This is our second post regarding the recommended herbs and supplements for greatly improving the quality of your sleep. It’s critically important the quality of these herbs and supplements be the purest and without fillers or contaminates. It’s doubtful you’ll find anything worthwhile at the grocery or drug store. You also need to do some serious homework locating the true high quality forms online.
Now let’s look at the second item you probably know about but may not know how it fits in the big picture. For example, are you sleeping worse because you are overweight or are you overweight because you are sleeping worse. Or, did you start sleeping worse, which caused you to start gaining pounds, which caused you to start sleeping worse, which caused you to gain more pounds, etc, etc, etc.
It’s the spiraling chicken or egg argument. Now, if we insert the right supplement into our formula, we can interrupt the spiral pattern. So you start getting better, much deeper sleep, which leads to more energy, less cravings, which naturally leads to more movement and eating less sugar, which leads to even better sleep, which leads to even more energy, etc.
In other words, it changes the direction of the spiral from downward to upwards as this INTERRUPT basically allows you to start working on yourself again.Obviously, this is beyond the deeper effects the ingredients the herbal formula has on the body; however, on a surface level, I’m sure you can agree on how much sense this “pattern interrupt” argument makes.
Now, on to the next ingredient in our formula- which is literally the reference drug for insomnia: This formula is structured in 3 phases: 2 ingredients set you up for better sleep: ashwagandha, l-theanine 2 ingredients get you to sleep faster and put you into deep sleep faster: melatonin, hydroxytryptophan 2 ingredients put you into DEEPER sleep and increase the spikes of growth hormone 8 FOLD while in deep sleep: L-Arginine, L-LysineMelatonin Also known as: the master sleep hormone, the Gold Standard for sleep main effects: puts you to sleep, promotes deeper sleep, insomnia cure, increases growth hormone, stops fat storage. Additional effects: protective against stomach ulcers, useful for jet lag, improves cancer mortality, reduces fight or flight hormones at rest, improves sleep quality, reduces heartburn, improves insulin sensitivity, antioxidant, better memory under stress, and weight loss.
Lifestyle considerations: no blue light exposure 2 hours before bed (monitors, TV), reduce sugar intake, no food intake 2 hours before bed, exercise but not 2 hours before bed, no caffeine or stimulants after lunch.
Additional interesting info: has been studied for weight loss, can help with tinnitus. Yes, good ole melatonin…Quite simply, melatonin is the gold standard for curing insomnia and putting people to sleep. And this makes sense, as a neurohormone produced in the pineal gland, this is what it is supposed to do – regulate sleep cycles. It is well known for this.
Doctors use melatonin for patients as a supplement to normalize abnormal sleep patterns. And, as we know, irregular sleep patterns are 100% associated with a wide variety of health problems and premature aging. The consensus is clear on this. The good thing: your body naturally produces melatonin. The bad thing: light interferes with melatonin production. (There’s the light thing we’ve talked about before). So, if the last thing you do before going to bed is look at your phone, you’re basically killing your body’s melatonin production, which of course, affects not only your ability to get to sleep…… but with the effects of less melatonin generation, it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible to get restorative deep sleep.
Melatonin has been ridiculously studied. It has neuroprotective effects as well as gastrointestinal protective effects. Supplemental melatonin has also been proven to not only put you to sleep, but put you into deep sleep faster. This deep sleep is also associated with a larger spike in growth hormone, which essentially means that it’s putting you into deeper, deep sleep. In fact, most of the benefits associated with melatonin actually are from this deeper sleep, other than it’s general anti-oxidant effects.
One of these benefits is actually stopping fat storage. That’s right, melatonin has also been extensively studied for weight loss. Now, that being said, melatonin supplementation has not been associated with a decrease in fat mass as much as it’s been associated with a lack of an INCREASE in fat mass. Remember “pattern interrupt” from above? This ingredient is an EXTREMELY useful pattern interrupt for irregular sleep patterns, from stress, jet lag, insomnia, or those that have ever changing shift work.
Melatonin is also safe and non-addictive. The only possible negative thing with melatonin is sometimes people can wake up a little groggy and is a minor annoyance that dissipates relatively quickly. This generally happens when being prematurely awakened from a sleep cycle that has deeper sleep (say by an alarm), without waking up on your own after the completion of a sleep cycle. I guess the good side of this would be at least you know it’s working! Special Note: There are two types of melatonin supplements; natural derived from the pineal gland of animals and second, synthetic. In this case steer clear of naturally produced supplements as they can be contaminated with viruses which is the last thing we need to be ingesting. In our next post, we’ll talk about the next “sleep inducing” ingredient of this formula… and this one actually makes you feel good too!
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