The Life Doula: Back To Sleep

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.