Detox Every Day 8: Sleep Like A Baby
close your eyes, take your liver to the detox spa
Getting a good night’s sleep is like giving your brain an 8-9 hour bath in a tub of antioxidants. Antioxidants fight free radicals, and free radicals accumulate not just from the chemical crap in our bodies but also from natural detoxification processes.
If you want to detox well, you need to sleep well. Detoxification doesn’t happen for free. It burns a lot of energy. And for energy, you must sleep, sleep, sleep.
Here’s some specific science – for the nerds. Sleep stimulates the release of growth hormone. This hormone, among many other functions, helps to regenerate your liver (reminder: the liver is your body’s detox powerhouse). The more your liver is renewed, the better it works. In essence, sleep = liver regeneration.
Not only do you need sleep to detox efficiently, but when you don’t sleep, you can get yourself into unwelcome anti-detox predicaments. Have you found yourself in any of these sleep quandaries?
- Shushing your liver detox enzymes with a morning cup of joe because you didn’t get in bed on time.
- Getting the munchies from staying up too late, and gratifying them with junk-for-my-liver-to-process .
- Too tired to make that kale green smoothie for breakfast, and opting for that Starbucks latte instead (with an extra shot of espresso).
- Watching Dr. Oz at 3pm because you’re too sleepy to get off your butt for an afternoon jog (this is my quandary).
If you sleep well, you will not only detox well, but you will have better mental and physical energy to eat and drink the right things. And you’ll feel better too.
Enjoy More Archerfriendliness
I have diagnosed heart murmurs in toddlers and managed asthma in school aged kids. I have sent sick babies to the emergency room and prepared the ER staff for their arrival. I have ordered STAT x-...
Whenever I work on these herb of the month articles, I end up all googly eyed over the particular herb. This month, I'm swooning for blue flag, known botanically by it's beautiful latin name,...
In the past month, I have been sick 3 times (a little too frequent for an aspiring naturopath if you ask me). The first two times I was sick, I used echinacea. The symptoms that make you fee...
aunt lisa
February 29th, 2012 at 11:50 am
You pointed right to me. I went to bed earlier last night, but even though I was tired, I still could not sleep. Any suggestions of what I might do before bed to fall asleep quicker? Can you tell me if taking my pain medicine
at bedtime can prevent me from sleeping?
Reply