Chapter 7 - Regeneration

Next, I recommend tryptophan as an amino acid that can help to promote sleep as well. It’s difficult to find it as a separate supplement today in health food stores and it’s somewhat expensive when you do. The best way to get plenty of tryptophan in amounts that help promote sleep, believe it or not, is to eat turkey. This is one of the reasons why twenty minutes to an hour after the typical Thanksgiving dinner, family members start passing out in front of the TV – tryptophan! It’s also available as an ingredient in amino acid capsules or powders.

Why not use sleeping pills? The greatest danger in using sleeping pills is that they’re drugs, whether they’re the over-the-counter type or prescription medicines. They all have unwanted and undesirable side effects. Most often, the worst side effects are that they’re addictive (manufacturers euphemistically call them “habit forming”).

Another danger, although seldom mentioned, arises because they alter some very important aspects of the five stages of sleep that are each necessary for maximum health benefit. Drowsiness, light sleep, two stages of deep sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage in which we dream, each serve specific purposes physically, emotionally and psychologically. Altering any one or all of them can have long-term detrimental effects. Just having your eyes closed and being unconscious doesn’t necessarily mean that the sleep you’re experiencing is accomplishing the same thing as natural, restorative sleep in all of its natural cycles.

In reference to Melatonin, this is a naturally occurring substance manufactured in your own brain in response to influence from the pineal gland. The pineal gland is believed to be the portion of the brain that’s most sensitive to light other than the eyes themselves. In the absence of light, it produces Melatonin to induce sleep. In millennia past, this served a very good purpose for diurnal creatures – those that roamed during the day and slept at night. Today, when we’re more concerned with clocks, schedules and appointments than with whether the sun is up or not, the process of Melatonin production, or the lack of it, is less important to us. We don’t want to fall asleep

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