Caffeine and sleep

 Finally, my body seemed tired of caffeine. About one month ago, I stopped craving coffee, drinking tea instead, and several days ago, I stopped craving tea, drinking water instead (how boring it is!). So for several days, my body has been caffeine-free, totally. What's the consequence? I slept well, naturally. I felt sleepiness in the nights and went into sleep about a half-hour after lying down. This had never been the case during my entire adult life. 

Never before I was able to cut off caffeine so completely. I drank either coffee or tea. Though I learned that caffeine was not good for sleep ages ago, my direct experience never proved that theory to me. This time is different, my body rejects caffeine. Something changed inside my body. And what it is and what was the cause, I still do not know. 

Life is full of mysteries. 

I found a way to rest my brain

To be specifically: to rest my left side of brain.

As a person who enjoy thinking, I found I could not think as much during these years of chronic illness, as my body did not support hard brain work. Somehow about over a year ago, I tried a way that partially "inspired" by my Yoga instructor long time ago, and it worked very well to me. I almost use it daily, mainly when I took lap after lunch. Most of time I found myself refreshed after doing this, even though I did not really fall into sleep.

I figured that all this technique did was nothing more than numbing left side of brain. This makes total sense to me, because by my understanding about brain function , when we sleep, it was left side brain who takes off from its daily duty, our right side of brain never stop working. That's why doing meditation can let us feeling refreshed simply by stopping "thinking", or stopping using left side of brain, not by actual sleep.

Here is how I practice this "ritual": lie on bed face up without pillow. Take a towel, roll it up like a small ball shaped piece, about a tennis ball size (or smaller), and put it underneath somewhere at back of skull, just a little above the neck (as picture shows by red circle). Make sure it is slightly toward left side. Since lying down face up, the gravity will naturally drag head down and let the towel ball produce some pressure on that part of head. If the location of the towel ball is right, I would feel some strong nervous stimulation around that area followed by some sense of numbness in my left side of brain. Then I just let it go, feeling relaxed and dreamy. After anywhere about 20 to 40 minutes, I could feel refreshed and recharged.

Of course, it doesn't have to be towel, but I found it works the best.

My strategy of fighting with CFS

Since March 24th, I started a quite strict diet and overall, I feel much better. But, bad days still come back. There are time that I still feel extremely tiresome and even caught shortbreath again.
However, I believe in DIET, because it made such a difference between now and before: more good days than bad days! And the bad days are not "that bad"! By thinking over what I have been donig with this CFS, I sum up my "strategy" of fighting with this CFS as below:
1, Killing candida yeast! To achieve this the first thing to do is diet! Check out my diet menu if you are insterested: http://overcomecfs.com/menu.html Another thing is medication. So far, for what I have heard and what I have been using, Lugol iodine is one of the best anti-candida medicine. It is actually a supplement but it does good job on killing bacteria. The only side effects for what I know is that it might cause thyroid problem. I followed the direction by supplier and stopped taking it after 3 weeks. So far, I didn't feel any problems at all. I am going to start taking it after over one week break.
2, Improve immune system! To do so, I changed my life style: more active physically. If I could not handle 45 minutes walk once a day, I may break it up to 2 or 3 times a day, and each time about 15 to 30 minutes. For other time of the day, try my best NOT to sit in front of computer! Always move around.
3. Keep a relaxed mind! This sounds like an useless tip but it really helps my sleep. I was a long term insomnia sufferer and I believe that it was one of the most direct causes of my CFS. So, after learned to be mentally relaxed, I do feel it is much easier for me to handle the rest problems.

What else?

4 things make me feeling good recently

For my recent 6 or 7 years, I was constantly driven into a condition that I could not handle my daily life. However, about 3 months ago I was suggested again to change my diet (I say again because I did once before). I took the suggestion and it really made immediate change on my health condition. Another thing helps me is a medication recommanded by an online friend: lugol's iodine. I started to take this medicatoin less than 20 days ago and I have to say, for about 3 or 4 days, I have been experiencing another positive change.
Here are 4 major things I believed that heeps my health getting better:
1. Diet. For more details about what I eat, please visit: http://overcomecfs.com/menu.html
2. Exercise. Mostly just walking.
3. Lugol's iodine? I started to believe it works. The first week since I took this medicine (or supplement, should I say?) I didn't feel much difference, but after 10 days, I do feel some obvious postive changes of my health.
4. Mental rest. Very important. One of reasons that I got into this health mess was stress. I didn't know how to rest myself since I was a teenager. I was a sever insomnia sufferer for over 25 years and it destroyed my health little by little until I reached the situation that my mental care could not recover my physical weakness (even though mental issue might be the reason for the beginning of my physical damage). So, since I learned to rest myself, everything seemed to be much easier.