Late Afternoon Medicine

Do you ever wake up between 2 and 6 and have trouble gettingh back to sleep? Do you feel an energetic slump or spaciness in the later afternoons? Āyurveda has a way of understanding this, and some useful practices to help you sleep through the night, and feel well all the way through the afternoon.

Āyurveda understands the energetics of time as an expression of elemental qualities. Within a single day, a solar cycle, and a lifetime, the qualities that constitute space, air, fire, water and earth come in and out of prominence. We experience this in our body's as the shifts in how we feel throughout the day, the year and our lifespan.

Āyurveda maps this out in a "doshic clock," showing the interplay of these elemental qualities, as they are expressed through the doshas, vāta, pitta and kapha. These doshas are psycho-physiological forces that govern particular functions in the body, and in Nature.

Late Afternoon and the last part of the night are vāta times. Vāta, made up primarily of space and air elements and their qualities, increases during it's period, which is approximately 2 - 6 am/pm.

It's very common for people to awaken during vāta time of night and not be able to go back to sleep. That's because the subtle, light and mobile qualities of vāta increase in the environment and in us, and can cause us to wake up, and stay up.

One way to treat this is not only to attend to your evening routine with calming activities and or herbs, but also to attend to your need for rest, hydration and nourishment during the vāta time of day.

There's a period of life where we can get away with pushing past our real energy, or masking our energy dips with sugar or caffeine, and then there's mid life. As we reach perimenopause and beyond, this same strategy will back fire in significant ways.

We can nourish vāta and stay grounded during the late afternoon in simple ways by bringing in balancing qualities. Those are things like: stillness, softness, hydration and warmth. Supporting vāta in the late afternoon will not only help you feel well and in good spirits through the end of the day, but also support your ability to sleep through the night.

The next time you feel an afternoon slump, instead of reaching for caffeine or sugar, or otherwise pushing past your real energy, do one of these things.

1. Nourish yourself well at lunchtime--skipping lunch will lead to a real crash in the late afternoon. Avoid that by taking time for a meal mid day.

2. When you notice you're losing energy, rather than pushing through, take 10, step away from whatever activity you're engaged in, and rest. Sit or lie down and feel the earth supporting you, or step outside for some fresh air. Train yourself NOT to push through.

3. Hydrate with a cup of warm water or herbal tea.

4. Skip the sugary snack or hit of caffeine. If you’re craving sugar, have a piece of fresh fruit or a handful of nuts or seeds.

5. Put your legs up the wall or take a yin pose and breathe or step outside for a walk.

   
   

If you have the option to schedule in a 24 minute break mid day, please do. Set a timer, and pick one of the listed activities that best suits what your body needs in the moment. Do this regularly and you'll build the habit.

Sometimes (often) we're more wired than we realize. That wiry energy is vāta dosha masquerading as real energy (nervous energy--that's fidgety rather than calm; jerky rather than smooth). We need to move that out of our system regularly.

For cogniitve vitality and good health going forward, we need to both work our body deeply, and also include periods of deep body relaxation. We need to give our organism the space and time to down shift all the way. And not just with deep sleep at night, which is it's own medicine, but in these rest periods during the day, which allow our prāņa, life force, to seat itself deeply within our own organism again.

Prāna is our real energy--and when it's seated within our organism, it brings calm and smoothness rather than the uneven, jerky quality of excess vāta.

Sometimes we're in a situation where our energy is scattered or depleted, and we can't step away. Train yourself to take a 1 minute moment with closed eyes. I used to do bits of this in the car waiting for my kid, or before teaching a class. Any amount of calling you energy home, your mind home to your body will build the habit.

The real medicine is finding a way to schedule in that afternoon break! Keep returning to this 24 minute practice during vāta time of day. Eventually it will stick, and you'll be really great at it. Then you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

I hope this helps. Leave a comment and let me know what works well for you.

 Much Love to you, Shannon