By Clara and Justin Hamel
Roll your ankle stepping off a curb and you will know within a minute that something is wrong. It swells, it gets hot and it hurts. Every one of those things is your body’s repair crew arriving on the scene. That is inflammation. It is not the enemy. It is part of the body’s natural response to injury and an important part of the healing process.
Now, do the equivalent to your brain.
You get nothing. No swelling you can see, no heat you can feel and no pain to tell you something is wrong. The brain, remarkably, does not have pain receptors of its own, so it cannot actually feel pain the way the rest of your body can. So what does it do instead? It often reports trouble through performance.
This is one of the most overlooked things in brain health, and it is worth paying attention to. When your brain is under stress or dealing with inflammation, it may not send a traditional pain signal. Instead, you may notice a bad week, a short fuse over something that normally would not bother you, a word that suddenly will not come to you, a day when noise feels unbearable, or an exhaustion that sleep just won’t fix. We do not always recognize these things as symptoms. Instead, we attribute it to stress, getting older or simply having a rough few days. And when we do not recognize the signs, the problem continues unchecked.
Inflammation is supposed to be temporary. There is an injury, the body responds, the repair process begins and eventually the inflammatory response settles. However, when the repair crew moves in permanently, the response that was designed to protect us begins to become the problem.
So what keeps the repair crew active? Often, it is the everyday things that have quietly become normal over the course of years. It can stem from too little sleep, rapidly fluctuating blood sugar, a discontent digestive system, a continuous stream of stress or a head injury that was never fully addressed.
The high school football tackle, the car accident, the fall off the ladder that left you shaken but able to get up — these can all be the beginning of something that does not show up till much later. We have a tendency to think that if we were able to get up and walk away, then nothing significant happened, but sometimes the effects of an injury can linger long after the event itself has been forgotten.
Which brings us to one of the most important and least glamorous points when it comes to brain health. Sleep is not a luxury. It is the maintenance window.
While you sleep, your brain is busy with important processes involved in restoration, repair and clearing the waste products that accumulate throughout the day. When we continually cut sleep short, that maintenance does not simply disappear. It gets deferred. Deferred maintenance is how most expensive problems begin.
In a world where people work hard, raise families and have a long list of responsibilities, sleep is often the first thing we sacrifice. It is one thing that does not complain when we take an hour away from it. But sleep may also be one of the highest leverage and lowest cost things to do for brain and overall health. It costs nothing, requires no appointment and is available to you every night.
So here is the challenge. For the next two weeks, protect your sleep before you try to change anything else. Go to bed at the same time each night, keep your room dark and comfortable, and put the screens away for the last 30 minutes before bed. Give your brain the time it needs to do its maintenance work — and then pay attention to what changes.
Sometimes improving your health does not begin with adding something new. Sometimes it begins by giving your body what it has been asking for all along: the time, environment and opportunity to do what it was designed to do.
*Dr. Justin Hamel and Clara Hamel have a combined over 30 years of experience in health fields. Reach them at 1° Performance & Longevity, located at 46 N. Central Park Plz., Suite 101, in Jacksonville, on Facebook or by phone at 217-243-6358.
