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Routinely sleeping less than six hours a night weakens your immune system, substantially increasing your risk of certain forms of cancer. Insufficient sleep appears to be a key lifestyle factor linked to your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
page 1 & ive read all i need to lol
Inadequate sleep—even moderate reductions for just one week—disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic. Short sleeping increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, setting you on a path toward cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure.
wow
the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span.
The physical and mental impairments caused by one night of bad sleep dwarf those caused by an equivalent absence of food or exercise.
omg
they took a trip into Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, one of the deepest caverns on the planet—so deep, in fact, that no detectable sunlight penetrates its farthest reaches. It was from this darkness that Kleitman and Richardson were to illuminate a striking scientific finding that would define our biological rhythm as being approximately one day (circadian), and not precisely one day.
go cats
the placebo effect is, after all, the most reliable effect in all of pharmacology.
tells me everything i need to know tbh
For every day you are in a different time zone, your suprachiasmatic nucleus can only readjust by about one hour.
wow
Caffeine—which is not only prevalent in coffee, certain teas, and many energy drinks, but also foods such as dark chocolate and ice cream, as well as drugs such as weight-loss pills and pain relievers—is a common culprit that keeps people from falling asleep easily and sleeping soundly thereafter, typically masquerading as insomnia, an actual medical condition. Also be aware that de-caffeinated does not mean non-caffeinated. Depending on the decaffeination method and the bean that is used, one cup of decaf can have between 3 to as high as 10 percent of the dose of a regular cup of coffee.
the brain always requires a new bout of sleep and its varied stages each night so as to auto-update our memory networks based on the events of the prior day. This
Let’s say that you go to bed this evening at midnight. But instead of waking up at eight a.m., getting a full eight hours of sleep, you must wake up at six a.m. because of an early-morning meeting or because you are an athlete whose coach demands early-morning practices. What percent of sleep will you lose? The logical answer is 25 percent, since waking up at six a.m. will lop off two hours of sleep from what would otherwise be a normal eight hours. But that’s not entirely true. Since your brain desires most of its REM sleep in the last part
of the night, which is to say the late-morning hours, you may lose 60 to 90 percent of all your REM sleep, even though you are losing 25 percent of your total sleep time. It works both ways.
recent MRI scanning studies have found that there are individual parts of the brain that are up to 30 percent more active during REM sleep than when we are awake!
signals of emotions, motivations, and memories (past and present) are all played out on the big screens of our visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensory cortices in the brain. Each and every night, REM sleep ushers you into a preposterous theater wherein you are treated to a bizarre, highly associative carnival of autobiographical themes.
dreams
When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate
model of how the world works, including innovative insights and probl...
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Once put in place, the postural body muscles, such as the biceps of your arms and the quadriceps of your legs, lose all tension and strength. No longer will they respond to commands from your brain. You have, in effect, become an embodied prisoner, incarcerated by REM sleep.
During REM sleep, there is a nonstop barrage of motor commands swirling around the brain, and they underlie the movement-rich experience of dreams. Wise, then, of Mother Nature to have tailored a physiological straitjacket that forbids these fictional movements from becoming reality, especially considering that you’ve stopped consciously perceiving your surroundings.
The brain paralyzes the body so the mind can dream safely.
sleep is the state we must enter in order to fix that which has been upset by wake.
can never “sleep back” that which we have previously lost is one of the most important take-homes of this book,
The more nights an individual sleeps in the new location, the
more similar the sleep is in each half of the brain. It is perhaps one reason why so many of us sleep so poorly the first night in a hotel room.
Individuals who are deliberately fasting will sleep less as the brain is tricked into thinking that food has suddenly become scarce.
It is deeply biological. All humans, irrespective of culture or geographical location, have a genetically hardwired dip in alertness that occurs in the midafternoon hours. Observe any post-lunch meeting around a boardroom table and this fact will become evidently clear. Like puppets whose control strings were let loose, then rapidly pulled taut, heads will start dipping then quickly snap back upright. I’m sure you’ve experienced this blanket of drowsiness that seems to take hold of you, midafternoon, as though your brain is
heading toward an unusually early bedtime.
Both you and the meeting attendees are falling prey to an evolutionarily imprinted lull in wakefulness that favors an afternoon nap, called the post-prandial alertness dip (from the Latin prandium, “meal”). This brief descent from high-degree wakefulness to low-level alertness reflects an innate drive to be asleep and napping in the...
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Instead, the true pattern of biphasic sleep—for which there is anthropological, biological, and genetic evidence, and which remains measurable in all human beings to date—is one consisting of a longer bout of continuous sleep at night, followed by a shorter midafternoon nap.
where the ensuing mortality risk of not napping increased by well over 60 percent.
that REM sleep increases our ability to recognize and therefore successfully navigate the kaleidoscope of socioemotional signals that are abundant in human culture, such as overt and covert facial expressions, major and minor bodily gestures, and even mass group behavior.
the coolheaded ability to regulate our emotions each day—a key to what we call emotional IQ—depends on getting sufficient REM sleep night after night.
wow
REM sleep can even take a step back, so to speak, and divine overarching insights and gist: something akin to general knowledge—that is, what a collection of information means as a whole, not just an inert back catalogue of facts. We can awake the next morning with new solutions to previously intractable problems or even be infused with radically new and original ideas.
this givss "sleep on it" a new meaning
Infants and young children who show signs of autism, or who are diagnosed with autism, do not have normal sleep patterns or amounts. The circadian rhythms of autistic children are also weaker than their non-autistic counterparts, showing a flatter profile of melatonin across the twenty-four-hour period rather than a powerful rise in concentration at night
Autistic individuals show a 30 to 50 percent deficit in the amount of REM sleep they obtain, relative to children without autism.
these unborn infants suffered a depression in breathing during REM sleep, with breath rates dropping from a rate of 381 per hour during natural sleep to just 4 per hour when the fetus was exposed to alcohol.VII
2 glasses of wine
the suprachiasmatic nucleus begins to latch on to repeating signals, such as daylight, temperature change, and feedings (so long as those feedings are highly structured), establishing a stronger twenty-four-hour rhythm.
young individuals who are at high risk of developing schizophrenia, and in teenagers and young adults with schizophrenia, there is a two- to threefold reduction in deep NREM sleep.
Passing into your mid- and late forties, age will have stripped you of 60 to 70 percent of the deep sleep you were enjoying as a young teenager.
Sleep before learning refreshes our ability to initially make new memories.
Those who were awake throughout the day became progressively worse at learning, even though their ability to concentrate remained stable (determined by separate attention and response time tests). In contrast, those who napped did markedly better, and actually improved in their capacity to memorize facts. The difference between the two groups at six p.m. was not small: a 20 percent learning advantage for those who slept.
wow - guilt free napping coming soon
