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September 10 - October 20, 2019
Sleep reforms the body’s metabolic state by fine-tuning the balance of insulin and circulating glucose. Sleep further regulates our appetite, helping control body weight through healthy food selection rather than rash impulsivity.
First, after waking up in the morning, could you fall back asleep at ten or eleven a.m.? If the answer is “yes,” you are likely not getting sufficient sleep quantity and/or quality. Second, can you function optimally without caffeine before noon? If the answer is “no,” then you are most likely self-medicating your state of chronic sleep deprivation.
Should you ever have to give a presentation at work, for your own sake—and that of the conscious state of your listeners—if you can, avoid the midafternoon slot.
That older adults simply need less sleep is a myth.
For fact-based, textbook-like memory, the result was clear. It was early-night sleep, rich in deep NREM, that won out in terms of providing superior memory retention savings relative to late-night, REM-rich sleep.
Even daytime naps as short as twenty minutes can offer a memory consolidation advantage, so long as they contain enough NREM sleep.
After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail.
The less you sleep, the more you are likely to eat.
Neglect sleep, and you are deciding to perform a genetic engineering manipulation on yourself each night, tampering with the nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health story.
With healthy REM sleep came a reduction in the patients’ clinical symptoms and, most critically, a decrease in the frequency of their repetitive nightmares.
It is sleep that builds connections between distantly related informational elements that are not obvious in the light of the waking day.
This electrical jolt compels the brain to rocket from the basement of deep NREM sleep all the way to the penthouse of wakefulness, but it gets stuck somewhere in between (the thirteenth floor, if you will). Trapped between the two worlds of deep sleep and wakefulness, the individual is confined to a state of mixed consciousness—neither awake nor asleep.
Insomnia is the opposite: (i) suffering from an inadequate ability to generate sleep, despite (ii) allowing oneself the adequate opportunity to get sleep.
A subtly lit living room, where most people reside in the hours before bed, will hum at around 200 lux. Despite being just 1 to 2 percent of the strength of daylight, this ambient level of incandescent home lighting can have 50 percent of the melatonin-suppressing influence within the brain.
Alcohol sedates you out of wakefulness, but it does not induce natural sleep.
Alcohol-infused sleep is therefore not continuous and, as a result, not restorative.
The aldehydes in particular will block the brain’s ability to generate REM sleep.
A bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (18.3°C) is ideal for the sleep of most people, assuming standard bedding and clothing.
Hot baths prior to bed can also induce 10 to 15 percent more deep NREM sleep in healthy adults.
Best to get your workout in at least two to three hours before turning the bedside light out (none LED-powered, I trust).
Terman found that no matter what the age, the longer a child slept, the more intellectually gifted they were.
