Sleep Vocabulary and Discussion

“Sleep is perhaps the single most effective thing that we can do each and every day to reset the health of our brain and our body.”
~ Matthew Walker

My mother is a morning person. I am a night owl. It was always a challenge to wake up for school. I would have recurring dreams that I was awake and getting ready for school, only to wake and find myself still snuggled warmly in my bed.

recurring: occurring again periodically or repeatedly

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We don’t talk enough about the importance of sleep. Surprisingly, despite extensive research, people don’t take this basic human necessity seriously enough. The research results are clear: not getting enough sleep is bad for your health. It’s bad for your mind, bad for your body, and bad for your relationships. It’s also bad for memory and learning.

Having always been a night owl, I love staying up late. I used to postpone going to bed for as long as possible, even when I had an early morning ahead of me. However, now that I know and have experienced the benefits of a regular 8 hours per night, I want to share that knowledge with others. I want to let people know just how important sleep is to our overall health and well-being.

Grammar

If you’re a language learner who is curious about the difference between sleep and asleep and wake and awake, head over to my affiliate Shayna’s 6-minute video lesson. It includes a clear written explanation with examples and will teach you how to use them correctly. It also includes the difference between wait and await.

Let’s Talk About Sleep

Are you a good sleeper or do you toss and turn and struggle to fall asleep? Perhaps you have difficulty staying asleep. Or maybe you are someone who drifts off the moment your head hits the pillow (very quickly). While I used to be someone who would lie in bed awake for hours, unable to fall asleep, I have made changes to my routine that help me fall asleep much more quickly (and earlier!). I’ll tell you about those changes and give you some tips after talking about the importance of doing so.

Even though we all know we should get around 8 hours each night, we often fall short of this goal. Lack of sleep can have a negative effect on our memory, our emotions, and our physical and cognitive functioning.

fall short: fail to meet an expectation or standard

Avoid Cramming

One reason that I care so much about this topic is that every semester, I encounter students who are extremely sleep-deprived. They pull all-nighters and push themselves so much in the wrong direction in an effort to perform well. They stay up cramming (studying intensively over a short time just before an exam), only to miss their test because they were to tired to hear their alarm going off.

Unfortunately, their efforts to do well are futile (useless) without the necessary rest. They are basically shooting themselves in the foot. If they had adequate rest, their minds and memories would work much better.

shoot oneself in the foot: do something foolish that harms your chances for success

“One longitudinal study tracked more than 5,000 Japanese schoolchildren and discovered that those individuals who were sleeping longer obtained better grades across the board. Controlled sleep laboratory studies in smaller samples show that children with longer total sleep times develop superior IQ, with brighter children having consistently slept forty to fifty minutes more than those who went on to develop a lower IQ.”
(Walker, 2018, p. 311)

“After you’ve been awake for 19 or 20 hours, your mental capacity is so impaired that you would be as deficient as someone who was legally drunk behind the wheel of a car.”
~ Matthew Walker (2019)

NREM and REM are both necessary

There is more to sleep than just getting enough of it. We also need to get the right kind of it so that we are not short-changing ourselves.

short-change: to deprive or give less than what is due, to cheat someone of something

Each night, we cycle through NREM (non-rapid eye movement) and REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. This happens four to six times (every 90 minutes) per night. As the night progresses, the ratio of NREM to REM changes, with the first half of the night consisting of lots of deep NREM and the second half favoring REM. Both NREM and REM are important for different reasons as different processes occur in each stage.

“It is the lack of REM sleep—that critical stage occurring in the final hours of sleep that we strip from our children and teenagers by way of early school start times—that creates the difference between a stable and unstable mental state.”
(Walker, 2018, p.310)

It is in the final stages that our body’s immune system and cardiovascular system recharge. With the majority of REM occurring later in the sleep cycle, getting only 6 hours of sleep in a night significantly reduces the amount of REM.

REM sleep helps us integrate new experiences with past experiences, fueling creativity, assisting in problem-solving, and birthing new insights.

integrate: combine or bring together parts into a whole

You Can Improve Your Sleep

Learning about the detrimental effects of insufficient sleep and the many benefits of adequate rest is the first step in beginning to get serious about making a change.

Learning about habits was an essential part of my ability to create new habits that promoted better sleep hygiene. If I can do it, so can you. Believe me, I thought I was an exception. For a long time, I resisted the notion (idea) that we can change our sleep patterns. I thought there was no way I could adjust my sleep schedule. After all, it is part of our biology. It is genetic. Some of us are night people. It’s who we are. I was wrong. Change is possible.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not easy. I was right about always being a night person. We each have a chronotype or genetic predisposition related to when we prefer to sleep. It is always going to be somewhat of a challenge for me to go to bed before 1:00 or 2:00 AM, but by prioritizing it, I am able to do it and to get much better sleep than ever before. You can too.

to get someone wrong: to misunderstand someone

But why bother? Well, unfortunately, we live in a world where the workday typically begins at 9:00 AM. This means an even earlier wake-up time. In order to get sufficient rest, training ourselves to go to sleep earlier is essential.

Priority + Habit Formation = Better Sleep

As important as sleep is to our well-being, we often fail to prioritize it. To be our best, we need to start making it a priority.

In my last post, I talked about habits. Before that, I wrote about priorities. Both of these can help us. Once you decide to make sleep a priority, a lot of other aspects of life and self-improvement begin to fall into place.

fall into place: make sense, happen in a satisfactory way

From boosting your immune system to increasing productivity and improving both memory and mood, sleep is essential to well-being. The benefits are far-reaching.

Sleep hygiene needs to move to the top of our list of priorities. Unfortunately, our fast-paced society is more of a hinderance than a help when it comes to getting a good night’s rest despite the fact that with adequate sleep, we become more productive, better able to retain information, and more capable of handling stress and solving problems.

 “By any metrics we use to determine business success—profit margins, marketplace dominance/prominence, efficiency, employee creativity, or worker satisfaction and wellness—creating the necessary conditions for employees to obtain enough sleep at night, or in the workplace during the day, should be thought of as a new form of physiologically injected venture capital.”
(Walker, 2018, p. 305)

No More Screens in the Bedroom

While I will always be a night person by nature, I have been able to improve my sleep greatly by implementing new habits. The most helpful change I made was keeping devices and screens out of the bedroom. It might not sound like a habit, but moving phones (and other such devices) out of the bedroom is an environmental change that makes the habit of looking at our phones (and other light-producing screens) more difficult. It can make a world of difference.

a world of difference: a big difference, usually a positive one

Habits are the method by which you can begin to improve your sleep. Create a routine that works for you. For me, it’s brushing my teeth at the same time each night. After brushing my teeth, I read. I put my phone away for the night an hour before bed. Finally, I tidy up the living room, folding blankets and fluffing pillows. This routine is invaluable in preparing my body to relax and get ready for sleep. Create a routine that works for you.

fluff: make (something) appear fuller or softer by shaking or brushing it

Learning and Memory

Sleep is critical for memory in 3 ways. You need it before learning in order to prepare to receive new information. You need it after learning in order to save new memories. The hippocampus and cortex work together during deep sleep to commit memories to long-term memory. Sleep also helps us weave different concepts together so that we can wake up with new ideas and solutions to problems.

Before reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, I brushed aside the adage (proverb or saying) that one cannot make up lost sleep. Sleeping for 10-12 hours to make up for a few nights of only 4 or 5 hours certainly felt to me like making up the lost sleep. Once again, I was wrong.

“You may try to make up hours of sleep by getting more sleep later, but you can’t make up or repair the damage done to your body during the days you didn’t get enough shut-eye.”
~ Kimberly Holland (Healthline)

“…if you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of ‘catch-up’ sleep thereafter.” (Walker, 2018, p. 157)

The damage done by sleep deficit is no laughing matter. You can’t get back all of what you’ve lost.

no laughing matter: something serious that should not be joked about

Sleep Environment and Routine

Improving sleep involves creating the right environment and sticking to a regular schedule.

As I said, the number one change that I made was removing all devices from the bedroom. I highly recommend committing to not having screens in your bedroom. If you live in a one-room space, you can put your phone in the bathroom or away in a drawer. Make it invisible and difficult to reach. This will help break the habit of reaching for it, which is easily done when it is right beside you.

3 Tips

Here are three tips from one of Matthew Walker’s Ted Talks to get you started:

1. Establish a routine. Go to bed and wake up at the same time as much as possible. Set a schedule and stick to it (maintain it, continue without changing). A regular routine cues your brain that sleep is around the corner (coming soon).
2. Keep it cool. According to research, the ideal temperature for a good night’s rest is 18 degrees Celsius (65 degrees Fahrenheit).
3. Keep it dark. Darkness releases melatonin, which is known to help regulate sleep. One of the most effective ways to begin to regulate your sleep is to end screen time at least one hour before bed. Dim lighting will help make you sleepier and set you up (prepare you) for a good night’s rest.

These tips are about training yourself, your body, and your habits. Mindset, my next topic, is about your beliefs related to whether you can improve something. If you don’t believe that you can change, you won’t change. Don’t worry. You can change your mindset.

The very first step in achieving something is believing that you can.

You can improve your sleep. You can go to bed earlier. You can get enough. Harness the power of habits to get control of your sleep. Create better habits for a better night’s rest.

Your ability to be and do your best is decreased when you do not get enough rest.

In sum, you can develop an environment and a routine that promote healthy sleep.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that inadequate sleep has a detrimental effect on your health.

the bottom line: the most important point, the ultimate result
In finance, the bottom line is the net profit or loss.

Proper rest helps us heal and recover. We need it to maintain a healthy immune system and to function at our best. Our neurons depend on it. Our ability to learn, remember, and problem-solve depend on it.

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References:

_{PhD, W. M. (2018). Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (Illustrated ed.). Scribner.}