Wonderful Sleep

By J.E. Block M.D., PhD, FACP

Poor sleep can have a terrible effect on your health. Poor sleep raises your risk for many chronic conditions. It's even a factor in more than 100,000 car crashes each year and 35% higher incidence of a cardiovascular death. Popular sleep remedies like melatonin or valerian doesn't work consistently for everyone. It can cause daytime drowsiness, headaches, anxiety, and mood swings. You see, your body produces chemicals  (neurotransmitters) that excite the brain. It can also produce chemicals that calm your nerves down.
  
If you're under stress or a sudden threat, your body releases hormones such as cortisol and adrenalin to speed up your heart and get your muscles ready for action. This is the "fight or flight" response. Our brain also makes chemicals to calm down our nervous system and help it relax. The neurotransmitters GABA, dopamine and serotonin are relaxers and glycine, glutamate and norepinephrine are exciters!

If there is an imbalance in this system — too much of the "excitatory" chemicals and not enough of the relaxing ones — then chances are your body's not going to be able to calm down enough to fall asleep quickly or stay asleep all night.

The key is to find out what kind of imbalance you have, and correct it. Stress is a 21^st century phenomenon. With our 24/7, non-stop, always connected lifestyles, we're constantly having to deal with issues at home or at work. It's hard to switch off worries about health, money, job security, retirement, or your children and grandchildren.

The trouble is, this constant stress causes your body to release cortisol. That's the "fight or flight" hormone I mentioned before. But cortisol doesn't just get us ready to slay a wild animal. It can also cause sleep problems. Cortisol is our body's "wake up" hormone. Our cortisol levels jump by 50 to 60 percent within minutes of waking up each morning. So the last thing you want is to have high cortisol at nighttime. Ideally, our cortisol levels should gradually decrease during the day, reaching the lowest point just before bedtime.  But if we are constantly stressed or over stimulated during the day our cortisol levels get stuck in over-drive!

Constant high cortisol can make it difficult to fall asleep. It can prevent us from getting deep, restful sleep; and too much cortisol can wake us up in the middle of the night. Studies like the four time salivary cortisol lab show that people with sleep problems had the highest amount of cortisol in their saliva, in the evening. To improve sleep, one needs to reduce our cortisol. Regular exercise helps. So do stress-reducing activities like yoga or meditation, bi-aural music, magnesium, meditation, breathing exercise, and prayer.

One of the best ways to do that is with niacinamide, also known as vitamin B3. Niacinamide is a potent sleep inducer. It directly affects the "benzodiazepine" receptors in our brain. These are the same receptors that are targeted by a well-known, anti-anxiety medicine such as Xanax or Ambien. Niacinamide has been shown to induce a feeling of calmness as well as sleep.

Do not take calcium. It can make one feel anxious, and it causes muscles to contract. Calcium can also contribute to restless leg syndrome and leg cramps that can wake us up in the middle of the night and keep you up. Magnesium is a natural muscle relaxer and sedative. Magnesium reverses restless leg syndrome and cramping in both legs and feet.

Green tea, despite the fact that green tea has caffeine also help. It contains the amino acid L-theanine.  L-theanine blunts the stimulating effects of caffeine, and has an overall calming effect.  L-theanine helps increase "alpha-wave" activity in our brain.  Alpha waves correspond to the same state of calm relaxation that you feel with meditation and yoga. Taking L-theanine is like getting a mini-dose of meditation for calming down your mind and promoting deep, restful sleep!

Serotonin is your body's natural "feel good" neurotransmitter. It helps regulate your mood and appetite as well as your sleep. If people crave sweets they might have a serotonin deficiency.  Woman are more likely to have this problem compared to men. Also, serotonin deficiency can cause humans to struggle with worry, anxiety, obsession, winter blues, and low self-esteem.  People with a serotonin deficiency often have sleep problems.

During the day, our body slowly converts serotonin into melatonin. Our body stores this melatonin inside the pineal gland. When daylight turns to night, it signals your pineal gland to release the melatonin. The melatonin then helps us to fall asleep. If the serotonin levels are too low during the daytime, your melatonin levels will be too low at night. But you don't have to take melatonin to correct this. One of the best ways to reverse a serotonin deficiency is to take a natural amino acid called 5HTP (5-hydroxytryptophan). 5-HTP is the "precursor" to serotonin. That means it's the final step in your body's production process for serotonin. By taking 5-HTP, we bypass the conversion of other molecules and directly produce more serotonin. 5-HTP also improves the quality of your sleep. 5-HTP increases REM sleep by about 25 percent and boosts your deep, restorative sleep; and 5-HTP does this without increasing total sleep time.

Supplementing with B vitamins helps boost your serotonin, too. Our body can’t make neurotransmitters like serotonin without them. That's why you need the vitamin B3 (niacinamide).  Also, we need vitamin B6.  Vitamin B6 is involved in thousands of reactions in the body. It's essential for the creation of serotonin. Vitamin B6 also helps your body minimize the effects of stress. It helps you feel comfortable and prepares you for a good night's rest.

GABA deficiency causes sleep and relaxation problems. GABA (Gamma-aminobutyric acid) is our body's most abundant "inhibitory" neurotransmitter. That means it's the cornerstone of your body's "calming" system. Without enough GABA, we can feel out of balance, prone to anxiety and sleep problems. Also stiffness, and inability to relax or loosen up happens without enough GABA.

Think of GABA as the “brakes” when it comes to neurotransmitter activity. When stress triggers a spike in adrenaline, causing the "fight or flight" response, GABA slows down the response by blocking the signal. GABA relaxes, sedates, and reduces overstimulation.

The obvious way to increase GABA is to supplement with GABA. But it’s important not to take too much.  So, in addition to an appropriate amount of GABA, one should also supplement with the building blocks of GABA, which are amino acids. These amino acids are able to cross the blood brain barrier.  That means they go right to the brain where GABA is created. Taurine is one of these important amino acids. Taurine helps increase GABA without any adverse side effects. Taurine is also an excellent stress buster. Taurine inhibits the release of adrenaline, the stress neurotransmitter. A neurotransmitter urine study can be done by a paid for insurance test from Pharmoscan to give insight to the diagnoses of sleep and mood disorders.

Source : http://docblock.com