Sleep Your Way to Being Anxiety and Stress Free!
By Graeme Teague
Can you actually eliminate stress and anxiety by sleeping? If you just take a nap does stress or anxiety just disappear? It would be nice to think so wouldn’t it?
Well don’t be alarmed, and don’t turn off your computer just yet. I will let you into a secret.
Stress and anxiety can be eliminated by sleeping. Not just any sleep, good sleep.
To understand this you need to know a few things about your sleep patterns. Firstly you need to know what happens to your brain when you sleep (how do you release your anxiety and stress) and secondly what happens to your body.
The Mind Changes
When you sleep you go through three brain wave patterns. When you are awake, you are in a Beta brain wave state. As soon as you close your eyes you enter Alpha, and then with time you go through Theta and eventually in a deep sleep you enter the Delta brain wave.
Each of these brain wave states has an anti stress and anxiety purpose
The Alpha mind is where you dream. It is those colorful movies you play in your head. This is your mind working out all your problems of today or your past and trying to find solutions and answers to problems or question you have, it helps you release your anxiety and stress.
The more stress or anxiety you have, the longer it takes to go through Alpha and get to the Theta state.
In Theta your mind creates the still images, like photos. They tend to be in black and white. This is also your thought state.
Have you ever wondered why the saying ‘let’s sleep on it’ occurs. It means you go to bed, relax and have a good sleep and when you go through the Theta state your minds comes up with new thoughts on the stress and anxiety issues at hand.
Once Theta is finished you enter the brain wave state of Delta. This is where you recharge your energy cells. Now the strange thing is you only need 8 minutes of delta sleep to fully recharge your energy.
Your brain goes through four cycles when you sleep you go from alpha to theta and then to delta, you then come up through theta again and enter alpha once more. You repeat this cycle four times in the night and finish by going from alpha to your waking Beta state.
If you go to bed with more stress or anxiety on your mind, then two things happen. You spend more time getting through the Alpha and Theta mind levels so it takes longer to get to Delta. This means you tend to not get through the four cycles before your alarm goes off. Of even if you have a longer time to sleep, you still may not have enough time to go through the four cycles.
You then wake up feeling tired, unsettled or even agitated your anxiety and stress levels are almost as bad as when you went to sleep.. Your brain hasn’t had enough time to eliminate the stress and anxiety or to recharge your batteries fully.
And in Your Body
When you sleep your body changes also. Certain organs have peak activities when you sleep. Your Liver has a peak activity between 1am and 3 am. If you are not fully asleep, or are tossing or turning from your anxiety and stress levels being too high, or the above situation with your mind is occurring, then your Liver will not gain the full functional level.
Your Liver is one of your anti-ageing organs. It helps to detoxify your body, relates to the hormonal system (which also affects blood pressure, heart rate, anxiety and stress levels etc) and helps your body to recharge energetically.
So if your sleep is poor then both your mind and body suffer the effects of stress and anxiety.
What can you do to stop this?
Good sleep will therefore help your mind to eliminate stress and anxiety; it will allow your mind and body to recharge fully. The problem is you need a good sleep. You need to be able to slip through the Alpha and Theta brain levels and access your Delta mind and have the Liver functioning well.
Going to sleep with less stress and anxiety will help. You need to eliminate stress and anxiety while you are awake. You need to use simple, proven and natural ways to drop your stress levels so sleep is natural and efficient. Sleep medication will not achieve this.
Stress and anxiety relief will not just make tomorrow better, it will aid your anti-ageing effects and help to make your life better and longer. So get a good night sleep it will help stop your anxiety and stress levels increasing.
Dr Graeme Teague is an expert on stress and the affects it has on health. His unique and fresh views on anxiety, depression and stress are a welcome change. His web site Fast Stress Relief.com is designed to give you all the information and facts on how and why stress affects you, and more importantly simple, proven and natural ways to eliminate anxiety, depression and stress.
To learn more about anxiety and how you can eliminate it - click here … Anxiety.
Or you can visit his site, and find more information on various stress problems and how you can overcome them … Home Page!
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Graeme_Teague
Technorati Tags: stress and anxiety, brain wave patterns, delta, good sleep, theta state, take a nap, sleep patterns, deep sleep, energy cells, still images, new thoughts, strange thing, go to bed, firstly
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