I've tried a lot of different things over the years to improve my 5 hours of sleep per night. Several things have helped but after a short time, I seem to fall back to the 5 hours. I have finally found something that works and I've gone to 6 plus hours per night. Initially, I was at 8 hours and I often have 7 plus depending on what I ate that day.
My solution came from studying longevity. I've moved my focus of study from Lyme and moved it over to longevity. Surprisingly, the same things that help Lyme are what increase longevity. I bought and started wearing TrueDark Sunglasses. They block blue light from entering the eyes and can be beneficial for people with migraines. I wear them all day long. After such improvement in my sleep, I started studying what they were doing.
In a nutshell, they increase melatonin levels. Melatonin levels drop as we use it as an antioxidant and we don't sleep very much. This affects everything downstream from a cellular standpoint. The glasses can increase our melatonin levels which has an effect on glutamate and GABA levels. Our GABA increases and our glutamate decreases. If your brain runs fast when you wake up and you can't go back to sleep, you have too much glutamate. Melatonin is a another piece of the puzzle and it's a corner piece.
I've determined that melatonin and thiamine are some of the most important hormones and vitamins we have. Melatonin is ultimately responsible for phase separation inside our cells. For everything inside our cells to work, proteins must come together and join and then separate back apart. Melatonin basically regulates the physics inside our cells. High melatonin levels and viruses can't replicate. This applies to SARS-Cov2 as well. I think wearing the glasses has reduced my immune issues with some of the viruses that I've been fighting. Melatonin needs Vitamin C to function efficiently and we Lyme patients don't recycle Vitamin C like we should. We need to increase our Vitamin C level.
Thiamine is a very important vitamin, especially for Lyme patients. The conversion of tryptophan to niacin is increased when thiamine levels are diminished. This is big for us. We just don't have enough.
If I had to rank the importance of things I've learned when it comes to our body, I'd do it like this.
1. pH is going to regulated no matter what. Critical processes may temporarily stop in order to maintain pH. We need to reduce inflammation, ie histamine, to make it easier for our body to function efficiently.
2. Methylation is my number two. Without it, no DNA replication, no immune system, we suffer greatly and do not survive. This is also how cancer became so prominent in American society. We over methylate and push the pathway too much.
3. Melatonin levels ultimately allow DNA to supercoil and unwind to replicate inside our cells. I can't think of any other hormone, protein, substrate, or anything that is that important.
4. Thiamine levels can be responsible for a lot of problems because it is a cofactor in many reactions. ATP production is dependent on it. Every cell needs thiamine and they often don't get it in Lyme patients. Thiamine deficiency is known as beri beri, but there can be temporal beri beri as well. This is where the blood levels of thiamine are fine, but it may not be able to enter the cells. Thiamine needs to be inside our cells to work and it has difficulty getting in there for some people. This temporal beri beri may require higher dosages to get thiamine where it needs to be.
Post Edited (Georgia Hunter) : 4/12/2022 2:46:08 AM (GMT-6)