Health Damaging Lifestyles

Gravity plays an important role in the circulation of the brain. When your head is down, it gets extra pressure because of gravity. When your head is up, gravity helps drain the brain and resist the pressure of blood pumping up from the heart to the head. Our culture tells us that sleeping on a flat bed is normal and should cause no problems. That is incorrect. Flat sleeping causes brain congestion and pressure.

Increased pressure in the head can lead to fluid accumulation within the tissues, resulting in a congestion condition called edema. If you have a puffy face in the morning, with sinus congestion and baggy eyes, it is a sign of facial edema. If your face has edema, then so does your brain.

Tissues that have edema are low in oxygen and sugar, which the brain desperately needs to function. Over time, edema leads to tissue dysfunction and degeneration. Brain edema has been associated with many brain conditions, although the cause of the edema has usually been considered unknown, since the relationship between sleep position and gravity's effect on the brain has been ignored.

It is known that slight head elevation is an effective treatment for brain edema, and lowering the head is known to cause brain edema.

We believe that sleeping too flat for too long, perhaps for 8-12 hours daily, day after day, year after year, can lead to chronic edema of the brain. This effect of sleep position has been ignored in brain research because of the cultural assumption that flat sleeping is normal and therefore unable to harm us.

What conditions are caused by chronic brain edema in any particular person depends on many factors.