These days I listen to a lot of children's songs because of my little daughter. One line often comes to mind when I think about the benefits of going to bed early: "Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." Talk about a major pearl embedded in a children's song! Early to bed is the key to health and happiness. Our grandmas and moms tried to tell us, but did we listen?
A lot of us have the misconception that as long as we get 8 hours of sleep a day, we are good. In fact, many of us feel pretty guiltless about squeezing in 6-7 hours of sleep a day. Sure we've all been told growing up that we need to go to bed early to be healthy, but how many of us actually took that seriously? Going to bed late symbolizes the freedom and glamour of adulthood. Kids all whine when told that it was time for bed: "How come you guys get to stay up late?" Night time is our time to unwind, to relax, to have fun. It really belongs to us, and we can't seem to make it last long enough. The majority of teenagers and adults, based on what I have gathered talking to folks in our practice, go to bed after 11 pm. Most teenagers go to bed near or way after midnight. Going to bed late seems to be the social norm nowadays. We have forgotten that all the other diurnal animals (animals who are active during the day, including us) go to sleep soon after nightfall. In other words, we have forgotten that we are too, a part of nature, and that our body, whether you believe in evolution or creation, was designed to function in sync with the natural world.
Traditional Chinese Medicine believes that the human body is a miniature universe with its own internal rhythm, a rhythm that is comparable and intimately related to the change of season and the cycle of day and night of the natural world. Like the plants and the animals around us, our body responds to the change in light and darkness, and the change in season. We know that once a baby is born, the amount of daylight helps to shape his/her sleep cycle so that with time, the baby adjusts to sleeping longer at night and staying more awake during the day. We call this phenomenon adjusting one's biological clock. People who travel through different time zones experience jet lag because of the discrepancy in daylight hours.
TCM has a special term for the biological clock: Zi Wu Liu Zhu - Flow and Infusion (of energy) from Midnight to Noon. Through perhaps thousands of years of careful observation, doctors in China found that the body, indeed, has its own rhythm. Things do not happen randomly in the human body. Instead, there is a schedule that the body follows faithfully everyday. TCM believes that our Xieqi, or blood energy, flows through our body organ by organ and nourishes each one in succession, following a timetable as predictable as the tides.
The ancient Chinese marked time with twelve shi-chen. Each shi-chen is two hours long and corresponds to an organ in the concept of Zi Wu Liu Zhu. In other words, every organ gets its 2 hours of maximal nourishment so that it functions best in its hour.
Here is the timetable of the human body:
5-7 am: large intestine active. Best time to defecate or poop.
7-9 am: stomach active. Best time to digest.
9-11 am: spleen active. Best time to absorb nutrients and produce blood.
11-1 pm: heart active. Best time to circulate blood through out the body and in turn, helps digestion.
1-3 pm: small intestine active. Best time to absorb nutrients once again.
3-5 pm: bladder active. Best time to get rid of excess fluids and toxins.
5-7 pm: kidneys active. Best time to store away the essence produced by each organ throughout the day.
7-9 pm: the pericardium active. Once again the heart is strengthened and circulation is improved, aiding digestion.
9-11 pm: the three cavities active. The body sleeps and enters a resting state.
11-1 am: gall bladder active. Old bile gets processed and new bile produced.
1-3 am: liver active. Liver filters blood, gets rid of toxins and purifies blood.
3-5 am: lungs active. Lungs distributes the refreshed blood stored in the liver to get ready for a new day.
Okay, some parts of this timetable may look funny to someone unfamiliar with traditional Chinese medicine. What the heck is the pericardium or the three cavities? The spleen helps with absorbing nutrients? The kidneys do what? Don't we use the lungs to breath? TCM does not view the organs exactly like we understand them based on anatomy and biochemistry. Some organ functions correspond well to what we are familiar with, some sound more nebulous but actually make a lot of sense once we get familiarized with some TCM concepts. I will try to explain the organs in TCM terms in a later post.
For now let's focus on the 11-3 am block on our timetable, which is vital for our beauty sleep. That block of time corresponds to the gallbladder and the liver, which are viewed as one system in TCM. That makes sense because the gallbladder is connected to the liver and stores the bile produced by the liver. Together the gallbladder and the liver makes the most powerful chemical factory in our body; its mission? To take out and break down all the garbage that our body dumped into the blood through a full day of activity and to put nutrients back into the blood. If you think about it, the plumbing for your water source and your sewer system are separate entities. For our body, it's all one system in terms of molecular nutrients and waste. Our body relies on our five liters or so of blood to deliver food and oxygen to all its parts, and at the same time, needs it to carry away all the chemical waste generated by millions of reactions necessary to keep us running. Our liver has the most important job of making sure that our blood stays fresh and nontoxic, and it needs us to be soundly asleep to function its best. A lot of us are doing what between 11-3 am? Vegetating in front of the TV? Glued to Facebook? Chatting online? Or even worse, drinking and partying. Our poor liver not only cannot do its job of detoxifying our blood, it needs to work extra hard to keep us going. The liver can take a lot of damage. We know how well it regenerates. It will continue to work hard despite our abuse. Thus in the short term, we do not feel any major effect of staying up late, but over a longer period of time, we will get more and more tired and look worse and worse because, guess what? Our blood has turned into dirty motor oil with globs of toxins and garbage floating in it. Garbage like what? Bad cholesterol, fat, uric acid (the stuff that causes gout if in excess levels), and many more. Will dirty motor oil replenish our skin so we stay wrinkle-free, pimple-free, full of healthy glow? Probably not. Will our heart be happy pumping dirty motor oil through it 80 times a minute? Probably not. Will we be able to think clearly when dirty motor oil percolates around our brain cells? Probably not. The result is that we get on the fast-track toward aging, illness, and death if we stay up late all the time.
The good news is that even if we have been on the fast-track to aging for years due to innocent misuse of our body, we can make a change now for the better and start treating our liver with respect (and yes, reverse aging!). Get to bed by 10-11 pm, the earlier the better, and we will soon get our natural rhythm back and actually feel rested in the morning. Our complexion will improve, wrinkles lessen, bags and dark circles diminish, and our mood dramatically better. I find that my patience level and tolerance for stress directly depends on the amount of quality sleep I have had. Our happiness truly depends on it.
Impossible you say. There's no way I can fall asleep at 10 even if I go to bed then. May be not right away. A good way to deal with that is to listen to your body. If you are tired at 3 pm, go to bed then if you are able. If you are tired at 8 pm, go to bed at 8 pm. You are not acting crazy, you are just trying to get some rest. The world will not come to an end if you failed to update your Facebook page or watch that one show on TV. The world will come to an end for you sooner if you stay up late to do those superfluous things all the time. Mr. Alex Wu said it well: those who don't have time to sleep eventually find time to get sick. Also, think of all the cool things you can do with all that extra time in the morning! You can exercise, meditate, read the news, and may be even find time for a leisurely breakfast instead of just downing a cup of coffee.
So good night, sweet dreams.
Addendum: I often find out with dismay that many of my young patients (preschool age toddlers or even infants) go to bed late like their parents, some as late as 11 pm or 12 am! This is simply not acceptable. Sleeping late will seriously compromise the health of our young children. My late-sleeping patients tend to have more illnesses, worse digestion, and poor weight gain. Children depend on us to guide them and take proper care of them. Healthy parents tend to raise healthy children because the parents know how to take proper care of themselves to start with. Please set a proper bedtime for your child, something like 8 -8:30 pm for infants and young toddlers, 8:30-9 pm for older children, and 9-10 pm for teenagers. Expect them to sleep at that time and enforce the bedtime. Go to bed early yourself so your child will not want to stay up late with you. Our children's future depend on us. Please get them on the healthy track rather than the fast track. Some of my patients have so many activities and homework that they cannot sleep early if they wanted to. Parents, give them a break! Teach them to pace themselves and focus on what is important in life, which is happiness and health, not success in the conventional sense, i.e. wealth, fame or power. If they stay happy and healthy, they will have accomplished the greatest accomplishment in life.
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