Welcome back. This is Dr. Jin Sung. We're at Clinical Excellence meets Excellent Results.
How to clean the brain, the glymphatic system. What is it? What are some of the conditions associated with it? Most importantly, how do we improve the glymphatic system to improve our overall health? So let's get right into it.
The glymphatic system is analogous to the lymphatic system of our body. Basically, it's the lymphatic system of our central nervous system, which is brain and spinal cord. The lymphatic system utilizes CSF, or cerebral spinal fluid, to do the clearance and delivery of nutrients.
So, it clears waste material, as well as maintains homeostasis of the central nervous system. It distributes glucose, lipids, amino acids, and neurotransmitters. to the central nervous system. So it's a very important delivery system. Okay?
The lymphatic system is filled with CSF, or cerebral spinal fluid. Basically, it's clearance as well as delivery. That's how it's very simply put in that manner. So it will help clear beta amyloid, which is associated with Alzheimer's disease, alpha-synuclein, which is associated with Parkinson's disease. And a dysfunctional glymphatic system will impact things like MS, as well as disturbs clearance of neurotoxins when you have a brain injury or mild traumatic brain injury.
Now, a poor dysfunctional glymphatic system will also impact things like stroke, CTE, sleep disorders will certainly impact that, age or advanced age, as well as migraine. Now migraines is typically a vascular headache, so blood flow. So it will certainly impact the lymphatic system because you need proper blood flow to the brain. Now, here are some of the important things that you need to do to help enhance the lymphatic system.
Number one really is sleep. They've done studies on animals and They noticed that when you have proper amounts of sleep, between seven and nine hours of good deep sleep, you will have better clearance of the glymphatic system. Also, sleeping on your right side is the best position to enhance the system or clear the system.
Sleeping on your left is the second best position, followed by your back and then on your stomach. Really, right side or left side is probably the best. for this purpose.
Exercise will increase blood flow and exercising 30 to 45 minutes per day, whatever exercise you can tolerate. So you can start with walking, running, HIIT exercises, more high intensity, weight training, etc. So exercise is very important for the clearance.
Hydration is very important. So you want to drink at least half your body weight and ounces of water and you want to add in some minerals or some salts to that water. Posture and ergonomics is also very important because people who are sedentary when they're working as well as their lifestyle they're not going to have proper blood flow. So posture and ergonomics is very important also. Stress reduction is also crucial because stress promotes inflammatory cytokines and inflammation really.
So breathing exercises, things like the physiological side or alternate nostril breathing or deep belly breathing can be quite beneficial for stress reduction. Obviously you want to reduce those stressors in your lives, but breathing can certainly help and make an immediate impact. Okay, omega-3 has also shown to help improve the lymphatic system. There are other nutrients. I'll list those below.
Basically, if you can enhance blood flow to the brain as well as decrease inflammation, you're going to enhance this system. Vagal stimulation. I talked about this in other videos. Humming, gargling, gagging, anything that you can stimulate in your throat and neck area will help stimulate the vagal nervous system.
And that is in the brain stem, thereby improving cerebral spinal fluid flow to the brain. Chiropractic care, upper cervical manipulation can also help improve cerebral spinal fluid flow. Obviously there needs to be more studies done on that but vagal stimulation probably has a lot of studies on this. Also LED lights or what we call photo modulation can also help quite a bit increasing blood flow to the brain.
Now it The penetration of these lights can be very superficial, but you can increase the blood flow superficially, thereby increasing blood flow to the brain. Intermittent fasting, interestingly enough, as well as prolonged fasting. I've done many videos on fasting, intermittent fasting, three-day fasting, etc.
Essentially, fasting will put your body in a state of autophagy, right? So when you go into autophagy, basically what you're doing is clearing debris, right? Cellular debris. So the glymphatic system is enhanced when we do fasting. Number one thing for the glymphatic system is really sleep, proper sleep.
You have to really take into consideration, are you getting deep restful sleep? Do you feel rested in the morning? You want to think about sleep hygiene, getting the electronics out of your room. right?
Reading in a dim light for an hour before bed rather than looking at your phone before bed. Complete darkness is very important to get proper sleep. A cool environment.
They say anywhere from 65 degrees to 70 degrees is ideal so your body temperature doesn't rise overnight. It's important to keep your body cool to get a deep restful sleep. Also, You can use apparatuses, things like a weighted blanket. You can use white noise. You can also do mouth taping, and I made videos on these.
So you can do these things to enhance your sleep. We're actually coming out with a module on your basic foundational things that you should do to improve your health. And sleep is a...
big component of that module. You have to do all the necessary things so you can sleep well, so you could rest and heal, right? Now, there are certain medical conditions that can impact this, like sleep apnea.
So you need to be evaluated with the sleep study. But essentially, if you can get proper sleep, you're going to have a better brain. All right. My name is Dr. Jin Sung, where clinical excellence meets excellent results.
We'll see you guys next week on the healthy side. Have an awesome day.