Ahhhh! Sleep Part 1
Today I want to discuss sleep related issues and sleep in relationship to the oils. I recently made a post concerning a new oil, Good Night. The purpose of that oil is to deal with sleep issues. Now why is sleep an area that we should be concerned with? That is what we are going to be looking at. So here goes.
The brain consists of about 3% of your body weight. But it uses a tremendous amount of energy, figures of 25% or even more of the energy requirements that you might use on an average day, is used for brain function. During the day you take in all sorts of stimulus, numbers per second is a huge amount on this incoming data, figures of into the thousands per second is normal activity. Only a small amount is actually used. So the brain automatically sorts and keeps or discards much of that data. For the most part that data is stored in short term memory in the Hippocampus. There are other brain parts involved, but this process is very sensitive to stress. So as the data come in, under the color of stress it makes all of the process messed up. The brain is largely running on auto pilot much of the time you are awake, on a comparative basis as compared to when you are asleep. Then when we go to sleep, all sorts of activities take place. For the most part, useless data is rejected, filed in file 13. Sometimes the disjointed useless data will appear in dreams as the brain is constantly trying to make sense of all of the data, even when the data is in the trash can. During the various sleep cycles, known generally as short wave and rapid eye movement cycles. The problem that you get into is if the sleep cycles gets disturbed or if the sleep isn't enough, enough movement through the sleep cycles.
Most people don't have a lot of problems falling asleep, it is keeping asleep. As a side note one of the tale tell signs of depression is not going to sleep but keep in the sleep going. A responsible healthcare person when treating a person for depression or simply doing a diagnostics on a person that could have any hint of depression, will control for this or inquire about sleep activity. In this day and age, so many people have some underlying depression issue, usually stress will play a role in it. Keep in ind that stress does not cause any disease or condition, it just takes a person predisposed condition and magnifies it. Then you have all of these other factors such as minerals, enzymes, all sorts of hormones, water and other things playing an active role in brain function. In fact being schooled to be a psychologist and what is learned about the brain in that arena, I often make the comment that because of the delicate balance of the saline solution and electrical impulses that the brain has to have and then looking at the outside influences, such as radio waves, chemicals that gets into the brain that aren't suppose to be there along with all sorts of faulty emotional stuff, I am amazed that we as humans even function as well as we do or even function at all. But we seem to function somewhat normal, kind of, maybe. The question is then raised, what is normal? The brain is an amazing part of the whole. In fact the brain is really a part of the body that is preserved at almost at all costs. In times of deprivation, the brain requirements are the first to be met, then what is left over gets distributed at other points of need throughout the body. If there isn't enough for the brain's needs then we have a problem. Bonkers here we come.
Now I have mentioned how many, many elements play an important role in the brain and brain function. I don't think we can say one is more important than the other, but rather all are important, equally. Here in this discussion we are looking at the role essential oils play and some possible essential oils to use to work with brain function.
It appears that this post is getting way too long, so lets leave it here and in part 2, I hope we can cover it in one more part we will discuss various oils and why we use those particular oils. Then we will tie it into sleep. As a teaser, sleep or rather a lack of sleep has been documented to a lot of physical based health problem issues. It also is directly tied to emotional issues as well. But my main point of where I originally wanted to go with this is how sleep affects weight loss. A little hint... sleep problems.. you cannot loose weight. How is that for you? We will address these issues in future parts, so maybe we will go more than 2 or even 3 parts as I really want to deal with this issue in full spectrum. It is vital and it is at the core of why we use essential oils. We will also be dealing very heavy in the psychological aspect of brain function and sleep.
Thank you for your time, we will have fun with this, I promise. Until next time, try to get some sleep.
Written by Kent King.
