The Science of Sleeping - Thrive Global

Formula For Success For Your Quantum Brain and Health

The greatest wealth in the world is your health. You can be rich and financially independent with millions or billions of dollars, with trophy buildings, properties worldwide, your own private islands, luxury yachts and jets — yet none of them equate to being healthy.

Ask any person who is ill and they will tell you there is nothing in life that is more valuable than good health. Health is worth more than all the riches in the world. There have been many people who have had their careers obscured — or worse — completely lost their careers and businesses due to being ill.

When once asked what surprises him the most, His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama offered a quote by the British author James J. Lachard, “Man sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. Then he is so anxious about the future that he doesn’t enjoy the present: the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

Compromising your health at times begins with something as simple as disrupting and diluting your lifestyle. All too common amongst successful “Mover-Shakers” of the business world, this self-destructive pattern of lack of sleep can easily slip up on even the most well intentioned health-conscious professionals, starting with small compromises to priorities of lifestyle and schedules that then cement and grow over time, until eventually the imbalance becomes the normal de facto way of living. Sleep deprivation impairs your cognition in a negative manner. It’s a weapon of self-destruction to your health.

What’s more, lack of sleep, and all of its many physical and mental side-effects that come with it, creates a slew of interrelated issues, resulting in a multitude of triggers for stress, which is now identified as the number one contributing cause of disease and ill-health.

Steve Jobs, the genius founder and former CEO of Apple Computers and Pixar, described what it was like when he got sick due to compromising his health from running two companies:

“It was rough, really rough, the worst time in my life. I had a young family. I had Pixar. I would go to work at 7:00am and I’d get back at 9:00 at night, and the kids would be in bed. And I couldn’t speak, I literally couldn’t, I was so exhausted. I couldn’t speak to Laurene. All I could do was watch a half hour of TV and vegetate. It got close to killing me. I was driving up to Pixar and down to Apple in a black Porsche convertible, and I started getting kidney stones. I would rush to the hospital and the hospital would give me a shot of Demerol in the butt and eventually I would pass it.” — “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson, the author of the best-selling Jobs biography noted, “Jobs would later speculate that his cancer was caused by the grueling year he spent, starting 1997, running both Apple and Pixar. As he drove back and forth, he developed other ailments other than the kidney stones.” Jobs told him, “That’s probably when this cancer started growing, because my immune system was pretty weak at that time.”

The life story of Steve Jobs of extremely personal compromise for ultimate business and professional success is all too common in the business world. Many creatively driven and professionally ambitious professionals feel as though sleep is a luxury when one’s professional life is at stake. However, sleep is not a luxury.

Neuroscientists found we are particularly dependent on sleep in order for our nervous system to work properly. Studies show that our neurons begin to malfunction without sufficient sleep, suggesting that sleep gives the neurons that are used while we are awake a chance to shut down and repair themselves. Without sufficient sleep our neurons become depleted and cellular activities start to breakdown, much like a computer may begin to get “buggy” without a nightly power down cycle and reboot.

Dr. Chiara Cirelli MD, PhD with the Center For Sleep And Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, states, “The human brain expends up to 80 percent of its energy on synaptic activity, constantly adding and strengthening connections in response to all kinds of stimulation. This energy expenditure is huge and can’t be sustained. We need an off-line period, when we are not exposed to the environment, to take synapses down. We believe that’s why humans and all living organisms sleep. Without sleep, the brain reaches a saturation point that taxes its energy budget, and ability to learn further. Sleep serves to renormalize synaptic strength, counterbalancing a net increase of synaptic strength due to plasticity during wakefulness. Our brain circuits get progressively stronger during wakefulness and sleep helps to recalibrate them to a sustainable baseline. We believe that learning occurs only when we are awake, and sleep’s main function is to keep our brains and all its synapses lean and efficient.”

That’s quite a wake-up call for those hyper-busy professionals who think being able to plow through an 18-hour day on four hours sleep and seven macchiatos, while multi-tasking calls, emails, and social media sites, means they’re the reigning King or Queen of productivity: Definitely not.

Lack of quality sleep creates tremendous stress on the body. The physical and mental impact is immediate. Research shows that in just one night the impact of sleep deprivation manifests by rapidly deteriorating the synaptic plasticity and cognitive performance of the brain. A person who is sleep-deprived is usually unfocused, ungrounded, scattered and lacks concentration. Functioning professionally or trying to operate a business in such a bewildered state can be costly — for all of the obvious reasons. As the old saying goes, “Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.” Quality sleep ensures we are ready when opportunity comes knocking.

Consistent sleep deprivation is also an underlying issue that can promote a multitude of ailments including, Irregular Heartbeat, Heart Disease, Heart Attack, Heart Failure, Hypertension — High Blood Pressure, Stroke, Diabetes 2, Obesity, Increased production of Cortisol — also know as the Stress Hormone, Impaired Judgment, Stress, Depression, Anxiety, Mental Distress, Forgetfulness and Memory Loss.

Director of both UCLA Sleep Disorders Center and UCLA Neurology Clinic Dr. Alon Y. Avidan MD, MPH states, “Without sleep, our memory disintegrates and cognitive function is disturbed. Sleep is like having the computer go through a defragmentation. It allows all the ‘files’ to get organized and make room for new memories.”

And it is in the relaxed, organized and defragmented clarity of well-being that consistent rest and good sleep allows our greatest creativity and insight to take form and to amplify our vision for life and business, providing the energy and motivation to implement even our most ambitious plans — and to succeed.

One of the bewildering questions in Neuroscience is; How does sleeping enable us to learn more as we sleep? One theory is while we are awake we have an unlimited increase of synaptic connections in the brain.

Dr. Chiara Cirelli MD, PhD, suggests that, “Sleep is thought to be “by the brain and for the brain.” There is a molecular window while sleeping that facilitates and reinforces changes in the gene expression. The sleep-related transcripts are involved in increased brain protein synthesis and synaptic consolidation. Sleep fortifies and concentrates experience-dependent brain plasticity.

Think about your brains’ synaptic connections expanding like a huge piano accordion that stretches out forever. This exquisite execution of expansive phenomena is unsustainable because the sturdier stronger connections voraciously devour more energy and take up more space. This is no different to downloading applications, while also streaming music, movies and photos on your computer — all using the same memory of your computer’s processor — or brain. When you run out of memory on the computer it inevitably crashes.

The human brain is no different. The belief behind this theory of sleeping is that we sleep to consolidate, decompress and renormalize connection strengths of the brain, allowing us to process the myriad of information that is learnt daily. This daily consolidation is vital for processing new information, because it stabilizes our overall memory. Results in studies have shown that the overall synaptic strengths — along with numerous synaptic proteins — are up-regulated during wakefulness and down-regulated during slow-wave sleep, indicating that the unifying force of sleep bolsters the synaptic plasticity and long-term memory.

One way to kick start and improve your memory is by steeping yourself in heaps of sleep. Sleep facilitates offline memory processing, resulting in superior recall the next day..

Sleeping and Having Benefits Never Looked So Good or Felt So Good!

Seduce yourself to sleep as you tantalize, allow, invite and employ the power of sleep into your life. Ahh . . .The benefits of sleep facilitate you looking younger, refreshed, rejuvenated and renewed without you being stressed, and without stress being written and telegraphed all over your face. Sleep enables you to live longer, gives you an upper hand in becoming triumphant with your health, wealth and business. It stimulates creativity and innovation. Sleep sharpens your attention and it gives you focus making you more productive.

Would you like to accomplish all that you want to achieve by relaxing, unwinding and sleeping?

Want to be productive while you sleep?

Would you like to have your brain rewired and reprogrammed to be a Quantum Brain For Your Success and for Your Health?

Would you like this version of Sleep?

S — Sustain

L — Limitless

E — Excellence

E — Effortlessly

P — Persistently

Are you asking me if you can really have all of this while you are sleeping? “The answer is YES.”

Just say, “YES”

You’re DNA is being recoded now, creating new synaptic plasticity to have all of the above.