I had written this blog years back, now sharing it on this website.
If you or your loved one is suffering from Insomnia, this post can help you.
Most adults have experienced Insomnia or sleeplessness at one time or another in their lives.
Causes are so many. Stress is only one amongst them. And Stress as we know is the most common factor of various problems.
Long working hours, no exercise rather no movement, sedentary lifestyle can attribute to so many diseases.
People often think that they are disease free but few problems are silent for long periods and then it manifests into a disease.
Anyways let us not deviate from the topic, which is Insomnia 🙂
I want everybody should be helped and that too in the most natural way.
As we are realizing it gradually that allopathic medicines should be generally avoided unless urgently required as they cure the symptom and not the cause.
My endeavour here is to make you understand few useful concepts about sleep in the simplest language.
Let us begin with the understanding of what induces sleep.
Melatonin is the name of the sleep inducing hormone, which is secreted by the pineal gland located in the brain.
Its production declines as we age. So if we can encourage its production within our body with the help of certain foods we can overcome Insomnia.
Serotonin is another essential hormone which calms the brain by reducing the nerve traffics reaching to the brain.
Melatonin is manufactured from Serotonin.
Let us also divide the food types in two forms so that it becomes easy to understand which food stuffs will help us to promote this melatonin hormone in our brain.
These two forms are Tyrosine and Tryptophan.
Tyrosine is an amino acid which keeps us awake by perking up the brain, and it is found in high protein diet.
We should avoid such high protein food items in our dinner meals.
Tryptophan is the vital amino acid which gets converted into seratonin.
The real secret is that we need calcium to use the Tryptophan to manufacture melatonin.
That is why people prefer to take a warm glass of milk before going to bed as milk is high in calcium.
Let us also understand how carbohydrate rich food can help.
Ingesting a carbohydrate rich food causes your body to release insulin, which diverts many of your other amino acids away from your brain, leaving tryptophan with little competition to cross your blood-brain barrier to gain access to your brain.
So in nutshell the key to getting melatonin to your brain to sleep well at night is to combine a tryptophan rich food with a carbohydrate and calcium rich food like rice, beans.
Trypthophan rich meals are: Oatmeal, raisins, milk, eggs, lentils, chick peas, cherries, bananas, Sesame seeds.
And yes sleep in the dark room.
So you now know the key to induce a good night’s sleep.
Hope you will make the most of this knowledge.
If you are still sleepless, despite adopting correct lifestyle and taking right kind of food then you are definitely in love 🙂