Think Happy!

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned – and need to keep learning – over the last 10 years, it’s simple: I NEED SLEEP!

The amount of sleep you get – and its quality – can radically change your life, for better or worse.

Researchers at the University of California found that people who live the longest are consistently seen to sleep for six to seven hours each night. Other studies seem to show a connection between sleeping more than 7 to 8 hours a day and increased mortality.

Of course, sleeping too little is hardly a healthy choice either. Aside from falling asleep at the wheel, making rash decisions, or over-reacting to stressful situations, there are a whole host of dangers from not getting enough sleep. Lack of sleep increases the risk of having high blood pressure and can more than double the risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

Professor Francesco Cappuccio, working with researchers at the University of Warwick and University College London, has concluded:

“Short sleep has been shown to be a risk factor for weight gain, hypertension, and Type 2 diabetes, sometimes leading to mortality. …In terms of prevention, our findings indicate that consistently sleeping around seven hours per night is optimal for health, and a sustained reduction may predispose to ill health.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising to find out that up to 90% of adults with depression are found to have sleep difficulties. There’s a question of cause and effect, of course, but the connection is undeniable.

This is such an important topic – and one that I’ve seen the effects of in my own life – that I’ve spent more than a little time investigating it. So, I’m sure you’ll understand if I spend a few future posts discussing how to sleep better and why. For now, you might find this article from the BBC interesting:

Problems are solved by sleeping

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers.

They tested whether “incubating” a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM.

Volunteers who had entered REM or rapid eye movement sleep – when most dreams occur – were then better able to solve a new problem with lateral thinking.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published the US work.

In the morning of the test day, 77 volunteers were given a series of creative problems to solve and were told to mull over the problem until the afternoon either by resting but staying awake or by taking a nap monitored by the scientists.

Compared with quiet rest and non-REM sleep, REM sleep increased the chances of success on the problem-solving task.

The study at the University of California San Diego showed that the volunteers who entered REM during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%.

The findings suggest it is not merely sleep itself, or the passage of time, that is important for the problem solving, but the quality of sleep.

Lead researcher Professor Sara Mednick said: “We found that, for creative problems you’ve already been working on, the passage of time is enough to find solutions.

“However for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity.”

The researchers believe REM sleep allows the brain to form new nerve connections without the interference of other thought pathways that occur when we are awake or in non-dream-state sleep.

“We propose that REM sleep is important for assimilating new information into past experience to create a richer network of associations for future use,” they told PNAS.

Dr Malcolm von Schantz of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre at the University of Surrey said: “Whatever the importance of the dreams themselves are, this paper confirms the importance of REM sleep, the sleep stage when most of our dreaming takes place.”