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Sleep XIV

For me the most important bits of the book were in the last section because they really convince you to make a lifestyle change mostly by scaring you with the effects of sleep deprivation. But that doesn't mean the rest of it isn't important. They are. They are also fun to read and are mostly non-scary, because Matthew is hoping you'd be super convinced by now to sleep at least 8 hours! The section is titled  Why and How we Dream. We usually dream in the REM state, but it's not the only state of sleep we dream in. As we are falling asleep or exiting sleep, the dream like experiences you have tend to be visually or movement based. But dreams as most of us think of them - those hallucinogenic, motoric, emotional, and bizarre experiences with a rich narrative - come from REM Sleep. MRI scanner help effectively measure localized activity of the brain in three dimensions covering upper, middle and upper brain. Scientist have placed individuals inside brain scanning

Sleep XIII

Sleep fights infection and sickness by deploying all manner of weaponry within your immune arsenal. When you do fall ill, the immune system actively stimulates the sleep system, demanding more bed rest to help reinforce the war effort. Less sleep and less of that magic! My mother has been telling me that my immunity is dropping in the last couple of weeks. This might be true - because I have been falling sick too often and too easily. The weather in Bangalore has been a bit crazy off-late, but  i should be stronger than that - especially with all the yoga I do and the nutritious food i eat, I also sleep 8 hours at least in the night, with an hour (or to) of afternoon naps thrown in on holidays and weekends. So i need to dig deeper about my weakened immunity. But one thing is for certain - it's definitely not because of lack of sleep. How does sleep affect immunity? Now, if you have been on this sleep journey with me - you should know better than that! A couple of weeks bac

Sleep XII

In the French classes I attend most folks are in the 20-25 age range. So often to tease them I say things like "oh the young, how naive they are" - much to their chagrin. I of course don't mean it most of the time, because I've learnt myself age is no barometer of one's intelligence or depth of a human being. However, all things said there are some things only age can teach you. I learnt much later in life to value my sleep - and even today sometimes when there is a kickass movie playing on TV, I find myself struggling with the need to watch it by sacrificing an hour or two of sleep. I regret it a LOT the next morning when I show up in class groggy eyed and heavy bodied! A couple of days back, my young friends from class were lamenting on the fact that they don't get enough, they were visibly tired and it showed not just physically but also in their aura and overall demeanour - they needed to rest. I asked them a very simple question "how much sleep do y

Sleep XI

" The less you sleep, the more you eat. In addition, you body becomes unable to manage those calories effectively, especially the concentrations of sugar in your blood" What else needs to be said after the above sentence! If sleeping less contributes to obesity and type 2 diabetes - who in their right minds wouldn't want to sleep more and sleep well?! Every body has sugar circulating within called blood sugar or glucose, which slowly but surely damage the tissue and organs of your body - eye diseases, nerve diseases, kidney failure, in fact even high blood pressure and heart diseases! But the one we know most about is Type 2 Diabetes. Again, body being the magician it is, knows how to handle a situation when the glucose shoots up. It releases a hormone called insulin, which instructs the  cells of your body to open channels on their surface that deal with the increased glucose flowing in the arteries. Sometimes the cells of the body stop responding to insulin and t

Sleep X

This is the last chapter in the second part of the book - Why we should sleep. Of course Matthew Walker saved the best for the end. This one does not hide behind performance or memory or creativity - i'm not saying all of those things are not important, of course they are! This chapter calls it out clearly and succinctly. It's titled - Cancer, Heart Attacks and a Shorter life. To quote Matthew " every major system, tissue and organ of your body suffers when sleep becomes short. No aspect of our health can retreat at the sign of sleep loss and escape unharmed."  But there's the one below that really is amazing : "The leading causes of disease and death in developed nations - diseases that are crippling health-care systems, such as heart disease, obesity, dementia, diabetes and cancer - all have recognized causal links to a lack of sleep." A lot of the work I do in yoga is amongst people who are financially well settled - but their health is a matte

Sleep IX

Alzheimer's is a scary term. When I was learning to be a yoga therapist, the doctor who taught us alzheimer's had a personal experience of it and she looked at us very sternly and said "i have no words to tell you how much it breaks you down - irrespective of whether you are suffering from it or if you are a caregiver". Many many many suffer from this condition and the numbers are only increasing, not only as human life has stretched but also as total sleep time as decreased. Matthew claims that sleep can help us with diagnosis, prevention and therapeutics of the condition. Over 60% of patients with Alzheimer's have at least one clinical sleep disorder. Sleep quality especially deep NRE sleep, deteriorates as we age. This causes a decline in memory - in the case of an Alzheimer's patient, memory loss is more exaggerated - sleep disturbance precedes the onset of the disease and therefore can act as a warning sign or even a contributor to it - therefore

Sleep VIII

Even though I'm trying my best to pick out the key points of the chapters and i'm sticking to the notes I made - often times directly quoting the book, the real magic is reading the whole book itself and I find myself stopping the writing just to re-read the whole chapter all over again because the notes just don't do enough justice. If you have the time and the can get yourself a copy of this gorgeous book - please read it!  This one is a short chapter on learning and sleep. We've spoken before about how sleep helps consolidate learning. But in this chapter Matthew talks about an experiment he did with his own students at Harvard University. In the survey he shares with his students at the start of the course he tries to understand what their sleeping habits are. And he answer he usually finds is that more than 85% of them pull all-nighters - especially to study for an upcoming exam.  So he decided to conduct an experiment. He divided his students into two gr

Sleep VII

I have been lazy and I have been putting off writing about sleep for a long time now. I blame it on very busy days and I rightfully prioritised sleep over writing at 10pm in the night. French classes got busier - i cleared level 1 - hurray! I finished hosting a gorgeous retreat in the foothills of the Himalayas with a bunch of lovey very beautiful souls and I'm back to being superbly busy with classes here in Bangalore and Level 2 of my French language classes. I'd think about picking up writing about sleep on and off and i would not find the time and energy. Only this last weekend when I fell terribly sick, unable to move out of bed even, did I realise I had been sacrificing on my sleep to read a few pages or watch a little bit of TV at night or read about India's political climate on my phone - all not ideal to do at 10:00pm in the night. So over the last week, all I have done is sleep to heal myself and thankfully I feel a lot better now. My thoughts went back to this

Sleep VI

Matthew Walker finally starts to get into the juicy parts of WHAT is it that sleep actually does for your brain. He starts by telling us about memory and how sleep helps augment that function of the brain. He divides the assistance sleep provides into a couple of sections and Im sharing some notes I made on those sections below. We have established before that all types of sleep - NREM (all stages) and REM sleep responsible for different functions in the body & mind and can therefore not substitute for each other. You can not be missing out on either kind if you wanted to live a more healthy, happy and productive life.  I am currently learning a new language - French. I am also teaching many back to back yoga classes, the first of which starts at 6:30 am. I need to wake up at 5:30 am to get ready, arrive at a certain balanced frame of mind before teaching my students. Calculating backwards means I need to sleep at 9:30pm to get a full night's beauty sleep. Truth be told, I

Sleep V

The meaty stuff starts now! Im in that phase of life where most of my friends are having kids. As I was reading through this part of the book on how sleep assists infants and adolescent, my enthusiasm to share bits and pieces of what i was learning with them  must have been quite irritating to them. But considering how immensely important the information was i could not stop myself. Most folks who have babies are cognisant about the need for sleep and frankly babies don't do anything but sleep in the first few months anyway. It is the folks who have pre-adolescent kids and adolescents who need to be told about the importance of sleep and the way it changes as the kids mature from one stage of life to another. I knew there was something draconian about super early school-start times, this book has scientific data to back my previously baseless theory! Additionally Matthew also informs us about how sleep then disintegrates towards the later stages of our lives, both in quality and q

Sleep IV

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Source : infoplease.com I should really be moving faster because I am only chronicling the scientific aspects of how sleep works. I want to get to the meaty stuff of what sleep does to your body physically, mentally and physiologically and more importantly what happens to you when you do not get enough of it. Since I am re-reading this book,  I recognise so many patterns in myself and in people I know that could be related to sleep deprivation. Of course there are many other factors affecting us every day, but i had never considered sleep to have a major role in it. I knew it was important, but I did not know it was this  important. Somewhere i the book Matthew says, he always knew that sleep was one of the three pillars of a healthy lifestyle others being - a good diet and frequent and correct exercise. As he worked through is research in the of neurosciences and sleep specifically, he realised that even the other two pillars of good health : diet and exercise and dependent