Sleep is Nature’s Balm

Being awake builds up metabolic toxins in your brain that are flushed out when you sleep. When you’re asleep, your brain cells shrink slightly, creating additional space between them, allowing fluid to flow through and wash out toxins. So sleep is your brain’s way of keeping itself clean and healthy.

O sleep! O gentle sleep! Nature’s soft nurse

Shakespeare

This toxic buildup is why you may struggle to think clearly after insufficient sleep. You’re working with a brain with metabolic toxins impeding its optimal functioning. Besides the short-term effects of sleep deprivation, such as doing worse on tests, having too little sleep over too long is linked to headaches, depression, heart disease, diabetes, and a shorter lifespan.

Sleep, the main course in life’s feast, and the most nourishing.

Shakespeare

Sleep is a crucial part of the memory and learning process. During your slumber, your brain tidies up ideas and concepts you were thinking about and learning, erases the less important parts of memories, and consolidates areas that you need or want to remember. In addition, your brain uses this downtime to repeatedly go over certain neural patterns to strengthen them, rehearsing some of the trickier parts of what you’re trying to understand and learn.

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care

Shakespeare

Sleep significantly enhances your ability to understand and solve complex problems. The deactivation of the conscious ‘you’ in the prefrontal cortex helps other areas of your brain to start communicating with each other more easily. This state is a prime example of your diffuse mode in action forming the neural pathways to your learning tasks while you’re resting. Even dreaming about what you’re learning or studying can majorly enhance your ability to understand it by condensing your memories into more accessible to grasp ‘chunks.’

Plant the seeds for your diffuse mode by first doing focused mode work when awake. Then, you can increase the chance of dreaming about a particular topic you covered by going over it shortly before sleeping or napping. You can also improve this chance by suggesting your mind dream about something.

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