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SLEEP

If you want better focus, you need to get good sleep. If you want to be a clearer thinker, you need to get good sleep. If you want to make better decisions or have a better memory, you need to get good sleep. According to the National Institutes of Health:

Quality sleep—and getting enough of it at the right times—is as essential to survival as food and water. Without sleep you can’t form or maintain the pathways in your brain that let you learn and create new memories, and it’s harder to concentrate and respond quickly. Sleep is important to a number of brain functions, including how nerve cells (neurons) communicate with each other. In fact, your brain and body stay remarkably active while you sleep. Recent findings suggest that sleep plays a housekeeping role that removes toxins in your brain that build up while you are awake.¹⁰

The takeaway: getting enough sleep—and getting enough quality sleep— is essential if you’re going to make the most of your brain.

Sleep Is Not a Choice

I know there are lots of people out there who say they don’t need a lot of sleep, or that they don’t have time for sleep, or even consider it a point of pride that their lives are so full of activity that they “have no choice” but to sacrifice sleep. That’s a mistake, and, if you’re one of these people, it’s something I want you to reconsider right now.
“Sleep is crucial to overall health and daily functioning,” writes Dr. Jean Kim, a psychiatrist and a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at George Washington University. “Increasing evidence has tied lack of sleep to a host of mental and physical disorders, including increased depression, irritability, impulsivity, cardiovascular disease, and more. One study noted that sleep actually functions as a sort of laundry cycle for the brain, where during sleep, blood vessels (and lymphatic channels) in the brain hyperperfuse and flush out metabolic buildup from the day and remove neurotoxins and distribute components that enhance cellular repair.”¹¹
In his TED talk about sleep, Dr. Jeff Iliff of Oregon Health and Science University takes the “laundry cycle” metaphor even further. He notes that, while we’re awake, the brain is so busy doing other things that it doesn’t have the capacity to clean itself of waste. The buildup of this waste, amyloid-beta, is now being linked to the development of Alzheimer’s disease.
“When the brain is awake and is at its most busy, it puts off clearing away the waste from the spaces between its cells until later, and then, when it goes to sleep and doesn’t have to be as busy, it shifts into a kind of cleaning mode to clear away the waste from the spaces between its cells, the waste that’s accumulated throughout the day.”¹²
A little later in the talk, Iliff warns against doing something that so many of us do: sacrificing sleep until we get a chance to catch up. “Like our housework, it’s a dirty and a thankless job, but it’s also important. In your house, if you stop cleaning your kitchen for a month, your home will become completely unlivable very quickly. But in the brain, the consequences of falling behind may be much greater than the embarrassment of dirty countertops, because when it comes to cleaning the brain, it is the very health and function of the mind and the body that’s at stake, which is why understanding these very basic housekeeping functions of the brain today may be critical for preventing and treating diseases of the mind tomorrow.”¹³
So, if you’re one of the many people who have convinced themselves that there’s a level of nobility in getting by with minimal sleep, it’s time to revise your thinking. There’s simply too much to gain from a good night’s sleep (including what you can learn from your dreams).

Getting through the Night

It’s one thing to say you’re going to get a good night’s sleep. It’s another thing entirely to accomplish it. About a quarter of all Americans experience some level of insomnia every year.¹⁴
There is, however, very strong evidence connecting exercise to sleep, even among chronic insomnia sufferers. A study performed by Dr. Kathryn
J. Reid and others found that aerobic exercise had strong positive results on a group of participants who’d previously regularly encountered sleep problems. “Results from this study indicate that a sixteen-week program of moderate intensity aerobic physical activity plus sleep hygiene education is effective in improving self-reported sleep quality, mood, and quality of life in older adults with chronic insomnia,” the authors wrote. “These results highlight the potential of structured physical activity programs to improve the effectiveness of standard behavioral approaches for the treatment of insomnia, particularly in a sedentary older adult population.”¹⁵
A group at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine built upon this study by drilling down on the data gleaned and then studying the interconnection between exercise and sleep. What they found is important to consider: exercise is not a magic pill. If you’re having trouble sleeping, you can’t solve the problem with one session at the gym. They found that, even after two months, the effects of exercise on sleep were minimal. But by the end of the 16-week study, the results were considerable, with participants getting as much as an hour-and-a-quarter extra sleep per night.¹⁶
So, there’s a clear connection between exercise and sleep, but you’re going to need to give it time. But, given the overall benefits of exercise on your health, committing to an exercise routine is always a good idea, even if you won’t feel the benefits on your sleep right away.
There are varying ideas about how much exercise is necessary to affect sleep, but a commonly stated amount is 2.5 hours a week of aerobic exercise, coupled with some resistance work. “Brisk walking, light biking,
elliptical machine, anything that increases your heart rate so that you can still talk while exercising but have to catch your breath every few sentences or so, is considered moderate exercise,” recommends Dr. Christopher E. Kline of the University of Pittsburgh.¹⁷

Giving Your Mind a Break

One of the many reasons why people have trouble sleeping, is not being able to get your mind to turn off. We’ve all been there: You have a huge meeting coming up, or something disruptive (either positive or negative) happened during the day, or you got a phone call just before bedtime that got you riled up. Your head hits the pillow, but you might as well be running laps around your house because your mind is busy with this inciting event. You wind up lying there for hours, and sleep seems as unapproachable as Everest.
Fortunately, you have a tool available to you at all times that can help you deal with this: meditation. The benefits of meditation are numerous (and there are many, many books out there that detail them), including everything from boosting immune function to decreasing anxiety to actually increasing your gray matter. One of those many benefits is helping with insomnia.
In a study performed by Dr. David S. Black and others, a group of older adults with sleep problems were introduced to mindfulness meditation through six two-hour sessions. By the end of these sessions, this group showed meaningful improvement with insomnia.¹⁸
If meditation seems foreign to you (and, if that’s the case, you’re in the vast majority, as less than 15 percent of Americans meditate),¹⁹ it’s likely because you’ve heard that meditation is difficult or that it requires you to completely blank your mind. Ariel Garten, creator of Muse, a headband that assists in meditation, clarifies that it isn’t about emptying your mind, but rather, “training your mind to be aware in the present moment.”²⁰
She told me that you can choose any time and any place to meditate and that you can feel the benefits from it with as little as three minutes spent with eyes closed, taking deep breaths and then releasing those breaths, counting as you go. Another tool she advocates is focused attention, a super-simple process of placing all your attention on your breathing. When your mind wanders from your breathing (as it invariably will), just notice
this and bring it back. This technique promises to demystify meditation for anyone who thinks you need to be a Zen master to get anything out of it. Few of us are capable of locking our focus on one thing for an extended period, so it’s good to know refocusing is equally valuable.
When you regain your attention on your breathing, Garten says, “you’re exerting an important skill—you’re learning to observe your thinking. You’re not caught up in your thoughts, but you’re in a process of observing that you’re thinking. You begin to recognize that you can have control over your thoughts and that you can choose what you are thinking.”²¹
Meditation can improve your sleep, even with these simple methods. My meditation coach, Emily Fletcher, author of Stress Less, Accomplish More has a unique process called Ziva Meditation. You can watch a full video of us going through her process by going to LimitlessBook.com/resources and we will walk you through it.