We spend up to a third of our lives asleep.  Although some hard-driving people may view sleep as an inconvenience that curtails productivity and leisure activities, slumber is certainly no waste of time. In fact, sleep may play a more crucial role than diet or exercise in fostering optimal health.

A natural restorative, sleep offers an antidote to the damage done to our bodies during the day.  It allows the body to replenish its immune system, eliminate free radicals, and ward off heart disease and mood imbalances.  When sleep is disrupted—whether by lifestyle factors, insomnia, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, restless legs syndrome, jet lag, sleepwalking, night terrors, imbalance of hormones, or some other disorder—emotional and physiological health suffers.  But you don’t have to accept sleep deprivation and the ills that accompany it.   One way to gently snooze your way back to health is to focus on balancing your hormones.

Balance your hormones
The word hormone comes from the Greek hormon, meaning “to stir up.”  Hormones are released by the various endocrine glands in the body in order to regulate energy production, growth, sexual development, stress responses, and many other functions.  Because minute quantities of hormones can “stir up” so many activities in the body, when they are thrown out of balance the results can affect the entire body.  Imbalances of Hormones often manifest as insomnia and other sleep problems.  Key factors that can upset hormone levels include thyroid dysfunctions, perimenopause and menopause (in fact, disturbed sleep is one of the complaints that cause women to seek treatment for menopause and perimenopause), and andropause (the male form of menopause).  Although hormone levels generally decline as a result of aging, they can also be affected by dietary choices, mineral deficiencies, environmental toxins and synthetic chemicals, medications, smoking, and stress.

Rather than artificially manipulating your estrogen levels with synthetic hormones and ignoring the reasons behind any imbalances of hormones, it is more valuable to determine why you have imbalances of hormones in the first place. Depending on the reason, restoring hormonal balance may be more effectively achieved with dietary changes, nutritional supplements, natural progesterone cream, herbal therapy, or traditional Chinese medicine tailored to the specific factors causing the imbalance of hormones.

Now  & Zen

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Excerpted from Alternative Medicine magazine’s Definitive Guide to Sleep Disorders: 7 Smart Ways to Help You Get a Good Night’s Rest (Celestial Arts, 2007)

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