Sleep to Prime Body & Brain!

How much capital did you put in your sleep bank this week? Since Night Owls and Early Birds may skimp on sleep, it gives us pause to reflect on how much sleep we've had in the last week. We benefit with plenty! Just consider...

Brain practices day's lessons as we sleep As you try a new recipe or try your hand at fixing your snow-blower, your brain creates new dendrite connections. These reactivate and strengthen your long term memory at night.

Sleep helps you problem solve Try asking yourself a question about something you're curious about or even a problem you want to solve, just before you go to bed, Dr. Ellen Weber advises.

More sleep increases athletic performance Members of the Stanford tennis team maintained their regular schedules. They slept and worked out as usual. Then the players extended their sleep to 10 hours a night for five to six weeks. It made a difference. After increasing sleep, their drill performance increased.

Sprinting drill times dropped on average to 17.56 seconds from 19.12 seconds. Hitting accuracy, measured by valid serves, improved to 15.61 serves, up from 12.6 serves, and a hitting depth drill improved to 15.45 hits, up from 10.85 hits.

Getting enough sleep is vital to academic success Does it make sense that adequate sleep is vital for people to feel awake and alert, maintain good health and work at peak performance?

"New research highlights the importance of sleep in learning and memory," Dr. Lawrence Epstein reports. "Students getting adequate amounts of sleep performed better on memory and motor tasks than did students deprived of sleep."

Good sleep is important in regulating emotional responses As you sleep your brain selectively preserves memories that are emotionally significant and relevant to future goals when sleep follows soon after learning. Effects persist for as long as four months after the memory is created, according to research findings of Jessica Payne of Harvard Medical School. She notes selectivity within emotional scenes, with sleep only consolidating what is most relevant, adaptive and useful about the scenes. It was even more surprising that this selectivity lasted for a full day and even months later if sleep came soon after learning.

Link between sleep and weight If you are trying to lose weight, a good night's sleep might be critical. A recent study of nurses at Walter Reed Army Medical Center reveals that study participants who got less than six hours sleep per night) tended to have higher body mass index [BMI] than long sleepers. Arn Eliasson, lead researcher says there are several possible reasons...

Lack of sleep may disrupt natural hormonal balances, triggering overeating. Stress could also be a factor -- contributing to less sleep and more eating in the same people.

Sleep boosts ability to learn a language In an earlier study University of Chicago of Chicago professors found that...

Ability of students to retain knowledge about words is improved by sleep, even when the students seemed to forget some of what they learned during the day before the next night's sleep.

Sleep debt can be repaid... "Tacking on an extra hour or two of sleep a night is the way to catch up," says Lawrence J. Epstein, medical director of Harvard-affiliated Sleep HealthCenters. "For the chronically sleep deprived, take it easy for a few months to get back into a natural sleep pattern."

When banking extra hours, lengthening the hours and intensity of your sleep are critical. Your most refreshing sleep occurs during deep sleep. And when you sleep more hours, you allow your brain to spend more time in this rejuvenating period.

As you erase sleep debt, your body will come to rest at a sleep pattern that is specifically right for you. Sleep researchers believe that genes—although the precise ones have yet to be discovered—determine our individual sleeping patterns. That more than likely means you can't train yourself to be a "short sleeper"—and you're fooling yourself if you think you've done it. A 2003 study in the journal Sleep found that the more tired we get, the less tired we feel.

Hmmm... good reasons to sleep in on Saturday mornings?