Insomnia Keeping You Awake at Night? (Energy Feed #9)

The Ayurveda Experience November 10, 2016

Do you have difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep at night?

If that’s you—to any degree—you’re dealing with insomnia.

A main key to Ayurveda’s cure for insomnia is RHYTHM in your life.  And in most cases, your sleep rhythm is off because your foundational biorhythm or circadian rhythm is off.

Ayurvedically speaking, insomnia is caused by a vata imbalance, meaning there is too much that is super-mobile and erratic happening in you and probably in your life overall.

All that frenetic force in you is throwing your biological rhythm off.  To tame it, you want to re-program your body to its natural biorhythm.

Watch my “Energy Feed” below for the full tutorial of how to cure your insomnia.

How to Reprogram Your Circadian Rhythm So You Can Sleep Well Again

• Establish an eating rhythm. Wean yourself to three meals a day that you eat around same time each day, with no snacks or stimulating beverages between those meals. It’s especially important for you to have a lighter, earlier dinner.

• Drink an Ayurvedic nightcap. This is an exception to the “no snacking” guideline that you can experiment with. I call this classical recipe that will help you fall asleep and stay asleep an “Ayurvedic nightcap.” Drink it one to two hours after dinner and one to two hours before bed.

To make this natural sedative, blend together ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg, ½ teaspoon ground cardamom and one date in a cup of milk. Bring it to a steam on the stovetop, and drink it warm 1-2 hours after dinner and 1-2 hours before bed.

• Go to bed early. Aim to get to sleep before 10 p.m. and around the same time each night.

• Wake up early.This means by or around 6 a.m., so you are harnessing the momentum of the rising sun and rousing Nature to bring your day into action. If you’re tired at that early hour, commit to getting up and going to bed earlier that night. It may be difficult at first, as you uproot the old habit of sleeping later, but it WILL become easier within a few days or weeks—this cycle is supported by Nature!

• No napping! Unless you have exceptional circumstances (illness, jetlag, new baby, etc.), naps can be more debilitating than helpful, because they further throw your innate biorhythm off-kilter.

When you are doing all of these things, you are actively resetting your body’s sleep biorhythm to its natural circadian cycle, in which you have more restful nights of sleep and feel a whole lot better in the daytimes.

The longer you keep this rhythm, the more fully it becomes reprogrammed in your body with healthy sleep becoming the new set habit that replaces the insomnia.

3 Reasons We Struggle to Improve Our Health:

1) We don’t get specific about what we want.

2) We don’t uncover the obstacles that sabotage our success.

3) We don’t get the support we need to change.