SLEEP: In the arms of Morpheus

I can’t sleep. Haven’t had a good night’s sleep for years. Sure, sometimes, I get 5 or 6 hours of uninterrupted snooze time per night, but I usually get an entr’acte squeezed in for good measure. 

I hear stories of people who are able to fall asleep in planes, in buses, in front of the TV, in vertical form, some even get shot at for dozing off at official events, and I feel such a big surge of jealousy rising up - not for those whose life is in danger but for those who have the ability to snooze off after 60 seconds of what Dr. Andrew Weil calls the 4-7-8 breathing technique.

  

In those 6 years I’ve suffered from insomnia, I have overhauled my diet, included  juices and superfoods in my daily diet, I have become a yogini, read all the “get more sleep NOW” category of self-help books, gone to a sleep specialist, cleaned up my beauty products (if you don’t see the correlation, don’t worry, neither do I!) all in the name of supporting my adrenal glands and increasing my energy levels, enough to go about my daily activities and meet all of life requirements, in other words I have dealt with trying to live with lack of sleep instead of dealing with sleep directly. 

A couple of weeks ago, I finished listening to a 12-day sleep summit organised by Lianne Soller, who brought together top specialists in the fields of holistic health who talked about nutrition, meditation, hypnosis, yoga nidra etc etc. Fantastic summit but alas, has my sleep improved? 

Needless to say, I’m now obsessed with sleep: whether I’ll ever bond with Morpheus again, whether I’m doomed or fated, whether there is still some tip I haven’t tried and I’m not cognizant of. 

Also, I live in sunny Greece which means that, in the warmer months, life happens on balconies, with high decibel conversations and music blaring out from every pore of people’s habitats. To ask people to keep it down is like asking for the sun to stop shining. Also, my neighbours are night owls. They come out after dark; their 11.00 pm is my 5pm!  

But through trial and error, through obsession and indifference, I have realised what works in my favour – besides the standard tips of avoiding caffeine after 12:00pm, having a cool and quiet room, no checking phones/computers/tv just before going to bed. What helps is having a relaxing bedtime routine at least 30 minutes before I lay my head on the pillow. My relaxing routine involves reading so even if I have returned home in the weeny hours of the morning, I read a few pages, just enough to calm body and mind. Ideally, the hours preceding sleep should not be too energetic (activities which are physically and mentally straining) so that my melatonin reaches its sleep level by bedtime.

The other tip is to go to bed only when you are really sleepy, otherwise I just toss and turn endlessly growing ever more annoyed and anxious and delaying sleep further. From personal experience, I’ve noticed that I am sleepy around 22:30 – 23:00 pm.  If I miss that sleep deadline, I am doomed and I have to wait for my next sleep cue!  

We have 90-minute sleep cycles (this cycle repeats itself during the night) and 4 sleep stages, all important for our proper functioning. The biggest repair occurs in stages 2 and 3, that’s when tissue grows and repairs, when energy is restored and hormones are released. I personally do not believe that we absolutely need between 7 to 8 hours of sleep per night. You can cover less ground if you don’t skip on restorative sleep (quality sleep), on stages 2 and 3. Most deep sleep occurs in the first half of the night, and I’ve noticed that the earlier I fall asleep (and by early I mean by 11pm) the better quality of sleep I get. The time I wake up in the morning is not important. The time I fall asleep is what makes the difference in terms of real body and mental restoration!  

Hope I haven’t passed on my obsession onto you!

Love and sweet dreams,

Sophie 

DRINK UP YOUR VEGETABLES AND REV UP YOUR ENERGY

About 5 years ago, after a year suffering from terrible insomnia bouts, I googled therapies and ways to up my energy levels. After many months of terrible sleep patterns, I wasn't functioning at full speed, I was finding it very difficult to concentrate or focus, to carry out my daily tasks and work responsibilities, and quite frankly impossible to take the necessary steps to move along in my life. I was even getting more and more depressed as I was unable to socialise properly because I was unable to stay up late.

I got so obsessed with curing my insomnia (it was also causing devastating effects on my skin!) that I bought and read a number of books on sleep; I even went to see a sleep specialist, and when this didn't help, I went on another google search: how could I function – albeit in a handicapped way – with just those 3 or 4 hours of nightly sleep. How could I go about my day nonetheless.

My second search led me to juicing. So I went out and bought myself a juicer and the rest is history.

Five years later, I may still be sleep deprived but I am still religiously downing my juice every morning. It means that I have to get up earlier every day, as I have to prep, juice, and then clean my juicer, but I have got the whole process down to about 20 minutes. And I still rather wake up earlier and have a juice than stay in bed and miss out on my morning shot of vitamins. It invigorates me and it helps me poo.

I try to stick to this routine no matter the wake up call. It has now become second nature and I miss it if it is not part of my morning routine. I wake up, I pee, I make my bed, and go and make my juice. THEN, I get dressed and eat my breakfast. I only change the order on weekends when I leisurely drink my coffee before I turn to juicing.

My favourite green juice consists of:

Kale

Spinach

Cucumber

Celery

Ginger

Apple or Pear

Ps: I went a bit overboard with the celery in this photo!

It is better to juice organic produce but my purse doesn't allow me buying all my produce organic. My rule of thumb is if I'm going to take the skin off my fruit or vegetable then I don't need to buy organic. I am strict with my greens though. I buy them organic without fail.

Another favourite juice recipe, which I try on days when I think I need to up my vitamin C intake, consists of oranges, carrots and ginger:

Though my love affair with juicing remains intact, I now also make smoothies on days when time is really pressing or when I just want to add more ingredients in the mix (seeds or powders which do not juice).

You would rightly ask, at this point, what is the difference between juicing and blending. Both have health benefits and at the end of the day, do what you prefer. I just prefer juicing.

When we juice our veggies, we are removing the indigestible fibre and making the nutrients more readily available to the body. When you drink your vegetables, your body doesn't have to produce digestive enzymes to break down the food to access the nutrients, so juicing gives your digestive system a rest.

Unlike juices, smoothies consist of the entire fruit or vegetable and thus contain all of the fibre from the vegetables, but it still supports the digestive health. Smoothies are also more filling.

As far as smoothies are concerned, the rule of thumb is to use a green base (spinach/kale/lettuce etc), some fruit (I like banana), some nuts or seeds (I find smoothies are a perfect opportunity to eat chia seeds which are full of good omega-3 fats and proteins), some liquid (I use either almond milk or coconut water), and then a bit of sweetener (honey or dates or agave nectar). I also add some maca powder which balances hormones, or some raw cacao which is packed with antioxidants.

Below two recipes that I often make:

1) Arugula, orange and banana

2) Almond milk, banana, blueberries, maca powder

I keep a very green fridge in order to always have my ingredients at hand. After I've bought all my greens, I wash and dry everything, and put it all in special bags which I annotate. Quite nerdy I'd admit but so convenient when juicing time is here!

Unfortunately, my juicer is not very good so a great deal of produce goes to waste. I put it through the feed chute twice in order to yield as much juice as I can. But still, some of it goes to waste.

My dream is to one day be in the position to buy a great centrifugal juicer and the crème de la crème of blenders: the Vitamix blender. Only caveat: it costs around 600 euros! Maybe one day...

 

Thriving the Huffington way

Last week, I attended a talk on a book I read a few months ago: “Thrive: the third metric to redefining success and creating a happier life” by Arianna Huffington. As the title implies, the book is about finding an offset to overwhelm, overwork, and our overflowing to-do list. Easier said than done!

How do you thrive? Arianna says by focusing on four little areas: well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving. She takes us through each area, bulletproofing her facts with statistics, and punctuating her words with true stories of companies which have offered their workforce a third metric (a nap room, a no-mobile phone policy after hours, strict working hours) which resulted in an increase in productivity among their employees. I can’t see how this can be translated in a Greek workplace where we don’t even get a lunch break!

Furthermore, how can you incorporate a third metric to your daily routine when you are struggling to make ends meet, in the case of a single mother who is trying, at the end of each day, to wrap up all the daily requirements of rearing offsprings?

With tresses the perfect hue of autumnal auburn, and a face perfectly painted to match her dress and expensive adornments, Arianna insisted that in such dire times, when the wear and tear of daily life bears heavily on your shoulders, that is when we have to turn to the Stoics idea of happiness and turn inward. You need to make recharging and unplugging a priority. Prioritise inward time, sleep, silence, breaks, and master the art of giving.

I am a single woman living on my own and I have difficulty focusing on well-being, wisdom, wonder and giving! I am sleep deprived, feel exhausted, my adrenals are fatigued, my energy levels have been sucked dry. Could I/ should I/ must I employ the Stoics idea of happiness? I hear a resounding yes. Yes but...

My aim is to leave work on time and keep all work-related worries strictly confined to that timeframe, my goal is to not take things personally, and instead push myself to go out to meet friends and watch art, meditate for a few minutes a day, breathe deeper down the belly, eat or drink my veggies, watch happy movies, in other words take control of my inner world. Add some good, remove some bad.

Huffington also talked about turning to entrepreneurship as a means to allay the bad economic situation, spur growth and create jobs.

Do you have a product or service to offer? Then create it and fashion it in a way that will reach an audience, generate revenue for you and the wider world. This part of the conversation found fertile ground within the auditorium which was crowded with self-employed individuals trying to sell their ideas and attempting to open the floodgates of cash flow. Arianna referred all these people to her team working at the freshly established Huffpost Greece, putting her international media staff and forum to the service of these would-be entrepreneurs in an effort to help publicise their ideas and concretise their dreams. I pitied her team who was suddenly bombarded from all sides! I bet they will go looking for their third metric soon….

Madame Huffington ingrains her speech with humour, enrapturing her audience and finally sending us all off convinced of the emergency to live the good life.

SUGAR

With the winter months moving in full swing, we inevitably turn towards comfort food. However, prompted by a gluttonous few weeks, lack of exercise, and hike in my glucose index, I started pondering over the weekend ways to satisfy my sweet tooth whilst reducing the bad sugars in my system.

Just about everything we eat is laced with sugar. It's in carbs, in fruit, in cereals, in sweets of course. So I started thinking about ways to reduce the  levels of sugar I consume on a weekly basis. Eating low-fructose fruit rather than high, eating whole grains instead of using white flour in recipes... Just small changes yielding big returns.

And so I attempted to make raw chocolate, which surprisingly was delicious and satisfied all the taste buds that would have been satisfied if I had run to the kiosk to buy processed chocolate filled with sugar and milk. I still got my shot of sugar but it was sugar in its purer form and in smaller dosage.

I used:
Approx. 50 gr of almonds ground in blender
Approx. 70 gr of coconut oil
2 tbsp of raw cacao
About 2 tbsp of agave nectar
3-4 dates

I mixed everything together and put everything in freezer to solidify.

I meant to write this blog entry about meditation a few months ago but life got in the way. As it always does. So here I am now. 

I have been doing yoga with great delight for the last couple of years; 11 months of the year. August is the month off. 

This summer, at the tail end of July, before we bid farewell to each other with a Namaste, and curtsied in yogi respect, my teacher asked me to think about one thing I would like to add or change in my life during the month away from my practice. And try and incorporate it in my daily schedule for 10 minutes a day.

More than anything I need to be less nervous, more calm. Have a more zen-like approach to life. 

My mind is erratic, I find myself screaming at people at work. Of course, the unprofessionalism encountered at work as well as my work conditions would bring even the most placid person to the edge of the cliff! But still, we could all gain from finding some serenity and peace of mind and heart. And I am the first in line.

I have dabbed into meditation a few times in the last few months. I can’t necessarily get the heartbeats to slow down but I love sitting on my meditation cushion for 10 minutes (or less if time is pressing), shutting my eyes, and staying still for just those blissful moments when nothing is pressing, nothing needs to be dealt with, sorted, or managed, no problem is urgent enough to require immediate tackling.

There is a misconception that during meditation, one is meant to manage to NOT think. Impossible. Thoughts cannot be stopped. You’re just supposed to watch them pass by, without judgement. The trick (if ever there was a trick) I use is to visualise your third eye, feel the movement of the breath in your abdomen going up and down like an elevator, and when extra help is needed, I slowly repeat a mantra – a word with no meaning, a word which doesn’t invoke thought - to myself. By using a mantra (the most obvious mantra for meditation is the sound ‘om’), you can focus your attention on the sound (instead of the word itself) without fueling your thought process. Not easy. But I’m hoping I will keep at it, because as Malcom Gladwell writes in ‘The Outliers’, the secret to success in any field lies in the hundreds of hours practicing a specific task. So if I keep at meditation, will I become the zen master I aspire to be?? Not sure it works this way, but hope dies last! 

For the rest of summer 2013, there was work and there was rest, puerile fun with the nieces, a nephew bidding for space in an environment filled with girl energy, and then, there were books. Lots of books. And lucky me, I thoroughly enjoyed all of my picks. Here they are:

Enjoy the weekend ahead!

 

17th July 2013

Just finished reading “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail” by Cheryl Strayed, an account of a 1,100-mile hike that the author undertook alone along the Pacific Crest Trail (starting from the state of California, finishing about 3 months later in Oregon), after her mother’s death and the disintegration of her life as it was.  In her own words, she did the hike in order to “save herself”. 

Her mother had been dead for 4 years before she embarked on her hike but in those years, she had gone through a divorce (following a slew of infidelities on her part), a brief immersion in the world of heroin, and had witnessed family ties loosen their grip.

She embarks on her long trek fairly ill- prepared, a novice hiker carrying a monster of a pack on her back, wearing a pair of boots too small for her feet, uninformed about the record fall of snow that obliged her to skip part of the trail, sometimes even running out of money, but reaching finishing line elated and proud.    

During the description of her hike – the good, the bad, the x-rated - she also dives into stories about her past, especially stories related to her mother, her life, illness and subsequent death. 

The author hikes mainly alone, however, her memoir is also populated by characters and fellow hikers whose path she crosses along the way, and who inadvertently enrich the storyline.

At various posts on the trail, she picks up resupply boxes she had mailed to herself before she left home, each box containing some cash, some food and books. After she finishes reading each book, she turns it into ash and thus unloads her pack every time ever so slightly. 

The only book she carried all through her trek is a book of poems by Adrienne Rich entitled “The dream of a common language”. The title alone made me look it up on the internet. I came across one poem entitled “Power”. I just love it. 

Here it is:

“Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.”

*****************************

The book is currently being adapted by Nick Hornby (the author but also screenwriter of About the Boy and Fever Pitch). The title role of the movie will be played by Reese Witherspoon. I personally think it’s a good choice; she even looks like Cheryl Strayed!