As indicated in my blogger tagline, wellness is also a topic I cover from time to time and discuss in greater depth with my sex life coaching clients. This post is about an all natural powdered sleep aid (mix it up in water) I found through www.drdavidwilliams.com . I have a male client with sleep issues and for him at least, it changed his life. I also list below my research and current understandings of easy ways to improve our sleep. Better sleep for better sex. Dr. David Williams is one of the best alternative doctors with a product line out there who my mentor, Betty Dodson, also likes. She takes his Joint Advantage product. Williams does for alternative healing products what I do for sex. He formulates his own things or recommends things that are great from other sources. To describe further how he's impressed me, he puts out a newsletter which I subscribe to that detailed instructions and recommendations for, in his how-to rendering, wives to give prostate milking massages to their husbands to reduce prostate cancer. Anyway, the name of the product is ZenBev. It has a tryptophan in it. It's the chem that makes you drowsy and keeps you asleep. Tryptophan is the chem in turkey that puts us out, by the way. It gets converted into Melatonin and is the chem that your body makes when it's time for bed. What I learned after some online research and ZenBev product info was your eyes play a role in helping your brain to know, in addition to natural internal clocks, when it's nighttime. This happens by the amount of light entering the eye. If you were a forest dweller/caveperson, you'd go to sleep when it's dark and wake when it's light. This synergy with the eyes and the brain's melatonin production is another reason why light sources, sunlight or otherwise, even behind closed eyelids, will wake people up earlier than they'd like. Light comes in, it must be time to wake up, so melatonin production is decreased and up you wake. What I've been doing to maximize sleep quality is: 1.) Go to bed earlier and wake earlier. I plan on being in bed by 11 or 11:30, midnight at the latest. There are claims that there are particular systems in your body that need you to be asleep between whatever bio-clock equivalent of 11pm and 1am for feeling as energized as possible. This isnt a time zone thing or a daylight savings time thing. This is calculated by your body by how many hours you've been awake. 2.) Candles arent just for sex, intimate dinner, and when the lights go out. What sleep specialists will tell you is to avoid bright light sources before sleep. That includes the bright bathroom light you have on while you're getting ready for bed, the television, bedroom lights, etc. I carry a lit candle or battery-operated candle with me and turn out all the lights in preparation to get the house ready for bed too. I shower by candlelight, brush teeth, etc, carry the candle back with me to bed, blow it out or turn it off and hop into bed. (You may want to leave the smoking candle outside your bedroom door if you can safely do so (kids, pets) so you wont have to smell the blown-out wick's smoke while trying to go to sleep (the battery variety is a good workaround for that). Candlelit shower sex, btw, with your partner, is hot. That's what I'll blog on next time. This sounds hokey to some of you, but it works. It gives your eyes and brain the caveperson environment it wants to make melatonin: very low light. I go to sleep so much faster doing this -and- with a big redux in brain/thought chatter that keeps you awake. 3.) When you first get the yawns, quickly bring what you're doing to a close, turn out the lights, and fire up the candle or two. Start getting ready for bed then. We habitually push past this crucial moment, failing to take advantange of it for falling asleep faster and also earlier. We push through this opportunity that is the body's clock signaling that you've been awake long enough. It's sleepytime. We ignore it or drink coffee and push through and wake back up again. Then by 2am or 3am, our bodies will try again. You know the rest. Getting up early is when you can get back to what you were doing. I sometimes make notes of what I was dealing with when I start getting the yawns and then close things up so when I restart the next morning, I won't be so out of place. 4.) Use a good sleep mask. I the one from www.magellanans.com . It is bubbled over your eyes so that you dont have that annoying pressure against your eyeballs which interferes with REM cycles and makes your body more often pull the mask off during the night. For me, it's especially helpful to block out all light sources while I'm trying to go to sleep and then in the morning after I wake up to go to the bathroom and I want to go back to sleep. You can also get blackout drapes for your windows, which I like too, but are more expensive than this sleep mask. This mask is also great for sex when you want a blindfold because you can't see down under the bottom of it and it's comfortable for your eyes. 5.) Plan some affection and light sex time with your partner(s) after kids are in bed and 30 mins before you typically get the yawns. Share some apricot kernel oiled massage with a happy ending for each other. 15 mins each or so depending on times to reach orgasm needs. Doesnt have to be a full body massage. Just choose from the the big parts: the back, the stomach, chest/breasts, neck, shoulders, bum, thighs, or even more focused, just the back or front torso before genital loving. Have them wear the aforementioned sleep mask to darken their eyes and enliven their touch senses. An orgasm helps people calm down, breathe, and get drowsy, esp for most men as we all have heard the rumor of. This is also a great opportunity for a small serving of sex and affectionate touch and attention that we too often don't set enough priority for, but when we do we're glad we did. Then shower up and snuggle down into bed. Sleep is much more important than we give it credit for. We take it for granted until it's not there anymore. Or worse, think we can live without it. For a while, yes. But your immune system does most of its work, so I researched, while you sleep. I'll bet that's why more often you'll feel better after waking up the next morning while getting over the flu or whatever. For those of you dealing with herpes and HPV, you want to keep your immune system in as strong a shape you can to keep outbreaks, in the case of herpes, to a minimum, and give your body all the advantages it can get toward wiping out an HPV infection. More sleep means more energy and things work better througout the body. Orgasms are easier and bigger, erectile function, and especially sex drive and desire. For many of us, drive and desire are affected tremendously by sleep. So, get those old fashioned or battery candles out, try some ZenBev if you need it, and sleep better. -Fin For those new to my blog, I write on my and others' sex life, in erotica form, because many of us need only read of an example of what really is possible. It so often lights a desire to "Want to do that. Feel that." A want to learn how to have better sex through sex advice and sex education , maybe for the first time in their lives. I also intend to present to my readers the reality of great sex from basic to advanced. Finally, ever wonder how good the sex that your sex therapist or sex educator is having in their sex life really is? I have. I'm not a sex therapist, I don't do sex therapy. I'm a sex life coach. I teach and I do.
