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.