Quite often, when we think about becoming healthier, we only focus on exercise and diet. It is the same when we think about recovering from an injury or dealing with physical pain. We think about controlling our food intake as well as how we can work out to achieve weight loss or engage in physical therapies that facilitate injury recovery. Rarely do we ever think about the importance of getting good quality sleep.
Nutritionist Samantha Gladish advocates the importance of getting a good amount of restful sleep every night in order to give our bodies the time to properly manage our hormones and achieve better health. It is during sleep when our stress hormone cortisol is regulated. It is also during sleep when insulin levels are managed to facilitate proper blood sugar levels. Also, human growth hormone, which helps delay aging through its antioxidant properties, is also produced during sleep.
But apart from just our hormones, sleep is also the time when our bodies repair any damaged or injured muscles or joints. The inability to achieve a truly restful and deep sleep at night is a main contributing factor to why our aches and pains seem to take forever to go away even if we are taking medications and engaging in all the supposedly right physical therapy sessions.
Samantha, who also practices privately, likes to remind her clients that people evolved to rise with the sun and fall asleep at night when the moon is out. This is our circadian rhythm and it is ideal for the sake of our health that we remain in harmony with this rhythm. Although it might seem ironic, getting out and exposing yourself to sunshine is vital to achieving a good night’s sleep. This is because sun exposure helps stimulate the pineal gland which is one of the parts of the brain responsible for resetting our circadian rhythm. Thus, proper sun exposure in the morning can help us have better quality sleep at night. This has been proven by studies showing that people who are always indoors and exposed to fluorescent lighting experience greater difficulty falling asleep because they lack exposure to natural sunlight.
It is worth remembering that we are not talking about just going out in the sun but still wearing a big hat and covered up in long sleeves and pants. You need to have your skin exposed to the sun. In fact, the more skin you can expose to the sun, the better. The central reason why this is necessary is for our vitamin D absorption. The truth is that vitamin D is less of a vitamin and more of a hormone. It also helps regulate our insulin levels.
Now, you may ask, what about the deleterious effects of the sun such as sun damage wrinkles, not to mention skin cancer? Shouldn’t we be putting on some sunscreen at least? Well, Samantha says that those lotions can also affect our health negatively. These sunscreens are also full of toxins that get absorbed by our bodies and have to be detoxified by our livers. But then, the liver is also where our natural hormones get metabolized. So if we are overworking our livers with the toxins absorbed from our sunscreens, we compromise its ability to properly metabolize our own hormones. Actually, it is not just the sunscreen that acts as a source of toxins. Our cosmetics, deodorants and dental products may also be full of these toxins.
It is true that too much of a good thing causes damage to our health. When it comes to sun exposure, as much as possible, get it in the early morning and not at noon time or even in the afternoon when you might be more prone to UVA and UVB damage, which is manifested as premature aging and sunburn, respectively. Try to limit the amount of time you spend under the sun to under an hour in order to protect against serious diseases like skin cancer.
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