Detox Every Day 8: Sleep Like A Baby

Getting a good night’s sleep is like giving your brain an 8-9 hour bath in a tub of antioxidants.  Antioxidants fight free radicals, and free radicals accumulate not just from the chemical crap in our bodies but also from natural detoxification processes.

If you want to detox well, you need to sleep well.  Detoxification doesn’t happen for free.  It burns a lot of energy.  And for energy, you must sleep, sleep, sleep.

Here’s some specific science – for the nerds.  Sleep stimulates the release of growth hormone.  This hormone, among many other functions, helps to regenerate your liver (reminder: the liver is your body’s detox powerhouse). The more your liver is renewed, the better it works.  In essence, sleep = liver regeneration.

Not only do you need sleep to detox efficiently, but when you don’t sleep, you can get yourself into unwelcome anti-detox predicaments.  Have you found yourself in any of these sleep quandaries?

• Shushing your liver detox enzymes with a morning cup of joe because you didn’t get in bed on time.
• Getting the munchies from staying up too late, and gratifying them with junk-for-my-liver-to-process .
• Too tired to make that kale green smoothie for breakfast, and opting for that Starbucks latte instead (with an extra shot of espresso).
• Watching Dr. Oz at 3pm because you’re too sleepy to get off your butt for an afternoon jog (this is my quandary).

If you sleep well, you will not only detox well, but you will have better mental and physical energy to eat and drink the right things.  And you’ll feel better too.

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