Look and feel younger

Sleep, Stress and Anti-Aging

People spend fortunes trying to look younger yet a good night’s sleep is one of the best preventative measures you can take toward remaining young, vibrant and healthy. It makes each day go better. However, the modern world too often causes disruptive sleep patterns to form. With this comes stress and with stress wrinkles are more likely to form.

Our evolutionary natural state is a state of relaxed awareness. When under threat our automatic protective mechanism enters the primitive fight or flight state, a state of hyperarousal. Modern living causes us to be fall out of relaxed awareness and into the fight or flight state far too often until it becomes chronic. In this state our body temperature rises, brainwaves speed up, anxiety increases, thinking becomes sluggish, and hyperarousal becomes a constant leading to insomnia.

While a certain amount of higher level activity will keep life interesting, healthy, and helps keep us safe, it must be managed. MindSpa will allow you to develop tools to manage your physiological response. It gives you more control over how you respond to every day events in the world around you. We each respond in a slightly different way to stress, however there are many common factors.

Internal Physiology

When under stress you release high levels of the hormone cortisol. Studies show that high levels on a chronic basis can raise blood sugar and lipid levels, leading to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain forms of cancer.

Among other things, chronic stress can slow the healing process, affect your memory and can make you more susceptible to diseases such as the flu. Your digestive, reproductive and immune systems all suffer under chronic stress. Because of its internal nature, we can be unaware of the damage it is doing until it is too late.

External Physiology – Younger Looking Skin

When you are tired and stressed, your skin reflects it. Because of the habitual nature to contract facial muscles which cause wrinkles and become more pronounced with time, chronic stress and anxiety have been linked to the development of premature wrinkles, overall skin condition and elasticity. When you are relaxed your face relaxes, reducing wrinkles, your body relaxes, you will look healthier and more youthful.

Among quality sleep’s many benefits, as you sleep you release the hormone melatonin. Melatonin helps fight free radicals that can lead to cell damage. MindSpa is a great anti-aging tool, because it works on the root cause, stress, providing the ability to better maintain your natural state of relaxed awareness during the day and enhance your sleep experience at night.

The Power Nap Process

Another common use for MindSpa is power napping. There is a rapidly growing body of scientific evidence demonstrating daily naps are a highly productive use of time promoting better health, mental alertness, creativity, better concentration, increases in worker and student efficiency, accuracy and output. One recent Japanese study demonstrated student test scores markedly increased with daily naps.

Sleeping and Napping

The process of taking a nap while using MindSpa is distinct from sleep. Sleeping is primarily a regenerative process following a regular, 90 minute cyclic pattern of deep, dreamless sleep to light (REM) sleep. Napping is primarily a performance-based process where you remain at the edge of consciousness in a sleep-like state for a relatively short period of time. Sleeping and napping both help to enhance information processing and learning.

A “Power Nap” is a 10 – 45 minute period of revitalization resulting in increased energy and productivity, and provides reduction in feelings of stress and anxiety. The effect is cumulative when practiced on a regular basis for providing both short and long-term benefits. A recent study by NASA’s Fatigue Countermeasures Program found that pilots who took a short nap improved their performance by 34% and their alertness by 54%.

Among the best times for power napping are when you feel a general lowering of your energy level as commonly experienced in early or mid-afternoon. Generally, one power nap during the day or early evening is quite sufficient.

In addition to various health benefits, naps have an overall positive impact in how you look and feel. We highly suggest making even short naps using MindSpa an integral part of your daily regimen.