Sleep researcher Ty Bernhard writes a special guest column for Deccan Mirror about why he wrote the book ‘End Sleepless Nights’
“While in my mid-forties, I began to develop a sleep issue. It didn’t happen overnight and actually took a number of years to really settle in. I believe and know that difficulties with sleep stem from many different areas of life.
For me, it started with being too accommodating and allowing myself to be controlled and even manipulated by others. I wasn’t valuing myself, wasn’t speaking up, and was agreeing to things that led to overwhelm and anxiety. In addition to being Mr. Nice Guy, I also had gut issues, exposure to heavy metals, and Lyme disease from a tick bite.
Most of these conditions and problems were completely unknown to me until years later. I started diving into this a lot more and found out that so many things are connected to poor sleep and that poor sleep is really a symptom of a number of areas of life being disrupted or hijacked by numerous conditions.
I searched so many professionals, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, alternative doctors, a sleep study, and so much more, only to find that most of them knew very little about what affects sleep and even less in how to get someone back on track.
Since the majority of my efforts for a solution were fruitless, I had to figure a bit of it out myself. I read an enormous number of books on nutrition, anxiety, cognitive therapies, altered my eating habits, tried to incorporate exercise and relaxation techniques.
Over the years, I amassed knowledge about what did and didn’t work and I continue to learn more all of the time. Since I didn’t find very much help with the system in place to get better sleep, I decided to write a book to help others get the help they needed.
I don’t know about you, but after I spent thousands of dollars and an enormous amount of time and aggravation, I wanted something to show for it. I was astonished that so-called sleep experts, sleep psychologists and so on could charge so much and produce basically nothing. Through my quest for healthy, restorative sleep, I recognized that sleep is affected by so many factors.
Most doctors treat symptoms and only look at one small part of the body and mind. I was fortunate to find a few practitioners who had some of the answers, like specific bloodwork and tests to get a better understanding of underlying issues. That led to more discoveries and more questions to be answered.
My research included learning about the Autonomic Nervous System, which incorporates the sympathetic (SNS) and parasympathetic systems (PNS). The SNS controls many body functions, including but not limited to heart rate, digestion, and fight/flight. The PNS works to calm us down after a surge of fight/flight adrenaline and cortisol. We can influence our SNS through PNS avenues like conscious breathing, humming, soft, gentle music, gentle activities like Yin yoga, and stretching.
I read lots of books about breathing, why we sleep, nutrition, ways to control the fight/flight mechanism, dental protocol as the mouth affects breathing and digestion (two very important aspects of calibrating one’s sleep) and what supplements help. The foods we eat and the health of our GUT have a lot to do with quality sleep.
It all starts at the mouth and nasal passage and includes the vagus nerve and digestion.
I’m passing those on through my book to help people see that this thing that we call sleep is actually extremely important for our health and well-being. It has to do with our immune system. It has to do with how long we live. It has to do with heart health, heart attacks, strokes, and just healing in general.
There are other components as well, like amalgam or silver fillings, breathing issues, dental issues, and sinuses. There are so many components to great sleep, and it includes our nasal cavity, which is so connected to sleep, and our guts and the vagus nerve, which runs from our brain stem to our heart, to our gut.
Everything is connected, so you can’t just look at one little aspect of life. The best way to treat a sleep issue is to get to the root cause, which is what I’ve done. Once we get to the root cause, then we can come up with a way to get your sleep back on track.
It has to be addressed from many different angles and not just from the products that someone’s trying to sell you or even CPAP machines, which are just Band-Aids on a huge, huge problem. I totally believe that we have to get to the root cause, and once you do, your entire health improves, not just one little aspect of it. Better sleep means better clarity with the energy to live a healthy, active life.
My goal is to help people get it done.”