Originally distributed July 2005
THE BENEFITS OF SLEEP
Some of you have heard me talking often about the benefits of sleep. From a Chinese medicine point of view, sleep is the time when we build and store yin.
What is yin and why is it important?
Yin and yang have entered our common parlance, with the idea of them as being complete opposites of each other. Why is this apparently simple concept one of the cornerstones of Chinese medical theory and practice?
The Chinese characters for yin and yang show the shady and the sunny side of a hill respectively. Yin represents such qualities as dark, storing, and sinking, while yang represents bright, active, and rising.
But nothing is absolute. Something is yin or yang only in relation to something else. For example, if noon is the most yang (brightest, most active) time of day and midnight is the most yin (darkest, quietest) time, then 11 a.m. is a yang time but it’s more yin than 11:30 a.m. And as in this example, nothing stays the same: yin and yang are relative not only to each other but exist within a flow (of time, events, changes, and so on). The two Chinese characters representing the two sides of a hill point to the qualities as related to the movement of the sun (and time).
What does this have to do with sleep?
Night time is the time of yin: dark, storing, less active. And it’s the time when our bodies are able store up our yin.
In a frenetically active, work- and activity-obsessed culture, our lifestyles have become very yang. So we really need to restore and store up our supply of yin.
If we don’t replenish our yin, we will have to reach into our yang supply. Since yin and yang support each other, using up our yin then reaching into our yang will leave us tired and worn out. This will eventually affect all major acupuncture meridians.
Chinese medicine calls for regular sleep on a nightly basis. Some of us try to get by on a few hours of sleep on weeknights and then “catch up” on the weekends. Unfortunately, sleep is not a substance that we can binge on.
A recent Harvard Magazine article, explores sleep binging-and-purging and calls it chronic sleep deprivation. Researchers at Harvard-affiliated institutes have linked even short periods of sleep deprivation to lowered immunity, insulin resistance (a pre-diabetic condition), loss of natural appetite regulators and weight gain, and severely impaired performance at work, while driving, or in creative tasks.
Some more good bedtime reading is the nonfiction book Sleep Thieves by Stanley Coren. Entertaining and alarmist, this book documents the species-wide trend towards less and less sleep since the invention of the light bulb and how this adversely affects us as individuals and as a society, especially some of our more vulnerable citizens, children and adolescents.
Sleep or the lack of enough good sleep will aggravate conditions such as back pain, knee pain, tinnitus, any reproductive-organ related imbalance, and, commonsense tells us, any type of fatigue. Many of my clients have noticed how much better they feel when they get more sleep. I always say, when you don’t get enough sleep, you make my job harder, and you're probably making your job harder too.
If you have any questions about sleep and how it is
related to optimal health, please feel free to contact me. Likewise, if
you or anyone you know suffers from insomnia, acupuncture can help. Contact me to find out if acupuncture would be recommended in your
circumstances.