Disclaimer: as always, a very personal and biased collection of thoughts extracted from the book. This collection by no means aims to replace the reading of this book.
These are some of the aspects I would like to highlight, especially to the Information Security community professionals, so that they do not waste themselves, either by working or worrying, into sleepless nights.:
Main takeaways
- Women need some more sleep than men.
- Lack of sleep produces overweight and heart attacks.
- Sleep is currently an underrated health habit. It is a side of life that should be as important as our awake time.
- People in key jobs such as drivers, pilots, doctors run higher risks when they are not well rested.
- Sleep changed from being a social and looked after event to being a despised need. Now there are changing times.
- Sleep is for the brain to be healthy. During sleep, the brain cleans itself from toxic proteins.
- Poor sleep transforms into poor memory.
- Sleep is key in the complex task of understanding our lives.
- Sleep on it: A smart way to learn and decide.
Sleep phases
0. Beta waves in the brain during our awake time.
1. Light sleep (starting to decrease our temperature and heart rhythm.
2. Deeper sleep (temperature drop)
3. Slow high amplitude delta wave sleep (if we wake up there, we feel disoriented)
4. REM (rapid eye movements), body rates increase again (blood pressure, temperature, movement). it is when we do most of our dreaming activity. REM sleep takes us offline.
The later dreams occur during the night, the more bizarre they are.
Normally we go through 3 to 4 sleep loops during a night.
Sleep and health
- Required to avoid illness and also required to recover from illness.
- Self control requires mental energy. Sleep gives us energy.
- From Freud to Jung: dreams are an internal experience, a possibility to learn and to link with our spirituality.
Programming dreams
- Dreams are essential for learning and memory.
- You can try to program your dreams first by writing them down right after having slept and subsequently by thinking on what to dream just before going to bed. Certainly without any digital device.
- Nice piece of advice: Keep a dreams diary.
- Dream incubation example: In which area of life would you like to receive guidance?
- Dreams regulate our experience, our emotions and our memories.
- Dreams contribute to emotional intelligence.
- Dreams reset the emotional compass.
- Innovations come also from dreams.
- Dream about an exam and you will score higher.
- Sports people practice this to get a better performance.
The best meditation is sleep
- Take deliberate actions to improve your sleep.
- Meditation and sleep are friends.
- Simple relaxation technique to try to sleep: Inhale with 4 counts, hold with 7 counts and exhale with sound on 8 counts.
- Use breathing to slow down yourself.
- Another simple relaxation technique: The half-smile relaxation.
- Try to find serenity through a picture, some music, the memory of a place.
- Bringing thoughts of kindness and gratitude certainly help: Think of the opportunites to help people that you used.
- Create a gratitude list.
- All this always via baby steps.
- A 30-min nap can reverse the hormonal impact of a night of poor sleep.
- We need more stillness in our lives.
Before going to bed
- No sugar, no alcohol, no big meals.
- Interesting thought: We will all die, thinking about this fact will let you distinguish what is important.
- Assertive statement "to practice death is to practice freedom".
- Use a mind-dump to-do list before going to bed to release you from those worries and... tomorrow will be another day.
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| The sleep house |
