This is something worth contemplating. The average person spends a third of their life in bed; for children or the elderly it can be even more than this.
There are a growing number of people experiencing sleep disorders of some type, either chronic or intermittent sleep disturbances. To combat this, we may take medication, look at our caffeine intake, our stress levels, our bedtime routine, but are we taking into account the actual mattress and bedding on which we sleep? The place we lay our head to rest for 8 hours? Is it really restful, comfortable, supportive, breathable, providing a good spine alignment and pressure point relief? Is it the place to relax and let go?
Sleep is vital to our wellbeing. The body is in fact, very active while we sleep, performing many tasks vital for our survival: detoxification, hormone production, growth and repair. Also recently discovered, our brain “cleans itself when we sleep”… Scientists found the clean-up process was so energy-intensive it would hinder our thinking if done when we were awake. They concluded that unlike the rest of the body – which depends on the lymphatic system to drain toxins – the brain has its separate method of rubbish removal.
“The brain only has limited energy at its disposal and it appears that it must choose between two different functional states – awake and aware or asleep and cleaning up,” Dr Nedergaard said. “You can think of it like having a house party. You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, but you can’t really do both at the same time.” An important implication of the cleaning process is if someone did not get enough sleep. The toxic build-up could mount and have health consequences. The number of hours a person needed to sleep to avoid a chemical build-up depended on the individual, however, as a general rule, eight hours of sleep each night was needed for a good, restorative sleep. “Something so basic is really quite elegant.”
If we can provide ourselves a space of pure-rest, then these processes can occur more effectively, providing benefits to our overall wellbeing and happy productive life.