Day 27--The Dark, Dark Past--Learn from it!!
This journey called life has taught me a wonderful concept---DON'T LOOK BACK. In fact Larry and I remind ourselves often with this phrase, "Yesterday ended last night". It is one of the healthiest things we have done to heal our relationship and relationships with others. Yes, we have been married for 50 years, but marriage is a journey and we work on it daily. It is that important to us. In Philippians 3:13-14, Paul encourages us to forget those things in the past, and press toward the mark set before us. Forgetting my past has to be an easier task for me than it was for Paul---he persecuted and killed Christians. Surely I can do this. My past (bad sleep habits), and my mark that I am reaching for (good health) seems like a piece of cake. ( I need to forget this bad habit, too). The only reason I bring up the past right now, is because it was a very dark time in my life---literally. And I want your to see this so that you can make adjustments in your life if you find yourself in some of these circumstances. I wish I had known what I know now.
If I could pinpoint a time in my life that I suffered the greatest sleep deprivation, the greatest depression and the greatest health problems, it was from 1999 to 2014. This span of time was the last 15 years that I worked in the school system. No, it was not the job, it was the environment. Now there was some great highs during those years. All my grandbabies were born, and I had landed my dream job the last seven years as a Career Development Coordinator, so your would think it was the happiest time in my life. But I had many low times and I had no idea what was going on. I told you in an earlier blog (Day 21), that my family has a history of depression. We have actually had two suicides and multiple hospitalizations for depression. So in my mind I just thought it must be hereditary. So Larry and I faced it full force with the only thing we knew to do, and that was get my mind off the past and present circumstances. So we would take a ride, go on a trip or maybe just talk about it. This helped so much--- temporarily. I did not know at that time what role diet, exercise and good sleeping habits had to do with overall health and depression. I want to learn from the past, not dwell on it. So--on to my environment for those 15 years.
I lived in darkness in more ways than one. As I said I worked in the school system, Southwest High to be exact. I loved it----everything about it. My three principals were the greatest, I made some really good friends with the teachers, and I loved the students with all their bumps, so what could have been so bad about it? It was the darkness of my rooms. I lived for 15 years all day long with no sunlight. I had an interior room in the school building with no windows when I taught, and then when I got an office job, my office had no windows. I was also exposed all day to all fluorescent lighting and there is a great debate going on about the danger of being exposed to this type of lighting all day. (You can go there if you want to, it is too deep a subject for me). So to say that my circadian rhythm was off is an understatement. It would have been a great place to sleep, but not to work. There were many days that I did not see the light of day. Since I was a workaholic, I got to school before seven, getting there in the dark (school started at 8:30) and would leave at dark, so I was getting no natural light. Looking back, there were things that I could have done differently, but I had no clue at this stage of my journey through life what to do, how to do it, and even that it really mattered. This is what I would have done had I known what I know now. I would have eaten lunch outside when the weather cooperated. I did that a few times. We rarely had cafeteria duty, and on those days I could have stood by the windows or doors in the lunchroom. I could also have walked the track during lunchtime. On my planning period I could have walked outside, made a loop around the school and returned to my room to do planning. I could have taken my papers outside and graded them on the picnic tables. There were probably numerous things that I could have done, like not getting to school so early, or spending some of those early hours outside. It all seems simple now, but I had no clue what it was doing to my health. So it effected my health in the following ways.
#1 Sleep. I was getting at most, six hours a night. I went to bed around 11PM and got up at 5AM. Now I got in bed at 11, but I did not go straight to sleep. In fact I had a hard time getting to sleep. so I would watch TV until I feel asleep and a lot of time it would be hours. (I suggest not having a TV in your bedroom). I was absorbing the blue light and my body was telling itself not to produce melatonin. And on the nights that I would fall asleep, I would often awaken at 2-3AM and be wide awake, so I would get up and do school work, balance the checkbook, etc. Sometimes I would go back to bed and sleep an hour or so and get up at 5am, dead to the world, having to face the day with little energy. So I was not getting the four stages of sleep that I needed. A quick reminder of what goes on in each stage that I was not getting.
A. Stage One information moves from short term memory to long term memory. It gets placed in
an organizational structure so that you can retrieve it and make good decisions. So-- I began to
have a terrible time remembering names and other facts.
B. Stage Two vital anti-aging hormones are secreted during sleep. During this time serotonin and
dopamine levels increase and those are you "happiness hormones" that regulate the calming
functions. Your growth hormones increases that is the main hormone that keeps you young.
Sleep is when you recharge your hormones and neurotransmitters. Overall it was a sad time.
C. Stage Three is when the toxins are cleared away from your brain cells---waste removal time.
While you sleep, your brain cells shrink allowing space for fluids to wash away toxic waste.
Your brain can't think and clean at the same time. Alzheimer's is characterized by a buildup of
toxic proteins in the brain. I suffered some brain fog.
D. Stage Four sleep invigorates your cellular energy, like a furnace. You want the energy in your
cells to be high. An interesting study was done with identical twins. They checked their cellular
energy after allowing them to sleep 90 minutes less. Their cell function was equivalent to
someone 10 years older. I definitely felt old.
E. REM sleep, which occurs in these stages is the time when mental restoration occurs. God only
knows how many of my brain cells died during this time.
So how was this affecting me? Not at all, I thought. I just thought I was getting old and this is what I could expect. After all, my ages during those years were 51-66. Shouldn't I be feeling old? Well I'm living proof that this is not true and nothing to joke about---which I did, saying that I had Old-timers disease. I would walk into a room not knowing why I was there, and studies has shown that this rarely happens when you get a good nights sleep and can actually be traced to that lack of sleep---even for just one night. Otherwise, if it were just the fact that you were getting old, you would do it a lot more, and more often. I have started tracking that and I have found it to be true. I had a lot more times of being sad and experiencing times of not being calm when I faced situations that were not really about life and death, and should not have caused me anxiety. I did not notice this at the time it was happening to me---until I now look back and see the difference since I have started my journey on doing it God's way. So now I take definite steps to get proper sunlight---the natural light that God provides.
As soon as I wake up in the morning I open all the blinds in every window in the house. I only use enough artificial light to get around if the sun is not yet up or use my blue light filter glasses. As soon as it is light enough to go outside, I try to get at least fifteen minutes of natural light. Let the light enter your eyes without sunglasses. This shuts off all melatonin, which naturally declines in the early morning hours, but this natural light shuts the melatonin off completely. I try not to use any artificial light during the day. This is hard for me because I am a "lamp lover" and I love bright lights. But I love my sleep also, and if I have to give up my lamps, then so be it. I also gave up daytime naps because I realized this interfered with good sleep at night. I still rest, just not with my eyes closed. Then at night I put on my reverse sunglasses and wear them in the house until bedtime. This allows me to do some computer work, television watching and facebook checking. I also remove all electronics from my bedroom, including my phone. I leave it an another room. We do not have an alarm clock that glows all night, Larry sets the alarm on his phone and puts it in the bathroom with the door closed. I close the door to my bedroom so I will not see any lights from the cable box or stove. I have read that all these small lights interfere with sleep patterns and melatonin production.( more later).
#2 Depression I won't go into a lot of detail here, because I don't remember a lot of specifics, and the few that I do remember I do not feel free to share at this time, so I am going to narrow it down to the fact that I had terrible mood swings. I have read and studied enough now to know that it was directly related to lack of good, continuous sleep and the dark times I faced in the my school environment. The swings would baffle me and I'm sure baffled Larry. He would continuously remind me of every reason I had to be happy, and it would help tremendously. If only I had started my health journey ten years earlier I could have prevented myself a lot of heartaches. And thank goodness the swings were very short lived. They might happen in the morning and be gone by night. They did not generally last for days, it was mostly hours and sometimes minutes. I can look back and see the whole picture now, but then I was clueless and most of the time did not even realize it was happening. I even excused it as going through the "change". Now I know hormones do play a part in mood swings, but in my case I knew it was more. I also recall during that time that there were several teachers who were in the dark interior rooms who were on anti-depressants, which they called their "happy pills". It makes me wonder is they were suffering also from staying in those dark rooms all day long.
#3 Health This is the time that I was suffering from my severe GERD issues. You can read more about that in Blog- Stop the Leaks" Day 15. if you are interested in the cause and the cure. I just mention it now because I wanted you to see the timeframe of when it happened in my life. This dark room era caused me to do things that directly affected my GERD issues. It messed up my sleep which caused me to be awake at night and while I was awake I would sometimes snack on foods and drink things that directly affected the GERD. Snacking in the middle of the night is the absolute worst thing you can do. It starts your digestive process which takes away from the healing that your body is doing at night. My leaky gut had no time to heal. Digestion also affect you, should you decide to go back to sleep a few hours later. Digestion should be limited to only a few hours a day. That is the great thing about intermittent fasting (covered in Blog "Breakfast of Champions--Day 3). It allow your body to concentrate on healing more hours in the day. It is hard to digest and heal at the same time.
So the journey to good sleep has been long and hard. I continue to learn as I continue to read about the wonderful benefits of sleep as God intended it. It is still not perfect for me seven days a week, but it continues to get better and I will always be open to ways that will make it better.
If I could pinpoint a time in my life that I suffered the greatest sleep deprivation, the greatest depression and the greatest health problems, it was from 1999 to 2014. This span of time was the last 15 years that I worked in the school system. No, it was not the job, it was the environment. Now there was some great highs during those years. All my grandbabies were born, and I had landed my dream job the last seven years as a Career Development Coordinator, so your would think it was the happiest time in my life. But I had many low times and I had no idea what was going on. I told you in an earlier blog (Day 21), that my family has a history of depression. We have actually had two suicides and multiple hospitalizations for depression. So in my mind I just thought it must be hereditary. So Larry and I faced it full force with the only thing we knew to do, and that was get my mind off the past and present circumstances. So we would take a ride, go on a trip or maybe just talk about it. This helped so much--- temporarily. I did not know at that time what role diet, exercise and good sleeping habits had to do with overall health and depression. I want to learn from the past, not dwell on it. So--on to my environment for those 15 years.
I lived in darkness in more ways than one. As I said I worked in the school system, Southwest High to be exact. I loved it----everything about it. My three principals were the greatest, I made some really good friends with the teachers, and I loved the students with all their bumps, so what could have been so bad about it? It was the darkness of my rooms. I lived for 15 years all day long with no sunlight. I had an interior room in the school building with no windows when I taught, and then when I got an office job, my office had no windows. I was also exposed all day to all fluorescent lighting and there is a great debate going on about the danger of being exposed to this type of lighting all day. (You can go there if you want to, it is too deep a subject for me). So to say that my circadian rhythm was off is an understatement. It would have been a great place to sleep, but not to work. There were many days that I did not see the light of day. Since I was a workaholic, I got to school before seven, getting there in the dark (school started at 8:30) and would leave at dark, so I was getting no natural light. Looking back, there were things that I could have done differently, but I had no clue at this stage of my journey through life what to do, how to do it, and even that it really mattered. This is what I would have done had I known what I know now. I would have eaten lunch outside when the weather cooperated. I did that a few times. We rarely had cafeteria duty, and on those days I could have stood by the windows or doors in the lunchroom. I could also have walked the track during lunchtime. On my planning period I could have walked outside, made a loop around the school and returned to my room to do planning. I could have taken my papers outside and graded them on the picnic tables. There were probably numerous things that I could have done, like not getting to school so early, or spending some of those early hours outside. It all seems simple now, but I had no clue what it was doing to my health. So it effected my health in the following ways.
#1 Sleep. I was getting at most, six hours a night. I went to bed around 11PM and got up at 5AM. Now I got in bed at 11, but I did not go straight to sleep. In fact I had a hard time getting to sleep. so I would watch TV until I feel asleep and a lot of time it would be hours. (I suggest not having a TV in your bedroom). I was absorbing the blue light and my body was telling itself not to produce melatonin. And on the nights that I would fall asleep, I would often awaken at 2-3AM and be wide awake, so I would get up and do school work, balance the checkbook, etc. Sometimes I would go back to bed and sleep an hour or so and get up at 5am, dead to the world, having to face the day with little energy. So I was not getting the four stages of sleep that I needed. A quick reminder of what goes on in each stage that I was not getting.
A. Stage One information moves from short term memory to long term memory. It gets placed in
an organizational structure so that you can retrieve it and make good decisions. So-- I began to
have a terrible time remembering names and other facts.
B. Stage Two vital anti-aging hormones are secreted during sleep. During this time serotonin and
dopamine levels increase and those are you "happiness hormones" that regulate the calming
functions. Your growth hormones increases that is the main hormone that keeps you young.
Sleep is when you recharge your hormones and neurotransmitters. Overall it was a sad time.
C. Stage Three is when the toxins are cleared away from your brain cells---waste removal time.
While you sleep, your brain cells shrink allowing space for fluids to wash away toxic waste.
Your brain can't think and clean at the same time. Alzheimer's is characterized by a buildup of
toxic proteins in the brain. I suffered some brain fog.
D. Stage Four sleep invigorates your cellular energy, like a furnace. You want the energy in your
cells to be high. An interesting study was done with identical twins. They checked their cellular
energy after allowing them to sleep 90 minutes less. Their cell function was equivalent to
someone 10 years older. I definitely felt old.
E. REM sleep, which occurs in these stages is the time when mental restoration occurs. God only
knows how many of my brain cells died during this time.
So how was this affecting me? Not at all, I thought. I just thought I was getting old and this is what I could expect. After all, my ages during those years were 51-66. Shouldn't I be feeling old? Well I'm living proof that this is not true and nothing to joke about---which I did, saying that I had Old-timers disease. I would walk into a room not knowing why I was there, and studies has shown that this rarely happens when you get a good nights sleep and can actually be traced to that lack of sleep---even for just one night. Otherwise, if it were just the fact that you were getting old, you would do it a lot more, and more often. I have started tracking that and I have found it to be true. I had a lot more times of being sad and experiencing times of not being calm when I faced situations that were not really about life and death, and should not have caused me anxiety. I did not notice this at the time it was happening to me---until I now look back and see the difference since I have started my journey on doing it God's way. So now I take definite steps to get proper sunlight---the natural light that God provides.
As soon as I wake up in the morning I open all the blinds in every window in the house. I only use enough artificial light to get around if the sun is not yet up or use my blue light filter glasses. As soon as it is light enough to go outside, I try to get at least fifteen minutes of natural light. Let the light enter your eyes without sunglasses. This shuts off all melatonin, which naturally declines in the early morning hours, but this natural light shuts the melatonin off completely. I try not to use any artificial light during the day. This is hard for me because I am a "lamp lover" and I love bright lights. But I love my sleep also, and if I have to give up my lamps, then so be it. I also gave up daytime naps because I realized this interfered with good sleep at night. I still rest, just not with my eyes closed. Then at night I put on my reverse sunglasses and wear them in the house until bedtime. This allows me to do some computer work, television watching and facebook checking. I also remove all electronics from my bedroom, including my phone. I leave it an another room. We do not have an alarm clock that glows all night, Larry sets the alarm on his phone and puts it in the bathroom with the door closed. I close the door to my bedroom so I will not see any lights from the cable box or stove. I have read that all these small lights interfere with sleep patterns and melatonin production.( more later).
#2 Depression I won't go into a lot of detail here, because I don't remember a lot of specifics, and the few that I do remember I do not feel free to share at this time, so I am going to narrow it down to the fact that I had terrible mood swings. I have read and studied enough now to know that it was directly related to lack of good, continuous sleep and the dark times I faced in the my school environment. The swings would baffle me and I'm sure baffled Larry. He would continuously remind me of every reason I had to be happy, and it would help tremendously. If only I had started my health journey ten years earlier I could have prevented myself a lot of heartaches. And thank goodness the swings were very short lived. They might happen in the morning and be gone by night. They did not generally last for days, it was mostly hours and sometimes minutes. I can look back and see the whole picture now, but then I was clueless and most of the time did not even realize it was happening. I even excused it as going through the "change". Now I know hormones do play a part in mood swings, but in my case I knew it was more. I also recall during that time that there were several teachers who were in the dark interior rooms who were on anti-depressants, which they called their "happy pills". It makes me wonder is they were suffering also from staying in those dark rooms all day long.
#3 Health This is the time that I was suffering from my severe GERD issues. You can read more about that in Blog- Stop the Leaks" Day 15. if you are interested in the cause and the cure. I just mention it now because I wanted you to see the timeframe of when it happened in my life. This dark room era caused me to do things that directly affected my GERD issues. It messed up my sleep which caused me to be awake at night and while I was awake I would sometimes snack on foods and drink things that directly affected the GERD. Snacking in the middle of the night is the absolute worst thing you can do. It starts your digestive process which takes away from the healing that your body is doing at night. My leaky gut had no time to heal. Digestion also affect you, should you decide to go back to sleep a few hours later. Digestion should be limited to only a few hours a day. That is the great thing about intermittent fasting (covered in Blog "Breakfast of Champions--Day 3). It allow your body to concentrate on healing more hours in the day. It is hard to digest and heal at the same time.
So the journey to good sleep has been long and hard. I continue to learn as I continue to read about the wonderful benefits of sleep as God intended it. It is still not perfect for me seven days a week, but it continues to get better and I will always be open to ways that will make it better.
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