A world where hustle is chic and where you only live once , it's irrational to spend so much time sleeping isn’t it?
So sleep is pretty weird. Evolutionarily, I think sleep is a ridiculously stupid thing because we're out cold for eight hours where any predator could come and kill us while we're completely defenceless. But for some reason God/evolution has decided that these risks are totally worth it and that the benefits of sleep far outweigh being blind and defenseless for a third of our lives. So clearly sleep is important, but we had never really given much thought
about how to sleep better and more productively, until we read Matthew Walker's fantastic book,"Why We Sleep".
So, before we talk about how to actually sleep productively, we need to be sold on why sleeping better is actually important. Firstly, one of the key points is that we all actually kinda need more sleep. There is apparently this epidemic of like, you know, people not sleeping eight hours a day and there's all this stuff around, oh, I'll sleep when I'm dead and I only need six hours of sleep to function perfectly fine. But as Matthew talks about in the book, there is a tonne of evidence allegedly that shows that if you chronically sleep for less than eight hours a day, you're screwing yourself in various domains of life.Yes, apparently there are people who can sleep for less than six hours each night and function completely fine without any issues, but those are less than 1% of the population and I’m sure most of us don't fall into that category.
If we don't sleep for eight hours a day, we can get all sorts of issues further down the line. For example, Matthew says in the book that, routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night, demolishes your immune system more than doubling your risk of cancer. Secondly, if we get less than eight hours a day of sleep repeatedly, apparently that also reduces our performance, lowers our productivity, our social fluidity, our rational decision-making, memory recall, and even our emotional control. In fact, he says that after 10 days of just six hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for 24 hours. So imagine what it feels, how grim it feels to not sleep for 24 hours.
So the answer is here.
Sleep is a natural bodily process for healing the human body and remembering the information better. A proper sleep increases efficiency , boosts the immune system, helps maintain a good mental health and most importantly, it helps lose weight ! Despite being aware of its importance, people define sleep as a time lost forever. Surprisingly , sleep deprivation is defined as a symptom of hard work, advocated by idioms burning the midnight oil” .
Why do we sleep is a great book by Matthew Walker explaining the science of sleep. If anyone feels guilty for honoring themselves with ( 7-8) hours of sleep a day and have cut it short to ( 5-6 ) hours only , then reading this book will make you realize what ill you were doing to yourself.
The point is despite being aware of all this , why are we not sleeping? Why are we turning blind to the scientific facts ? Is it because of the increasing competition that we feel we will be left behind if we will sleep? Why is sleeping less equated to more success and even if we want to change , why are we not able to ? Now answering these questions in general is difficult as the reasons for every individual can be different. Although reading this blog will surely provide you valuable insights on sleep and you will be motivated to change!
Something even more fascinating about sleep is the fact that it lets you travel the world even during the pandemic and lock down, it lets you discover the unexplored mysterious lands and meet some new face.. Yes, we’re talking about the dreamworld. You are getting sleepy, very sleepy. When your head hits the pillow and it’s switch off time for the brain and body, right? Not if you consider the brain cells that must fire to produce the sometimes vivid and sometimes downright haunted dreams that take place during the rapid-eye-movement stage of your sleep. Why do some people have nightmares while others really spend their nights in bliss? Like sleep, dreams are mysterious phenomena. When we talk about sleep, the idea of dreams certainly crosses our mind. We spend roughly one third of our lives sleeping, —and during that time, we dream. no one yet fully understands their purpose or what exactly dreams mean. Some researchers believe they have symbolic meaning, while others believe that dreams are related to waking life. The brain is active all night long, with particularly intense brain activity in the forebrain and midbrain during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is when we dream. While dreams are often heavily influenced by our personal experiences, researchers have found that certain dream themes are very common across different cultures. For example, people from all over the world frequently dream about being chased, being attacked, or falling.
Dreams, moreover, are also meaningful. If you dream about winning the lottery or having an accident, should you prepare? If you answered "yes," you’re not alone, according to a study published in the February 2009 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers ran six experiments, finding that not only do we put meaning to our dreams, we also judge dreams that fit with our own beliefs as more meaningful than ones that go against the grain.
Scientists have long wondered why we dream, with answers ranging from Sigmund Freud's idea that dreams fulfil our wishes to the speculation that these wistful journeys are just a by-product of the rapid-eye-movement, or REM, sleep. Turns out, at least part of the reason may be critical thinking, according to Harvard psychologist Barrett who presented her theory in 2010. She has found that our slumbering hours may help us solve puzzles that have plagued us during daylight hours. According to Barrett, it's the visual and often illogical aspects of dreams that make them perfect for out-of-the-box thinking that is necessary to solve some problems because "Whatever the state we're put in, we're still working on the same problems,".
Although there is not much solid evidence regarding the fact, studies do show that you can control your dreams. If you're interested in lucid dreaming, you may want to take up video gaming. Both represent alternate realities. Additionally, the level of control may also help gamers turn a nightmare into a carefree dream. This bar of sorts against nightmares could help war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after combat and other patients cope with various forms of mental illnesses.
Let's now talk about the practical things we can do right now to make ourselves sleep better immediately.
Rule number one, set a sleep schedule and try to sleep and wake up at the same time every day.
Secondly, don't use alarms if you can help it. Alarms apparently cause a huge stress response when we wake and we can all relate to that feeling of that annoying alarm and like the worst sound in the world.That apparently actually has a measurable increase in our stress levels. And even worse if we snooze our alarms, We get that repeated stress trauma every single morning. Rule three, wake up with the sun or use very bright lights.
This helps set our circadian rhythm and helps tell our body clock or internal body clock that,oh, it's daytime therefore I'm gonna be awake. Another interesting point is Try and get the temperature down to 18 degrees when you sleep. And finally, don't lie in bed awake, trying to fall asleep for more than 20 minutes.And this is something that I used to struggle with a lot before I started taking care of my sleep.Well, I'd be lying awake in bed for absolutely ages being like, oh, why am I not sleeping? And what he says in the book is that, when we're in that mode of trying to talk ourselves into sleeping, that is actually increasing our stress and anxiety levels, which paradoxically makes it even harder to fall asleep. Instead, he says that if you're struggling to fall asleep, and if you haven't been able to for more than 20 minutes, then just get up out of bed and do something, do some sort of activity.
So, that was all we had to offer on sleep and its many benefits. We hope you enjoyed reading it and took home some valuable insights.