Trouble Sleeping?

SO MANY people (including me) have disrupted sleep sometimes or often. 

Honestly (and unfortunately), with the amount of stress most of us are under and being glued to screens for a large majority of our days and nights, it’s no wonder our brains struggle to settle in for a good night’s sleep.

In Chinese Medicine, disrupted sleep can be due to a variety of reasons, but the main key that allows us to have restful sleep is the quality and abundance of the Blood of the Liver and Heart. 

Blood has different roles in the body, and when it fulfils the work of particular organ systems, we name it after the organ it helps. 

Have you ever found that sometimes sleep comes more easily when you have a heavier blanket on top of you? Sometimes in Summer a sheet just doesn’t feel like enough (but also it’s sweat city so a doona would be craaaaaazy). 

The gentle weighing down we get from a heavier blanket or even a doona actually physically “grounds” us, and allows us to more easily settle and relax. 

Interestingly, Chinese Medicine theory speaks to a similar concept. 

Yin and Blood are substantial, nourishing and cooling energies, and help to ground and anchor the more fast-moving, warming, transformative energies of Qi and Yang. 

Our minds and Spirits are very, very Yang (they are the most ethereal/insubstantial “treasure” in Chinese Medicine) and thus necessarily require Yin and Blood to be grounded. 

If we don’t have enough Yin and Blood (for example because we have heavy periods and lose a lot of Blood, or we sweat it out regularly without adequately replacing what is lost, or we stay up late and miss the crucial hours of sleep to replenish Yin, or we have been overworking and not resting), the Spirit isn’t anchored and instead “floats up” and we stay awake 😳

Other reasons sleep can evade us include Heat in the Heart and Liver (this comes about largely due to emotional disturbances, repressed anger and insufficient movement and exercise preventing adequate movement of Qi in the body), and agitation of the Mind from too much stress, stimulation or emotional disturbance. 

Unfortunately, as I said at the start, many hours of screen time and big stress really don’t help us land in sleep restfully or easily.

Our eyeballs see the light and get a bit confused about day and night, we see things on social media that trouble us or drop us into a swirl of worry or comparison, or we are just desperately trying to finish a work or uni project and the stress is all-encompassing. 

Relaxing in any of those situations is pretty much impossible. 

But what can we do? 

Fortunately (of course the good news was coming), acupuncture and Chinese herbal medicine can really help to support restful sleep by addressing the specific reasons that sleep is disturbed (be it soothing the nervous system, supplementing depleted resources, clearing Heat).

Plus, acupuncture features the acunap, which is possibly the best kind of rest - being horizontal while the acupuncture needles do their magic ✨

And of course, there’s a lot we can do with sleep hygiene: creating a bedtime routine so we prime our body to rest, limiting screen time before sleep, use an alarm clock (rather than your phone), charge phones outside the bedroom, if phone must stay in bedroom keep it in aeroplane mode only, getting temperature and lighting right in the bedroom, being consistent with bedtime and waking times, resting more during the day, eating well (and enough). 

And if all of that doesn’t help, get in touch - I’d love to support you with acupuncture and Chinese medicine!