Getting enough sleep (7-9 hrs) vital to brain memory function, consolidation of memory, forgetting non essential information, building long term memory required for skill and knowledge development, a wide range of cell repairs like muscle strengthening, bone remodeling, bone marrow immune boosting, cell clean up processes called autophagy & other essential maintenance cascade restoration that occur during 4 different stages of sleep, during your sleep cycles or blocks of sleep.
Your body becomes dehydrated when you sleep. Your eye do not get as much oxygen from your eye lids as they do during the day by diffusion, so you might notice some "snow" in your visual field upon first wakening. After 3+ hours without food or water your body enters a pre-fasting state where digestion starts to calm down & as sleep continues these fasting processes are essential for metabolic health.
It is completely normal to wake up between sleep blocks, and each sleep block has stages, block are also called cycles, and the way these stages & cycles happen is referred to as sleep architecture. There are 4 phases of sleep in sleep cycles.
In the first stage of sleep your brain transitions from wakefulness to a state of suspended physical activity, rest, where your closed eyes allow your mind to "drift off" into sleeping, this takes between 1 and 5 mins. As the person dozes off, the body & brain slows down. You can wake a person during N1 sleep but if they remain undisturbed they will enter N2 or the second stage of sleep quickly. Sometimes people twitch during N1 transition & that can be a queue that even you might notice as you are falling asleep.
In the second state of sleep, eye movement stops, your body fully relaxes its muscles, the brain slows down, the body temperature reduces slightly, and breathing rate slows. The N2 stage gets longer with each sleep block & people spend about half their time sleeping in N2, where the brain produces pulses of activity to keep you from being awakened by external stimuli such as light or sound or touch. These cycles last between 10 & 25 min, becoming longer with each successive system throughout the night.
In the third stage of sleep, known as slow wave sleep or delta wave or N3, the restorative repair processes begin. Its hard to wake someone in deep sleep as they are fully relaxed and not sensitive to external stimuli during this stage, when someone is said to be "out cold" or "completely asleep" Heart rate or pulse declines further, muscle tone relaxes even more, breathing slows further, and while the brain was previously thought to be less active, recent research show it engages in insight creation, creativity & memory formation during N3, though much of the physiological restoration phases as most active during this phase. N3 phases last 20 to 40 minutes becoming shorter with each cycle throughout the night.
In the fourth stage of sleep, known as REM for rapid eye movement, the brains becomes active dreaming at levels similar to full wakefulness. Brain activity during N4 essential to executive or cognitive function, and while dreaming can occur in any state, the most vivid & intense dreaming occurs during REM. It takes about 90 minutes of sleep before a person can enter REM, the first REM cycles are as short as a few minutes, the later stages can last up to an hour.
Not getting enough sleep degrades mental performance, slows healing, & generally bad for the body! Sleep an essential part of a healthy lifestyle & something that has been degraded by light & sound pollution. I tell other people aim for cooler, darker or silent sleep conditions, though white, pink, red or brown noise emitted by an Echo device or similar speaker system can help to block out impulsive background noises from trains, airports, traffic, conversations, TV, dog barking or similar. I like the lower pitch sound of "Brown Noise" to help block out other sounds. I also run two small low power fans that produce their own "interference noise" to "drown out background sounds"
Newborn babies can sleep 16+ hours & spend nearly half their time asleep in REM, which they enter almost immediately upon falling asleep. Adults spend less time in REM as we age, the decrease in REM sleep cycle length thought to be involved with neurological declines in executive function or an increase in "brain farts" as they are sometimes called. Have a sense of humor, life to precious and special to spend our finite time alive uptight & frustrated by things that will be gratefully forgotten when we look back on our lives just a few years later. If it is not important enough to remember, why are you allowing yourself to get so upset by it now in the first place.
Alcohol interferes with early REM stages, reducing their length & intensity, though as it wears off a rebound effect causes later REM stages to become more intense & last longer.
To improve your sleep thin about Sleep Hygiene. Go to bed at the same times & wake up at the same time every day. Avoid alcohol near bedtime so that your body can metabolize it before your go to bed. During the day try to expose your eye to natural day light or a high CRI artificial light that simulates sun exposure used to treat seasonable affective disorders. Daylight or 5000K color temperatures lamps & bulbs that are also full spectrum meaning they also emit the other colors of light, exposing yourself to this simulated daylight during the earlier & mid parts of the day can promote proper wakefulness levels. Avoid screens, smartphones, computers, TV's, artificial lights & light sources near bedtime.
Darkness essential to allowing your brain to enter sleep stages. In the retina of your eye exists a bundle of nerve ganglion linked to the SCN in the brain, a connection which has a regulatory effect on the circadian rhythm such that upon detecting light in the eyes, the brain reduces melatonin levels & increases cortisol release. This is why light pollution causes sleeping & stress disorders that started affecting so many people after the introduction of artificial lighting technology during the industrial revolution. An uptick in caffeine consumption, light & sound pollution, longer days became norms of working conditions, longer shifts & more productivity were the goals for the creation of wealth & economic prosperity.
If loud noises are waking you up, uses a noise generator, or similar functions on your Alexa Echo device or similar voice activated personal digital assistant devices from Google or Samsung. You simple ask the robot, hey [Whatever you call it] "play 'brown''red''pink"white"{you choose} noise" / I say "Hey Alexa, play brown noise" & it emits a dong sound & shortly after starts playing the brown noise, in my case to block out very loud TV happening in the wall behind where my head lays when I am trying to sleep. I say trying to sleep because I have had problems being easily awakened. This is why I resorted to playing noise & having fans run in the background, to help drown out the TV sounds, which are outside of my control.
I started focusing on sleep more after I enabled the Health App on my iPhone & Apple Watch SE. With the latest software updates & sleep tracking turned on, the Apple Watch now gives me a stage summary graph & other cool biofeedback data about my sleep^^ Thank you Apple! I previously (a long time ago) used Fitbit's for sleep tracking, but their poor charging cable & battery that fades quickly after a year or so, really turned me off. I also had problems with sweat rashes under Fitbit bands & back then it was not easy like it is now to change the bands. That's one of the main reasons I like the Apple Watch lineup. You can buy a band for an Apple Watch & it works on every Apple Watch. You can have a collection of different bands, one for causal wear, one that's dressy, one that's for working out, one that's for sleeping, they are easy to change in just a few seconds. My Apple Watch SE the cheaper one, not the fancy flagship * does not contain all the bells & whistles of the more expensive models, though it is water resistant to 50M the main idea as I water cool it while its charging on its inductive charging cables, upside down in a small dish of cooled water, as keeping it cool while charging prolongs the calendar or long term life of the internal LIPO lithium cobalt nickel manganese aluminum battery. While I try to keep my batteries in mobile electronics charged 30-80% to maximize useful battery life, I often forget they are on the charger & charge then 100% which is bad for the battery. It can be helpful to set a timer so that does not happen.
I started writing this posting very early in the morning & was trying to be as quiet as possible so as to not awake my lovely wife Meg :) Knowing that she stayed up late cleaning the kitchen means she needs to sleep in a little more. I woke 5:45 am naturally with no alarm today, having fallen asleep at 7:44pm last night. I feel a lot better and accomplish a lot more when I go to bed earlier, wake really early, only drink coffee early in the day, avoid alcohol in general though not all the time, aim to stay well hydrated by drinking water right upon waking, & steadily throughout the day, by getting enough fitness to keep my muscles strong, balance & coordination in tune, mental energy maintained, emotional health maintained, productivity levels maintained. I try to not eat anything in the morning, drinking my coffee black with water added to cool the espresso down to safe 130 F or 50 C drinking levels so that I can start enjoying it right away. I put my Apple Watch and iPhone on chargers during this "coffee stage" in the early morning for example, but became distracted writing this posting, which is why they both got to 100% today, I will try again tomorrow to cool them properly & not charge beyond 85%.
It took me a long time to do this, but you can stop the movie when you are watching it & resume the next day, you do not have to stay up late to finish watching it, especially if doing so is going to make you feel sick or very tired the next day. Not getting enough sleep can cause sleep debt, & sleep debt causes car accidents that injury & kill people. Many industrial & commercial workplace accidents happen because people are tired & not full function from sleep deficits from not having good sleep hygiene or healthy sleeping habits. Habits are a powerful way to integrate helpful lifestyle tricks into your daily operations. If you want to do something, at first you will have to force it to happen, but overtime your brain will automate the activity.
It can be helpful to study content about whatever it is you are interested in doing. For example, if you want to clean & organize your home, reduce clutter or improve organization around the house or in your garage, you can watch movies, documentary films, YouTube videos & read blog postings about "cleaning & organizing". Meg & I previously watched episodes featuring organizational expert Marie Kondo, who teaches people the "Does this item give you a spark feeling" idea, where a person goes around their home, picks up different things & if they get a special spark from it, they keep it, otherwise they put it in the donate, recycle or trash piles respectively to reduce, streamline & clean up by reducing the number of superfluous items around the house.
Its easy to slowly accumulate possessions if you are not careful with your money. I sometimes throw away PLA printing from my 3D printer if they are no longer serving a purpose. I know that decorating your home with items you like can produce a nice feeling, when you look around & see things that you like, but perhaps there are things you own that are burden to you, you do not ever or rarely ever use, have no interest in anymore, consider getting ride of those things just like you might consider your sleep habits to improve sleep health or to improve your sleep architecture to improve your overall health & wellness.
Take an inventory of your mind, your thought life & what you have been thinking about lately. Having unhealthy mindsets can inhibit you from making healthy lifestyle choices, like going to bed early enough so that you can wake up feeling refreshed & restored from getting enough sleep. Remember, if you want 7 hours of actual sleep, you might actually require 9 or more hours, since your likely to spend some of that time in bed awake, between sleep cycles, and waking after a sleep cycle totally normal & something that affects nearly everyone. The only way to really know about your sleep is to use some device, a fitness tracker like the Aura Ring, the Apple Watch, a Fitbit or Samsung Gear & enable the sleep tracking functions & actually review the data on your smartphone & think about it & apply the learnings. For example in the Apple Watch sleep tracking app on the iPhone there are short educational articles about sleep stages that you can compare against the stage graph that it produces to see how much total time in bed, how much time awake, in light sleep, in deep sleep, in REM, how long the cycles were & how many total blocks of sleep.
I do well when I get 4 sleep cycles, feel tired & sore if I get 3 or less- that means I need 8 full hours of sleep during a 10 hour block to feel totally rested. I can get away with operating on 6 hours of sleep, even 5 or less, but I am almost 40 years old & cannot sustain that the way I did in my 20's anymore. I didn't understand sleep architecture, sleep cycles, the circadian rhythm, the SCN, stimuli, light pollution or sound pollution back then. I was obsessed with information & would stay up late for hours every night reading wikipedia, to learn as much as possible about the world. "The devil is in the details" an expression that consolidates the motivational feelings I had at the time.
I would for example engage in at least 12 hours of research on a product to inform whether or not I should consider buying it. I made a lot of mistakes buying things I did not really want later on, useless junk that was complicated to recycle for example. Many things were given to me that I held on to, believing with confusion that the more stuff I owned & controlled the more of a man I was, but that was not true, it was a burned of heaviness but literally & psychologically. I had so much stuff I could not even keep track of it all. That's not a healthy life, for me less is more.
I went through many phases of streamlining & consolidation, liquifying, spinning off, down cycling, recycle, donating, & cleaning up to reduce clutter & improve organization. Its hard when you have 14 hobbies to keep everything like a museum. So you have to cut out things in your life that are stealing your time & not bringing you joy. The balance, its hard to fix anything if you do not inventory tools, but people get to a point where they don't need to fix anything anymore. I am aquatinted with much older people who gave away all their tools for example, fixing anything is beyond them now as they approach death. Life is a spectrum & everyone at a different point along their timeline. No one is the same & every day is different also. We work better working together as teams because everyone has something different to contribute & you can learn wise things from anyone. We are all in this life together & that's why I often say that I think about it!
Watching the local news can cause mental illness by stepping you out with FUD or fear uncertainty or doubt. Last night for example, they were talking about local murders, car accidents, the war in the Ukraine, & an astroid that NASA is working to divert from impacting the Earth. Further negativity about flooding from tornados & hurricanes affecting Florida right now. What is happening all around the world way too intense for any one person to consider completely. You have to focus on what you care about personally. I would never be able to read the Bible for example if I wasted all my time consuming information about world news or politics or science & technology or any of the other hundreds of different topics someone sane might consider, available online 24/7 as the world never sleeps. This can cause sleep disorders & obsession a young mans game, foolish for older people to be anything other than fair & balanced, reasonable, honorable, kind & honest, treating others people, animals & nature with dignity & respect.
We need more love in the world, less selfishness, more generosity & benevolence. When we help other people we make the world a better place one person at a time. If everyone helps other people, we can create a utopia of social connectedness, more friendships, less crime, a nicer world to live in! Think about that & how to make it happen! You can start by going to bed earlier & waking up at the same time everyday, squeezing in workouts & activists & variability to add some spice to life to keep it more interesting & engaging so that you can live more fully every day. Don't sweat the small stuff, older people used to tell me, there is a profound wisdom in this saying. A happy wife makes a happy life. Frugality intelligent, so save your money. I had a lot of wise older people share wisdom with me over the years thankfully. Their willingness to share these profound insights with me helped me avoid making other kinds of mistakes, I am deeply grateful for their positive healthy inputs. That's part of what motivates me to share about my life by writing these blog postings!
No comments:
Post a Comment