In my previous post 'Waiting for Inspiration to Strike' I wrote
about sleep and how important that it was to me. That I need sleep and
lot of it in order to function well, we all do. However some need it
more than others. What we really need to get to grips with here is
although the variety of hours that us human must sleep varies greatly
there are a few key reasons why good quality sleep is very very
important.
Sleep is essential to human survival if
you don't get enough sleep you will eventually start to have waking
hallucinations and begin to go mad the whole process only take about
3 days. Sleep is so important that sleep deprivation has been
known to be used as form of psychological torture.
Are you beginning to understand how
powerful it is?
Sleep is the way in which we process
our subconscious and conscious thoughts. The way that we do this is
that we have to enter period of delta sleeps and most of us need at
least four hours of delta sleep to function well. Delta is a kind of
electronic brain wave that we generate during deep sleep. During this
deep sleep we also experience rapid eye movement often referred to as
REM sleep (and most importantly where REM the nineties rock band get
their name from). R.E.M is physical sign of dreaming. Dreams are our
brains way of processing our thoughts and brain activity; archiving information in our memory banks so as not to overload our ordinary
everyday brain function. We can not store all information in the
frontal part of the brain. Think of delta sleep and dreaming as a way
of converting your memories to a hard drive, that can be accessed
at a later date if necessary.
Other stages of sleep create Alpha and
Theta waves. It takes roughly one hour of sleeping in both of these
stages to be able to drop down into delta sleep. Now that you know
this it might better explain why getting woken in the middle of the
night even if it's just for a few moments can have massive impacts on
our alertness and productivity the next day.
When we think about our lives and how
we were at the beginning, as babies, it's well known that new born babies
spend most of there time sleeping (admittedly not necessarily when
their parent want them too). Who could blame them in a brand new
world. During their time in the womb they have gradually had to become
use to noise, movement and light stimuli. Now the world that they
have been born into must feel like a complete sensory overload from
light, colour and sound. Think how much sleeping it must take in
order for them to be able to process all this amazing new information
it must be quite trauma.
So here is you in your everyday life. Almost every bodily function is automatic, we can drive cars, travel at fast speed observe and speak and communicate multiple interactions often in varying languages to several different people in several different locations via a variety of media before we have even arrived at work. No wonder we need 10 mins to decompress before we even sit down at our desks. No wonder we need break, the best thing we can do is give ourselves one and get more sleep.
So here is you in your everyday life. Almost every bodily function is automatic, we can drive cars, travel at fast speed observe and speak and communicate multiple interactions often in varying languages to several different people in several different locations via a variety of media before we have even arrived at work. No wonder we need 10 mins to decompress before we even sit down at our desks. No wonder we need break, the best thing we can do is give ourselves one and get more sleep.
