Insomnia & Your Immune System

The cost of poor sleep is higher than you think. In addition to chronic fatigue, difficulty focusing and irritability, insomnia depletes the immune system making you more susceptible to colds, viruses and infections. In a 2015 study, Aric A. Prather of the Center for Health and Community at the University of California, San Francisco “experimentally exposed people to the cold virus after assessing their typical sleep, and those who slept six or fewer hours were roughly four times more likely to develop a biologically-verified cold than those who slept more than seven hours.” (1) But sadly the association of poor sleep as a precursor to other more serious illnesses. According to Dr. Sanjay R. Patel of the Center for Sleep and Cardiovascular Outcomes at the University of Pittsburgh, “chronic poor sleep increases the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.”

Insomnia and Chinese Medicine

Doctors rarely emphasize the impotence of proper sleep but in Chinese Medicine, and especially in my practice, I always quiz people on sleep. I make establishing a healthy sleep pattern part of my goal for all patients, even those who come to me with something seemingly unrelated, such a chronic sciatica or tennis elbow. Why? Because during sleep our bodies are busy repairing cells and tissue, cleansing the blood, and slowing other bodily systems giving them a break so systems can reset. When our bodies are deprived of these important functions, the potential for chronic illness anywhere in the body increases. It is like running your car into the ground without proper maintenance, eventually you will have problems with it and it may even lead to having to retire it before it’s time. That is why sleep is one of my 5 pillars to good health. Contact me to learn about the other 4 and how to get on the road to optimal health, including kicking insomnia.