Sleeping Soundly: Dive Into the Past With Ancient Tips to Enhance Your Rest

In TCM, sleep is considered a crucial factor in maintaining the balance of yin and yang in the body. Find out how TCM addresses different sleep issues.

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Sleep plays a crucial role in human health. Sleep disorders such as insomnia, poor sleep quality, or inadequate sleep duration not only weaken the immune system, impair memory, and disrupt hormonal balance but also potentially increase the risk of cancer.

In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), sleep is considered a crucial factor in maintaining the body’s balance of yin and yang. Therefore, TCM offers various methods to improve sleep quality, including acupressure, diet therapy, herbal teas, and exercise. These methods help alleviate issues such as nocturia (sleep disruption due to the need to urinate) and restlessness, thereby promoting restful nights.

3 Major Harms of Sleep Disorders

The following are the main effects sleep disorders can have on the body:

1. Impaired immunity: Poor sleep quality not only affects the immune system, rendering it ineffective in combating viruses, bacteria, and other foreign invaders, but also increases susceptibility to various diseases, including certain types of cancer.
2. Memory decline: Insufficient sleep can leave the brain feeling sluggish, diminishing concentration, cognitive abilities, and judgment and making it difficult to handle daily tasks or learning activities effectively. Sleep serves as a time for bodily repair and plays a crucial role in consolidating long-term memory. Inadequate sleep duration deprives the brain of sufficient time to form long-term memories. This can lead to difficulties in memory retention, such as remembering facts for an exam, regardless of one’s efforts to study during the day.
3. Hormonal imbalance: Staying up late disrupts the body’s natural physiological rhythms, leading to hormonal imbalances. Notably, this poses a greater risk to women, as it could potentially trigger gynecological cancers.

Effective Ways to Overcome Insomnia

If you frequently experience the following three types of insomnia, consider trying TCM methods to improve sleep quality and enhance your overall quality of life.

Problem 1: Difficulty Sleeping Due to Excessive Daytime Sleepiness

This type of sleep disorder is prevalent among older people. They often leave the television on during the day and unintentionally doze off. Then, they find it difficult to fall asleep once they lie down at bedtime. This is because their sleep has been “fragmented” and they haven’t established a complete sleep cycle. The solution is simply to avoid napping for more than half an hour during the day to prevent it from affecting nighttime sleep.