CHP Magazines Winter 2019 #15 | Page 12

I think I have TATT!! Did you know (and this is fact) that one of the most common causes for GP visits is overwhelming tiredness!!… GP’s actually short hand the diagnosis by giving it a tag called TATT otherwise knows as “Tired All The TIME”. Tiredness comes in various forms, it can be illustrated by that feeling of heavy eyes as you drive blissfully along the motorway and suddenly realise that you are covering 2 lanes of the road and heading for the ditch… Thankfully, the brain has this emergency button and announces in a biochemical fashion “hey, you with the hands on the wheel, we’re heading for problems”; adrenalin pumps in, you quickly correct your wayward driving 12 Complete Health and the guy behind you catches it all on his illegal iPhone moviemaker and you are then on A Current Affair that night.. Is sleep all that important, can’t we just take a power nap here and there.? Well, it sounds like a good idea however; when you are in that state of deep sleep slumber, your brain is actually taking this time to cleanse itself of waste in the form of proteins that builds up throughout the day. Unless you grab that 7 hours of shuteye, things like mental, physical and emotional needs of the body aren’t being met. You simply have to have time to allow your body to cleanse, stabilise and heal itself. Tiredness has many causes and often one of the most frustrating things to deal with. This tiredness thing is a direct cause of lack of sleep, spouses who snore like a chainsaw, stress, and poor choice of takeaway, too much Friday night indulgence or maybe some other metabolic process that upsets the circadian rhythm… Our immune system also goes to work during sleep where it recharges itself by making powerful antibodies and fighting infection while you are in state of deep sleep. Tiredness and fatigue are associated with many health conditions, here is where Dr Google comes along and offers a gazillion links to various causes, diseases, remedies and other yada yada.. A good source of information if not for something else that can lead to other problems and that is, discovery of a disease that you don’t have but will now worry about and you wont get to sleep because you have developed a type of paranoia.. dear me, it just seems to get worse doesn’t it.? There are a number of approaches