Antioxidants May Help Counter the Effects of Sleep Deprivation

[senseless virtue]

Quanta Magazine article Why Sleep Deprivation Kills tells of cutting edge research on sleep deprivation. It turns out that the gut is the first organ to show damage from sleeplessness: The intestinal linings become covered with reactive oxygen species (ROS), which will lead to lethal tissue damage after enough buildup.

 

What came as a surprise then was that feeding test animals with antioxidants helped them to completely overcome the ROS buildup and its damaging effects.

 

Quote

The strangest, most exciting period of the project may have been when the researchers decided that if oxidation from ROS was killing the flies, perhaps they should give the flies antioxidants. It sounded like a zany health food experiment, but Vaccaro searched out antioxidants known to work in flies, then fed them to the insects. To the researchers’ surprise, the lethally sleep-deprived flies reached a normal fly life span. The same thing happened when they raised levels of antioxidant enzymes in the gut (but, tellingly, not when they did it in the nervous system).

 

Please note that this simple model only accounted for insect physiology and cannot account for other benefits that ordinary sleep may bring to higher animal bodies like possessed by the human spirit.

 

It's not recommendable to substitute good regular sleep with antioxidants, but people who have chronic sleep issues should take a cue from this study and make sure they have healthy diets with enough sources of antioxidants to help mitigate any oxidation damage poor sleep might have caused.

[Cheshire Cat]

According to a number of spiritual traditions, to sleep less is an important aspect of spiritual cultivation: the nath yogis and even the contemporary Buddhist teacher Nan Huai Chin used to sleep only a few hours per day. 

Even Gurdjieff used to sleep 4 hrs per day. 

 

But today's science tells how harmful is sleep deprivation. 

[Cleansox]

3 minutes ago, Cheshire Cat said:

 

But today's science tells how harmful is sleep deprivation. 

For the majority of people. 

The ones that breathe poorly, whose minds try to solve problems without end. 

[senseless virtue]

7 minutes ago, Cheshire Cat said:

According to a number of spiritual traditions, to sleep less is an important aspect of spiritual cultivation: the nath yogis and even the contemporary Buddhist teacher Nan Huai Chin used to sleep only a few hours per day. 

Even Gurdjieff used to sleep 4 hrs per day. 

 

But today's science tells how harmful is sleep deprivation. 

 

Sleep deprivation certaintly is harmful if your body isn't detoxed, purified, and energetically wired through deep meditation to withstand the effects of reduced sleep.

[ralis]

The Mother in her writings said that Sri Aurobindo didn’t sleep for over 20 years, but did a walking meditation for 8 hours a day in lieu of sleep. 

[Takingcharge]

On 15-6-2020 at 5:38 PM, ralis said:

The Mother in her writings said that Sri Aurobindo didn’t sleep for over 20 years, but did a walking meditation for 8 hours a day in lieu of sleep. 

 

where the heck did he walk to though every night, thats alotta  of walking