Insomnia and Stretch to Sleep-Program

by Claes Zell

Overview

Today, men and women all over the world are experiencing higher stress levels as a result of poor or reduced sleep. According to author Claes Zell, the answer to this problem could be as simple and enjoyable as stretching and targeted exercise.

After years of self- experience practicing, Zell discovered that many who suffer from insufficient deep sleep complain of the same issues—restlessness, stiff limbs, and difficulty reaching the pre-sleep alpha rhythm. With this information, Zell has developed an effective ten-minute program (minimum) design to target and lengthen specific muscle groups, relaxing your body in order to allow you to relax your mind.

The market for chemical remedies for sleeping disorders has become vast, and yet the problem of inadequate sleep remains. Rather than subject your body to chemical interventions that may or may not work, interventions that could cause any number of new and unpleasant problems, why not give yourself ten minutes at the end of the day? With just ten minutes, you can bring your body and mind into alignment and finally get the deep, quality sleep you’ve been missing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475979992
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/26/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	9 MB

Read an Excerpt

Insomnia and Stretch to Sleep-Program

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By Claes Zell

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 Claes Zell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-7997-8

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CHAPTER 1

Sleep

Sleep is important for all people. Without sleep, we can't function properly. All people have various sleeping needs. Some prefer mornings; others prefer late evenings or nights. We all need a number of sleeping hours each night, and without doubt, sleep quality also has a major importance. The needs of sleep apply in many theories, one of which is the possible connection between sleep and learning in humans. A 2009 study by Peyrache and associates suggests that sleep quality (in terms of deep-sleep hours) has a large impact on learning abilities, based on the electrophysiological recordings of a large number of isolated cells in the prefrontal cortex of rats. The study revealed that the cells that formed upon learning were more active during subsequent sleep episodes. This means that those replay events were more prominent during slow-wave sleep and were coacting with the hippocampus events.

Is sex more important than sleep? I read about a survey not long ago. Sleep is important, we know that. But is it more important than sex? Some of you may say, "Absolutely not!" But what do men think about this issue? Well, a survey clearly showed that 80 percent of British men preferred a good night's sleep, than to be interrupted with a close encounter with their mates. This is surely not due to lack of lust, which is the problem. Sex is just not at the top of the list; many other things have to be taken care of during the day, researchers say.

A major contribution to improving your sleep is how you prepare yourself. Are you still tense and stressed despite several hours having passed since you stopped working for the day? Of course, late evenings for morning people are a bad habit. But those people who like to wake up early in the morning used to go to bed in time in the evening. It is more likely that if you stay up late in the evening, you're doing it because you can't sleep at the right time. This can have a lot of different causes. However, scientists agree that sleep quality is more important than the total number of sleeping hours and that sleep requirements fluctuate from person to person.

Sleep Positions

There are some issues based on sleeping in different positions. Through the years, you have obviously determined your favorite sleep position and you will not sleep in a position that feels unpleasant. My experience, though, is that your favorite sleeping positions may change through the years. I always slept, in my younger years, on my belly, with my left leg drawn up. This used to be called the recovery position. Nowadays, I lie flat on my back, without snoring hopefully. And snoring, unfortunately, is not dealt with in this book. Snoring is normally about a physical throat problem, which needs a lot of medical attention. But what you do in the different sleep stages is harder to do something about. Science states that sleep postures have both negative and positive factors.

You must have heard many times that someone woke up with pain somewhere, mostly in the neck, and said, "I've been sleeping in the wrong position," or something similar.

Belly Position

The belly position, or front position, is sleeping with the legs mostly straight and flat against the bed. This position will help for breathing problems, but you can find comments against this position due to head issues. The head-body junction can be in a strained momentum; that front position can lead to nerve problems in the upper body. Make sure that your cervical vertebrae are not put out of alignment with the spine. This is even more important for older people and for those with increased risk for arthritis conditions.

Half-Side Position

Sleeping in the half-side position used to be described as the "recovery position," because it's similar to the posture used in emergency situations. The main factor is to recover or restore the breathing option. Also, if you have trouble with a medical condition known as gastroesophageal reflux disease, you should sleep on your left side. Sleeping on the right side gave longer recovery from draining out of the esophagus, as compared to sleeping on the left side. Patients felt more discomfort sleeping on that side. It has also been suggested that the sleep-side posture can cause more wrinkles on that side of the face.

Side Position

This is one of the popular position, seven of ten sleepers use this position, and is also called the fetal position. You lie on one side, on your shoulder, with legs more or less drawn up toward your belly. There are some key areas, checkpoints, to consider. What is important in the side position is to have your spine in a straight position; this is often what bed fabricants mention to sell their products. The neck is the other area to look at in this position. The neck and the spine should be in the same horizontal line to be optimal and not give any pain or complaint when waking up. Even so, to have the legs toward the belly gives a release, by curling the body inward, opening up the back, and reducing pressure on the discs. A too-soft bed makes the spine curve down, according to gravitational pull.

Back Position

Sleeping on your back is often used at some time during the night. A well-known factor is that these positions aggravate snoring and sleep apnea. The muscles in the jaw and tongue are relaxed and are pulled down by gravity. Nevertheless, the back position has good influences for distributing weight throughout the body. Research has shown that those who sleep on their backs are more likely to have decreased oxygen levels in their bloodstream, which is a particular concern in patients with heart and circulatory problems. On the other hand, the back position can help give you relief for your tired legs after standing or running about at work. To put a pillow under your legs can switch the nervous system. There is, however, something to bear in mind

Sleep Architecture

You might think that an active life should balance a calm and inactive brain during sleep. In fact, the first third of sleep is a deep state of sleep and there is not much going on; the brain waves are not very active. But after the first part of the sleep cycle, it's the opposite. A Harvard Medical School professor and researcher, J. Allan Hobson, stated that this nightly process accounts for the varied shifts in brain activity throughout the night, resulting in changes in body temperature, chemistry, and sensory activities. The whole function of sleep has not been completely understood, and the absolute hours of necessary sleep are still unknown. The fact is that the human species have a lot in common, but each is still very unique. So when some individuals show full effectiveness with only four to five hours of sleep, others need eight hours of sleep (or even more) to perform at their best.

To measure the animal kingdom sleep habits, you will find that pigs have exactly the same sleeping hours in general as humans, eight hours. But what can we learn from that information, probably nothing. Except that pigs eat in general the same food, a variety of everything, as humans. As more meat you eat more rest/sleep you seems to need, according to animals. And the opposite is; no meat, eat around the clock.

What is probably accurate is that the more quality sleeping hours you get, the more refreshed you feel. Sometimes I think, "How can I feel refreshed when I slept fewer hours than usual?" I have also noticed that if you can't remember waking up in the night, you probably had a good night's sleep without any major breaks. Quality sleep before length of sleep! But there are obviously a lot of parameters to take under consideration.

The knowledge of sleep was described for the first time in the previous century. Lee Loomis provided the earliest detailed description of various stages of sleep in the mid-1930s. With the technique of electroencephalography (EEG), he discovered in 1937 "the sleep K-complex," a typical waveform that occurs in stage 2 sleep. Aserinsky and Kleitman (1955) identified rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. There can be a misconception about sleep, due to its calm and relaxing appearance, but during EEGs you find that sleep isn't a passive and constant state; in fact, it's quite the contrary. Sleep consists of different phases, which are revealed in EEG monitoring, although EEG monitoring has other purposes than to explore sleep, for instance, when it is to discover Alzheimer's plaque in the brain. Both the brain and the body are active during sleep, and the brain is (in some sense) even more active during sleep. The more common (these figures have some variations through medical establishment) brain waves revealed in an EEG are the following:

~ Beta waves, normal awake state: 12–30 Hz

~ Alpha waves, relaxed with closed eyes: 8–12 Hz

~ Theta waves, REM sleep: 6–10 Hz

~ Slow-wave, Delta Sleep: 0.1–4 Hz

Hypnogram

Hypnogram show simplified sleep depths and sleep stages. Every stage represents brain waves (Hz) of a specific category, and a hypnogram is easily describes as a step-by-step diagram. Originally it was based on a set of visual sleep stage scoring rules, which classified the sleep as wakefulness, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, non-REM sleep stages S1 (lightest sleep) to S4 (deepest sleep), and movement time (MT). Normally a sleep session has six periods, and the first two periods of three hours each contain deep sleep, which you do not often wake up from. If you wake up, it's often after the deep sleep state, and then you can experience or feel overheated. Then REM sleep takes over. At first it may not feel so prominent, but as the night goes by, the sleep gets lighter and REM sleep more characteristic. Hypnogram also reveal specific steps between every stage.

The two major sleep patterns

There are clearly physiological differences between the two major sleep patterns, NREM and REM. NREM sleep represents the calming and rebuilding phase, and REM sleep is the total opposite, which can be seen belove It has been shown (Van Cauter, Leproult) that sleep—more specifically, slow-wave sleep (SWS)—does affect growth hormone levels in adult men. During eight hours' sleep, studies show that the men with a high percentage of SWS (average 24 percent) also had high growth hormone secretion, while subjects with a low percentage of SWS (average 9 percent) had low growth hormone secretion. And we know that growth hormone is extremely important for many processes in your body, for instance, stimulate growth, cell production and regeneration.

The two major sleep patterns:

Physiological Process During NREM During REM

Brain Activity
Decrease
Increase
Heart Rate
Decrease
Increase
Blood Pressure
Decrease
Increase

Table 1. Physiological process

Through EEG findings, it's possible to divide sleep into different parts or stages. Doctors normally divide sleep into two main rubrics, which have totally opposite effects toward the human body:

1. Non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep

2. Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep

Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) Sleep

What can you find from the name? Non-rapid eye movement sleep is about sleep without rapid eye movement. NREM sleep represents the main part of the sleep cycle, normally 70 to 80 percent of the total sleep time. In the beginning of the period, you'll find the deepest sleep; this is probably the most important period in terms of the renewal processes of the body system. REM sleep represents a very light sleep, with paralytic muscles due to a very hectic dream phase. Without the paralysis state, you would "live out" the dream. In some cases, people do live out the dream, and unfortunately that is not the purpose.

The basal forebrain, including the hypothalamus, is an important region for controlling NREM sleep and may be the region keeping track of how long we have been awake and how large our sleep debt is. The brainstem region known as the pons is important for induced REM sleep. During REM sleep, the pons sends signals to the visual nuclei of the thalamus and to the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for most of our thought processes. The pons also sends signals to the spinal cord, causing the temporary paralysis that is characteristic of REM sleep. Other brain sites are also important in the sleep process. For example, the thalamus generates many of the brain rhythms in NREM sleep that we see as EEG patterns.

Newborns sleep an average of seventeen hours per day. By the time a child is three to five years old, total sleep time averages twelve hours a day, and then it further decreases to eight hours per night by adulthood. One of the most prominent age-related changes in sleep is a reduction in the time spent in the deepest stages of NREM (stages 3 and 4) from childhood through adulthood.

The real functions of NREM sleep remain unknown, but one (Benington and Heller) theory proposes a decreased metabolic demand of glycogen stores. This state is shown by PET (positron emission tomography) camera studies, which show that the blood flow decreases throughout the entire brain. As NREM stages progress, stronger stimuli are required to result in an awakening.

NREM sleep stages

During more than half a century, ever since Loomis in 1937, there has been research done on the character of brain waves, according to different sleep stages. There is clearly an oscillation of brain waves through the entire life span, like the heart is beating to supply blood through all the areas of our body. In an awake state, the brain shows alpha waves with electromagnetic oscillations in the frequency range of 8 to 12 Hz.

Alpha waves are reduced with closed eyes, drowsiness, and sleep. The most widely researched stage is during the relaxed mental state, where the person is at rest with eyes closed, but is not tired or asleep. The mature alpha wave, at ten waves per second, is firmly established by age.

Alpha waves are common during meditation. You sit with your eyes closed and usually with your legs crossed. The major difference between alpha waves and meditation is that you maintain clearness. You don't want to sleep. Almost twenty years ago, I had a period of half a year where I was very dedicated to meditation. I woke up at four o'clock in the morning and sat for one and a half hours.

Stage 1

In this stage, sleep is at a state of unconsciousness, in which the brain is relatively more responsive to internal than external stimuli. The brain gradually becomes less responsive to visual, auditory, and other environmental stimuli during the transition from wakefulness to sleep, which is mostly considered as stage 1 of sleep. Slow rolling eye movements (SREM) are usually the first evidence of drowsiness seen on an EEG. This movement is most often horizontal but can also be vertical or oblique. This stage is referred to drowsiness or presleep and is the first or earliest stage of sleep. It is considered to be a transition between wakefulness and sleep. It usually accounts for 2 to 5 percent of total sleep time. If you can't sleep for some reason, this stage increases in duration. And it will also do so as you get older, unfortunately.

Stage 2

This stage is the predominant sleep stage during a normal night's sleep and occurs throughout the sleep period; it represents 45 to 55 percent of total sleep time. The dominant feature in an EEG that establishes stage 2 sleep is the appearance of "sleep spindles" and the K complex.

Both the K-complex and delta wave activity in stage 2 sleep create slow-wave (0.8 Hz) oscillation and delta (1.6–4.0 Hz).

During sleep, these spindles are seen in the brain as bursts of activity immediately following muscle twitching. Researchers think the brain, particularly in the young, is learning about what nerves control what specific muscles when asleep. Also, spindles generated in the region of the thalamus have been shown to aid sleeping in the presence of disruptive external sounds (Dang Vu et. al). Sleep spindle activity has furthermore been found to be associated with the integration of new information into existing knowledge (Tamminen et. al).
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Insomnia and Stretch to Sleep-Program by Claes Zell. Copyright © 2013 Claes Zell. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................     9     

Acknowledgments....................     10     

Introduction....................     12     

Increased Stress Level....................     14     

Part 1: Sleep....................     24     

Sleep Positions....................     24     

Sleep Architecture....................     27     

Dream state....................     37     

Sleep in Adults....................     41     

Circadian rhythm....................     44     

Jetlag....................     50     

Shift work....................     51     

Power Nap....................     54     

Sleep Hygiene....................     56     

Part 2: Insomnia....................     64     

International Classification of Sleep Disorders....................     68     

Stimulants....................     70     

Pharmacological Treatment....................     80     

Part 3: S2S Program in Theory....................     86     

The Autonomic Nervous System....................     89     

The Human Constitution....................     93     

Exercise and Stretching....................     104     

S2S Program Blueprint Symptoms....................     114     

Part 4: S2S Program in Practice....................     124     

S2S-1 Thighs....................     125     

S2S-2 Calves....................     129     

S2S-3 Back of Thigh....................     132     

S2S-4 Back of Leg....................     134     

S2S-5 Bottom....................     137     

End of First Part....................     139     

S2S-6 Neck....................     140     

S2S-7 Shoulder....................     144     

S2S-8 Lower Arm....................     148     

Conclusion....................     153     

Index....................     157     

References....................     161