LegendaryLife Blog

Sleep is even more important than diet! You can live a week without eating but no more than a few days without sleep!

No doubt about it, sleep is vitally important for a productive day, it’s not a waste of time as many marketers or success gurus preach!

What happens during sleep?

During the sleeping process, your body essentially goes into overdrive! Your brain is actually busier when you are sleeping than when you are awake! All of the days knowledge is reviewed (which some people think may be the origins of dreams), the muscles, skeletal and nervous systems all get fixed, optimized and polished for another grueling day in addition to a complete “oiling” of your joints. Basically, sleep is the one time of the day in which your entire body undergoes a makeover… and it doesn’t cost a thing!

Why is sleep so vital to a healthy, successful lifestyle?

Sleep deprevation studies have shown that somebody who hasn’t slept for more than 24 hours acts as if they had a few too many beers. They would fail a sobriety test and would be even considered legally drunk! This should give you a very big hint at why sleep is so vital towards turning your hopes and aspirations into reality! If you aren’t getting enough sleep, you are working under a deprived state which will catch-up to you… either in the form of micro-sleeps during the day (which may happen anytime, including while driving) or difficulty concentrating and even forgetting key bits of information vital to your career. You want to become successful? SLEEP!

How much sleep is enough?

Most scientists say about 8 hours is enough, as for me, I wake-up when my body tells me to… today I slept for 10 hours, yesterday 9 and my average is usually higher than 8. Why? I haven’t a clue but I believe the amount of sleep is dependent on what you did during the day. If you had an amazing workout, did lots of studies and pushed yourself to the limit, I am sure you will sleep far more than if you just watch television. There is also such a thing a quality, for me, I usually fall asleep within 10-15 minutes of touching the pillow but if I did nothing during the day, I noticed this number can be doubled or tripled. I have no set schedule to live by, if my body needs 10 hours, I give it 10 hours… and I believe this is a far healthier method of keeping yourself in a ready state to conquer the coming day!

Sleeping is like a bank

I have also ready several times that sleep is like a bank, if your body doesn’t get enough one day, the amount of deprevation builds-up and is taken at other times. Say your body needs 7 hours of sleep a night, if you give it only 6, your body keeps track and will get that extra hour out somewhere, either in the form of micro-sleeps during the day or, like most people, over the weekend. You can’t escape from sleep, you can’t negotiate with it nor can you predict how much you need. In general, we require less sleep the older we get, some scientists believe this is due to efficiency but I believe it’s more due to a lack of stimulation. If you aren’t constantly challenging yourself in some way, physically and mentally, your body and mind will go into stagnation… avoid this at all costs!

Effects of sleeping on aging

Our bodies are built to last a very long time, but nothing makes you age more than a stressful life as, you guessed it, it leads to an abundant quantity of bad sleep! If you aren’t sleeping well, your body isn’t as efficient fixing you up for the next day, the result, sped up aging! All the creams and diets in the world cannot replace what you get for free while sleeping.

How to sleep easily

Your body can only adapt to about an hour change of sleep a day, so if you normally go to bed at 10pm but decided to go at 9pm instead, it may take a few days but you would quickly adapt to the new circumstances. If you, instead, switch from a night to a day shift, you are doing yourself incredible harm as it’s just too much of a change, sleeping during the day is difficult already, changing this every two weeks or month is beyond horrible. I actually did this for a few months and I can attest first hand, to the effects it has on you mentally and physically. Do whatever you can to avoid any job that has rotating shifts, the money you make isn’t worth the toll it puts on your body. Try to get to bed at about the same time every night, plus or minus an hour is no big deal and try to maintain a set routine about an hour or two before going to bed so you can relax into your sleep instead of speeding-up into it, which is far more difficult.

The Bottom Line

Dreams are the cheapest form of entertainment out there… enjoy them!

Buzvia: DreamClue.com

Sleep means different things to different people. In business books, more often then not, sleep is seen as a waste of time while for hippies if you where awake longer then you where asleep then you had a bad day.

What is sleep?

Sleep is generally seen as the period in which loss of consciousness occurs. Just about every living thing on this planet has some type of sleep, I have seen ants sleeping in the morning, I have seen fish sleeping in an aquarium and even sometimes a cat or two that where awake. Sleep is the natural process of rejuvenation that we ALL need for our survival. During sleep, our hearing, body movements and state of alert all decrease dramatically yet, our brains are even MORE active then during our waking hours. Our cells work overtime repairing and rebuilding the days damage while the general breakdown of our bodies structures slows down.

Why do we sleep?

Although the exact reason why we sleep is still not known, it is thought to be a mix of things. The first a processing of all the days memories, lessons and experiences into our brain for classification, sort of like what your computer does when it isn’t active… the hard drive speeds up much like our brain and an indexing mechanism kicks in. The second repairs and restoration from the days damage both externally (skin, limbs etc. ) and internally (organs and cells) on both a macro and microscopic level. The third reason I believe we sleep is because we suck at navigating our way through the night, our night vision isn’t very well developed so we cannot really hunt nor gather and simply looking at a camp fire for 10 hours straight till the lights get turned back on doesn’t make for a good use of time. Truth be told, our brains still have no clue that we live in a 24 hour global village.

To me, the reason for our lost of consciousness makes perfect logical sense. Extensive system wide renovations would probably be so painful that we wouldn’t ever do them, our brain needs dedicated processing power for indexing and our toes need protection from bashing into every tree at night.

What are the stages of sleep?

Sleep occurs in four stages, N1, N2, N3, V4 and R. First stage is called N1 which is essentially the gateway between consciousness and subconsciousness. Second stage is N2 in which conscious awareness of the environment around you goes away, you spend half of your night in this state. Third stage takes up about 5% of your total night and occurs right before you go deep into N4. N4 occurs right before R in which you loose all conscious awareness and the final stage R is when your dreaming.

What happens if you don’t sleep?

If you don’t sleep, irritability, loss of concentration, hallucinations and a host of other temporary mental disorders start to rear their head. There are people who have gone up to 11 days without sleep during experiments but generally, going without sleep isn’t a good idea unless your goal is to be the least productive human on Earth.

What affects sleeping patterns

Sleep is heavily influenced by both the mental and physical environment you find yourself in. Remember how for Christmas when you where a kid, you could either sleep right away or simply toss and turn all night… waiting for those Christmas presents to appear? Same thing occurs in adulthood, except it can be an upcoming exam, presentation or a new job that causes fantastic or insomnia. Stress, physical activity, diet and even general mood heavily influence the quantity and quality of sleep you will receive. From what I have read, the best way to get a good night sleep is to have a set routine you play out every night and every morning.

Why do we dream during sleep?

We may be able to figure out how to fly to the moon but ask humans to figure out sleep and all you get is mostly gobolygook. I believe dreams are simply a by-product of processing, or re-organization of the brain… remember earlier how I mentioned that I believe our brains are busy re-indexing our experiences into its archive while we sleep, well, I think some of those files fall out or get stacked… the result is dreams!

The Bottom Line

Sleep isn’t anything to skip out on, if you need 10 hours or 5 hours, then that is what you need but always remember, sleep is like a bank where regular deposits are required for a healthy account.

References:
Sleep Research Society http://www.sleepresearchsociety.org/
National Sleep Foundation http://www.worldsleepfoundation.com/
American academy of Sleep Medicine http://www.aasmnet.org/