Sleep Heals all Wounds

It's supposed to be Time that heals, but I think to be more precise, it's sleep that heals - good deep uninterrupted refreshing sleep.

When an animal is wounded, its first reaction is to sleep. I had a dog get into a fight once, and it slept off the injuries for a whole week, barely getting up to eat.

Sleep is incredibly healing for everything: I find that if I worked out and am sore, I feel so much better if I can get really langorous deep sleep. If I feel like a cold is coming on, a really good night's sleep seems to help push it off before it takes ahold of me. When I graduated from acupuncture school I took several months of sleeping in and taking naps to recover.

And this year I took the summer to recover from the loss of both my parents in one year. I slept in whenever I could, I slept as long as I wanted on my days off, I took extra naps wherever I could fit them in. And it has paid off. I felt a shift in my energy just last week where I didn't feel as tired, felt more relaxed all around, and felt ready to take on new things again.

It strikes me that modern society does not value sleep enough. We seem to be quick to seek signs of depression and quicker to banish them - what if being tired is simply part of a recovery process? Sleep is the one activity that we cannot skip, yet can skimp ourselves out of and still survive. However, getting "beauty rest" yields such a quality of life, I think it may even be more important than diet and exercise!