The Most Successful Techniques for Rising Early ‘The proper response to life is applause.’ ~William Carlos Williams By Leo Babauta Waking early is one of my favorite things in the world. Waking early can give you an hour or three of extra time for focus and creativity. I haven’t written about waking early for awhile, mostly because my waking time is in constant flux. I’ve learned a thing or two about how to change your wake-up time with joy, and today I’ll share the most successful techniques in my many experimentations. The Gradual Method The best method for changing the time you wake up is to do it gradually — 10-15 minutes earlier for 2-4 days, until you feel used to it, and then repeat. That might seem too slow to most people, and you’re free to disregard this advice. Sudden changes of an hour earlier or more in your waking time are difficult, and not likely to last. Sleeping patterns are difficult to change, and so the gradual method works much better. 3 Steps to Actually Get Up Here’s how to beat that in 3 steps: Get excited.
The Miracle and Mystery of Sleep: 12 Remarkable Psychological Studies “Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche What beautiful rewards sleep delivers– if you can get enough of it. Sleep has profound effects on our memories, desires, self-control, learning, relationships and more. Here are twelve studies which demonstrate some of the psychological benefits of sleep and a few of the dangers of not getting enough. 1. Sleep is slippery beast, not least in how it’s susceptible to our perceptions of its quality. If we think we’ve had a wonderful sleep last night, we feel and perform better, even if our sleep was actually the same as usual. This is what Draganich and Erdal (2014) found in a study which had participants hooked up to sensors which they were told were measuring the quality of their sleep. Actually the sensors weren’t measuring anything. When they were given a cognitive test the next day, those who’d been told they slept the best also did the best in the test. The researchers dubbed this ‘placebo sleep’. 2.
Get Better Sleep: 5 Powerful New Tips From Research Ever have trouble getting to sleep? Or staying asleep? Or you get plenty of shut-eye but you’re not refreshed? And feeling tired the next day isn’t the half of it. Via Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School: Take an A student used to scoring in the top 10 percent of virtually anything she does. And losing “beauty sleep” really does make you less attractive. Want to be miserable? Via NurtureShock: The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories, yet recall gloomy memories just fine. And if that’s not enough, lack of sleep could contribute to an early death. Via Night School: The results, published in 2007, revealed that participants who obtained two hours less sleep a night than they required nearly doubled their risk of death. We need answers before sundown. On his YouTube channel he has a number of great videos including this one on sleep tips. If you’re not too tired to keep reading, let’s get to it… No booze. Sum Up Tags:
The Incredible Importance of Sleep for Habits & Motivation By Leo Babauta For a long time, I underestimated the importance of sleep. Sure, I know that sleep is important for health and happiness and all of that … but it wasn’t until I learned two things that sleep took on a new importance for me: If you don’t get enough sleep, you will fail at changing habits; andIf you have a lack of sleep, your motivation will drop tremendously. For years I focused on waking early so that I’d be more productive and be able to focus on my morning habits. I could cite a bunch of studies and numbers, but here’s the honest truth: based on my own self-experiments, and working with thousands of people on habits, sleep is one of the most important but least valued factors when it comes to creating habits. And in my own life, I’ve noticed that when sleep levels drop, my productivity drops. Here’s what happens: This pattern continues until I get enough sleep. How to Get Better Sleep I’m not an expert on sleep, but here’s what I find to work for me: Go to bed earlier.
How to Fall Asleep in 120 Seconds When you’re on military exercise, sleep is a luxury. Maybe you can only snatch a few hours each day. So there’s nothing so frustrating as lying in your sleeping bag with your eyes closed, waiting for something to happen. You’re totally exhausted. You have to be up in three hours for picket. If you don’t sleep, you’ll burn out pretty quickly. That’s what happened with U.S. fighter pilots in World War II. No one wants to be that guy. Luckily, you never have to be. Which means if you follow these steps, falling asleep will be a piece of cake. Work with the real estate you have Check out the available terrain. In the training, the pilots were taught to fall asleep while sitting upright in a chair. Your face is the key to slowing down everything Now that you’ve got your position, it’s all about the face. Your eyes are shut, but you want to make sure they are totally limp. When you relax your face and let your eye sockets go limp, you signal to the rest of your body it’s time to unwind.
Why ‘Sleep on It’ Is Our Most Useful Advice for Learning A s a strategy for raising educational achievement, sleep should rank highly. Yet you will hear scant mention of sleep in the education discourse. For all the debate on curriculum and assessment, pedagogy and behavior management, so little attention is given to an issue that acutely affects our everyday lives. Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep addresses that dearth. Sleep, it appears, is vital to every aspect of our mental and physical wellbeing. Walker’s expertise lies in neuroscience, and his well researched work exposes the fallacy in thinking we can get by with compromising on our sleep — not just the amount of sleep we get, but also the consistency of our sleep patterns. Sleep, Walker suggests, is crucial to problem solving. Walker is only confirming what problem solvers have long understood. French polymath Henri Poincare articulated the importance of sleep in the nature of invention, stating, “The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me incontestable.”
Does Too Much Sleep Have Negative Repercussions? Source: wavebreakmedia/Shutterstock Common sense and anecdotal evidence support the notion of consistently getting a good night’s sleep throughout the week. We all know from first-hand experience that sleeping too little makes most of us groggy and prone to brain fog the following day. article continues after advertisement Now, the so-called “World’s Largest Sleep Study,” of 16,812 participants around the globe, has identified an inverted-U association between sleep duration and cognition that illustrates how getting too much or too little sleep both have negative repercussions on brain function. This massive online survey of the link between sleep duration and cognition was conducted by neuroscientists from the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University in Ontario, Canada. Getting Between Seven to Eight Hours of Sleep per Night Is Linked to Optimal Cognition Source: Conor J. Why Does Too Much Sleep Impair Certain Cognitive Functions?
Association of sleep duration at age 50, 60, and 70 years with risk of multimorbidity in the UK: 25-year follow-up of the Whitehall II cohort study | PLOS Medicine Abstract Background Sleep duration has been shown to be associated with individual chronic diseases but its association with multimorbidity, common in older adults, remains poorly understood. We examined whether sleep duration is associated with incidence of a first chronic disease, subsequent multimorbidity and mortality using data spanning 25 years. Methods and findings Data were drawn from the prospective Whitehall II cohort study, established in 1985 on 10,308 persons employed in the London offices of the British civil service. A total of 7,864 (32.5% women) participants free of multimorbidity had data on sleep duration at age 50; 544 (6.9%) reported sleeping ≤5 hours, 2,562 (32.6%) 6 hours, 3,589 (45.6%) 7 hours, 1,092 (13.9%) 8 hours, and 77 (1.0%) ≥9 hours. Conclusions In this study, we observed short sleep duration to be associated with risk of chronic disease and subsequent multimorbidity but not with progression to death. Author summary Why was this study done? Introduction Methods