What if someone told you that you have the power to significantly lower your chances of getting in a car accident or improve your ability to fight off disease and decrease your risks of getting sick? How could you increase your productivity and creativity using this ability? What if you never had to pay a dime for this superpower and liked it?

“What is this ability or superpower?” Its Sleep.

Sleep seems to be the most unproductive activity we perform. We living beings spend a third of our life motionless, lying in bed with our eyes closed when we could spend a lot more time getting stuff done. But if you could see what the brain is doing while you slept, you would see that not only is sleep productive but it might be the most productive thing you do all day. Read the book “Why We Sleep“ - By Doctor and Author Matthew Walker who has studied sleep for over two decades. He says that during a full night of sleep our brains transition between 3 types of sleep: Deep Sleep, Light Sleep & Rem Sleep

Every 90 mins we cycle through these 3 phases of sleep. But not every sleep cycle is the same! When you fall asleep the first 90 minutes of sleep is mostly deep. When you stay up a bit later than normal to watch a movie or to browse the web, you are sacrificing a large portion of your deep sleep that night and that’s something that you might later regret. Think of Deep sleep like a mail delivery service. During the day your brain (the mailroom) collects packages. This mailroom is your Hippocampus, temporary storage space in your brain. The packages are bits of information you’ve learned during the day for example a person’s name or dates or an address. When you fall into a deep sleep you start up the fleet of delivery trucks and start delivering these packages to a permanent address in your brain outside the hippocampus. But when you decide you stay up late and skip out on the first few hours of your sleep schedule, you will fail to get those packages to your intended destination. Hence the contents of those packages will be lost forever.

Right after the deep sleep is a period of light sleep. Light sleep is like the cleaning of the mailroom. Its job is to clear the hippocampus every day. After being awake for 16 hours and more it’s harder for your hippocampus to hold onto any new information. That’s why when you're staying up late to read a textbook or a novel, you often find yourself reading the same paragraph over and over again, failing to comprehend the information. Light sleep is a mental refresh that renews your ability to learn new facts. Most of our light sleep is at the end of our regular sleep schedule. That means waking up early to study is counterproductive.  Waking up early and only getting 5-6 hrs of sleep severely impairs your ability to learn new information. If you get up typically earlier than usual, say 6 am when you typically get up at 8 am you are also missing out on the majority of your Rem sleep.

REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement. If you film yourself during Rem sleep, you'd see your eyeballs rapidly moving underneath your eyelids. You would pretty much look like you're possessed and if you film the rest of your body you wouldn’t notice much of anything. During Rem sleep, the rest of your body is completely paralyzed. This an analogy to explain what happens during Rem sleep: If deep sleep is like a program that stores handwritten notes that you made during the day into a permanent cloud-based note-taking system, then Rem is a program that goes through those notes in the cloud, combines them, edits them and produces a store you can understand. When you enter Rem sleep, your mind gets to work trying to understand and make sense of what happened during the day. To do that, it makes connections between newly stored information and previously stored information. The connections made are often bizarre and something you never think to do while you're awake and therefore the results are often a creative breakthrough. This means for writers waking up to the outline of their next chapter in mind, for entrepreneurs waking up with a new product idea, etc. Rem sleep not only offers creative insights but also offers emotional insights. Walker in the book explains that the dreams we experience during Rem sleep often act as therapy.

“Think back to your childhood and try to recall some of the strongest memories you have. What you’ll notice is that almost all of them will be memories of an emotional nature. Also notice however, your recall of those detailed memories is no longer accompanied by the same degree of emotion that was present at the time of the experience. ”

In the book he says, without dreams, we would all suffer from chronic PTSD. Dreams thrust us back into the anxious moments so that we can get past that anxiety and move on with our lives. If you're going through a bitter breakup, its cycles of rem dream sleep will help you transition from despair to hope.

If we fail to get our full night’s sleep, a full 7-9 hrs of sleep and miss any part of our deep, light, or rem sleep, we will remember less, learn less, and understand far less. Without a full night’s sleep, it’s impossible to be our best self. To ensure this, sleep needs to be our number 1 priority each day. To have a full good night’s sleep it’s important to have good sleep routines.

When your brain detects light especially the blue spectrum in light, it suppresses melatonin as melatonin triggers your first sleep cycle and provides the initial push you need to fall into a deep sleep. Our body temperature needs to drop 2-3℉ to fall into a deep sleep but this is oftentimes hard as our houses stay at room temperature. A good routine to follow would be to oftentimes take a hot shower. When you take a hot shower, your body heat goes to the surface of your body and dissipates once you get out of the bath or shower. The dissipation of heat immediately drops your core temperature to the ideal temperature for sleep.

When you experience deep, light, and rem sleep following good sleep routines you strengthen your memory, your ability to learn & grasp concepts faster, and your ability to solve complex problems and recover from emotional setbacks. So whether you’re compelled to reprioritize sleep for health benefits, or to keep your brain healthy, sleep; and know that you are part of a community that will cheer you when you get your eight hours of much-needed sleep!

References:

I got my references from the book I read "Why We Sleep" By Matthew Walker and it is one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever come across.