Another great bit of writing, from my friend and guest-blogger Linda Stowe.
Uhhhh. Try to keep your eyes open here.
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Sleep
By Linda Stowe
I once read about a country where the common greeting was to ask how well that person slept the night before. That struck me as a more reasonable question than our own generalized “how are you?” greeting to which we automatically respond that we are fine.
I have been paying attention to my sleep quality for the past few years, even to the point of noting it in my diary. I track my sleep quality because I have found that it is a harbinger of what my day is going to be like.
Since I have been tracking my sleep for a long time, you would think that I would have a generally good understanding of sleep. But recently I heard about a study that added to my store of sleep knowledge. Specifically, this study was about brain fog. Brain fog is more than that fuzzy feeling some of us have upon awakening. Drinking a cup of coffee will give the brain a boost, it will not be able to address the root cause of brain fog because the brain cannot perform at its best when it is in a fatigued state. Coffee is a Band-Aid, not a cure.
According to the discussion I heard, it is important that we get eight hours of sleep every night. Some people say they only need four or five hours of sleep a night, but according to this study, that’s not true. We need the entire eight hours, and this is why: During the day the brain builds up something that’s known as metabolic waste. When we sleep, especially as we go longer into our sleep, our cerebral spinal fluid channels open and a watery fluid washes through the brain and carries that waste down into our kidneys and eventually out of the body. We need that time, that eight hours, to debug our brain so that it is fresh for the next day’s events. If we don’t get the eight hours of sleep, the cycle cannot be completed and the waste remains, clogging up our brain and slowing it down. That’s why when we haven’t slept well, our brain feels foggy the next day. We haven’t cleared out all the waste from the day before. If we don’t devote eight hours to sleep, we sabotage the quality of the next day before it has even begun.
The discussion about sleep is at 56:56 on this podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/…/offline-with…/id1610392666
Sleepy, sleepy. How do you do?
