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March 27 - April 4, 2021
“The basic biology of feeling connected to others has profound effects on stress physiology,”
It’s pretty poetic that feeling connected to others literally fixes a broken heart.”
Going to coffee with a colleague only to discuss work won’t do you much
That’s why we recommend this strategy for the end of your workday.
•Have the courage to take breaks throughout the day,
•Take a walk lasting at least 6 minutes to increase creativity and decrease the ill effects of sitting.
•Put yourself in the way of beauty.
•Meditate.
•Hang out with friends! At the end of hard work—
In 1942, the average American slept 7.9 hours every night. Today, that number is down to 6.8 hours.
Much, if not all, of our collective sleep loss is related to the technologies that keep us connected at all times and allow us to work at all hours.
working immediately prior to bedtime is an awful idea.
While we can rebound from being in a room where the light bulbs are on, it’s much harder to rebound from staring at a screen.
blue light can shift our internal clocks by up to six time zones.
Those who read the e-book reported feeling far less sleepy when it was time to go to bed.
the e-book readers experienced a 90-minute delay in their bodies’ release of melatonin, the hormone that makes us feel sleepy.
Most worrisome is that these effects resulted from just 5 days of using a blue light–emitting device 4 hours before bedtime.
Blue light alone is detrimental. Combine blue light with a racing mind, and it becomes easier to understand why we’re sleeping less than ever.
Sleep is one of the most productive things we can do.
We grow in our sleep.
We can put in all the work in the world while we’re awake, but if we don’t sleep, much of its value is lost.
Sleep’s critical role in learning is a rather new discovery. Robert Stickgold, MD, PhD, a preeminent sleep researcher at Harvard, told the New Yorker magazine that until recently, people thought “the only known function of sleep was to cure sleepiness.”
When we sleep, and in particular when we dream, the brain goes through the countless things we were exposed to throughout the day
and decides what is worth storing in memory. It also figures out where in our web of knowledge to store these things.
In all our conversations with artists, sleep was linked to periods of high creativity and emotional fire.
scientists are beginning to wonder if insomnia is not only the result of many mood disorders but also a cause.
Sleep also impacts our self-control.
chronically sleep-deprived individuals have less self-control and are at increased risk for “succumbing to impulsive desires, poor attentional capacity, and compromised decision making.”
sleep is the most important “supporting session” there is.
the longer we sleep, the greater the proportion of it is in REM.
Hours 7 to 9—the hours that the majority of us never get—are actually the most powerful.
Maria Konnikova,
“As we sleep, our brains replay, process, learn, and extract meaning. In a sense, they think.”
During our waking hours we expose ourselves to all kinds of psychological stimulus (stress), and during our sleep (rest) we make sense of it all.
In our sleep, we grow. And we grow not just our cognitive and emotional muscles but our physical ones, too.
One topic where there is complete conformity, however, is sleep.
“Sleep might be the most important thing I do.”
“catabolic”
Our muscles, and even our bones, break down on a micro scale.
We become tired and sore, which is the body’s natural way of informing us it’s time to take a rest.
If we neglect rest and keep pushing, the breakdown continues and, eventually, our health and performance suffer.
But if we listen and allow the body to rest, it shifts from a catabolic state to an anabolic one, in which the body repairs and rebui...
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it is only when we follow stress with rest that adaptation...
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Once we’ve been sleeping for at least an hour, anabolic hormones start to flood our system.
Testosterone and human growth hormone (HGH), both of which are integral to muscle and bone growth, are released after the first REM cycle and stay elevated until we wake.
These hormones increase protein synthesis, or the generation of proteins specifically designed to...
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This means much of the protein athletes eat, diligently counted gram by gram throughout the day, goes to waste...
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you can get more of the same hormones that countless athletes have risked their health, reputations, and careers for (by injecting synthetic steroids, aka doping) simply by sleeping for a few additional hours.
If you’ve been searching for the fountain of youth or taking all sorts of crazy supplements, you can stop now. Instead, simply get under the covers and close your eyes.
They are elite because they sleep.
