Preventing Dementia and Cognitive Decline, Part 1 More Sleep

The key to getting more sleep is to carefully train your brain to the 8 hours that you need.  If you are currently getting 5 or 6 – or less – then you need to plan your evening so that you are asleep 15 minutes earlier than usual. 

Think of your evening as your prep for a big presentation before a live audience.  You hone your speech.  You prepare notes on cards or pages.  You check the lighting and the sound.  You breathe deeply to reduce nervousness.  You hit the loo 10 minutes before show time.  Well, it’s the same thing with sleeping.  You need to prepare. 

1)      Make sure that you get at least 20 minutes of exercise/movement every day.  It helps “tune” your body to better health on all levels of metabolism and circadian rhythm, as it improves your brain, and especially memory, function.

2)      Make sure that you aren’t eating a heavy dinner less than 3 hours before bedtime.  When I worked in a corporate job, and stayed late at my desk, I had dinner in the office fridge, then came home and had a 100 calorie snack before bed.  That snack stabilized my blood sugar for sleep.  I still do the 100 calorie snack.

3)       Stop thinking about business, politics, doing Facebook, or anything else serious or potentially upsetting (no email!) for at least an hour before bed.

4)      Two hours before sleep time, use Dump the Garbage or a similar tool from Take Back Your Lost Heart or 101 Stress Busters.

5)      Sometime in the evening, HAVE FUN, something that engrosses you and genuinely brings joy – which passively watching TV doesn’t, usually.  101 Stress Busters has lots of ideas. 

6)      If you feel resistance to sleep time rather than joy, take a deep breath or five, and see if you can hear the “I don’t want to go to bed and you can’t make me!” voice.  The more it sounds like a 3-year old, the closer you are to Reality.  This is the part of you that will keep you awake until it gets some fun – and no amount of substitutes (alcohol, sweets, TV, you name it) will really satisfy.

7)      Develop an unvarying Go To Bed routine.  Unvarying is important.  You want your brain to get programmed to wind down as you go through the routine.  I cover this in the Kick Weight Loss to the Curb class and will cover it in my newsletter.

8)      If you have a spouse or partner who snores, insists on watching TV in bed (a VERY bad idea, because it associates the bed with TV, not sleeping, to his/her brain) or in any other way disrupts your sleep, sleep somewhere else.  If they want to sleep with you, then they have to SLEEP in the bedroom and do other things elsewhere.  For the last 3 years, hubby has had to get up at 3:30AM and of course, goes to bed much earlier than I.  So we have slept apart on commute days and together on non-commute days.  If your partner doesn’t love you enough to put your needs ahead of their desires, then you do what you need to do to take care of your health and safeguard your mental acuity. 

9)      If you find your sleep disrupted by trips to the bathroom, stop drinking in the evening.  I can’t drink anything after 4PM myself.  I gathered data for 6 months before I came to the latest I could absorb fluids before I had night-waking troubles.  For most people it’s 3 hours, not 6, so see what it is for your body.

Our bodies change and shift over time, usually gradually – elders have more trouble staying asleep because brains get poorer at releasing enough melatonin, and the over-55 set gets less exercise, for example.  If it’s relatively sudden, first check any changes in medications; have you started or stopped anything?  Then think: are you eating differently or taking/stopping a new supplement?  

Check with your doc or pharmacist (the latter are easier to get time with), to see if there is a known sleep disruption associated with the chemicals involved.  Supplements are less safe than prescribed drugs in the sense that there is no quality or purity control imposed by a government agency focused on our safety, but assuming the pills really are what the label says, the pharmacist can tell you what is known about effects of the supplement.  

And then there are hormones of menopause and perimenopause (starting anytime after age 43, on average), which are known to wreck sleep for a while.  Absent any of these known reasons, sudden sleep changes warrant a medical visit.

Kick Dieting to the Curb: Get and Stay at Your Healthy Weight – Forever!

https://soaringdragon.leadpages.co/kick-dieting-to-the-curb-get-and-stay-at-your-healthy-weight-forever/

Take a Spiritual Path to More Effective Weight Loss

There are about a million blog posts, videos and even books on how to lose weight and (presumably) keep it off.  

We all know that we need to eat fewer calories, burn up more calories and jigger our internal biochemistry so that we preferentially ditch fat not muscle mass.  How do you do that?  You eat abstemious amounts of healthy food.  No, pizza isn't on the list, except for my birthday and Christmas.  Had my Xmas cake and GOD WAS IT GOOD.  Ahem. I love veggies.  Yes, I do.  Or to be exact, I like the health that I get when I eat veggies and a lean vegetarian diet.  

We all know that we need to move our bodies, to build muscle mass [no, ladies, you will never look like AHnold, no matter how muscled you get; bulgy muscles come from testosterone and have nothing to do with actual strength] and to juice metabolism.  YOU NEED TO MOVE.  You need strength training with weights and with yoga. And you need aerobic activity that gets you to sweat.  You cannot, cannot, cannot get healthy without exercise.  I did an entire class on the mental blocks about exercise and how to overcome them.

And you need to jigger your metabolism.  If you have winter blues, you need to get that under control [Journey Out of SAD, 2nd Ed., at Amazon or your local bookseller].  If you aren't spending time every day in effective stress control, that will shift your hormones.  101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity is just out!  Amazon or your local bookseller.  You absolutely, positively cannot be healthy with cortisol, adrenalin and hormones that are screaming at your body to hold on to fat.  Can't be done.  You have to prioritize this and strategize to spring loose time for it.

But you know that - or some of it.

What you don't know is that relying on willpower will just get you through a few weeks at most.  Then you will start making an exception to your new regime.... just this once.  And then it will be every other day and then it will be gone entirely.

You need to harness the deep parts of your mind, where you genuinely make your decisions, and where unresolved anger, resentment and childhood damage and adult trauma generate powerful pulls away from health and wellness, into passionate needs to assuage all those feelings through substitutes like cake... TV....video games.... you name it.

You don't really want those substitutes, at a deep level.  You want to be happy, at a deep level.  The only way to circumvent the sabotage that is running 24x7 in your deep levels, is to get down there with clinical hypnotherapy and turn it OFF.  And substitute a belief that you really can get what you really want.  And deep surgery to heal whatever needs healing, so it is gone forever.  Surface treatments like affirmations and coaching can never, ever have a lasting impact, because they can't get to the deep levels where the sabotage is happening.  Only hypnosis can do that - and you're only safe with an experienced, highly trained practitioner.  [I was in training and supervision for a year at my school. You want this level of training, not a grad of a quickie course, who doesn't know what they are doing with these major issues, this deep surgery.]

So think it over.  Do you want to have change that lasts?  Yes? Then sign up for a FREE transformation class.

For those with spirituality in their lives, many of these classes use spiritual tools.

And when you are ready to REALLY commit to change, find the package that is specially tuned to your specific problem, or a 30 day program just for you, at 

http://www.soaringdragon.biz/sessions-classes/

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/9897/FREE-Transforming-My-Beliefs-About-Myself-The-Creator

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/8842/Retrain-Your-Immune-System-Smarter-Cells-Healthier-Life

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/8844/The-Spiritual-Path-to-LOVING-Exercise-Veggies-Yes-you-will

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/8839/Harness-Your-Goddess-Energy-to-Stop-Self-Sabotage

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/8843/5-Magic-Components-of-Your-Successful-Self-Care-Program-Starting-with-Self-Love

Or explore the list of almost-free classes:

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/9895/Meet-Your-Biological-Ancestors

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/9896/30-Days-Create-Your-Way-to-Health-and-Joy

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/9873/6-Week-Stress-Busters-for-People-Who-Don-t-Have-Time-to-Waste

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/9879/Goddess-Connection-to-Drive-Weight-Loss-6-Weeks-to-Happy-and-Healthy

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/10091/Become-the-Shaman-of-Your-Own-Life

Having Fun with 23andme - the joys and broader vision

Genetic identity products like the 23andme product I purchased recently have been wildly popular.  The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took the medical portion of the product off the market until concerns about how the info would be used could be addressed.  It’s so easy for someone who doesn’t have a deep background in genetics to misunderstand what a predisposition could refer to. 

As a larger issue, there is a real danger of employers in the US getting access to genetic information, because they WILL refuse to hire, and WILL find excuses to get rid of any person who might (big word there!) have a medical problem in the future – that their health insurance company would have to pay for.  The real villain in that scenario is insurance that is tied to an employer, not a basic right of citizenship, because it gives your employer a powerful motivation to get rid of you based on your potential for expensive health problems.  If your health is an issue for you and the community that pays for all its citizens, your employer is out of the loop.

But back to products that promise to give you insights into your genetic identity.  The 23andme product that I bought for myself and my husband included some basics from the nuclear DNA and from mitchondrial DNA with (for men only) some info from the Y chromosome.  To recap:  Your nuclear DNA comes from your mother and your father, and gets shuffled around in each generation.  Your mitochondrial DNA comes from the egg that started your journey to life, so it is entirely from your mother.  [Your dad’s sperm has nothing but nuclear DNA to make it as light and fast as possible.]  It doesn’t mix and match with every generation, but provides an unbroken, except by mutations, lineage from some very ancient woman.  Men’s Y-chromosomes also provide an unbroken lineage, except for mutations, from a very ancient man. 

Another aside: a group of Jewish South Africans who claimed biological descent as Cohens (a priestly family in ancient Palestine) were never believed because to all outward appearances they were just black South Africans.  But a Y-chromosome study proved them right; that DNA came from ancient Palestine and was similar to other Jewish Cohens who were still living in their ancestral home. 

I will admit that I paid the money ($180 for the two of us) for entertainment purposes, and that’s a good way to approach any consumer product.  We both could see the known outlines of our ancestry popping up in the numbers. 

What everyone except me misinterpreted and what I want to talk about is the small amounts of DNA in which I resemble folks in east and west Africa, Oceania and East Asia.  The immediate assumption is that I have a distant ancestor from those places.  I wouldn’t mind if I did, and it could be.  A more likely explanation is the mundane genetic fact that similarity doesn’t necessarily mean direct ancestry.  It most likely means that I have some very old DNA that hasn’t changed since all of us were encapsulated in 2000 individuals living in East Africa, 60,000 years ago.  A bit of it went west to west Africa, a bit of it took off into the Middle East and from there travelled to East Asia and then to Oceania, and the rest became the Neolithic farmers who moved into Europe, killed off the hunter/gatherers and took their land.  Horticulture and agriculture allowed my ancestors to feed more kids and breed more fighters, it was that simple.   My mitochondrial DNA supports that narrative.  There are a lot of fascinating details, that I am keeping appropriately private.  I’m less Neandertal than the average European. 

And I am re-assessing the “purely entertainment” motive.  Right after I received my genetic info, I researched more about the various identified groups and genes and found myself profoundly moved.  One of my course offerings is a fascinating journey to consult with one’s biological forebears.  It has been inspiring and profoundly healing for many people.  Looking at the geographical distribution of those maternal haplogroups led me to take the journey myself, psychically touching those women who lived so long ago.  [Email me for more information on the course.]

We can get so wound up in our daily to-do lists that we forget to, as my course encourages, visit with our very distant ancestors, to put a larger perspective on our lives.  All 10,000 generations of them changed their culture and their world in all the small ways that a person’s life does.  

We have the opportunity and the privilege to be beacons of love, comfort and inspiration in our own time.  This little glimpse into the past reminded me of my duty to do my very best with the life that all these fascinating ancestors have given me.