We’re always looking for the next best thing, something special that will make a big and lasting difference in our day to day life.
Marketers love to advertise the newest miracle pill or ‘super’ food. But what if there were a cheap and commonly available mineral that could make you happier and healthier, could help you sleep better and recover from exercise better. What if it could improve your digestion, give you a boost in mental clarity, and increase your energy?
That mineral is Magnesium. Magnesium is considered a ‘Master Nutrient’ because it is involved in over three hundred and fifty transactions in the body (some researchers say thousands of different transactions in the body).
It’s a misnomer that Magnesium can ‘give’ you all the benefits listed above. What magnesium really does is it helps your body work optimally so you can work and feel like you should feel. The reason you don’t sleep well, have low energy, etc, is because your body is lacking the nutrition it needs to operate at the top of its game.
Magnesium benefits:
1. Less Anxiety/Increased Level Of Well Being
One of the symptoms of magnesium insufficiency is anxiety, and any of the flavors of anxiety (like anxiousness, insomnia, claustrophobia, overactive mind, fear, etc).
To physiologically deal with emotional, mental, or physical stressors, the body burns up magnesium. When there’s not enough magnesium in a body, that body literally can’t deal with stress as well as it should, so things that shouldn’t occur as stressful do.
Many people think that they are just an ‘anxious person’, but chances are high that it’s just a matter of not having enough magnesium available in the body.
2. Improved Sleep
Insomnia is a symptom of magnesium insufficiency, and it can be full blown I-can’t-sleep-all-night insomnia or it can be mild tossing-and-turning-and-just-can’t-get-a-good-night’s-sleep. Or you have a hard time falling asleep in the first place.
Adequate magnesium intake can turn a person that isn’t sleeping well into a person that sleeps great. And good sleep is required to:
• feel good
• physiologically heal and rejuvenate at night
• be mentally ‘awake’ and energetic
• get rid of those dark bags under your eyes
3. Less Muscle Aches And Pain
Magnesium is required for a muscle fiber to relax. If you don’t have enough magnesium, your muscles can and will get tight, and stay tight. Chronically tight muscles cause Tendonitis, spasms/cramps/twitches, muscle pain, osteoarthritis, and a whole host of other soft tissue maladies.
Tired of tight, sore, and achy muscles? Get magnesium into them.
4. Increased Energy
The mechanism here is very complex, but in short, when your body doesn’t have enough magnesium it’s impossible for you to maintain or generate even normal levels of energy.
There are of course other causes of low energy. For instance, eating a lot of sugar and/or processed foods can cause you to crash. Low energy from magnesium, however, is something you can’t bounce back from. It’s a little like not having an empty gas tank: you’ll never be able to drive down the road at 70 mpg if you don’t put more gas in the tank.
Muscle energy, mental energy, and even motivation energy…you should have it, but if you don’t have enough magnesium, you physiologically can’t have the energy you want and need.
5. Increased Mental Clarity/Decrease In ‘Brain Fog’
‘Brain fog’ is a symptom of magnesium insufficiency. This is different from the ‘mental energy’ in the category above. Energy is one thing, inability to function properly is an entirely separate thing.
Neurological function requires magnesium. If you’re forgetting things, have a hard time pulling up words, or just feel constantly like you’re in a mental daze, an easy place to look for solutions to that is magnesium.
Interestingly enough, research shows that high dose magnesium via intravenous delivery, if administered immediately after/during a stroke, greatly reduces the damage to the brain that a stroke causes. If magnesium can help protect and enhance neurological function in that scenario, imagine how much it can help your brain operate in a strong and healthy manner.
What Causes Magnesium Insufficiency?
There are many reasons that people have inadequate amounts of magnesium in their bodies.
• A high stress lifestyle burns away magnesium
• Pregnancy (and the poor sleep afterwards) eats up magnesium
• Exercise and chronically tight muscles use up magnesium
• Type A personalities have high magnesium requirements
• Chronic pain (from injury or disease) drains the body of magnesium
• Other nutrients are required for the body to utilize the magnesium it does get, so if you’re short of those nutrients…you can’t uptake all the magnesium you do get
Just as importantly, the standard American diet, and even ‘healthy’ diets, are just lacking in magnesium for a variety of reasons. So even if you think you eat a ‘healthy’ diet, you very well just may not be getting as much magnesium as your body needs.
The good news is, Magnesium is cheap and easily available. It is very important, and one could make the case that it should be more expensive (because it provides so much benefit, whereas many other high dollar ‘health’ are marketed very well but provide far less value).
One could even make the case that magnesium is a far more effective helper against arthritis than arthritis medication is. There are tens of billions in sales of arthritis drugs every year, yet not a single person has ever been cured of arthritis by them. Whereas magnesium actively helps the body reverse the arthritis mechanism.