Harnessing the Power of Sleep for Cancer Recovery

Bettina M Brown: 0:09

Hello and welcome to this special short of In the Rising podcast. This podcast is your companion on the journey through cancer, offering support, insights and a community for fighters and the incredible families who stand by them. So it's pretty well known that a lack of sleep can have a negative impact on you, and having that extra stress going through treatment or even supporting someone going through a major medical crisis creates sleep difficulty as well. Insomnia is a fairly common sleep disturbance that is defined as having the difficulty in either falling asleep, maintaining the sleepiness or having a lack of quality of sleep, and so there can be increased daytime fatigue, irritability and moodness. And when that extra stress comes, like when you're going through that cancer treatment, that can affect all realms of your life, especially sleep. And how it affects your body is also incredible itself. The nervous system creates higher amounts of adrenaline and cortisol, so we have a higher fight or flight type of response all the time, and it wears your body down over time and reduces your immune system, because we're supposed to be able to run away from the bear and relax, but if that bear is chasing you for months at a time, you're exhausted. So what can we do to get better sleep Well. Dr Cassie Wilder, founder of the Minneapolis Integrative Medicine Clinic, shared a few tips. Some of the best changes that you can do to get better sleep at night actually start in the morning. So normally you have higher cortisol levels in the morning, but adding increased light to your morning helps increase that cortisol where some of us are flipped. We're having too much melatonin in the morning and too much cortisol at night. That keeps us wired and tired at the same time. But creating a really strong morning routine can be just as beneficial as that nighttime routine. Adding some lavender pillow spray, dimming the lights at night to promote that melatonin production is also helpful. And my favorite suggestion is adding physical activity to your daily life as well. Anything that promotes movement, even for 15 minutes, is helpful. Start looking at a journal or meditation to help you manage your stress and your worries. For some people, finding that support system to share their concerns is also helpful because it stops that ruminating that going over and over and over again. Our cardiovascular system is also affected. It can increase our blood pressure and our heart rate and cause inflammation in that circulatory system. And, lastly, your sleeplessness can also affect your gut. It can make you feel bloated, have a loss of appetite and your overall digestive health. So you can even be eating nutritious food but not really absorbing all the nutrients. So tune in on Tuesdays for an empowering journey through topics that touch your heart, while going through treatments such as relationships, health, self-care and mindset. The whole point of the podcast is to inspire and challenge and enrich your life. Subscribe to Never Miss an In the Rising podcast episode and until next time, let's keep building one another up.