How to Wake Up “In Joy”: Sleep, Organ Clock, Blue Light, Dementia
The alarm rings, a shrill harrowing ring goes off — it’s time to get up! Leaving that comfort can be tough for many people. The main question here is.. what’s going on inside our body if you can’t get your body up?
Is it really the lack of 7–8 hours sleep or is there more to that. Based on my experience, there are more depth to our body than the amount of hours we sleep. Here are some of the questions I ask myself to understand my sleeping pattern.
Ques 1: What happened last night? Did you wake up?
If you feel tired in the morning or snoozing the alarm, it’s because your body needs more sleep. There’s a circadian rhythm for each organs to get their ample amount of rest and rejuvenation that runs throughout the day and night. Google up “organ clock” to understand more about this. For example, if you woke up between 1–3am, your liver is saying “I’m not feeling well”.
Based on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), other organs will begin to compensate their energy to support the weaker organs, therefore shifting the body’s rhythm and manifests into tiredness. Or if you often wake up to pee in the middle of the night, this shows that your bladder and kidney needed some help.
Ques 2: When did you leave the screen?
Blue light from phone, computer and tv screens have been a hot topic for the past couple of years. By now, I believe it is a general knowledge, but I’ll share this if this is new to anyone. These blue light, according to Harvard’s Health, has serious impact on your circadian rhythm.
First, it confuses our brain by suppressing the melatonin production. Melatonin rises as we fall asleep, so when it is out of tune, our brain perceives that we don’t wish to fall asleep yet.
Second, most mobile operators use radio frequency waves in the range of 300 MHz to 3 GHz that can be harmful for human health. A research published in 2016 shows that people who spend more than 50 minutes a day using a cell phone could have early dementia or other thermal damage due to the burning of glucose in the brain. This is completely insane, people!
We need that balance with your electronic devices. No phone operators has mentioned this on their ads, so we need to watch out for ourselves. Put your phone on airplane mode every night before bed. I also even shut my wifi router before I sleep, and my sleep improved significantly the past 4 years.
Ques 3: What brings you joy this morning?
Do you remember the last time you sprung out of bed? Or that exciting moment to leave bed?
I went through severe depression 4 years ago and I remember not having the energy to pull myself out of bed to do a single thing on my list. I took on a random advice given on a blog to ask myself every morning “What brings me joy?”. I started out with one thing per day. To me, it could be as simple as making a proper breakfast and not just rushing out to work, writing a journal, listening to my favorite music or dance.
Never ever forget you deserve to have joy in your life. Start with one a day, do it, and increment as you begin to see the shift as you wake up every morning. I kept this habit with me the past years, and have never stopped doing it.
Today, my joy is to wake up and share my regards to my fellow Thai citizens, to share a personal story on Medium and later on, I’ll cook a healthy meal for myself, get some fresh Antwerp’s air and dance by the river :)
How about you? What brings you joy today?
