Reminders from Arianna Huffington's The Sleep Revolution
Taken from huffpost.com

Reminders from Arianna Huffington's The Sleep Revolution

Doris Chow (周菽芬) Doris Chow (周菽芬)

Doris Chow (周菽芬)

Project Management • Stakeholder Engagement • Strategic Communications • Strategic Planning • Business Development

Published Dec 24, 2017
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  1. No matter the constraints, whether a tiny, crowded apartment or a crowded work schedule, sleep is a fundamental human need that must be respected. It’s one of humanity’s great unifiers. It binds us to one another, to our ancestors, to our past, and to the future. No matter who we are or where we are in the world and in our lives, we share a common need for sleep. Though this need has been a constant throughout human history, our relationship to sleep has gone through dramatic ups and downs. And right now that relationship is in crisis. [Page 3]
  2. Sleep is a key element of our well-being and interacts profoundly with each of the other parts. Once I started getting seven or eight hours of sleep, it became easier to meditate and exercise, make wiser decisions, and connect more deeply with myself and others. It’s clear that if we’re going to truly thrive, we must begin with sleep. It’s the gateway through which a life of well-being must travel. From the moment we’re born until the moment we die, we’re in a relationship with sleep. [Page 5]
  3. What I’ve learned is that in today’s world, the path of least resistance is the path of insufficient sleep. And unless we take specific and deliberate steps to make it a priority in our lives, we won’t get the sleep we need. Because today a full night’s rest has never been more difficult to come by. But unless we’re vigilant, we can become disconnected from ourselves. [Page 8]
  4. Dreams give information about the secrets of the inner life and reveal to the dreamer hidden factors of his personality. ~ Carl Jung [Page 9]
  5. Because when we are asleep, the things that define our identity when we’re awake – our jobs, our relationships, our hopes, our fears – recede. And that makes possible one of the least discussed benefits (or miracles, really) of sleep: the way it allows us, once we return from our night’s journey, to see the world anew, with fresh eyes and a reinvigorated spirit, to step out of time and come back to our lives restored. These two threads that run through our life – one pulling us into the world to achieve and make things happen, the other pulling us back from the world to nourish and replenish ourselves – can seem at odds, but in fact they reinforce each other. [Page 12-13]
  6. Our sleep is not empty time. Sleep is a time of intense neurological activity – a rich time of renewal, memory consolidation, brain and neurochemical cleansing, and cognitive maintenance. Properly appraised, our sleeping time is as valuable a commodity as the time we are awake. In fact, getting the right amount of sleep enhances the quality of every minute we spend with our eyes open. [Page 18]
  7. It turns out that women need more sleep than men, so the lack of sleep has even more negative mental and physical effects on them. Duke Medical Center researchers found that women are at a greater risk for heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and depression. We found that for women, poor sleep is strongly associated with high levels of psychological distress, and greater feelings of hostility, depression and anger. In contrast, these feelings were not associated with the same degree of sleep disruption in men. [Page 23-24]
  8. And even when it doesn’t kill us, sleep deprivation makes us dangerously less healthy. Even losing an hour of sleep per week – which many of us do without a moment’s thought – can lead to a higher risk of heart attack. Even the switch to daylight saving time can temporarily disrupt our sleep patterns. [Page 26]
  9. A lack of sleep also has a major impact on our ability to regulate our weight. Sleep-restricted subjects gained more weight than their well-rested counterparts over the course of a week, consuming an average of 559 extra calories a day. People who get six hours of sleep per night are 23 percent more likely to be overweight. Get less than four hours of sleep per night and the increased likelihood of being overweight climbs to a staggering 73 percent. That is due in part to the fact that people who get more sleep produce less of a hormone called ghrelin – the “hunger hormone,” which increases our appetite The sleep-deprived group also had lower levels of the hormone leptin, the “satiety hormone,” which lowers our appetite. In other words, cutting back on sleep is a fantastic way to gain weight. Other research points to the role of sleep in the production of orexin, a neurotransmitter that normally stimulates physical activity and energy expenditure but is reduced when you are sleep-deprived. [Page 27]
  10. Microsleep occurs when we unknowingly fall asleep for anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or so. It is a terrifying phenomenon when you are behind the wheel of a car. [Page 32]
  11. Health is deeply intertwined with culture: what we eat, how active we are, and how much we sleep. [Page 36-37]
  12. If burnout is civilization’s disease, sleep deprivation is one of its chief symptoms. It’s a paradox of modern life that we live in a state of continuous exhaustion and yet we’re unable to sleep – which leaves us even more exhausted the next day, and the day after that. [Page 46]
  13. In twenty years, people will look back on the sleeping pill era as we now look back on the acceptance of cigarette smoking. This chronic use of sleeping pills is an ongoing public health disaster. [Page 48]
  14. Though the efficacy of these smart drugs is still being debated, a 2014 study found that long-term use may lower brain plasticity, especially in young people. The cost of short-term productivity may be long-term creativity, adaptability and intelligence. [Page 63]
  15. The good news is that there’s a solution: get enough sleep without sleeping aids, and there’s no need for all the Red Bulls and Adderalls in the daytime. It’s hard to quit only one half of the perfect circle of burnout without quitting the other. [Page 67]
  16. Sleep and dreams were not just shortcuts to solutions for earthly problems. They were a sacred bridge to the divine, a means of transcendence. [Page 69]
  17. Burnout is so associated with success, it’s become a cultural symbol. Overwork has also become a way to signal class status: ‘I am slammed’ is a way of saying ‘I am important’. This represents a sharp shift from a prior era when having leisure was a ‘class act’… We have this weird reversal in the US where the elite work very long hours, while the poor typically can’t get forty hours a week of work. [Page 90]
  18. The relationship between sleep deprivation and stress is also profound. Sleep deprivation results in higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol the next day. And many of the genes affected by lack of sleep are involved in processing stress and regulating our immune system. Lack of sleep actually changes the gene expression of more than seven hundred genes and increases the activity of genes linked to inflammation. This shift takes place after just one week of getting too little sleep. Our ancestors’ bodies readied themselves for potential injury (such as animal attacks) by triggering inflammation genes as protection. And that’s very similar to what happens when we don’t sleep. Sleep deprivation puts the body on alert for a wound but no wound happens. This could easily help explain the links between sleep deprivation and negative health outcomes such as heart disease and stroke. [Page 103]
  19. The less we sleep as we grow older, the faster our brains age. In Alzheimer’s patients, the brain ventricles – chambers that hold cerebrospinal fluid – widen as the brain shrinks, and the grooves and folds of the brain become more pronounced, creating gaps. Researchers found that lack of sleep in older adults increased the pace of brain-ventricle enlargement and decreased cognitive performance, the very markers of brain aging associated with the onset of Alzheimer’s. [Page 105]
  20. Sleep is also intricately connected with our general mental health. Consistent early bedtimes may reduce the risk of mental illness. The underlying mechanism involves our ultradian rhythms – cycles within our body’s twenty-four-hour circadian day – which govern body temperature, hormone regulation, and appetite. These rhythms are regulated by dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with the reward and pleasure parts of our brain. Sleep disturbances interfere with our dopamine levels, leading to an imbalance associated with bipolar and schizophrenic disorders. [Page 106]
  21. There is a circular relationship between poor sleep and poor memory, based on the protein beta-amyloid, believed to be the cause of Alzheimer’s. The more beta-amyloid you have in certain parts of your brain, the less deep sleep you get and, consequently, the worse your memory. Additionally, the less deep sleep you have, the less effective you are at clearing out this bad protein. It’s a vicious cycle. [Page 107]
  22. Twenty-four hours without sleep is the equivalent of a blood alcohol level of 0.1 percent – at which point you are more than legally drunk. [Page 108]
  23. Basically a machine that sleeps and dreams learns more and performs better in the long run than one that is always awake. What it means for a machine to sleep is to essentially switch off its direct connection to perception and action, while to dream means to repeatedly replay experiences in order to extract the maximum learning signal from them. It is a paradox. We think of sleep as an inefficient use of time, and in fact it is the most efficient use of time in terms of learning and memory. [Page 109]
  24. Science continues to prove that “sleeping on it” when grappling with a problem is a real thing. Sleep almost doubles our chances of remembering previously unrecalled material. The postsleep boost in memory accessibility may indicated that some memories are sharpened overnight. This supports the notion that, while asleep, we actively rehearse information flagged as important. [Page 110]
  25. Bed is a medicine. With an infection, patients often become sleepy, and…sleep helps them recover. But only if we let it. The fact that sleepiness is one of the symptoms of illness is a further reminder of what our bodies instinctively know about the power of sleep. Sleep can also amplify the effectiveness of other treatment. Getting more sleep greatly increased antibody levels of those who had just received the hepatitis B vaccine, and that averaging less than six hours of sleep could render the vaccine ineffective. [Page 111-112]
  26. Sleep deprivation may even allow cancer to spread faster. In mice injected with cancer cells, sleep disturbances and poor sleep quality resulted in more aggressive tumors, quicker cancer growth, and a reduced ability of the immune system to root out the early stages of cancer. It’s not the tumor, it’s the immune system. Fragmented sleep changes how the immune system deal with cancer in ways that make the disease more aggressive. Women who reported getting five hours or less sleep per night before they were diagnosed with breast cancer were one and a half times more likely to die of the disease than women who reported getting seven or eight hours per night. [Page 112]
  27. Appetite and metabolism are also profoundly affected by sleep. Healthy adults who slept an average of 5.6 hours a night for three weeks had a decreased resting metabolic rate and increased glucose levels after meals, increasing the risk of obesity and diabetes. Sleep deprivation sets the stage for diabetes by increasing the risk of resistance to insulin, a hormone that’s essential for absorbing blood sugar and either converting it to energy or storing it. And insulin resistance is a precursor of diabetes. Once diabetes is diagnosed, sleep is as crucial as diet for managing it. [Page 113-114]
  28. Self-control requires mental energy, and each of us has a limited reservoir. When we’re tired, these energy reserves run low, and our self-control suffers. This is why sleep deprivation puts us at greater risk of “succumbing to impulsive desires, poor attentional capacity, and compromised decision making. [Page 114-115]
  29. Yawning as a way of bridging mental states: “wakefulness to sleep, sleep to wakefulness, alertness to boredom, threshold of attack, sexual arousal, switching from one kind of activity to another.” As for the contagiousness of yawning, new research shows it may be a primitive form of empathy. [Page 116-117]
  30. Through our dreams, sleep opens up a pathway to other dimensions, other times, other parts of ourselves, and to deeper insights that lie beyond the reach of our waking consciousness. Dreams are a reservoir of knowledge and experience, yet they are often overlooked as a vehicle for exploring reality. If matter is “derivative from consciousness” and consciousness is fundamental, then consciousness includes dreams. The timelessness of dreams, the wildly different narrative rules, and the ways we move through the dream world – all of these allow us a unique access to our intuition and inner wisdom. [Page 126-127]
  31. With Sigmund Freund’s work, dreams went from being a unique way of accessing divine knowledge to being a unique way of accessing self-knowledge. Dreams were still a journey, but they became less of a sacred journey and more of a personal one. He argued that dreams are symbolic manifestations of repressed desires, fears, and wishes that are often too painful to experience or remember directly and are thus sublimated into our subconscious through “psychic censorship”. The dream is a psychic act full of import, its motive power is invariably a wish craving fulfillment; the fact that it is unrecognizable as a wish, and its many peculiarities and absurdities, are due to the influence of the psychic censorship to which it has been subjected during its formation. The psychodynamic dream theories were about wish fulfillment and also substitutions, so that often people or objects stood for something else entirely. But whether we understand them or not, our dreams are constantly manifesting themselves in our waking lives – because the relationship between the subconscious and the conscious is ongoing and intense. [Page 128-129]
  32. To Freud, dreams are a journey inward and back in time, sometimes through simple, forgotten memories and sometimes through dark, painful episodes in our lives. By making that journey and figuring out the meaning of our dreams, we can both heal and truly know ourselves. [Page 131]
  33. Carl Jung saw the unconscious as a wellspring of creativity and a conduit for the divine. He called the dream a ‘voice of God’. If one pays attention to one’s dreams, one can use the dream as a vehicle for transformation. As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature. A gap has opened up between the conscious mind, “characterized by concentration, limitation and exclusion,” and the “original mind” and its “primitive psychic energy.” It’s in this gap that modern anxieties, fears, mental illnesses, and psychological disturbances have grown and flourished. [Page 131-132]
  34. To Carl Jung, dreams “are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind” and fill in the “forgotten language of the instincts.” They “restore our psychological balance” by re-establishing a “psychic equilibrium.” What we consciously fail to see is frequently perceived by our unconscious, which can pass the information on through dreams. The dream gives a true picture of the subjective state, while the conscious mind denies that this state exists, or recognizes it only grudgingly. [Page 132-133]
  35. REM sleep may constitute a protoconscious sate, providing a virtual reality model of the world that is of functional use to the development and maintenance of waking consciousness. [Page 146-147]
  36. Since age is a determining factor for how much sleep we need, the National Sleep Foundation has broken it down accordingly: Newborn (0-3 months): 14-17 hours; Infants (4-11 months): 12-15 hours; Toddlers (1-2 years): 11-14 hours; Preschoolers (3-5): 10-13 hours; School-age children (6-13): 9-11 hours; teenagers (14-17): 8-10 hours; Young adults (18-25): 7-9 hours; Adults (26-64): 7-9 hours; Older adults (65+): 7-8 hours. [Page 170]
  37. Sleep is the best meditation. ~ The Dalai Lama [Page 209]
  38. If you are having a lot of trouble sleeping, your body may be trying to tell you something about the way you are conducting your life. As with all other mind-body symptoms, this message is worth listening to. Far too often the message is that we go through our days on autopilot, reacting to everything that comes our way and forgetting to pause and recharge once in a while – the cumulative stress making it harder to wind down at night. [Page 210]
  39. People look for retreats for themselves, in the country, by the coast, or in the hills, when it is possible for you to retreat into yourself any time you want. There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind…so constantly give yourself this retreat and renew yourself. [Page 212]
  40. A gratitude list – whether written in a notebook, spoken aloud, our just recited silently – is a great way to knock them down a peg, shift the spotlight, and make sure our blessings get the closing scene of the night. [Page 213]
  41. The 4-7-8 method popularized by Dr Andrew Weil, is rooted in the ancient Indian practice of pranayama. You inhale quietly through the nose for four counts, hold for seven counts, and exhale with a whooshing sound through the mouth for eight counts. Weil says that with practice and regularity it can put you to sleep in one minute. [Page 215]
  42. Stillness – our ability to pause and connect with our deeper selves – is a skill that can be learned and cultivated. And this is all the more important when the world is coming at us at an increasingly frantic pace. Becoming comfortable with stillness – without a constant stream of external stimulation – was a prerequisite to becoming comfortable with sleep. [Page 218]
  43. To practice death is to practice freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Being a slave to our job and our status in the world makes it much harder to put our day behind us and surrender to sleep. [Page 221]
  44. A short nap primes our brains to function at a higher level, letting us come up with better ideas, find solutions to puzzles more quickly, identify patterns faster and recall information more accurately. [Page 225]
  45. Tips for getting more and better sleep: i) Focus on quantity. If you are not in bed longer, you can’t get more sleep. ii) Focus on quality. Pay more attention to what you what you eat and drink in the afternoon and evening, and doing something other than work, like Sudoku or a crossword puzzle, right before falling asleep. iii) Be accountable. iv) Play the long game. Change is never a straight line. Little incremental changes add up. [Page 239-240]
  46. When forced to choose, I will not trade even a night’s sleep for the chance of extra profits. ~ Warren Buffett, 2008 Letter to Shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. [Page 243]
  47. There are few appointments throughout the day that are as important as bedtime. Yet our appointment with sleep is one we don’t seem to mind missing, day after day, night after night. When we think of sleep as an actual appointment – a meeting of sorts, with ourselves – we’re much more likely to grant it the time it deserves. [Page 257]
  48. Trainers today know that recovery is a critical element of successful training, allowing you to come back stronger. And recovery is about more than cooling down after stepping off the treadmill – it is, in a very big way, about sleep. [Page 259]
  49. To be able to leave the outside world behind each night when we go to sleep, we need to first recognize that we are more than our struggles and more than our victories and failures. We are not defined by our jobs and our titles, and we are vastly more than our resumes. By helping us to keep the world in perspective, sleep gives us a chance to refocus on the essence of who we are. And in that place of connection, it is easier for the fears and concerns of the world to drop away. [Page 283]
  50. For what sleep and dreams offer us is increasingly hard to come by in our waking lives – timelessness, renewal, the opportunity to make connections that have eluded our conscious brains, freedom from our everyday cares and concerns. When we reclaim sleep, we reclaim what sleep has offered us throughout human history – a gateway to the sacred and to life’s mystery. [Page 285-286]
Alan Ng

Product x Creative Technology • ARVR, 3D, GIS, Digital Twins

6y

Michael Lee

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Andrew Psarianos (He/Him)

CEO Picture Perfect Productions Vietnam and Singapore Video content production services in Singapore, Vietnam , APAC and Globally. Working to help you tell your story elevate your brand and increase ROI.

7y

Great post Doris. All valid points.

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