Samasthiti

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 ...

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...

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 ...

I took a break from writing the articles on sleep. I finished reading the book, and I am currently on a quest to re-read it, so that the message it imparts stays firmly lodged in my mind. Sometime I think re-reading books is one of those luxuriously wasteful things to do - because there are so many books to read in the world. But once a while, you do come across masterpieces that need to be read again - lest you have forgotten what it taught you. Why We Sleep happens to belong to the latter category. Matthew Walker starts off by telling us about the signs of sleep. There are two:  Absence of awareness of your external surroundings. Distortion of time Absence of awareness  This does not mean that your eyes, ears and noise have suddenly lost their ability to function. They continue doing their work - but the signals from the sensory organs do not reach the brain. What stops it? A barricade called Thalamus, a small oval shaped object that is located in the brain. ...

For the longest time I thought, I needed to be an "established" yoga teacher with a following of sorts to be confident enough to lead a retreat. I would often toy with the idea of hosting one and immediately brush it away saying "I don't have anything to show" or "I do not know enough to share".  So I'd beat myself and my idea down and not let it flower. At all. That does not mean that I did not dream of doing it one day or that I pushed it way back down so that it would be hidden away. It was always just behind the "logical" and "rational" barriers of my decision making mind.  In fact, it was so accessible that I used it one day to make an entire website ready to publish about my upcoming retreat in April 2018 with the fields on the logistics of where I was hosting it as "TBD". When I got back from teaching at Bergerac, France, a part of me was suffering from a major European hangover. Those who know me, know th...