For s
ome readers, it will not be possible to put into practice what I lay out in this blog post. The reason is that they just became parents. For those who think they can prepare themselves for the lifestyle of parents to a newborn by partying and sleeping late, forget it. Believe me, being a parent of a newborn is far from what you experience in your life before you are a parent.
In the post about the body clock, I presented you the concept of giving the body its times for rest and activity. The reason is that some organs work better when the body is at rest and some organs need the activity during the day to work well.
One major player in stress is sleep – or better: the lack thereof. When the body does not get its night sleep, the organs with high activity at night cannot work effectively. Imagine you want to finish a project. You have closed the door, switched off social media and you told your friends not to disturb you. However, the social media blocker is defunct and your coworkers are ignoring your request. Every two minutes you get a call, a notification or someone is running into your room. How effective will you be at finishing your task? Not very much, you may say.
And that is the same with the organs. If we do not allow our body to sleep and to rest, the restorative work that needs to be done cannot be effectuated correctly. For example, your liver works best between 1 and 3 am. During that time you should be in bed being asleep. Why? because the organ needs all the energy the body has to do its job. If you party or stay up late in front of the computer you are acting like the annoying colleague who ignores your request not to be disturbed. The effect is: you do not finish your job for the deadline, or you do the job lousily. The same goes for the liver. The liver is the detoxification organ. If it is not able to work, residual effects will be that more toxins remain in the tissue of other organs. That again affects the organs in such a way that over time they become less and less effective at doing their jobs. Consequences could be an irritable bowel, troubles with the gallbladder, with the adrenal glands or the stomach.
If many organs are less effective at doing their jobs you will feel less good. And that means that you are even more receptive to stress and negative experiences. Therefore, one way to lower stress and to immunize yourself against the deprivation of your energy is to give your body the rest it needs and to allow yourself a good sleep from time to time.
Organs, which work best at night
9 – 11 pm: triple burner
11 pm – 1 am: gallbladder
1 am – 3 am: liver
3 am – 5 am: lungs