staying young

I was reading a magazine while waiting for my massage today and there was a tidbit of an article about 3 ways to stay young, by Dr Oz. I was delighted to say that reflexology provides all three!

1) Reduce Stress. Reflexology does this by giving you a whole hour to just be. It also stimulates brain wave activity similar to deep meditation, so the body, mind and spirit enter a deep renewal period and recharge. Frequent session of reflexology (about 1 per month) help to teach your body how to relax and maintain that relaxation and adaptability much like bio-feedback training.

2) Increase Sleep. I always tell clients on their first session that I will take their snoring as a compliment. Reflexology is like a major power recharge. A study several years ago found that a 1 hour session of reflexology was like the equivalent of 8 hours of sleep, your body can really respond to this amazing work! Find yourself working long hours trying to meet a deadline, take an hour out to recharge both body and brain. It will save you years of your life.

3) Decrease Toxicity. It is estimated that we are exposed to hundreds of toxins per day. YIKES! Several of those toxins settle in the feet due to gravity and decreased circulation. Reflexology helps remove toxins from your system by stimulating circulation, and gently balancing all your organs through their reflexive points.

To wrap up reflexology not only makes you feels great but it actually makes you younger :D in a round about kinda way!

Sleep

So I am reading this book entitled Spinning Straw into Gold: What Fairy Tales Reveal About the Transformations in a Woman's Life and there is a section on sleep. Basically the book links the transformations of a woman's life and relates them to different fairy tales. In the section about sleeping beauty she talks a lot about how we as a culture avoid sleep because it isn't "doing something".

Here are some of the physiological thing that actually occur in your body when sleeping. In REM the inner organs wake up and start working at full steam. The blood flow to the brain increase by 40%, the heart speeds up and slows with no apparent reason, and your metabolism increases.

In deep sleep or slow wave, the lightest time of sleeping where no dreams occur, very important things happen. This is the time when links are forged in your brain. The short-term memory talks to the long-term memory and associations and connections are forged. In this period of sleep consolidation of significant memories is completed and the information is becomes available to you in a more accessible form.

So in fact hard work is NOT enough. *phew* I can stop running around like a chicken with it's head cut off in the attempt to do more. The author Joan Gould makes this great point that Sleeping Beauty goes to sleep a girl and wakes into a woman. Instead of suffering through the pain and agony of growing up she simply slept and let her mind and body sort things out. So on those days when life really is too hard to get out of bed for, maybe we shouldn't. Maybe it'd be ok to let ourselves dream our way out of the depression we are caught in.

Also when I say to my beginning students to sleep on the material and it will be easier in the morning there is some scientifically documented proof that this is true.