Biblical Science of Sleep! How to get true rest—
If you have struggled and struggled to get yourself to sleep (and to stay asleep), this one is for you! I think we’ve all encountered restlessness in our lives, right? Some more than others, and for those unfortunate ones (like myself), you’ve had sleep issues for what feels like forever. Well, my friends, look no further. I believe I have come to an understanding from our Creator why that is. You’re not broken, you’re just ignorant to sleeps true design.
Before we dive in, let’s briefly chat about why sleep is so important. When we are sleeping, our body takes this time to “reset”. It’s cleansing, healing and rebuilding itself. Our muscles, nerves, and brain rejuvenates. As you can see, sleep is incredibly vital for the maintenance of our health of our brain and body.
Now that we have that established, let me start by saying our Heavenly Father is absolutely incredible. Everything He created has a purpose and a law that it follows. Animals, the sun, the moon, stars, trees, oceans, etc never operate contrary to their given laws. Mankind, however, we go against our natural nature (law) all the time. We are the only creation that does thanks to a little something called free will. Somewhere down the line, man created their own “clock” or time rather, but the true clock was established in the beginning.
From the above scripture, we are made aware that day is light, and darkness is night. Contrary to belief, day does not include both light and darkness. Light is day, darkness is night. They are separated. A day isn’t 24 hours, it is 12 hours (John 11:9.) Hopefully I’m making sense because understanding this is important because the Most High has a timetable for everything; including when we should sleep for our well-being. The sky let’s us know when we should be awake (light) and when we should rest (dark).
Another factor comes into play with rest, because it directly affects our ability to get true rest and that is when we eat. Everything we do, besides sleep, should be done while the sun is up. (side note* I try to avoid napping during the day as much as possible because it does negatively affect the quality of my sleep at night).
When it gets dark, melatonin increases playing a major role in restful sleep and is also responsible for slowing down digestion. Digestion doesn’t speed up again until the sun rises because our digestive system was created to rest when the sun goes down. So, contrary to popular belief, yes, your body actually does know you’re eating carbs at 2 am lol and it unhealthy, affects your sleep and since your digestion is slowed down your food won’t properly digest, it will ferment and cause toxic buildup.
“On the evening of the fourteenth day of the month, while camped at Gilgal on the plains of Jericho, the Israelites celebrated the Passover.”
In scripture, there’s only one occasion that commands for a meal to be eaten at night and that is the Passover feast. This tells me that it’s okay to eat at night for an appointed time commanded by the Most High, and that’s it. One time won’t cause damage, but repeating this habit daily of eating at night will. There are times of the day when hormone levels are at a peak and the organ systems are functioning at optimum, and there are times of the day when the hormone levels are at their lowest point and the organ systems are resting. When we eat at night, our body now has to focus on digesting food with an already slowed system instead of healing our body of damaged cells and toxins.
Stage 4 sleep is the goal where all those beautiful processes I mentioned earlier take place. Eating late robs your body of stage 4 sleep. After some research, it’s accurate to say food takes about 5 to 6 hours to fully digest. This means if your bedtime is for 9 pm, your last meal should technically be at 4 pm. My bedtime is 11 pm (I need a couple hours to myself after putting the baby to sleep lol, if you’re a parent, you know what I mean!) This means my last meal should be at 6 pm, which ive been implementing as of late and my sleep is so much better, like a thousand times better.
If you’re someone who eats right before going to bed, that will affect the length of time your body is in stage 4 sleep. You might say, “but i still slept for 8 hours.” Although you might have laid down and slept for 8 hours, you only got 2 hours of stage 4 sleep because your spent 6 hours trying to digest your food. You missed out on a lot of vital maintenance, and you probably woke up tired which would prove my point. After 8 hours of sleep, the last thing you should wake up as is tired. You should be refreshed.
This post was probably a mouthful, but just keep this in mind and put it into practice and see how it goes well for you! I would love to hear about your testimonials if you’d be willing to share. Hope this post was a blessing to you, it was a blessing to be able to share. Peace be unto you! Take care, xoxo.