This week we will focus on techniques for hitting your pause button and sinking into deep relaxation.
Stress plays a dramatic role in blood sugar imbalance. It triggers insulin resistance, promotes weight gain around the middle, increases inflammation, and may ultimately cause full-blown diabetes.1 It is essential to engage in relaxation practices on a regular basis—deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, guided imagery, prayer, hot baths, exercise, meditation, yoga, massage, biofeedback, hypnosis, or even making love. Your survival depends on it.
Most of us don’t know how to relax. Our society doesn’t encourage it, and it’s a skill we don’t take the time to learn. But actively relaxing is an essential life skill if you want to be healthy and happy. Healing, repair, renewal, and regeneration all occur in a state of relaxation. We must activate our parasympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as the relaxation response.2 How do we do this?
Many cultures have developed techniques for relaxing the mind and healing the body. Here I offer two techniques you can try to help activate your relaxation response.
Learning to breathe deeply, sometimes called “belly breathing” or “diaphragmatic breathing,” can help you relax almost instantly, and it’s a skill you can take with you everywhere you go. I recommend you do this at least five times a day—once upon waking, before every meal, and once before bed. You can do it more often if you like. Try it anytime you are feeling stressed out or overwhelmed.
Learn how to breathe more deeply:
If you can, loosen your clothes and get into a comfortable position. Lie on the floor or recline in your office chair or just sit up straight wherever you are.
Close your eyes, and get in touch with your breath for a few moments.
Now place one hand on your belly and one hand on your chest. Notice whether your chest rises or your belly rises when you breathe. To breathe deeply, your belly should rise more than your chest. If this doesn’t happen for you naturally, focus some gentle attention on training your body to do this. Then put your hands gently by your side or on your knees.
Now inhale through your nose deeply, into your belly, to the count of 4. Take your time with this.
Hold the breath for a count of 2.
Exhale through your mouth slowly and steadily to the count of 6.
Pause for a count of 1.
Repeat the cycle for 10 breaths.
If you want to enhance the activity, you can add a “mantra”—a relaxing word you repeat over and over again—to the exercise. To do this, choose your mantra—it could be the word “relax” or “love” or “peace” or any other word that helps you remember to let go—and repeat it with every exhalation.
You can also extend the period of breathing. Some recommend engaging in diaphragmatic breathing for up to 6–10 minutes a day.
As Martin Rossman points out in his book The Worry Solution, most stressors today are internal, from our self-talk. You shouldn’t believe every stupid thought you have! Our sympathetic nervous system gets triggered by our thoughts, or what we imagine to be true, instead of by real external stressors. One reason for this is that our imagination tends to run away with us. We obsess over problems we can’t solve; we imagine the worst-case scenario; we think of the glass as half empty. We believe in and often live up to the negative stories we tell ourselves and often look for evidence to reinforce our self-defeating stories and beliefs about our lives.
If our imagination can be used to make us anxious, it stands to reason it can also be used to calm us down. We can visualize our way to a more peaceful state.
What follows is a simple visualization exercise you can use to help you relax. Memorize it, make a digital recording for yourself, have a loved one read it to you, or use the online version I have created at www.bloodsugarsolution.com.
Loosen your clothing and get into a comfortable position. Recline in your chair, or lie on your bed or the floor. Close your eyes, and begin breathing deeply using the diaphragmatic breathing exercise. Feel your breath come in slowly and go out slowly. Let your body begin to relax. Notice how your muscles begin to unwind and the tension around your eyes and head is released.
Now bring to mind a memory of a peaceful, nourishing, relaxing place you have visited. Try to see it in your mind’s eye in full detail. You may find yourself visiting the sea, standing under a canopy of redwoods or at the top of a mountain, or sitting in a cathedral. Whatever relaxes you is where you want to be.
As you relax into this environment, notice how your body feels. Do your feet and legs feel more relaxed? Is your belly soft? Are your arms heavy and free of tension? How does your chest feel? What about your neck and head? Are these soft and relaxed as well? Take some time to scan through your body and notice where you are holding tension. As you encounter the tension, gently encourage it to release and open up.
Take a few moments to tune into your breathing. Is it deep, slow, and powerful? Can you feel your breath fill your whole body? If not, deepen your breath and see if you can allow it to “massage” you from the inside and relax your body.
Stay in this place of deep relaxation as long as you like. When you are ready, slowly wiggle your fingers and toes, open your eyes, stand up, and go about your day. See if you can take the relaxed feeling with you into your day.
For more exercises like this, I strongly recommend Martin Rossman’s recorded visualizations. Learn more at http://www.bloodsugarsolution.com/the-worry-solution-visualizations.
Linda Stone (www.lindastone.net), a friend of mine who has worked for the CEOs of both Apple and Microsoft, has made some remarkable discoveries about the effects of media on our nervous system. Remember I said that the average American spends 8½ hours in front of a screen every day. The amount of negative and irrelevant information flooding our minds is enormous, and it can make you fat and cause diabetes. It also takes your breath away.
She says that screen time actually distorts your normal breathing. Linda Stone calls it “email apnea.” We hold our breath when in front of television and computer screens, and with other media as well, including magazines and radio.
As she says,
The trajectory of our nation’s ill health follows the trajectory of the ubiquity of personal technologies as well as our relationship with television. There are at least two things that contribute to email apnea: poor posture and a sense of anticipation. With anticipation, we inhale. Whether the anticipation is a result of email flooding into our inbox, or an emotional television show, the result is the same—we inhale, and most often, we don’t fully exhale.
Our breathing patterns are the key to managing our attention, to our feeling of well-being, and most importantly, to nourishing our body with great lymph and blood circulation and with oxygen. Breath holding contributes to a state of fight or flight, to impulsive behavior, to a flood of stress hormones, and to compromised digestion and elimination.
Teaching optimal breathing patterns, particularly in the early years, is as crucial as exercise and proper nutrition.
I recommend a one-week media fast during The Blood Sugar Solution.
If you are worried you will miss important world events, ask a well-informed friend once a day. You will be surprised at the amount of time you have to do things that support your life and your energy—shop, cook, eat well, exercise, relax, sleep, connect with friends and family. Then decide what media you want to let back into your life.
Take 20 minutes every evening to write about your day. Try to write without stopping. If you don’t know what to write, just say, “I don’t know what to write,” until something comes to you. Journaling has proven to be extremely effective in activating the relaxation response.
The research is clear: Lack of sleep or poor sleep damages your metabolism, causes cravings for sugar and carbs, makes you eat more, and drives up your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and early death. Getting enough sleep and sleeping well are essential for health and an easy way to maintain blood sugar balance and lose weight.
The first step is to prioritize sleep. I used to think that “MD” stood for “medical deity” and meant I didn’t have to follow the same sleep rules as every other human being. I stayed up late working long shifts, ignoring the demands of my body to rest.
Unfortunately, our lives are infiltrated with stimuli—and we remain stimulated until the moment we get into bed. This is not the way to get restful sleep. Frankly, it’s no wonder we can’t sleep well when we eat late dinners, answer e-mails, surf the Internet, or do work, and then get right into bed and watch the evening news about all the disaster, pain, and suffering in the world.
Instead we must take a “holiday” in the two hours before bed. Creating a sleep ritual—a special set of things you do before bed to help ready your system for sleep—can guide your body into a deep, healing night’s rest.
We all live with a little bit of post-traumatic stress syndrome (or we should say, traumatic stress syndrome, because for many of us there is nothing “post” about it). Much research has been done on the effects of stress and traumatic experiences and images on sleep. If you follow my guidelines for restoring normal sleep, your post-traumatic stress may become a thing of the past.
It may take weeks or months, but these twenty strategies will eventually reset your biological rhythms:
Practice the regular rhythms of sleep. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day.
Use your bed for sleep and romance only. Don’t read (except something soothing or calming) or watch television.
Create an aesthetic environment that encourages sleep. Use serene and restful colors and eliminate clutter and distraction.
Create total darkness and quiet. Consider using eyeshades and earplugs.
Avoid caffeine. It may help you stay awake, but this ends up making your sleep worse at night.
Avoid alcohol. It helps you get to sleep but causes interruptions in and poor-quality sleep.
Get at least 20 minutes of exposure to sunlight a day, preferably first thing in the morning. The light from the sun enters your eyes and triggers your brain to release specific chemicals and hormones such as melatonin that are vital to healthy sleep, mood, and aging.
Do not eat within three hours of bedtime. Eating a heavy meal prior to bed will lead to a bad night’s sleep.
Don’t exercise vigorously after dinner. It excites the body and makes it more difficult to get to sleep.
Write your worries down. One hour before bed, write down the things that are causing you anxiety and make plans for what you might have to do the next day to reduce your worry. It will free up your mind to move into deep and restful sleep.
Take a hot salt/soda aromatherapy UltraBath. Raising your body temperature before bed helps to induce sleep. A hot bath also relaxes your muscles and reduces tension physically and psychically. By adding 1–2 cups of Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate), ½–1 cup of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), and 10 drops of lavender oil to your bath, you will gain the benefits of magnesium absorbed through your skin, the alkaline-balancing effects of the baking soda, and the cortisol-lowering effects of lavender, all of which help with sleep.
Get a massage or stretch before bed. This helps relax the body, making it easier to fall asleep.
Warm your middle. This raises your core temperature and helps trigger the proper chemistry for sleep. Either a hot water bottle, heating pad, or warm body can do the trick.
Avoid medications that interfere with sleep. These include sedatives (although used to treat insomnia, they ultimately lead to dependence and disruption of normal sleep rhythms and architecture), antihistamines, stimulants, cold medications, steroids, and headache medications that contain caffeine (such as Fioricet).
Use herbal therapies. Try 300–600 mg of passionflower, or 320–480 mg of valerian root extract (Valeriana officinalis) 1 hour before bed.
Take 200–400 mg of magnesium citrate or glycinate before bed. This relaxes the nervous system and muscles. Take magnesium citrate if you tend toward constipation and magnesium glycinate if you tend toward loose bowels.
Try other supplements and herbs. Calcium, theanine (an amino acid from green tea), GABA, 5-HTP, and magnolia can be helpful in getting some shuteye.
Try 1–3 mg of melatonin at night. Melatonin helps stabilize your sleep rhythms.
Get a relaxation, meditation, or guided imagery CD. These can help you get to sleep, or use the technique for breathing and visualization in this chapter when you get into bed.
See your doctor. If you are still having trouble sleeping, you should be evaluated by your doctor for other problems that can interfere with sleep, such as food sensitivities, thyroid problems, heavy metal toxicity, chronic fatigue, stress and depression, and sleep disorders, which may need to be diagnosed at a sleep lab.
The key is to get good-quality sleep and relax every day—even if just for 5 minutes. Profound, deep relaxation for 30 minutes a day will transform your life. You are welcome to use my guided relaxation CD program called UltraCalm, at www.bloodsugarsolution.com/ultracalm, to help you hit your pause button.
I have also created a 20-minute guided restorative yoga sequence with audio and pictures available at www.bloodsugarsolution.com. It is a powerful form of deep relaxation and passive stretching that helps reset your nervous system.