Rest is part of the cycle of life. The body needs time to repair itself and recoup energy. During your rest cycle, your energies are "turned inward" to allow cells to regenerate and your body to gather debris for elimination. Therefore, proper rest is vital to health.

So, what is proper rest? It is a state of complete relaxation, a state many of my patients haven't experienced in a long time. They think they rest, but they don't. They tell me, "I sleep 10 or 11 hours a night and I wake up just as tired as I was when I went to bed. How can this be?"

Well, thoughts and attitudes get in the way of healthful, restorative rest. These patients are as tense when they sleep as they are when they're awake. That's sleeping, not resting.

Your body can't rebuild and repair when you crawl into bed at night exhausted, then lie there and re-live all of the frustrations, hurts, injustices, indignities, and general negativities of the day and the past.

When disturbing anxiety-provoking thoughts run rampant through your conscious mind as you finally fall asleep, you program patterns into your subconscious mind that dictate defense physiology. Falling asleep while you're in defense physiology "saves" that physiology on your mental "hard drive." You won't even need to think directly about the original thought to bring it up again.

All it takes to call up the whole defense physiology pattern again is to meander into a nearby thought neighborhood. Get close to the original thought with an associated thought in your mental musings and you hit the "restore" command for the original thought physiology: defend. You're designed to survive conscious physical threats. Responding to subconscious memory threats is physiology abuse.

To solve the restless sleep problem, make conscious choices. When you go to bed, exercise your freedom of choice over your thoughts and refuse to allow negativity to creep into your consciousness. Always finish your day with positive thought. To help you keep negativity at bay at bedtime, don't watch the late night news on TV. That's nothing but negativity. If you must rehash the day's events, find favorable or positive aspects to think about.

Once you get to sleep, how much sleep is enough? This varies with each individual. Some of us require eight or nine hours each night. Others are ready to bounce out of bed and greet the world with only five or six hours of pillow time.

One way to find out how much sleep you need is to not set an alarm to wake you. When you allow yourself to wake naturally, your body reaches its own level of sleep-need. If you need an alarm to wake you in order to get to work on time, go to bed earlier. You were designed to go to sleep naturally for regular periods of relaxing, restful sleep and to awaken feeling refreshed. You weren't designed to need a pill to go to sleep, an alarm clock to wake up, and another pill to face the day.

If you usually wake up tired and draggy, try this rest-inducing exercise for a week. When you go to bed at night, concentrate on thinking positive thoughts. Focus on a positive aspect of each experience of the day, and on what you learned from each experience. Even if an experience appeared to be negative, find something positive about it.

Concentrate on that positive. When you concentrate on positive thoughts and feeling, your conscious mind feeds "no-threat" signals to your subconscious mind and your body responds with relaxation. Very likely you will be surprised at how much better you feel not only when you get up in the morning but also throughout the day.

The essential area of rest is so important because during restful sleep, your body repairs and maintains itself. Internal "housekeeping," such as healing processes and preparing debris for elimination, takes place during restful sleep. Insufficient or ineffective rest interferes with these processes, and interference leads to exhaustion and paves the way for pain, symptoms, and disease.

Regular restful sleep is a boon to performance of body, mind, and daily tasks.

A well-rounded life of rest and work provides positive stimulation to body and mind. Paying attention to the essential choice of "rest" is vital to health, happiness, and success.