the liver is left with too little energy to do its extremely vital work.
Most of the available energy should be directed to the liver and also, to some extent, to the kidneys.
This helps the kidneys to filter the blood plasma, to keep the body fluids balanced and blood pressure normal.
Although the brain makes up merely one-fifth of the body mass, it generally contains more than one-quarter of the body’s entire blood content.
However, during the Pitta period at night, most of the blood located at the back of the brain moves into the liver for storage and purification.
If you are mentally or physically active at this time, the liver does not receive enough blood to work with.
It also cannot cleanse the blood sufficiently.
This results in the accumulation of toxic material in the liver and bloodstream.
If toxins keep circulating in the blood, they will settle in the interstitial fluid (connective tissues) of organs and systems, thereby raising acidity and damaging them, including the liver itself.
High blood toxicity can lead to secretions of stress hormones, brain fog, and injured capillaries, arteries, and heart muscles.
Most heart diseases are the result of a poorly performing liver that is unable to remove all toxic, noxious substances from the blood daily.
If we do not give the liver the energy it needs to conduct the most basic physiological activities, we sow the seeds of illness throughout the body.
Sleep can be divided into two main parts before-midnight and after-midnight.
Among adults, the most important processes of purification and renewal occur during the two hours of sleep before midnight.
This period involves deep sleep, often referred to as “Beauty Sleep.”
It lasts for about an hour from 11 pm to midnight.
During this period, you enter a dreamless state of sleep where oxygen consumption in the body drops by about eight percent.
This results in profound physical rest.
The physiological rest, which you gain during this hour of dreamless sleep, is at least three times deeper than what you get during the sleep after midnight when oxygen consumption in the body rises again by 5-6%.
Growth factors, commonly known as growth hormones, are secreted profusely during the hour of deep sleep.
These powerful hormones are responsible for cellular growth, repair, and rejuvenation.
People age faster if they don’t produce enough growth hormones.
The latest “fashion” in the beauty market is to consume synthetic growth hormones, which create “fantastic” rejuvenating results but can also have devastating side effects, including heart disease and cancer.
On the other hand, if the body makes them, at the right time and in the correct amounts, as happens during deep sleep, they can keep the body vital and youthful at every age.
Deep sleep never occurs after midnight and it comes only if you go to sleep at least two hours before midnight.
If you miss out on deep sleep regularly, your body and mind become overtired.
This triggers abnormal stress responses in the form of constant secretions of stress hormones such as adrenaline, cortisol, or cholesterol.
To keep these artificially derived energy bursts going, at least for a while, you may have to take recourse with such stimulants as cigarettes, coffee, tea, candy, cokes, alcohol, etc.
Once the body’s energy reserves have been depleted, chronic fatigue results.
Fatigue can be considered to be a major causal or contributing factor to today’s health problems.
When you feel tired, it is not just your mind.
And when fatigued, all the cells that make up your heart, lungs, digestive organs, kidneys, etc., suffer from low energy and are unable to function properly.
When you are tired, your brain no longer receives adequate amounts of water, glucose, oxygen, and amino acids its most essential nutrients.
The short supply of brain nutrients can lead to innumerable problems in a person’s mind, body, and behaviour.
When you drive a car during the night, for example, your body has to keep fighting the “sleepy” hormone melatonin, which naturally tries to keep your body at its lowest level of performance and activity.
According to research in the field of chronobiology, attention span after midnight drops considerably.
This dramatically raises your risk of making mistakes and having an accident.
Most one-way road accidents occur during nighttime, and accidents in factories are 20 percent more likely to occur on the night shift.
Doctors at the University of California, San Diego, have found that losing a few hours of sleep not only makes you feel tired during the following day but can also affect the immune system, possibly impairing the body’s ability to fight infection.
Since immunity diminishes with tiredness, your body is unable to defend itself against bacteria, microbes, and viruses and cannot cope with the build-up of harmful substances in the body.
Frequent tiredness and low energy precede any type of chronic disease and most acute illnesses, including cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, AIDS, the common cold, and the flu.
An ever-increasing number of children are the victims of sleep deprivation and its consequences.
The critical role of sleep and sleep disturbances in child development has been repeatedly demonstrated.
According to published research, psychopathology in children could result from or be exacerbated by insufficient sleep and consequent fatigue and sleepiness.
There exists a particularly strong relationship between sleep problems and neuropsychological functioning in children.
Sleep disruptions have often been implicated in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children because sleep deprivation and the resultant sleepiness could lead to ADHD-like symptoms.
There are clear indications that learning and attention skills could be significantly compromised by insufficient sleep or sleep disruption.
This is in no way limited to children only.
Most tiredness results from missing out on two hours of sleep before midnight.
Any treatment of disease that does not include natural “deep sleep therapy” cannot lead to lasting success, since the body’s healing system itself, the immune system, depends on proper, healthy sleeping cycles to be vital and efficient.
Pitta, which controls AGNI, the digestive fire, also becomes disturbed when you regularly eat your dinner late or have snacks during Pitta (night) time.
Consequently, Pitta will be disrupted also during the following lunchtime, which causes disturbances in the liver, spleen, gallbladder, stomach, and pancreas.
The main principle at work here is, that whenever you disturb or use up Pitta energy during the night, you also disrupt all the Pitta functions and Pitta organs during the following day.