Ayurveda, sleep and your faults!

We are a result of the interplay of energies and combinations of the five elements.

In this blog you will know a bit more about understanding sleep disorders in Ayurveda.

Lack of sleep can be very disruptive and I covered last time what acute insomnia and chronic insomnia can do to the body and mind (Read here). When I went through sleep upheaval, I looked into how Ayurveda looks at sleep so that I could learn and put into practice simple holistic solutions. For those who don't know what Ayurveda is, it originated in India thousands of years ago. It is the science of health and a natural system of medicine. Ayurveda is a combination of the words Ayur meaning life and veda meaning science or knowledge and it really does give us insight into the knowledge of life.

Ayurveda emphasises on prevention and getting to the root of the problem, not just treating the symptoms. It encourages, keeping ourselves healthy and bringing our body into harmony and balance with nature. It provides holistic solutions and promotes keeping the mind calm, managing our diet and food intake and keeping fit through yoga and physical exercise.

The beauty of Ayurveda is that it can provide tailor made solutions for the problem and the individual based on the individual's constitution and environment. The body constitution is governed by many different factors, both internal and external and can go into details of conception, our parents constitution, the country we were born in and so on. So you can imagine it's a pretty vast and fascinating subject.

The Ayurveda scriptures (Charaka Samita) state that insomnia is not just an illness, but it is a symptom of an underlying imbalance and informs us of other chronic physical issues. It therefore refers to insomnia as a sleep imbalance and while of course lack of sleep is an issue, Ayurveda also sees excessive sleep as a problem. If these are not addressed and treated can this lead to behavioral, cognitive and mental issues.

Ayurveda offers treatment for sleep imbalance with two goals in mind. One is to help with the quality and quantity of sleep and second is to address the underlying cause and prevent long term health impacts due to it.

Sleep is an important parameter to assess the health status of a person. Sleep patterns are affected during different disease conditions. Before we get into how Ayurveda manages sleep imbalances, there are a few foundational concepts in Ayurveda that need to be understood.

Within Ayurveda, there are three qualities or states of energy known as gunas. All around us, is nature (prakriti) and we too as human beings are part of nature. Ayurveda teaches that being in harmony with our environment and prakriti will keep us in good health (eating the right seasonal foods, living off the land, respecting and protecting nature).

Nature or Prakriti can be in a given state: It can either be

Sattva - pure,

Rajas - active,

Tamas - inertia/inactive.

The simplest explanation: when you get on the mat to practice yoga, you could start off feeling lethargic and down (Tamasic state) or you could be hyperactive and over stimulated (Rajas) and after you practice really immersive, mindful yoga, you come into a sattvic state (peaceful/harmonious). While you might think that both Tamas and Rajas are states that we want to avoid, that is not entirely true. We need a balance of all these especially during the day because we live in the modern world and are family and society oriented humans. Bringing our body and mind into a Sattvic state is of course good goal, and something we need to aim for especially when it comes to helping ourselves sleep (calm=sleep)

So just like Prakriti, we too have particular guna.

Yoga and Ayurveda provide ways for us to move away from the Tamasic state into a Rajasic (working) or Sattvic (calm/pure) state. We do need Rajas movement and activity to keep going, grow and thrive.

Someone with a predominantly Tamas state (lethargic/sluggish), sleeps excessively during the day or night or both.

Anyone who is super active and in a Rajas state, can have irregular sleep patterns and might feel sleepy during the day.

With a Sattva guna, deep sleep occurs at midnight and the patterns of sleep are fairly predictable.

Ayurveda also has another concept of Doshas. Doshas in its basic sense are faults or regulatory principles determine our constitution. If you want to go really scientific you can say Doshas are pathophysiological constitutional types (I'm not repeating that again!), that determines body functions.

We are impacted by space, air, fire, water, earth

There are three types of Doshas : Vata, Pitta and Kapha and when these are out of balance, they can cause illness. When they are in balance, they promote good health and equilibrium.

Again, this topic is vast and for the purposes of this blog, it is enough to understand that to learn how to balance the body, mind and consciousness we need to know how vata, pitta and kapha work together. Because we are so closely related to nature, the 5 great elements of nature Space, Air, Fire, Water and Earth impact us. The interplay of their energies affects our constitution and the 3 Doshas of Vata, pitta and kapha are combinations and permutations of these five elements. According to Ayurveda these not just manifest in us humans, but also in all creation.

For human beings the three doshas govern bodily functions with Vata governing movement and flow (air/space), Pitta governing heat and metabolism (fire/water), and Kapha, bodily substance (water/earth)

Doshas also govern the way we look, our characteristics, our behaviours and our health. At the end of this blog, I have added a link to a questionnaire that will help you work out your Dosha type. Please do this just as a fun exercise to get a bit of an insight into Doshas. Usually people are a combination of more than one Dosha type. If this has piqued your interest, please consult a qualified Ayurvedic Doctor.

How does your Dosha affect your sleep?

If someone is predominantly of vata dosha they usually need a lot of sleep! 10-12hours if possible. When Vata is imbalanced, they experience loss of sleep. This means, they might get to sleep easily but they might wake up many times in the night or wake up early between 2-6am (Nidra Nasha). I experience this because I am Vata Dosha predominantly. I can get to sleep easily at night, but I would wake up at a time close to 3:30am almost every morning. Usually, they are able to fall asleep and it is best that they get the full sleep their body needs.

If Pitta dosha is aggravated, they experience a decreased duration of sleep (Alpa Nidra). Pitta Dosha types usually can survive without massive amounts of sleep unlike Vata, they take a long time to sleep but when asleep have good quality sleep. When imbalanced, Pitta can take the from of a restless active mind. This active mind tends to spike just around bed time.

Kapha dosha can easily fall asleep and can manage without much sleep. When out of balance, Kapha makes the person tamasic and they sleep excessively. (Ati Nidra). They have difficulty waking up.

Ayurveda, puts sleep imbalance into two categories:

Excessive sleep (atinidra). Excess sleep is a result of eating a fatty diet, leading to heaviness in the body, lethargy and sluggishness. Lack of exercise and movement can also cause sluggishness and obstruction in proper energy and breath flow in the body resulting of imbalance of Kapha dosha.

Loss of sleep/insomnia (anidra). An imbalanced Vata dosha can cause sleeplessness as well as the body coming into too much Rajas and Sattva guna and decreased Tamas. We need a little bit of sluggishness to become sleepy. If we are feeling hyper energetic and alert (a quality of Sattva) then sleep wont come easily.

From the perspective of perimenopause, Ayurveda indicates that as the body starts reducing the female hormones moving away from the reproductive stage in our life, our body moves towards Vata dosha. This instigates the Vata imbalance and thus results in sleep imbalance along with other symptoms like hot flashes, nervousness, anxiety, moodswings etc.

Take the Dosha test and see if the Dosha type and the sleep imbalance co-relate for you. Ayurveda offers comprehensive solutions for us to balance our doshas using diet, exercise and herbal remedies. I will cover some of them in next week's blog.

If you have any questions or want to discuss/comment on any of the blogs please do get in touch.

Have you signed up to receive my free master classes and giveaways to help you sleep better?

I will be covering these topics and also giving away free guides and checklists to help you sleep better.

Click here to access the free Dosha Questionnaire. Check the instructions tab in the document before filling out.

Click on the button below to download The Deep Rest Toolkit a 3 part series of getting you to sleep and some deep rest.

The Deep Rest Toolkit

with gratitude,

sleep well,

Purnima