3 ways to Marie Kondo your cells

Marie Kondo for your cells

If you haven’t heard about Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, she is everywhere and cleaning up everything. I have never had a problem cleaning up, so I can’t comment on her techniques. 

Your cells need cleaning too and while Marie’s techniques won’t help you with this, there there are three ways to get rid of the junk in your cells.

Sleep

New research on sleep and heart disease has revealed an interesting link. Everyone knows that sleep is critical for health, but now we know it is critical for heart health.

Research at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has found that sleep protects against the build up of plaque in our arteries. 

Sleep regulates production of inflammatory cells in bone marrow and that lack of sleep interferes with the control of inflammatory cell production, resulting in inflammation and heart disease. 

Filip Swirski, PhD, of the MGH Center for Systems Biology says

“We also have identified how a hormone in the brain known to control wakefulness controls processes in the bone marrow and protects against cardiovascular disease.”

Sleep regulates your bone marrow production of inflammatory cells and maintains the health of your vascular system.

Vigorous Exercise

To adapt and respond our cells must be able to get rid damaged and unnecessary proteins, a quality control system is necessary to clean our cellular house.

Harvard Medical School researchers found two ways that we can activate our internal house cleaning system to purge unwanted proteins.

The first is vigorous exercise. 

Exercise dramatically increases our cell’s abilities to clean house. Cellular house cleaning is critical to prevent neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s  and ALS.

Vigorous exercise means having your heart rate up to near maximum, the equivalent of running at a speed of 10 KM/HR or more, cycling at 20-25 KM/HR.

Fasting

The researchers at Harvard also found that fasting, like vigorous exercise, cleans house. Brief periods of fasting, 12 hours or overnight, can remove unnecessary proteins. 

Fasting increased cells ability to breakdown defective proteins. That the fasting was relatively short, 12 hours, suggests that this a regular cellular chore. Like taking out the trash at the end of the day.

Eating, exercising and sleeping

Normal, everyday activities, that we once did without thinking, all are critical in maintaining proper cellular function. They also are great at tidying up the daily junk that accumulates in our cells to keep us healthy.

Think of them as life-changing magic.

Change your mind, change your health,

Shayla