Sleep Better to Lose Weight?

Can you lose weight if you just manage to sleep better? It sounds too good to be true—but recent research indicates that there is a definite connection between how much you weigh, and the amount of undisturbed sleep you get per night.

Two of your natural hormones, ghrelin and leptin, help control your appetite. When you don’t get enough rest, levels of ghrelin rise increase your hunger, while levels of leptin, which promote feelings of fullness, decrease. A study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology reported a significant disruption of nighttime ghrelin levels in chronic insomniacs and restless sleepers.

According to the study, this hormone imbalance leads people to experience an increase in appetite during the day, and weight gain over time.

In addition to creating a ghrelin and leptin imbalance , sleep deprivation or disturbances also cause higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which increases cravings for high-carb, high-calorie “comfort foods.”

Furthermore, the brain secretes growth hormone (HGH) during the deep-sleep phase, helping the body convert fat to fuel. AND Without enough deep sleep, fat begins to accumulate. This goes against any attempt to lose weight. To lose weight, you must learn to control your stress — and this, in turn, also leads to improved sleep.

Sleep expert Michael Breus, clinical director of the sleep division at Southwest Spine and Sports in Scottsdale, Arizona, says that there is no magic number of hours people should sleep, but that the average adult needs about five 90-minute sleep cycles per night — so 7.5 hours seems optimal as a minimum.

But simply getting under the covers is probably not a sufficient strategy to achieve long-term weight loss, Breus says.

How Can I Handle Tough Times?

Are you trying to deal with something you can’t control – tough times due to a natural disaster, the plunging economy, or just plain old bad luck?

 It IS possible to bounce back from tough times and go on to create an even better life.  But this requires a  kind of deep inner strength called resilience.

What is resilience? It’s the ability to find hope amid uncertain conditions. Resilient people do not let adversity define them. They transcend pain and grief by perceiving tough times as temporary, and believe better times are coming.

People do seem to differ in their inborn ability to handle life’s stresses, but resilience can also be cultivated. At the heart of resilience is a belief in yourself. It’s possible to strengthen your belief in yourself and to define yourself as capable and competent.

How to Handle Tough Times
One key to developing resilience is to go back in your mind and reinterpret past events. What you  want to do is  to discover the personal strength you built by surviving that event.

Resiliency is the capacity to rise above the challenges of tough times. Resilience is not the ability to escape unharmed. Resilient people have scars to show for their experience.

At the  heart of becoming more resilient is a technique called Reframing. This is a way of shifting focus from the cup half empty to the cup half full. Take the case of one woman who had been emotionally abused by her parents throughout her childhood. Her healing occurred in an instant when she realized what a powerful survivor she was.

Re-examine your life story to see how heroic your acts were as a child. Go back to an incident, identify your resulting survivor’s strengths, and your build self-esteem from this achievement. Build your resilience FAST!

Does Relaxation Really Change Your Genes?

Scientific studies now show that deep relaxation actually changes our bodies on a genetic level.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School discovered that long-term practitioners of relaxation methods such as yoga and meditation have far more “disease-fighting” active genes compared to those who do not practice relaxation.

This includes genes that protect from: pain, infertility, high blood pressure and even rheumatoid arthritis. The changes were induced by what they call “the relaxation effect” — a phenomenon  just as powerful as medical drugs,  but without the side-effects.

The experiment, which showed just how responsive genes are to behaviour, mood and environment, revealed that genes can switch on, just as easily as they switch off.

“Harvard researchers asked the control group to start practising relaxation methods every day,” explains Jake Toby, hypnotherapist at London’s BodyMind Medicine Centre, who teaches clients how to induce the relaxation effect. “After two months, their bodies began to change – the genes that help fight inflammation, kill diseased cells and protect the body from cancer, all began to switch on.”

More encouraging still, the benefits of the relaxation effect were found to increase with regular practice – the more people practised relaxation methods, the greater their chances of remaining free of arthritis and joint pain with stronger immunity, healthier hormone levels and lower blood pressure.

The research is pivotal because it shows how a person’s state of mind affects the body on a physical and genetic level. But just how can relaxation have such wide-ranging and powerful effects? Research around the world has described the negative effects of stress on the body. Linked to the release of the stress-hormones adrenalin and cortisol, stress raises the heart rate and blood pressure, weakens immunity and lowers fertility.

“What you’re looking for is a state of deep relaxation where tension is released from the body on a physical level and your mind completely switches off,” he says. You can only really achieve it by learning a specific technique such as self-hypnosis,  meditation, or neural brainwave training.”

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