This link has been bookmarked by 424 people and liked by 1 people. It was first bookmarked on 02 Mar 2006, by Mag T.
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ly written to the disk (for long-term use), and your RAM is clear and ready for a new day of learning. Upon waking up, you reboot the computer. If you reboot early with the use of an alarm clock, you often leave your disk fragmented. Your data access is slow, and your thinking is confused. Even worse, some of the data may not even get written to the disk. It is as if you have never stored it in RAM in the first place. In conclusion, if you use an alarm clock, you endanger your data. If you do not care about your intellectual performance, you may want to know that there are many other biological reasons for which using alarm clocks is unhealthy. Many people use alarm clocks and live. Yet this is not much different from smoking, abusing drugs, or indulging in fat-dripping pork. You may abuse your brain with alcohol for years, and still become president. Many of m
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10 Jan 14
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Sleep isn't just a form of rest! Sleep plays a critical physiological function, and is indispensable for your intellectual development! Those who do not respect their sleep are not likely to live to their full mental potential!
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The bad example of disrespect for sleep comes from the most important people in the nation!
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Dr Stickgold's research proves a fact that has long been known yet little appreciated: sleep is necessary for learning (Stickgold 2005[3])! With less sleep, we reduce the recall of facts we learned before or after a shortened night. Studying nights before an exam may be sufficient for passing the exam, yet it will leave few useful traces in long-term memory. The exam on its own replaces knowledge as the main purpose of studying!
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By cutting down on sleep, we learn less, we develop less, we are less bright, we make worse decisions, we accomplish less, we are less productive, we are more prone to errors, and we undermine our true intellectual potential!
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- highly optimistic
- sleeps well
- knowledge hungry
- stress-tolerant
- energetic, but able to slow down at the time of learning
Here are some characteristics of a person who is likely to be successful in learning:
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06 Nov 13
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20 Aug 13
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06 Aug 13
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If your sleepy potion
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caveats
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Adipose tissue
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Free running sleep algorithm
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do not go to sleep before you are sleepy enough
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do not go to sleep well after the expected bedtime
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do not take a nap later than 7-8 hours from waking
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Best brainwork time
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24 Mar 13
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06 Mar 13
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05 Mar 13
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01 Mar 13
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25 Feb 13
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Electric lighting and stress are the two chief culprits that have converted the natural process of sleep into a daily struggle for millions. In the new millennium, we can rarely hope to get a good night sleep without understanding the science and the art of sleep
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- your body clock must be saying "time to sleep" (circadian component of sleep)
- your hourglass of power must be saying "no more mental work" (homeostatic component of sleep)
To get a good night sleep, you need to combine two factors:
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If, on the other hand, you try to sleep without the sleepy potion while the hourglass of power is empty, you may succeed, but you will wake up very fast with your hourglass full again. That will make sleeping again nearly impossible
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If your sleepy potion tries to put you to sleep but your hourglass of mental energy is full, you will be very groggy, tired, but you will not fall aslee
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nsomniacs go to sleep before the body clock releases the sleepy potion
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. If you drink coffee in the morning, it helps you charge the hourglass and add some extra mental energy. But coffee combined with the sleepy potion produces a poisonous mix that engulfs your brain in sickly miasma. If you try to drink coffee to stay up in the night, you will feel like a horse kicked you in the stomach
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A great deal of sleep disorders can be explained by entrainment failure (i.e. the failure to reset the 25-hour circadian rhythm to the 24-hour daylight cycle
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There is a little-publicized formula that acts as a perfect cure for people who experience continual or seasonal problems with sleep entrainment[glossary]. This formula is free running sleep!
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Free running sleep is defined by the abstinence from all forms of sleep control such as alarm clocks, sleeping pills, alcohol, caffeine,
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any use of an alarm clock is the cardinal violation of the free running sleep principle
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The greatest shortcoming of free running sleep is that it will often result in cycles longer than 24 hours
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You will know that you execute your free running sleep correctly if it takes no more than 5 min. to fall asleep (without medication, alcohol or other intervention), and if you wake up pretty abruptly with the sense of refreshment
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After months or weeks of messy sleep, some circadian variables might be running in different cycles and free running sleep will not be an instant remedy. It may take some time to regulate it well enough to accomplish its goals. It cannot even be excluded that after years of shift-work or jetlag, some brain cells in the sleep control centers might have died out making it even harder to achieve well aligned refreshing sleep
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Of the obvious ones, bright light in the morning or melatonin in the evening may shorten the cycle
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It will also change when you leave on vacation. It often gets shorter with age
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Exciting activities in the evening will lengthen it.
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The period changes slightly with seasons
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shortsightedness, the ailment of the information age, makes us less sensitive to the light zeitgeber and artificially prolongs the circadian cycle.
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Avoid stress during the day, esp. in the evening hours
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Days longer than 24 hours are pretty normal, and you can stabilize your pattern with properly timed signals such as light and exercise. This can be very difficult if you are a DSPS typ
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do not take a nap later than 7-8 hours from waking. Late naps are likely to affect the expected bedtime and disrupt your cycle. If you feel sleepy in the evening, you will have to wait for the moment when you believe you will be able to sleep throughout the night
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Optimum timing of exercise may vary depending on your exercise goals and the optimum timing of zeitgebers (e.g. early morning for DSPS people and evening for ASPS people). In this example, the stress block is followed by the exercise block to counterbalance the hormonal and neural effects of stress before the siesta.
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. For inveterate workaholics, less challenging and stress-free jobs might also work ok
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TV, reading, family, DIY, housework
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without medical intervention, only a large protective zone in the evening, early nap (or no nap), and intense morning exercise can help balance the day in DSPS.
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My own work with SleepChart also shows that the use of alarm clocks can dramatically reduce memory recall and consolidation
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The difference may be impossible to spot without measurement. We are more likely to notice sleepiness, reduced mental agility, or bad mood.
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t is better to go to sleep at a natural hour (i.e. a bit later), wake up early, suffer a degree of sleep deprivation, and hope for a phase reset that will make it possible to continue on the designer schedule. For a solution to the insomnia trap see Curing DSPS and insomnia.
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Most of all, sleep inertia is not an inevitable part of sleep in humans. In healthy individuals, sleep inertia is a direct result of errors in the art of sleeping. With a religious adherence to the principles of sleep hygiene, you need not ever experience sleep inertia and its negative consequences for learning, attention, health, etc.
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The main cause of premature waking is an early bedtime.
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waking in a wrong phase
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Wrong-phase inertia is a bit harder to combat. In many cases you won't be able to fall asleep. Even worse, trying to sleep can sometimes make things worse. The best solution is to suffer through the discomfort, avoid napping till your next subjective night period, and go to sleep in the right phase. Most of the time, sufficiently long wakefulness and hitting the right phase will help you instantly synchronize all sleep variable
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All those three conditions can fool the sleep control systems into thinking that the nap is the opportune time for launching a full-night sleep episode. If an attempt to launch full-blown sleep takes place long before the main circadian low (nighttime acrophase), you may wake up prematurely with the sense that you got an incomplete and unrefreshing nighttime sleep. Such sleep will leave you groggy and will make it harder to initiate proper sleep during the subjective night.
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The root cause of problems that follow long sleep is prior sleep deprivation or sleeping in a wrong phase
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he most dramatic finding in reference to jetlag was the loss of cells in the hippocampus in flight attendants who were employed for longer periods in jobs involving intercontinental flights
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Restricting sleep to 5 hours per night causes some 20% change in the levels of these appetite control hormones. This change corresponds to some extra 1000 kcal in free running feeding, or over 3 kg of fat per month in energy terms. Sleep restriction can easily halve insulin sensitivity leading to type 2 diabetes. It also significantly increases the risk of hypertension, stroke, heart attack or kidney failure (Van Cauter et al. 2007[15]). Other hormonal changes include increase in thyroid hormone levels (Allan and Czeisler 1994[16]), prolactin, LH, and estradiol (Baumgartner et al. 1993[17]). Finally, the root cause of many phase shift problems is a complex impact of shift-work and jetlag on the circadian changes in the level of the stress hormone cortisol. The net effect of the impact of cortisol level changes is the hypercatabolic state that effectively results in the body "eating itself up" in the long run. This way, when neglecting your body clock, you can become obese and biologically "wasted" at the same time.
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hiftwork that involves circadian disruption is probably carcinogenic to humans". Using the term "carcinogenic" is probably slightly misleading as the actual cause of increased cancer in shift-workers is probably related to the decline in the immune function and the body's natural ability to fight off mutating cancer cells.
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Insensitive wake-meter may make people tend to stay up for long
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Few people know that they can easily adapt to a completely different schedule by means of chronotherapy (e.g. by shifting their sleeping hours by 30-45 minutes per day). If you ask a typical owl to go to sleep 30-45 minutes later each day, the owl will keep shifting its bedtime to later hours. Initially, it will sleep during the day. That sleep will shift gradually to even later hours until the owl finds itself going to sleep in the very early evening just to get up before the larks! Surprisingly, even the most committed owl can then comfortably stick to the early waking hours for quite long! There is little natural preference as to the sleeping time of the day!
However, there is a factor that drives people into believing they are of a given sleep-time preference type. This is the length of the circadian cycle and their ability to entrain it to 24 hours. As mentioned earlier, typical circadian clock period lasts longer than 24 hours. Those people whose cycle is particularly long tend to go to sleep later each day. They push the limit of morning hours up to the point when their compulsory wake-up time results in unbearable sleepiness. In other words, people with long cycles will tend to work during the night and sleep in the morning as long as it is only possible.
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Some correlation studies showed that owls (as defined by the timing of melatonin release) exhibit slightly higher IQs than larks
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we might be facing an epidemic of Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS) in younger generations, esp. among students and people employed in high-tech jobs. The epidemic is a result of an ever-growing discrepancy between the environment in which humans and their primate ancestors evolved over the last several million years, and the environment in which we live today with electric lighting, Internet, computers, TV, rat race, and 24-hour society.
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Even though aging is said to increase nocturnal awakening, perhaps due to the cell loss in sleep control centers, this subject reported no awakening in the study period.
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a monophasic sleeper may not get the same performance boost in the evening as biphasic sleepers due to the effects of the homeostatic sleep drive component.
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Even a few minute nap can result in a major boost in alertness. This has already been noticed by a prominent napping expert Dr David Dinges in his comprehensive surveys comparing habitual nappers with non-nappers
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he circadian benefits are muffled by the homeostatic decline in alertness, which is not shown in the graph.
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, the length of sleep at siesta time is very short (usually 15-80 min).
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Most nappers took naps lasting 15-120 min. Naps will be shorter if they are taken before the siesta peak. If they are taken after the peak, they will usually last longer,
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It is important to note again that the evening boost in alertness is magnified by a nap, but shows up also in non-nappers and can easily be deconvoluted in the two-processes model into its homeostatic and circadian components (
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Mid-day slump is as prominent in conditions of severe as well as mild sleep deprivation
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I happen to disagree with most of the interpretations put forward thus far except those that stand in agreement with the mainstream sleep research. We need to observe that most of human and pre-human evolution took place in tropical areas with far shorter nights than those that characterize winters in the north,
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found
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This type of sleep results in very refreshing nights, however, it would be pretty hard to implement in agreement with the modern lifestyle. Certainly, it would not optimize the time us
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People with a particularly long circadian cycle or with an insufficient sensitivity to zeitgebers are classified as suffering from Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS for short)
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increasing data indicates that various degrees of DSPS occur with epidemic frequency, esp. among high school and university students
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ry often, they tend to split the day sleep into two components. For example, DSPS students often get a short sleep in the night, wake up early with an alarm clock, go to school where they are semi-conscious and perform poorly, get a solid nap after school and only late in the evening they regain vigor and their full mental powers. DSPS students feel best after midnight when everyone else is asleep and they can focus on learning or other activities (reading, Internet, watching TV, computer games, etc.)
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- increased period of the body clock (well above 25 hours)
- reduced or increased sensitivity to factors that reset or advance body clock (e.g. light, activity, stress, exercise, etc.)
- electric lighting, 24-hour economy and the resulting "want to do more" lifestyle
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They also push their clocks ahead by activity late in the evening (the process opposite to the morning reset synchronization)
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- either make one's life less dependent on meetings and appointments that can collide with your sleep schedule, or
- study DSPS remedies that can stabilize your sleep-wake cycle.
This example illustrates the major dilemma of all more severe DSPS cases. Free running sleep will often produce a phase shift. Anyone who tends to wake up very late is also highly likely to tend to wake up later each day in free running sleep. This is a hallmark symptom of the DSPS. DSPS, however severe, is never a health problem on its own if the sleep is run free. It is the scheduling problems that are most bothersome. The choice is between the two extremes:
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Although sleeping in "unnatural" hours is certainly less beneficial healthwise than normal sleep, for a DSPS subject, free running sleep rhythm may by far less stressful and disruptive than any attempt to fit to "standard" lifestyle
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A very reliable determinant of synchronous DSPS is the loss of the link between the sleep onset hour and sleep duration (
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Due to a better sleep efficiency in episodes well aligned with the circadian cycle, people on a regular free running DSPS schedule report a much higher subjective alertness and energy as compared with those on an irregular DSPS schedule. This difference also shows up in data collected with SuperMemo.
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28 hour day is considered extreme enough to cause perpetual lack of synchrony between the timing of sleep and the circadian cycle.
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Some sufferers from DSPS report feeling better on the 28 hour schedule than on a conventional 24 hour sleep schedule. I do not think it is likely there are individuals out there with an innate ~28 hour circadian cycle, however, it is conceivable that the effort to squeeze a DSPS cycle into 24 hours is more painful than the alternative in the form of stretching the cycle to 28 hours. The main difference is that the shortening of the cycle usually involves the painful use of an alarm clock, while stretching the cycle requires "only" extra 2-3 hours of zombified wakefulness
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Even in severe DSPS, it should be pretty hard to adapt one circadian cycle to the 28 hour schedule as the phase response curve indicates that the sleep phase does not respond strongly enough to strongly delayed bedtime, which may, in extreme cases, cause a phase advance. Phase delays beyond 2 hours should be extremely rare.
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Segmented sleep is often a sign of premature bedtime and shows up when the 28h schedule bedtime falls ahead of the presumed free running subjective night. When the sleep schedule undergoes an eventual collapse, the positioning of lengthy recovery sleep episodes seems to indicate that the average daily phase shift might have actually been much less than 4 hours. In an extreme case, large disparity between the subjective night and the planned nighttime might result in self-cancelling phase shifts that might paradoxically stabilize the sleep cycle.
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- get tired and sleepy faster (work is more likely to make you tired again)
- you will not get anxious about falling back to sleep as soon as possible
- you will not waste time on futile tossing and turning
f you happen to wake up early in the morning, your further sleep decision should probably be made on the basis of how fast you believe you would be able to fall asleep. If you do not think the sleep is coming soon, it is definitely better to get up and do some work. This way you will gain in three ways:
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neffective! Warm bath, quiet room, rituals, cup of cocoa, etc. - all these work to reduce the stress factor and slow down the brain. However, again that won't work well if you try it too early in reference to the circadian cycle
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It is better to get less sleep when it is initiated in the right phase than to force extra hours prematurely.
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the key is not in sleeping less, but in sleeping at the right time!
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Most people believe that humans, as all other highly developed tropical animals, have developed a siesta habit as a way of getting around the midday heat. This explanation has also some cultural background as napping is by far less popular in moderate and cold climates.
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We remain strongly biphasic throughout the lifetime, and the monophasic model has largely been imposed by industrialization
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relatively little impact of napping on the night-time sleep in regular nappers:
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non-nappers power at half-steam through the second half of their waking day
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Dr Walker, who confirmed his point with later research, says convincingly: "It's as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full, and, until you sleep and clear out all those fact e-mails, you're not going to receive any more mail". Take it from a religious napper Mr Winston Churchill: "you get two days in one"! The value of the nap increases in proportion to the degree in which your work depends on your brain and the quality of your thinking
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Even Bill Gates enjoyed taking naps under his desk in his creative programming year
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In the future, this trend is likely to become more prominent as caffeine is not a fraction as effective as a nap in combating fatigue
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For neural reasons, coffee, doughnuts, press-ups, and other methods taken together will never prove as efficient in mental restoration as a nap.
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Do not use the alarm clock!
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Measure exactly the optimum length of the period between the natural awakening and the nap to maximize the effectiveness of a nap. The nap should come at the nadir of alertness, which usually comes 7-8 hours from natural waking. Napping beginners often miss the right timing! Choosing 7 hours as your starting point will allow of a 60 min. margin in case you were late for one reason or another
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If you nap for more than 100 minutes, you probably need more sleep in the night (or you nap too late)
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Exercise is good. Try to finish your exercise at least 45 minutes before the nap. If you fail to cool down, your nap may end up prematurely
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Meal before the nap is recommended
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On some occasions, it may happen that a nap cut short with an alarm clock will be somewhat refreshing and will prevent the ripples of a wrongly timed prolonged nap. However, it is always better to choose the appropriate time for a nap. It will usually be around 7-8th hour of the subjective day.
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However, in conditions of sleep deprivation, or misaligned sleep cycle, it is safer to take an earlier nap or even skip the nap entirely to help cycle re-synchronization.
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This myth comes from the lack of understanding of the two-process nature of sleep. It made many to believe that polyphasic sleep is a good long-term lifestyle choic
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For skeptics who do not believe in scientific models, blue-dot unprejudiced data should be the ultimate clinching argument. The graph says unequivocally that we got two major peaks of alertness during the day. It also states clearly that there are only two valleys conducive for sleep and napping
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Napping is a skill. Many people cannot nap even if they are sleepy. Measuring the time between your natural waking and the nap should help you optimize the quality of a nap.
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It is important to know that the timing of the nap should not be determined by the clock that hangs on your wall. Your nap should come at around 7-8 hour of your natural waking time. To be precise, only you can determine that value precisely by comparing what happens if you try to take naps a bit earlier or a bit later. The optimum value may not hold if you cut your sleep short with an alarm clock, or fall asleep earlier than usual (e.g. because of an exhausting day), or delay going to sleep beyond your natural sleep hour.
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The rule is simple: if you are sleepy at Phase 0, nap at will. Your brain clearly needs more sleep.
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This is probably the hardest time to nap of all.
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Napping in pre-siesta slot is possible. However, such naps are likely to be short and not as refreshing as Phase 7 naps. They are also more likely to be REM-rich for circadian reasons. Those early naps can probably be recommended to people who suffer from sleep-onset insomnia, and who still want to boost the second half of their day in terms of alertness and creativity. Those naps can also be executed "in a hurry" due to their short duration in cases where longer napping is undesirable, or later timing does not fit the day's schedule.
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This circadian low time comes at the roughly same clock time as the subjective night nadir at a roughly 12 hour shift (e.g. if the middle of your night falls at 3 am, naps at 3 pm could be most effective
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particularly bad time for napping
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can result in early awakening combined with the difficulty in launching back to sleep
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The less unfortunate outcome of a pre-sleep nap is if you successfully trigger the uninterrupted night sleep sequence. However, you will likely prematurely run out of the homeostatic process before the circadian function of sleep is completed. You will probably wake up earlier than usual. This is the long-night-early-waking outcome that produces nights that are amazingly unrefreshing considering the fact that premature sleep is often much longer than an ordinary night sleep. The reason for this low sleep efficiency is probably the scarcity of REM sleep which is strongly circadian. Moreover, for circadian reasons, your morning is likely to be unusually sleepy!
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Due to the precarious nature of Phase 15 sleep, it should rather be employed only in conditions of sleep deprivation, which provides good chances for a positive outcome
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If the goal of sleep is defined as achieving maximum creative productivity, and if the night sleep can run its healthy course (i.e. there is no sleep deprivation), then any nap attempt at times other than the siesta time will be wasteful. This is because falling asleep should be difficult, and simply resting with the eyes closed does not yield a fraction of the neural benefit of an actual successful nap. Moreover, even if successful, an extra nap forced in in the morning is likely to interfere with the afternoon nap. Similarly, an evening nap may result in shortening of the night sleep. Those extra naps may bring incremental improvement in performance, but will reduce the overall efficiency of sleep and may cause ripples in the circadian system. Our biphasic nature makes it quite clear, we should strive at a single nap in the afternoon (in the 7th hour of waking). For some people, even this will be too much, and monophasic pattern is their optimum.
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Many young creative individuals come up with their own designer sleep schedules. I often get mail with submissions of new sleep pattern propositions. For example, triphasic sleep: one main sleep episode of 6 hours (00:00-06:00) with two 30 minute naps after meals (12:00-12:30, and 18:00-18:30). Like most of artificial ways of making the sleep system work to design, this schedule is not likely to be efficient. Most people are strongly biphasic, and only biphasic or monophasic sleep works well for adults.
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Even thoug
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or caffeine to be harmless, it must be taken at the right time!
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Melatonin's impact on sleep structure is probably the reason why many people who use melatonin as a sleeping aid report feeling less refreshed in the morning.
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ecommendation for a cup of coffee in the morning in otherwise healthy individuals.
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High doses might be counterproductive as they could produce phase delays caused by prolonged action on the delay side of the PRC that begins pretty early in the subjective night. Needless to say, for the same reason, additional administration on a sleepless night would act in opposition to the desired effect as compared with a timely evening use.
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. Even after a good night sleep, without sleep deprivation, coffee can crank up the creative powers of the brain. However, it most likely does so at the cost of attention. It may then help in creative problem solving, but it might also reduce one's attention during a morning lecture or magnify the effects of a stressful situation
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or a creative individual, melatonin should only be used when absolutely necessary (e.g. in order to generate phase shifts needed to maintain a schedule needed to function in society)
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However, if you extract the pure learning process devoid of stressful associations, light, social aspects, etc., you will come to a different prescription.
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If you really want to prove your strength, go fast through the incremental procedure instead of quitting instantly. Quitting cold turkey is not only risky, it also increases the chances of a relapse. This is due to the immortal maxim: Easy come, easy go
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make sure that your monitor and your room are not too bright. Otherwise you may impact your sleep phase that will make sleep harder on the next day
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Remember that learning in a sleepy state is actually a violation of the learning hygiene. Science has not yet conclusively answered the question if this is good or bad for your memory in the long run
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smokers usually experience a shallow and unrefreshing sleep. Smokers get less REM than non-smokers!
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Nicotine will improve your alertness by acting on cholinergic receptors in arousal areas including an important sleep center, basal forebrain (see: Why do we fall asleep?). However, it will also cause night time withdrawal effect that often results in premature awakening. Do you often wake up after just 2-4 hours of sleep? If you quit, you might leave those premature awakening behind.
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22 Feb 13
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21 Feb 13
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20 Feb 13
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A metaphor can help understand the role of sleep and why alarm clocks are bad. We can compare the brain and its NREM-REM sleep cycles to an ordinary PC. During the day, while learning and experiencing new things, you store your new data in RAM memory. During the night, while first in NREM, you write the data down to the hard disk. During REM, which follows NREM in the night, you do the disk defragmentation, i.e. you organize data, sort them, build new connections, etc. Overnight, you repeat the write-and-defragment cycle until all RAM data is neatly written to the disk (for long-term use), and your RAM is clear and ready for a new day of learning. Upon waking up, you reboot the computer. If you reboot early with the use of an alarm clock, you often leave your disk fragmented. Your data access is slow, and your thinking is confused. Even worse, some of the data may not even get written to the disk. It is as if you have never stored it in RAM in the first place. In conclusion, if you use an alarm clock, you endanger your data.
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temporal"Myth: You can accumulate sleep benefit in advance. Fact: If you expect a sleepless night, it is naturally best to be in a good shape. Good sleep on a preceding night will help. However, you won't get much benefit from sleeping well in the preceding week or month. Sleep is not food. You cannot accumulate it in advance for future use. This is also why your body will not attempt to sleep longer in free running sleep. If you ever sleep inordinately long, this is only an expression of prior sleep debt. Sleep credit does not exist.
"sleep health productivity science lifehacks learning brain psychology
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19 Feb 13
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13 May 12
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10 May 12
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Sleep deprivation in society
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Sleep deprivation in society
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Few people realize how important sleep is! The alarm clock is an often-used fixture in an overwhelming majority of homes of the modern world
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Few people realize how important sleep is! The alarm clock is an often-used fixture in an overwhelming majority of homes of the modern world
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Those who do not respect their sleep are not likely to live to their full mental potential
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Sleep plays a critical physiological function, and is indispensable for your intellectual development!
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29 Mar 12
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Yet some basic truths about sleep are well-established, and practical conclusions can be drawn with the benefit to human creativity and intellectual accomplishment
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30 Dec 11
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04 Dec 11
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28 Sep 11
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14 Jul 11
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01 Jul 11
jacob youngI have for years been interested in sleep research due to my professional involvement in memory and learning. This article attempts to produce a synthesis of what is known about sleep with a view to practical applications, esp. in people who need top-qual
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10 Apr 11
Jakub Bares"the more you learn, the more you think, the higher your tendency to fall asleep."
science sleep health biology physiology productivity neuroscience learning article post
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esp. in people who need top-quality sleep for their learning or creative achievements
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Few people realize how important sleep is!
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By using the electric lighting, alarm clocks, sleeping pills, and shift-work, we have wreaked havoc on the process of sleep
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I regularly cut my sleep by 2-3 hours as compared with what my body seems to need
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Those who do not respect their sleep are not likely to live to their full mental potential!
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Cutting down on sleep does not make people die
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It does make them feel miserable
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sleep improves recall in learning
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sleep is necessary for learning! Without sleep we reduce the retention of facts we have learned the previous day (and not only).
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- highly optimistic
- sleeps well
- knowledge hungry
- stress-tolerant
- energetic but able to slow down at the time of learning
Here are some characteristics of a person who is likely to be successful in learning:
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The physiological function of sleep
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the hippocampus, a small brain organ, for memory formation
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Buzsáki provided an good model explaining how the two components of sleep, REM and non-REM sleep, work together to consolidate memories.
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However, these patterns have to be encoded in the neocortex to provide space for coding new short-term memories.
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The hippocampus acts as the central switchboard for the brain that can easily store short-term memory patterns
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This complex process of rebuilding the neural network of the brain takes place during sleep.
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requires the brain to be shut off entirely from environmental input!
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This automatic rewiring is the main reason for which we sleep and why there is no conscious processing involved!
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It rewires its circuits to make sure that all newly gained knowledge is optimally stored for future use.
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Electric lighting and stress are the two chief culprits
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- circadian component - sleepiness comes back to us in cycles which are usually about one day long
- homeostatic component - sleepiness increases with the length of time we stay awake
There are two components of sleepiness that drive you to bed:
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Circadian component - there are around hundred known body functions that oscillate between maximum and minimum values in a day-long cycle.
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In an average case, the maximum sleepiness comes in the middle of the night, reaches the minimum at awakening, and again increases slightly at siesta time in the afternoon
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the optimum timing of your sleep should take into consideration your circadian rhythm.
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Homeostatic component - homeostasis is the term that refers to maintaining equilibrium or balance in physiological and metabolic functions.
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The longer you stay awake, the more you learn, the more you think, the higher your tendency to fall asleep.
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- To get high quality night sleep that maximizes your learning effects your sleep onset should meet these two criteria:
- strong homeostatic sleepiness: this usually means going to sleep not earlier than 15-19 hours after awakening from the previous night sleep
- ascending circadian sleepiness: this means going to sleep at a time of day when you usually experience a rapid increase in drowsiness. Not earlier and not later! Knowing the timing of your circadian rhythm is critical for good night sleep (see below for more hints)
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Stressful situations are also likely to keep you up at the time when you shall be falling asleep
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Do not fight sleepiness, go to sleep even if this falls 2-3 hours before your expected time.
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do not go to sleep before you are sleepy enough
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- circadian phase and homeostatic sleepiness
- total sleep time the night before
- amount of slow-wave sleep sleep the night before (see Physiology of sleep below)
- regularity of the sleep-wake schedule
In healthy individuals, the daytime alertness is primarily determined by:
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Peak of the night: You are very drowsy and fall into refreshing sleep with latency of less than five minutes
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Argument 2 - It is true that people who try to free run their sleep may find themselves sleeping outrageously long in the beginning. This, however, is not likely to last and may be a body's counter-reaction to prolonged sleep deprivation
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the demand for sleep should be somewhat proportional to the amount of new learning received on preceding days.
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Shrutarshi Basu"I have for years been interested in sleep research due to my professional involvement in memory and learning. This article attempts to produce a synthesis of what is known about sleep with a view to practical applications, esp. in people who need top-quality sleep for their learning or creative achievements. Neurophysiology of sleep is an explosively growing branch of science. Many theories that are currently contested will soon be forgotten as a result of new findings. Consequently, this text is likely to grow old very quickly. Yet some basic truths about sleep are well-established, and practical conclusions can be drawn with the benefit to human creativity and intellectual accomplishment. In this text, I provide some links to research papers and popular-scientific articles that advocate disparate and contradictory theories. Please consult other sources to be certain you do not to get a one-sided view! This article includes some indications on how to use free running sleep in the treatment of insomnia, hypersomnia, advanced and delayed phase shift syndromes, and some other sleep disorders. If your own experience can contribute to the ideas presented herein, I will gladly hear from you (esp. in the context of learning and creativity)"
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28 Dec 09
Graham Perrinhttps://twitter.com/grahamperrin/status/527891631937454080
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Good sleep, good learning, good life
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13 Sep 09
chandra rinielems. However, people will severe DSPS may simply find it impossible to go to sleep at the same time everyday. Such forced attempts will only result in a self-feeding cycle of stress and insomnia. In such cases, the struggle with one's own rhythm is simply unhealthy. Unfortunately, people suffering from DSPS are often forced into a "natural" rhythm by
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spag85na végre végigolvastam. eddig is kattogtam már az alvás témán (próbálok éjfélkor aludni és napfényre kelni, ill van nap chair az irodában igaz nem használtam) de most ujra elgondolkoztam.
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