My mother is 94 years old. She is my best friend so when she started having trouble settling down at night to go to bed, it really started bothering me. In the evening she would start looking for things, cleaning and doing everything but settling down getting ready to go to bed. Once she got to bed she went to sleep, the problem was getting her to go to bed.
Since nighttime while you are asleep is the time that your body regenerates itself, that your liver and other organs cleanses itself. Sleep is crucial for good health and I knew my mom needed to go to bed at a decent time. I started to research what was wrong and I found out what the problem was and the natural solution for it.
The problem was her cortisol levels were high at night when they should have been low. Many people put everything that does not go right for the elderly on Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease but the truth is that much of the night time restlessness and agitation is due to high cortisol levels.
Cortisol it the primary stress-response hormone produced by your adrenal glands. Cortisol is your wake-up-and-tackle-life’s-challenges hormone. Cortisol levels are supposed to be highest in the morning and lower at night. In the morning the high cortisol levels should strengthen us and give us the energy to face the world. At night our Cortisol levels should be lower; we are tired and ready to go to sleep and rest our body. If levels are too consistently high at night when they should be low, we feel agitated, wired, tense, and have trouble settling down to go to sleep.
Now that I knew that my mom Cortisol levels were high, what was the natural solution? I found out the natural solution was an amino acid called L-theanine.
L-theanine is a naturally occurring amino acid in the body that helps transmit nerve impulses in the brain. L-theanine helps with anxiety and calming the mind and nervous system. L-theanine’s effect on the brain can be visualized on an EEG. Brain waves are actually smoothed out—but not flattened out—by supplemental L-theanine, the body is relaxed, the mind is calmed, but no drowsiness occurs. L-theanine enabled my mom to want to lay down and relax. Once she laid down and was in a relaxed state, she automatically fell off for a good nights sleep.
Although you can find L-theanine in capsule form, you can also get L-theanine from green tea. Not the green tea you buy in soft drink form from 7/11 stores, but the green tea you make from tea bags. My mom loves green tea and I make sure she drinks several cups of green tea every day throughout the day. Now, most nights my mom is fast asleep before 10:00 p.m.
