When You Don’t Get Enough Sleep…

How much sleep have you gotten in the past few days? Excluding last night, the two nights beforehand, I got a grand total of seven hours of sleep. Whoops.

And, guess what happened the next day? I felt off. Like, really off. It was worse last year when I pulled an all-nighter, and got sick the next day…and for several weeks after. So, what’s the common idea here? If you don’t get sleep, you WILL mess up your system. 

When you sleep (hopefully), your body performs cell mitosis, your brain repairs itself AND melatonin is created, which is SUPER important. Well, more important than I thought at least.

According to OrganicOlivia.com, the body loses half a billion cells, and replaces them through cell mitosis (remember way back in high school biology?) AND will wait until it is dark to do so. It is actually the light-sensitive pineal gland that sends signals to the brain to do that, so if there is light, the gland will not send those signals. The light from your phone counts because it creates a frequency, and your brain can’t distinguish between man-made frequencies and natural light frequencies.

Anyway, because of this cell mitosis, free radical cells that attack healthy cells are produced as a byproduct. Free radical cells are known as a major factor in cancer. Therefore, the best defense against those cells is melatonin.

A little bit about melatonin, the sleep hormone. In the medical world, it controls the sleep and wake cycle, it’s an anti-aging molecule. “Melatonin is like the mopper. It cleans up cancer cells. It cleans up waste,” said Olivia of Organic Olivia.

In fact, melatonin is five times as powerful as vitamin C, a vitamin known by Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winner, to cure cancer. You know those Emergen-C packets? Yeeaahh, I’m going to be using those a lot more.

We know this is true by looking at the statistics of people with cancer and their melatonin levels. For instance, the average woman with breast cancer has a 10 percent the normal levels and the average person with prostate cancer has 50 percent of the normal levels.

More than that, night shift workers have a 50 percent increase in breast cancer risk because of the exposure to light in the middle of the night, and night shift work is classified by the International Agency of Research on Cancer (IARC) as probable carcinogen. According to an Israeli study, woman who live in areas with nighttime illuminations are more likely to get breast cancer.

So, what really happens when your body doesn’t produce enough melatonin? Bascically,our immune system is less competent, you experience sleep disturbances, heart complications and arrhythmias and a much higher susceptibility to disease.

How do you naturally increase your melatonin? Olivia gave seven tips to boost your levels.

1. Avoid watching TV and using your computer or phone in the evening at least an hour before going to bed—Our parents or at least mine were right, y’all.
2. Make sure you get sun exposure regularly.
3. Sleep in COMPLETE darkness or as close as possible.
4. Install a low-wattage yellow, orange or red light bulb if you need a source of light at night or think about investing in a salt lamp, which you can find here.
5. Eat foods like bananas, oranges, oats, sweet corn, tart cherries, rice, tomatoes and barley

So, what have we learned? Sleep is very important.

Here is Olivia’s video:

Websites used:

http://www.costco.com/Emergen-C%C2%AE,-90-Packets.product.11614310.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plxYUaCduxE

http://www.amazon.com/Curing-Incurable-Vitamin-Infectious-Diseases/dp/09…

https://www.dropbox.com/home?preview=Melatonin+Cell+Phones+and+Cancer.pptx

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/12154.php

http://s9.photobucket.com/user/WildeRebellion/media/Gifs/tumblr_lnh736sm…

http://rebloggy.com/post/gif-mean-girls-coach-carr-you-will-get-pregnant…