Do you always feel tired? Now that might something that’s normal for you, but here’s the thing, in that state, it’s not going to be the best you. If normal to you is just getting through the day, what about making the best of the day, and if you’re always feeling tired, chronically tired, then there’s probably a lack of sleep [whether you know it or not]. I remember helping somebody out, a professional, a very well-to-do person, very intelligent and smart, and he was wondering how he could improve his productivity because he was always feeling tired during the day, and he didn’t get it, and it was really, really frustrating for him, ’cause he had just so many amazing things that he wanted to do. So I was on a panel, actually. It wasn’t just myself helping him, I was on a panel with other practitioners, doctors, for example, naturopaths, and they all took a stab at solving this problem, and they did a great job at it, and they talked about the chemistry of sleep, they talked about the chemistry of the supplements that could help you sleep, they talked about diet, they talked about exercise, and all of these things that definitely are part of the picture, but, it came to be my turn, and I asked him quite simply, I said, “How much sleep do you get, on average?” Nobody had asked this gentleman that very, very simple question, and I found out that his average was four hours a night. Bingo! Why don’t we start there? And, my friend, that’s where you can solve a lot of your problems. A lot of problems are manifested into these gigantic problems that are almost unsolvable, but we put our mind to work on that unsolvable problem, and we stay stuck, when really the answer, sometimes, is really simple, if we would just look at it in a very simple way, and that’s why I’ve been teaching you the Five Facets, because when we have problems in our life, when we have anxiety and depression and emotional problems, when we have health problems, when we have weight problems, you know, all of these sometimes self-created problems, we can look at them in a very simple way and get a really simple answer. So my friend, if you are always tired, I will ask you the same question that I asked that gentleman, how many hours, per night, are you getting sleep, and what is the quality of that sleep? We’re gonna talk about that too. But here’s another question for you, in the meantime. Do you need an alarm clock to wake up? And that’s okay, if you do, but I want you to ask yourself why, you know, why do you need that alarm clock? Why are you not waking up naturally? And have you ever woken up naturally, and what did your life look like at that point in time? ‘Cause that’s a really important question, because, if the truth be known, if you have really healthy sleep patterns, and we’ll take a look at a picture of what a healthy sleep pattern looks like, and an unhealthy one, then you really shouldn’t need an alarm clock. Of course, there’s those times, say, if you’ve got a flight at 6:00 a.m., you know, I’m gonna use my alarm clock too, just to make sure that I get up. But under normal circumstances, our body has the ability, it has an internal alarm clock, and if our body biology is balanced, it’ll actually wake us up on its own, and we don’t need any other electronic devices to do that. So you know, that’s an indication that there may be an issue and it’s something that we wanna look at and I’m gonna help you look at, then I’m gonna help you solve it as well. Here’s something else. Do you ever get hot flashes? Now if you’re going through menopause, if you’re a woman, you’re gonna go through hot flashes undoubtedly. I get that, I understand that. But I think that men and women, whether you’re going through menopause or not, have a really hard time balancing our internal biological thermostat when we’re not getting enough sleep. You know, if you’ve ever had that situation where you’re getting really run down, you almost think that you’re getting sick, and that’s what you point at, and that’s what you think sort of is the problem, but, you know, sometimes it’s not actually your immunity, you know, letting you down, and there’s some sort of bug or virus going on within you, sometimes it’s just sleep, because if we get enough sleep, our body has a better time, or an easier time, of leveling off our internal thermostat, and we don’t have those fluctuations where we’re cold, and then we’re hot and we’re sweating, and then take the jacket off, peel the layers off, and we’re cold again, and up and down, and all around. That’s another indication that sleep might be an issue and you need to become aware of that, and, obviously, awareness always leads to solving the problem, as we know. Do you ever get chronically depressed, or do you have chronic anxiety, you know, maybe this is something that you’ve suffered with for a long time. We’ve got the emotional facet, an earlier section in this course, you know, deals with specifically anxiety, which is, you know, another word would be stress, another word there would be fear. You know, stress, anxiety, these are more modern words for an old word, an old, perhaps not so much of a friend of ours, called fear, which we’ve been talking a lot about in this program. But besides that, something else to look at, other than just the emotional facet, is the sleep facet, and asking yourself, what quality and what quantity of sleep are you getting on a regular basis, and if it’s not the norm, as far as what a human being should get, and we’ve pretty much got that figured out now, the science behind that is pretty solid, we know how much we need for a human being, if you’re Donald Trump, apparently you only need four hours, but, of course, we want to be happier, not grumpier. Now sleep is directly related to the hunger hormone, so I need to ask you, are you always hungry or are you never hungry? Now you might be thinking, well, Kris, I’d love to never be hungry, but friend, no, I would not wanna see that for you. In fact, when I do see it, when I’m working with clients and they tell me, “Kris, I don’t have an appetite,” that really concerns me because that means their metabolism doesn’t have a pulse, that their metabolism is dormant, that is not working, and that is a huge problem because then we need a metabolism reset as well. But it’s actually sleep, more times than many, that is actually the cause of their dormant metabolism and the more common problem is, “Hey, Chris, I’m always hungry, “and how do I solve that problem?” But I can tell you, through personal experience, when I only get three or four hours, I can never stay satisfied the next day. I am hungry beyond belief. I’m starving all day long and when I look back and say, “Hey, I only got maybe three or four hours of sleep,” then it all starts to make sense and I sort of have a cause, I know that’s why I’m feeling that way, and I can work through it a lot easier, and I might eat a little bit more that day, but because I know why it’s happening, why I’m feeling that way, why I’m so hungry, the next day I can put a different plan into place and I can sort of learn from that consequence, and, of course, I’m gonna have to learn more than once, maybe a few times, maybe thrice before I actually get it. I come from the school of hard knocks, I don’t know about you, but that’s okay, a little bit of self-forgiveness and move on, and get on. Now the last and final symptom that is really common is our immunity, our lowered immunity, when we don’t get sleep. So if you’re from a northern climate, like me, and you’ve got winter to deal with, of course, there’s a lot more viruses and bugs and bacteria that we’re more susceptible to, but, you know, I pride myself on my good immunity, where I can get through a whole winter without having any sickness that puts me in bed for day, for example. I might have the odd sniffle or cough, but that’s it, and that tells me my immune system is working well, but that’s because I put the work into it, and the first thing that I work on is the non-working, the non-doing, the sleeping and getting that restorative sleep that I need that really boosts my immune system. Now you may have heard that a lot of diseases, and the research that they’re doing on these different ailments, they’re actually pointing at sleep as the culprit, or the catalyst that gets those disease genes turned on within us, and some of those are the diseases we see later in life, like Parkinson’s, and dementia, and Alzheimer’s, for example, and they’re also pointing at sleep because new research shows that our brain has a chance to shrink, very little, but enough so that it can actually relieve itself or drain itself of toxins. That’s some of the latest research that’s going on right now, and, again, pointing at just how important sleep is for avoiding dementia and Alzheimer’s later on in life, or any type of inflammatory type diseases in our brain. We need our brain to rest and relax and actually physically shrink in size, just because we don’t have a drainage system in our cranium, in our skull. We do have it for the rest of our body’s, it’s our lymphatic system, and if we’re healthy it works well and it does remove a lot of the toxins that we take on from our environment, and our foods, et cetera. But our brain doesn’t have a lymphatic system, so that’s why it’s important to let it rest and essentially let it drain and detoxify itself, and we can only do that when we sleep. A lot of other inflammatory-based diseases, digestive, for example, Crohn’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, a lot of these, we’re also pointing at sleep as the culprit or the initial catalyst that starts that disease to manifest within us, and turns on those disease genes that really we all have, most of us have in us, but they would never be turned on if we were taking care of ourselves and restoring ourselves back to that biological balance, or homeostasis, that we need to be in for a certain amount of hours per day. How many hours? Seven to eight hours.