The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time
by Arianna Huffington
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time:
The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.
REM sleep can help us process emotional stress.
In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Dumbledore asks Snape not to wake Harry: "Let him sleep. For in dreams, we enter a world that is entirely our own. Let him swim in the deepest ocean or glide over the highest cloud.
By helping us keep the world in perspective, sleep gives us a chance to refocus on the essence of who we are. And in that place of connection, it is easier for the fears and concerns of the world to drop away.
These two threads that run through our life—one pulling us into the world to achieve and make things happen, the other pulling us back from the world to nourish and replenish ourselves—can seem at odds, but in fact they reinforce each other.
the prevalent cultural norm of sleep deprivation as essential to achievement and success.
When we feel like there isn’t enough time in the day for us to get everything done, when we wish for more time,” wrote sociologist Christine Carter, “we don’t actually need more time. We need more stillness.
Newborns (0–3 months): 14–17 hours Infants (4–11 months): 12–15 hours Toddlers (1–2 years): 11–14 hours Preschoolers (3–5): 10–13 hours School-age children (6–13): 9–11 hours Teenagers (14–17): 8–10 hours Young adults (18–25): 7–9 hours Adults (26–64): 7–9 hours Older adults (65+): 7–8 hours
Asking a teenager to get up at 7 a.m. is like asking me to get up at 4 a.m.
sleep is profoundly intertwined with virtually every aspect of brain health. Lack of sleep over time can lead to an irreversible loss of brain cells—yet another debunking of the myth that sleep debt can be made up.
THE POWER OF DREAMS—AND WHY YOU SHOULD RECORD THEM
Montaigne: “To practice death is to practice freedom.71 A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.” Being a slave to our job and our status in the world makes it much harder to put our day behind us and surrender to sleep.
People look for retreats for themselves, in the country, by the coast, or in the hills, when it is possible for you to retreat into yourself any time you want. There
Those who do contemplative retreats in hermitages are far from doing nothing, since they are constantly engaged in training their minds, but there is no ‘noise,’ no ‘waste’ to eliminate, no stress to cure, no chaos to reorganize. This means that there is less to repair during sleep and the sleep quality of meditators is deeper.
Breathing is a favorite "sleep hack" of mine. Counting out a few slow breaths is one of the techniques I use when I'm having trouble falling asleep..the 4-7-8 method..you inhale quietly through the nose for four counts, hold for seven counts, and exhale with a whooshing sound through the mouth for eight counts.
..fly in the afternoon if you're headed west and in the morning if you're going east..If you have to take a night flight, he suggests at least trying to get in a nap the day before. "Taking a nap before you're exhausted can actually reduce the adverse effect of being awake at the wrong time of day. This is what we refer to as prophylactic napping.
Studying mice, they discovered a "master clock" in a region of the brain (the dorsomedial nucleus) that can reset the circadian rhythm when faced with a shortage of food. The thinking is that when food is not an issue, lightness and darkness synchronize our sleep cycle. But when food is scarce, another system kicks in to synchronize our sleep cycle with our ability to find food.
..there's an actual diet for jet lag called the Argonne Anti-Jet-Lag Diet, named for the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, where it was formulated by the biologist Charles Ehret. With this method, four days before your trip you alternate two cycles of feasting and fasting, switching every two days, making sure to link up the last fasting day with the day you travel. The diet was tested in 2002 by U.S. National Guard troops going to and from South Korea. The anti-jet-lag group was 16.2 times less likely to experience jet lag on their way home from South Korea than the control group was.
Also, milk does give us calcium, and calcium, along with magnesium and B vitamins, is involved in sleep regulation (while calcium deficiencies are sometimes associated with sleep problems). So although foods that contain calcium won't put us to sleep, there are key nutrients they include that provide the necessary building blocks for sleep. The same is true of foods that contain magnesium (such as nuts, seeds, leafy greens, and bananas), B6 (such as fish, beans, and poultry), and tryptophan (an amino acid found in foods like chickpeas, seaweed, egg whites, pumpkin seeds, halibut, and most famously, turkey). Another food that may help us sleep is cherries, which are rich in melatonin. A 2014 study from Louisiana State University found that participants who drank a glass of tart cherry juice twice a day for two weeks slept an average of eighty-five minutes more each night than those who drank the placebo.
The National Sleep Foundation recommends 65 degrees and says that sleep is actually disrupted when the temperature rises above 75 degrees or falls below 54 degrees.
At Dartmouth, computer-science professor Andrew Campbell collected data from students using a mobile app called StudentLife and discovered that the average bedtime for students was 2:30 a.m. It's no wonder that a Dartmouth health survey showed that more than half of the students had experienced sleep difficulties within the past year. Freshman Kristin Winkle said, "I think sleep is seen as the enemy of fun, or of productivity." Freshman Rob Del Mauro cited FOMO as the reason sleep was sacrificed, calling sleep a "taboo practice" at Dartmouth. And sophomore Ke Zhao tells her roommate that "the trade-off for A's are Z's.
..technologies are being created to help us beat jet lag. Researchers at the University of Michigan are developing an app called Entrain, which uses sophisticated math and data analysis to tell users how and when to utilize light to more quickly shift their sleep cycle in a new location. And then there is Re-Timer, an eyeglasses-like piece of headwear that can be used not just by travelers but also by shift workers who need to make regular adjustments to their circadian rhythm, especially in the winter. Worn over the eyes, it exposes the wearer to a simulation of outdoor light, which, when used in the morning, can help reset our body clock so that we can fall asleep at the right bedtime.
• Focus on quantity. You’ve got to get the basics first. If you’re not in bed longer, you can’t get more sleep. For me that meant getting to bed 10 minutes earlier, then another 10, and so on. • Focus on quality. I found two things made a difference: paying more attention to what I eat and drink in the afternoon and evening (no more afternoon lattes!) and doing something other than work, like sudoku or a crossword puzzle, right before falling asleep. • Be accountable. It helps to have help. In my case, I had Arianna as my sleep coach. I can picture her talking about the tough choices she’s made to get enough sleep and I’m motivated to do the same. And on the delicious mornings when I wake up more rested (okay, not every day) I imagine her smiling and saying, “Oh, good, darling, you’ve slept!” • Play the long game. Change is never a straight line, and trying to get more sleep has been no exception. Stuff comes up at work that I want to tackle. I’m with my family and friends, and I don’t want to leave the party. Some nights I just don’t sleep well—but I remind myself that this is a long game, and little incremental changes add up.
Yet our appointment with sleep is one we don't seem to mind missing, day after day, night after night. When we think of sleep as an actual appointment-- a meeting of sorts, with ourselves-- we're much more likely to grant it the time it deserves. Given that we now set alarms on our smartphones and smartwatches for things of much less importance, the work-down call is a great idea to adopt.
Another product that's gotten a big response is Chrona, created by Ultradia. It's a memory-foam insert that you slip inside your pillowcase, where it tracks your sleep based on the movements of your head and torso. Ultradia cofounder Ben Bronsther says his goal is to build Chrona into a home polysomnography, or PSG, device, which can act as a full-fledged home sleep lab for users, with no uncomfortable wires and no overnight stays in a lab required.
Technology promises us greater control, choice, and convenience in every aspect of our lives-- how we shop, whom we date, our friendships, our heart rates, our schedules. But it also sells us the illusion that minutely mapping out and controlling our lives, even if it were possible, is a worthwhile goal-- which it's not. Sleep offers just the opposite. While it makes us better at things our culture celebrates-- performing and doing-- it also teaches us how to trust and let go.
[Casper] has an interesting origin story.. "We noticed that everyone was drinking green juice and working at standing desks to stay healthy and increase productivity, yet sleep was something that everyone sacrificed..Even worse: they bragged about how little they slept.
Lack of sleep impairs a child’s ability to learn, their emotional well-being (mood swings, anxiety, depression, hyperactivity and other behavioral problems) and even leads to many health problems like infections, high blood pressure and obesity.
And in a long-term study completed in April 2015, researchers in Norway found that toddlers who consistently slept less than ten hours a night developed more emotional and behavioral problems by age five.
one of the least discussed benefits (or miracles, really) of sleep: the way it allows us, once we return from our night’s journey, to see the world anew, with fresh eyes and a reinvigorated spirit, to step out of time and come back to our lives restored.
