sleep inducing tea

Natural Sleep Remedies:

Sleep-Inducing Tea
For a relaxing bedtime beverage, Yance suggests combining several herbs as follows: Passionflower and skullcap soothe agitated nervous systems and can help with mental chatter; oat seed strengthens the nervous system and helps people who are too tired to sleep; and chamomile provides a gently relaxing base.

1 chamomile tea bag
30 to 60 drops passionflower tincture
15 to 30 drops skullcap tincture
15 to 30 drops milky oat seed (Avena sativa) tincture

Pour boiling water over tea bag and let steep for five minutes. Remove tea bag, and add drops of tincture to tea. Stir in a touch of honey if desired. Sip and enjoy.

Waking up in the morning should be as pleasant as falling asleep at night

Waking up in the morning should be as pleasant as falling asleep at night. The Zen Alarm Clock’s gradual, gentle awakening is transformative.

Waking up in the morning should be as pleasant as falling asleep at night. The Zen Alarm Clock’s gradual, gentle awakening is transformative.

Now & Zen

1638 Pearl St.

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

gentle awakening alarm clock with chime

gentle, chime alarm clocks

Fundamentally, dreams — like effective cognitive psychotherapy — “are about abstraction, the ability to pan back, get bigger than, stretch into the remembrance of a larger sense of self,” Naiman says.

And in this hard-charging, info-slurping, sleep-deprived era, in which about 70 million Americans suffer from chronic sleep disorders (and depression is also suspiciously widespread, affecting one in eight women), he and many other sleep experts are more convinced than ever of the link between mental health and a full nightly menu of sleep.

We asked the experts for their best tips to help you get restful sleep — ideally, seven to eight hours of it — that will yield all the dreams you’ve got coming to you.

Drink Moderately, And Mind Your Meds
“A glass of wine with dinner is fine,” Naiman says, but excessive alcohol will cause you to wake up after two or three hours when the sedative effects wear off; this interacts with the first significant REM cycle and disrupts sleep further from there.

Also, many medications — including a number of antidepressants, over-the-counter painkillers, and even, ironically enough, sleeping pills — suppress the hormone melatonin and/or the nutrient choline, both of which mediate REM. It’s always wise, Naiman says, to ask your pharmacist before taking any medicine if it has a REM suppressant and, if it does, whether there’s an alternative.

Utamaro Kitagawa, Bijin Combing Her Hair, 1750-1806

Establish A Presleep Routine
Take a 20-minute soak in a hot bath two hours before bedtime, Cartwright says. The body’s effort to cool itself after the bath mimics the cooling that occurs naturally as our bodies prepare for sleep.

If your logical waking brain is reluctant to let go of the same old anxieties, Cartwright suggests writing down the day’s cares (well before bedtime) in a worry diary, then literally closing the book, telling yourself, I’ve done my worrying for the day.

Create A Restful Environment
Use blackout shades or a sleeping mask to make the room as dark as possible; darkness prompts your brain’s pineal gland to make melatonin. Also, keep your bedroom at a comfortable 60 to 65 degrees; even subtle shifts in body temperature can disrupt sleep cycles.

create a calm environment

Put Technology To Work
Relaxation CDs have moved beyond ocean waves; new versions actually have frequencies embedded in the sound tracks to encourage slow-wave sleep. (Check out sound therapist Jeffrey Thompson’s sleep-enhancement collection atneuroacoustic.com.)

Soothe Yourself If You Wake Up
If you have trouble falling back to sleep, Cartwright advises adjusting your strategy depending on the time of night. If you’re waking up after only an hour or so, try some boring mental exercise: See if you can name all 50 states alphabetically, or count backward from 100, inhaling deeply and slowly, then exhaling with each number.

Use a Gentle, Chiming Alarm Clock to wake-up so that you will be calm in the morning.

Woodson Merrell, M.D., chairman of the Department of Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City, advises trying to remember the dream you were having when you woke up — even if you can recall only a detail or two — and focusing on it to see if you can drift off again.

If it’s close to your usual wake-up time — say it’s 5 a.m. and you usually wake at 7 — your core body temperature will just be starting to rise to get you active for tomorrow, which may make it hard to go back to sleep, Cartwright says. “The best thing is to take a positive attitude and don’t say to yourself, I’m going to be draggy all day,” she advises. “Instead say, Great, I have two more hours to rest!”

Let Go
“People with insomnia are hyperaroused — pushing, pushing,” Naiman says. “We’re all working so frantically to get a chance to rest. But the paradox is that rest is free.” And, he adds, the great beauty of dreaming — in which “parts of ourselves that recede during waking life” roam freely and creatively — is that “you don’t have to force it to happen. It’s just there for you when you stop.”

choose a chime alarm clock with soothing tones

How to Zazen - Stillness of Being

As the name Zen implies, Zen sitting meditation is the core of Zen practice and is called zazen in Japanese. The posture of zazen is seated, with folded legs and hands, and an erect but settled spine.

The legs are folded in one of the standard sitting styles.   In many practices, one breathes from the hara (the center of gravity in the belly) and the eyelids are half-lowered, the eyes being neither fully open nor shut so that the practitioner is not distracted by outside objects but at the same time is kept awake.

How to Zazen, a Sitting Mindfulness Practice adapted from wikipedia.org

Meditation Clock Timer- Zen Timers and Alarm Clocks by Now & Zen

Use our unique “Zen Clock” which functions as a Yoga & Meditation Timer. It features a long-resonating acoustic chime that brings your meditation or yoga session to a gradual close, preserving the environment of stillness while also acting as an effective time signal. Our Yoga Timer & Clock can be programmed to chime at the end of the meditation or yoga session or periodically throughout the session as a kind of sonic yantra. The beauty and functionality of the Zen Clock/Timer makes it a meditation tool that can actually help you “make time” for meditation in your life. Bring yourself back to balance.

Now & Zen – The Yoga & Meditation Timer Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

Wake Up Refreshed - Choose a Z E N Alarm Clock - Utamaro Ukiyoe Wood Pipe by Yukisakuma

“Waste not life,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, patron saint of American entrepreneurs. “In the grave will be sleeping enough.”

Centuries later, the attitude toward sleep in America – and in American business, in particular – has scarcely changed. Corporate culture reveres the e-mail sent at 3 a.m., the executive who rushes directly into a meeting from a red-eye flight. Bumper stickers offer an updated version of Franklin’s dictum: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

“There is a cultural bias against sleep that sees it as akin to shutting down, or even to death,” explains Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and director of the Sleep Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Most people, Ellenbogen says, think of the sleeping brain as similar to a computer that has “gone to sleep” – it does nothing productive. Wrong. Sleep enhances performance, learning and memory. Most unappreciated of all, sleep improves creative ability to generate “aha” moments and to uncover novel connections among seemingly unrelated ideas.

Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, once defined creativity as “just connecting things.” Sleep assists the brain in flagging unrelated ideas and memories, forging connections among them that increase the odds that a creative idea or insight will surface.

While traditional stories about sleep and creativity emphasize vivid dreams hastily transcribed upon waking, recent research highlights the importance of letting ideas marinate and percolate.

“Sleep makes a unique contribution,” explains Mark Jung-Beeman, a psychologist at Northwestern University who studies the neural bases of insight and creative cognition.

Some sort of incubation period, in which a person leaves an idea for a while, is crucial to creativity. During the incubation period, sleep may help the brain process a problem.

“When you think you’re not thinking about something, you probably are,” says Jung-Beeman, who has a doctorate in experimental psychology.

Wake up refreshed, love your alarm clock, transform your mornings with The Zen Alarm Clock's progressive awakening with gentle chimes.

Another theory is that typical approaches to problem-solving may decay or weaken during sleep, enabling the brain to switch to more innovative alternatives. A classic switching story, recounted in “A Popular History of American Invention” in 1924, involves Elias Howe’s invention of the automated sewing machine: After much frustration with his original model, which used a needle with an eye in the middle, Howe dreamed that he was being attacked by painted warriors brandishing spears with holes in the sharp end. He patented a new design based on the dream spears; by the time the patent expired in 1867, he had earned more than $2 million in royalties.

Spear-wielding savages make for compelling stories, but creative insights directly induced by dreams are rare. In general, people are unaware of sleep’s effects on their performance.

Ellenbogen’s research at Harvard indicates that if an incubation period includes sleep, people are 33 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas, and yet, as he puts it, these performance enhancements exist “completely beneath the radar screen.”

Sleep sounder - wake up refreshed - choose a natural chime alarm clock

In other words, people are more creative after sleep, but they don’t know it.

This lack of awareness makes it hard to identify specific “aha” insights that have been prompted by sleep.

“It’s more that sleep brings a change of approach,” explains Mark Holmes, an art director at Pixar Animation Studios who worked on the film “WallE.” “You can get tunnel vision when you’re hammering away at a problem. You keep going down this same path, again and again, just tweaking, making incremental changes at best. ” He continues: “Sleep erases that. It resets you. You wake up and realize – wait a minute! – there is another way to do this.”

Business attitudes toward sleep may be starting to shift. Claire Stapleton, a spokeswoman for Google, says grassroots interest in sleep led to an on-campus talk by Sara Mednick, a napping expert. Google also installed EnergyPods, leather recliners with egglike hoods that block noise and light, for employees to take naps at work.

Other companies that have installed EnergyPods include Cisco Systems and Procter & Gamble.

Vinayak Sudame, an engineer at the Research Triangle Park campus of Cisco, says he uses an EnergyPod to “shut my eyes and shut myself off for 10 or 15 minutes” when he is working on a problem or needs some quiet time. More than a walk or a coffee break, he says, this type of “total mental rest” helps him return to work with a reorganized perspective.

Alertness Solutions, a sleep consulting company in Cupertino, provided consultations and recommendations to several U.S. Olympic teams before the Beijing Games and also works with corporate clients. Bob Agostino, vice president of operations at L.J. Aviation, in Latrobe, Pa., worked with Alertness Solutions at a previous employer and says that employees learned specific strategies to improve performance. These included when and how long to nap, how to determine the amount of sleep one needs, and how to recognize signs of fatigue and symptoms of sleep disorders.

Acting on this knowledge, Agostino says, “gives you an edge.”

In general, West Coast companies are more concerned about sleep issues than their East Coast counterparts, says Arshad Chowdhury, co-founder and chief executive of MetroNaps, which developed the EnergyPods.

“Particularly in New York, where financial services play such a big role, people are consistently sleep-deprived and consistently in denial,” he says.

Chowdhury – who says the idea for EnergyPods came to him in a nap – recalls a seminar in which one banker responded to a survey question with a note saying she knew she had no fatigue-related problems at work because the only time she fell asleep was when she sat still. Chowdhury laughs a bit ruefully: “Maybe we could have avoided the crisis we are in now if these people had just gotten proper sleep.”

Our Bamboo Digital Zen Clock’s long-resonating Tibetan bell-like chime makes waking up a beautiful experience – its progressive chimes begin your day with grace. When the clock’s alarm is triggered, the acoustic chime bar is struck just once … 3-1/2 minutes later it strikes again … chime strikes become more frequent over 10 minutes … eventually striking every 5 seconds until shut off. As they become more frequent, the gentle chimes will always wake you up – your body really doesn’t need to be awakened harshly, with a Zen Clock you’re awakened more gradually and thus more naturally.  Unlike artificial recorded sounds coming out of a tiny speaker in a plastic box, natural acoustic sounds transform your bedroom or office environment.

adapted from sfgate.com by Leslie Berlin

Wake Up The Most Natural Way -- Choose a Gentle Chime Alarm Clock

Now & Zen – The Chime Alarm Clock Shop

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

orders@now-zen.com

dreams

There’s evidence that creative types may find it easier to dip into the well of their dreams. In one of the largest studies on dream recall and personality traits, conducted at the University of Iowa, subjects who were inclined toward imagination and fantasy in their waking lives were much more likely to remember their dreams and to report dreams with vivid imagery.

The power dreamers also scored higher in terms of “openness,” according to researcher David Watson, who measured their inclination toward novel experiences and different perspectives.

In her book “The Committee of Sleep: How Artists, Scientists, and Athletes Use their Dreams for Creative Problem Solving — and How You Can Too,” Harvard psychologist Deirdre Barrett recounts the stories of notable artists, athletes, and inventors to capture the sly beauty of dream-generated creativity. (My favorite example: In 1844, American inventor Elias Howe, puzzling over how to design sewing machine needles, reportedly woke from a dream in which he was being chased by cannibals carrying spears with holes in their pointed tips. He realized — eureka! — that machine needles would need holes at the front end.)

Barrett has found that 50 percent of people who tell themselves before sleep that they want to dream about a certain dilemma have dreams on their chosen subjects within one week, and that half of them find helpful new information. (The solutions aren’t necessarily as world-shaking as Howe’s. One student struggling to arrange furniture in a cramped apartment woke with a clear diagram of how to fit it all.)

Ohara Koson (Shoson). 1877-1945 two carp and white lotus 1933

Recent studies at Harvard showed that people who’d spent hours playing a virtual-reality skiing game often dreamed later about aspects of the experience with a strong emotional prick — places along the course where they’d crashed, for instance — and generally performed better on the actual game after dreaming about it. It’s not exactly news to most of us that hot emotions and vexing problems tend to dominate dreams.

Believe me, I didn’t need a Ph.D. to decode the work worry in my stressful smoothie episode. But what is surprising, and to some extent vindicating to Freud, is just how emotionally beneficial our woolly night hallucinations seem to be. (Though he might be disappointed to learn how few of our dreams are overtly sexual: University of Montreal researchers, surveying 3,500 dream reports, found that just 8 percent of dreams for both men and women involved sexual activity.)

Text by Louisa Kamps

gentle chime alarm clocks help you remember your dreams

Now & Zen’s Alarm Clock Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

Sounder Slumber with Natural Chime Alarm Clocks

There’s a growing body of evidence linking sleep deprivation to poor physical health. Now there’s a study that suggests sleeplessness can hurt your fiscal fitness too.

Researchers at Duke University have found out that sleep deprivation boosts the part of your brain that tends toward optimism,; it also leads the part of your brain that processes negative outcomes to pipe down. As the news releases noted:

Sleep-deprived individuals in the study tended to make choices that emphasized monetary gain, and were less likely to make choices that reduced loss.

Although the study examined the way people in casinos behaved, it’s worth pondering how sleeplessness could be affecting your everyday financial decisions.

It’s one thing to be a sleep-deprived new parent and pony up for the Cloud b Sleep Sheepbecause you are desperate for the baby to sleep anywhere other than your arms ( … um. Not that I speak from personal experience. Or am bitter it didn’t work).

But is it possible that the chronically sleep deprived might be more prone to false thrift because they’re focusing more on the perceived financial benefits than on the realistic and likely drawbacks? Or perhaps their fiscal discipline is napping while they’re still up. In the bookNurtureShock: New Thinking About Children, authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write:

Sleep loss debilitates the body’s ability to extract glucose from the bloodstream. Without this stream of basic energy, one part of the brain suffers more than the rest — the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for what’s called “Executive function.” Among those executive functions are the orchestration of thoughts to fulfill a goal, prediction of outcomes, and perceiving consequences of actions.

Working toward goals, thinking through consequences — those sound like two of the governing mechanisms that help people manage their spending and saving.

Perhaps somewhere Benjamin Franklin is smiling. After all he is the one who said, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

One of the ultimate Zen like experiences is waking-up from a great slumber refreshed and energized.

The right alarm clock can be the most beneficial investment for you. With our Now & Zen natural alarm clock you are awakened more gradually and thus more naturally. Now & Zen is focused on creating a naturalistic lifestyle, and our clocks are an example of our philosophy.

One of the ultimate Zen like experiences is waking-up from a great slumber refreshed and energized. Your mind and body are harmoniously one, both alert and focused. Having a refreshed mind and body are two keys to a natural and Zen lifestyle. Waking up in the morning should not be a loud and abrupt awakening, but rather it should be a peaceful positive experience.  The right natural alarm clock can transition your deep and tranquil sleep into a serene start to consciousness. Imagine a long-resonating Tibetan bell-like chime waking you up to a beautiful morning experience.

adapted from sfgate.com by Lisa Schmeiser

Now & Zen – The Chime Alarm Clock Store – Downtown Boulder

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

Orders@now-zen.com

The luxurious awakening provided by the Zen Alarm Clock is part of the growing preference for things natural—natural foods, natural fibers, and now, natural acoustic sounds.

soothing chime alarm clocks

The Bamboo Digital Zen Clock’s long-resonating Tibetan bell-like chime makes waking up a beautiful experience – its progressive chimes begin your day with grace. When the clock’s alarm is triggered, the acoustic chime bar is struck just once … 3-1/2 minutes later it strikes again … chime strikes become more frequent over 10 minutes … eventually striking every 5 seconds until shut off. As they become more frequent, the gentle chimes will always wake you up – your body really doesn’t need to be awakened harshly, with a Zen Clock you’re awakened more gradually and thus more naturally.  Unlike artificial recorded sounds coming out of a tiny speaker in a plastic box, natural acoustic sounds transform your bedroom or office environment.

Zen Clocks awakened you more gradually and thus more naturally

Now & Zen Headquarter Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383

Signing Bowl Alarm Clock and Timer - Ukyioe Girls Festival Chokosai Eisho

One powerful way to tap into the authentic inspiration and boundless creativity potential is to invoke your higher Self. The following meditation, which Yogi Bhajan taught students, can help you sharpen concentration, access intuition, and enhance creativity.

Begin by sitting in any meditation pose, with your eyes focusing on the tip of your nose. Lift your chest and elongate the spine. Lift the crown of the head as your chin relaxes down and in. Let the shoulder blades relax down the back.

Create a connection to the sacred wisdom within by chanting Ong namo guru dev namo three times. This chant calls on the creative consciousness and the subtle intelligence of the entire universe. Ongis similar to Om—the vibrational sound of the universe—but in its active, creative form. While Om is beyond time and space, Ongconnects us to the creative energy embodied in this moment. Namomeans “to acknowledge or call on respectfully.” Guru refers to wisdom or teacher, and dev refers to the subtle or divine.

Next, bring your awareness to the breath and silently repeat the syllables sa ta na ma, the sacred mantras signifying infinity, birth, death, and rebirth–the cycle of creation. Continue for 11 to 62 minutes. When you feel complete, inhale and retain the breath only for as long as it is comfortable. Exhale and continue to breathe naturally.

Take a moment to say a prayer or set an intention for your creative endeavors. To close, chant sat nam (which means “I am truth”) three times.

Singing Bowl Meditation and Yoga Timer with Gentle Chime

Use our unique “Zen Clock” which functions as a Yoga & Meditation Timer.  It features a long-resonating acoustic chime that brings your meditation or yoga session to a gradual close, preserving the environment of stillness while also acting as an effective time signal. Our Yoga Timer & Clock can be programmed to chime at the end of the meditation or yoga session or periodically throughout the session as a kind of sonic yantra. The beauty and functionality of the Zen Clock/Timer makes it a meditation tool that can actually help you “make time” for meditation in your life. Bring yourself back to balance.

adapted from www.himalayaninstitute.org by Hari Kirin Kaur Khalsa

Singing Bowl Alarm Clocks by Now & Zen, Inc.

Now & Zen – The Singing Bowl

Alarm Clock Headquarter Store

1638 Pearl Street

Boulder, CO  80302

(800) 779-6383