Table of Contents
A. Top Reasons for Post-COVID Sleep Insomnia
The active brain is the root cause of Post-Covid Sleep Quality Degradation
Why brain doesn’t seem to stop after COVID?
- Low Energy: Covid was(or is) a pandemic, and the body is not fully immune to the virus. The virus is high in the environment. Therefore body loses a lot of energy in dealing with the virus on a day-to-day basis.
- Overactive brain: Because overall energy availability is low, the brain lags the energy for better cognitive processes. Therefore a lot of threads remain unresolved in the brain, with immense confusion and a chain of thoughts.
- Financial Stress: Post-covid financial stress has been immense. Not only that, the economy is under stress which puts jobs and livelihoods under tremendous stress. There is an increased amount of job loss every day in urban jobs.
- Less Physical Work: Physical hard work leads to muscle utilizing a lot of energy, and goes through wear and tear, and therefore needs melatonin, which leads to deeper sleep. So tiredness results in better sleep, but fatigue and exhaustion due to mental work don’t.
- Relationship Stress: For most of human history, men went out to work, arranged resources, came back, and got healed by the family and children. Now women are working and therefore there is no healing. Men and women both are working in most households and both end their days with stress without healing, putting the relationship under stress, which then adds the stress back to the already existing stress.
- Physical Stress: As the body utilizes a significant amount of energy in protecting you against the virus, and you have lower energy than before the Covid, your ability to stretch your mind and body for overwork reduces, which further restricts you from going for more earnings.
- Less Human Interactions: A lot many people are working from home. Most human interactions today have become indirect and through technology like Social media and WhatsApp. Therefore most are interacting with technology rather than with other humans, which also increases our social stress.
In short, lack of energy, fatigue, reduced social interaction, and increased family and financial stress keep the brain overactive and there are no direct remedies or magic escape from this situation. The vaccine makes you more immune but doesn’t prevent one from shedding the viral load, and thus population viral load and the current scenario will remain for a very long time to come.
However, all of the above gets accumulated into one single key and critical problem, that is:
Too many threads and clusters in the cortex’s temporal memory are active during sleep.
B. Biological Problems due to active clusters
- Neuroticism(GAD- General Anxiety Disorder).
- Sympatho-Vagal Imbalance(Sympathetic overdrive->🔼Na+—>⬆⬆Ca++–> ⬇⬇K-.
- Elevated Testosterone levels post 7 PM in the Evening=>Circadian Imbalance.
- Anxiety-induced Acidosis<=>Impaired Digestion<=>Gut Dysbiosis=>⬇ Micro Nutrient Absorption.
- Acidosis=> Pulmonary Alkolosis=>Tissue Hypoxia(⬇Hbo2 during sleep)
- Elevated cortisol levels=>Increased sugar levels.
- Extreme exposure to blue lights, again causing impairment of SCN->Circadian.
C. Simple steps from the evening to sleep well
- Without fail go out during the twilight and observe the sunset. This is the most important part you must do. Eyes see sunset and increase melatonin, which runs the anti-oxidant network as well as a sleep signaling hormone.
- Shift all the phone calls with your family and relatives before 7 PM in the evening. Most talks with relatives are triggering, and unproductive as people very much have lost the basic sense of boundaries.
(Cortisol, adrenaline, and testosterone fall in the evening, and the brain can’t take any conflict after that). - Consider a warm bath after the evening which activates your vagal tone. At least clean your legs and hands with warm water after coming back.
- Hard but necessary:- Turn off the mobiles after 7 PM. Spend time with family, reading, talking, cuddling, or perhaps an evening walk.
- Don’t bitch at the dinner table. No property dispute talks or talks about bad events of the day.
- Prefer 60W-100W bulbs over CFL to protect eyes from Blue light.
- Prevent yourself from the common thinking that you get worried to see others in pain and want to help them. This is a victim mindset, where you try to escape from your pain by amplifying a known one’s pain. Focus on your healing. Become a source of inspiration, rather than advice.
- Keep windows open at night.
- Sit on a chair, take a deep breath, tilt your head on the back, and close your eyes, focus with closed eyes at the point between your eyes. Do this 3 times(30 seconds) which will shut down the brain.
- Anyone who tries to pick up a conflict after 7 PM should be emotionally withdrawn. Someone’s tantrum is less valuable than your life.
- Don’t watch TV during dinner.
- Don’t be a pathetic mother and put a mobile on your child’s hand to quickly get overfeeding. Once a child focuses on the screen while eating, he/she will have impaired GREHLIN-LEPTIN pathways, leading to a lost sense of energy, and causing sleep disorder for life.
Once you lose sleep, it is hard to get back ever in life.
Also, currently most of the urban population in particular has got habituated to pills. One falsely believes that when one has enough money, one can invest in magic pills which would solve life’s problems. The problem with this line of thought is that sleep is a natural phenomenon developed in fishes almost 100 million years back. This is fundamental to life like food. If sleep was not needed, it wouldn’t have become part of every animal’s natural life.
You can’t substitute food with pills, morning rituals with pills, stress with pills, and same way sleep with pills.
Pills kill, and Sleep heals.
D. Conclusion
Key for you to understand that insomnia is like a virus. If you chat late at night, with people who can’t sleep, you will also not be able to sleep. Once you lose a good sleep, there is no saving from NAFLD, fatigue, and Type II diabetes.
You can change your job, boss, house, profession, partner, and lifestyle but not your body. And nothing is more disturbing than dragging an ill body along and hoping that screwed healthcare run on the commission has any ability or intention to help you to recover beyond their pity targets for silly commission money.
Also remember, you don’t get stressed due to overwork. Overwork is never bad. What makes you suffer is not working hard enough, but feeling like working too hard. That happens when you don’t write your professional and personal day’s journal. Not writing a journal eliminates your brain’s basic need to think around events, cluster, contextualize and classify, leading to disconnected memory clusters.
Money can’t buy sleep. As you lose sleep, you lose energy. Low-energy interactions eliminate your chances of professional success. No one wants to deal with low energy.
I can go on.
So all in all, there is one thing that you must absolutely never compromise:- Sleep.
