MayBE 2023: Day twenty.

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

SLEEP.

(Shouty capitals because this is an important topic.)

I normally walk with the dogs with my husband, bright and early, but since he has been away, the kids have been walking with me. But sometimes I have to wake them which I hate doing. I know how important sleep is to the developing adolescent brain.

In 2019, I wrote:

In Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, a prominent medical sleep researcher, he writes about the last twenty years of research around sleep. A topic we take for granted.

A balanced diet and exercise are of vital importance, yes. But we now see sleep as the preeminent force in the health trinity. The physical and mental impairments caused by one night of bad sleep dwarf those caused by an equivalent absence of food or exercise. It is difficult to imagine any other state – naturally or medically manipulated – that affords a more powerful redressing of physical and mental health at every level of analysis.

Based on a rich, new scientific understanding of sleep, we no longer have to ask what sleep is good for. Instead, we are now forced to wonder whether there are any biological functions that do notbenefit by a good night’s sleep. So far, the results of thousands of studies insist that no, there aren’t.

Emerging from this research renaissance is an unequivocal message: sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day – Mother Nature’s best effort yet at contra-death.

Let’s repeat that in bold:

Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day.

For more information, read Dr. Andrew Huberman’s Toolkit for Sleep.

TODAY’S PROMPT:

• Copy a quote.
  • Pay attention to your sleep tonight. Try to sleep when you are tired and wake up without an alarm.
    • Can you remember the last time you dreamt? Look up the importance of REM and non-REM sleep.
    • Paint/Colour/Sketch a starry starry night.