Samasthiti

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 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...

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...

" 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...