Category: Sleep

You need more sleep than your kids

David Dempsey

So stop putting them to bed so early.

If you look at the brain with the entropy model that we’ve proven, kids have the lowest amount of brain entropy [in general]. Because they have the lowest amount of brain entropy, they need less recovery time to zero out the stresses of their day. Read my post about sleep for more on how this works.

It’s why you can’t keep up with them. And Coffee is not going to help you, long term.

It’s why they have so much energy. Science has shown that they have greater energy levels than endurance athletes.

There is no set amount of time that anyone should sleep. Especially kids. What’s important is that they enjoy their days enough to not want to sleep, and that they can identify when they start getting tired and lay down.

 

Why don’t you wear glasses in your dreams?

David Dempsey

Do people who wear glasses dream with blurry vision or clear? from NoStupidQuestions

Here’s a fun question to ask yourself. What is the nature of dreams? Why do we dream?

You’re obviously not wearing glasses in your dreams. Duh. So what does that tell us. Here’s what I think it means: your dreams are a simulation of the ideal you. A world where you’re not worrying about expectations or filters or fears or anxiety or any of the other things that plague you day to day. It’s an ideal you.

You don’t wear glasses in your dreams, because you don’t need them. The ideal you is at your ground state, and your dreams are a simulation of the ideal you. If you read my first post about sleep, or know anything about it, the REM cycle brain activity looks a lot like your brain when awake. The non-REM portion of the night helps us to recover with the slowest brain activity of our days. Why is the brain so active for half the night?

Do animals dream? Yes. Less some reptiles and insects. What does that say about their souls?

The people from Atlantis didn’t dream. Do what? That’s what this article says. What does that mean? They were a civilization way ahead of their time. What does their ability to dream say about their nature?

There was a show that aired a while back on NBC called Awake. It got cancelled after a season or two, but my wife and I liked it. Essentially a cop was losing his mind and losing touch with the difference between dreams and reality. The show swapped back and forth between two different realities, and they effected each other, without ever really knowing which was a dream and which was reality.

What types of disorders come from not dreaming? It’s hard to tell is someone is not dreaming or not able to recall their dreams, but we’re pretty sure that it’s not necessary for physical or mental health.

What is happening in lucid dreaming? It’s an awareness while you’re dreaming. It’s apparently a acquirable skill with some benefits. Jack Nicholas tweaked his golf game while asleep. The periodic table of elements was designed in a dream. They literally have tricks for lucid dreamers to figure out if they’re awake. Does lucid dreaming undermine the success of those people from Atlantis?

In summary, dreams are an important and widely unsolved riddle of humanity. I think the fact that most people with glasses see clearly in their dreams, tells us a lot about the nature of dreams as well as the nature of reality. To fully understand the mind, we need to fully understand dreams, and it’s a puzzle where we have only begun to skim the surface.

 

Here’s Your Brain Model

David Dempsey8 Comments

So far here’s what we have. If you only read one thing I write, let this be it. Do not take my word for it. Think critically and with an open mind.

  • You were given a perfectly functional brain.
  • Your eyes are completely capable of seeing.
  • Aging starts in the mind.
  • Your brain can be reprogrammed.
  • There is only one brain disease.
  • You are completely capable of restful sleep.
  • We can prove Intelligent Design without any math or complicated science.
  • Genetics doesn’t explain everything.
  • There is a mental ground state where you see your best, perform your best, and sleep your best.

 

Rethinking Sleep

David Dempsey8 Comments

Disclaimer: this gets complicated. Sit down and put your thinking cap on. 

We all sleep. Well all of us except that one guy from Vietnam. But we really don’t know a whole lot about it. There’s actually a bunch of data out there, but we can’t tie it all together. Here it goes.

Animals in the wild live longer, and sleep less. Well they definitely sleep less. The numbers aren’t super clear on the longevity. And rightfully so. There are predators in the wild. Draw your own conclusions. Here are mine: the captivity produces the same strain that harms and ages humans. The same strain that were trying to avoid to think our best, see our best, and be our best.

Black people don’t sleep as much. So in this article, and actually going back to slavery, we basically just assume that this is a bad thing. “Generally, people are thought to spend 20 percent of their night in slow-wave sleep, and the study’s white participants hit this mark. Black participants, however, spent only about 15 percent of the night in slow-wave sleep.” Just assume that it’s as bad thing, when we don’t even know what sleep is. Turns out, it’s not. In a previous post, I talk about black people seeing better and not drinking coffee, and how that could give them a leg up in athletic events. What I’m saying here though, is that less sleep is not necessarily a bad thing. Quantity doesn’t matter here, it’s quality.

We do know this: Other things that effect sleep: blood sugar, anxiety, depression, stress. Does that list look familiar?

That really is not the whole story though. There are brain waves during sleep, and there are different brain waves through each cycle of sleep. The slowest brain wave cycle is delta waves. It’s the recovery wave, and the wave of dreamless, meditative sleep. Some people [like Zen masters] have learned how to consciously get to this state. For the sake of this article, there are delta waves and non-delta waves, or meditative and non-meditative.

If you’re curious, here’s why this simplification is possible. Some people say there are four types of brain waves, some people have three, etc. What distinguishes one from the other is the frequency, or basically the speed of the wave. If you looked at your brain like a heart, you’d just see “brain beats.” We don’t call slow and fast heart beats anything different. I don’t know how this became the standard unit in brain measurement. It cycles through these waves at different amplitudes. So if we assume all the amplitudes are the same, all we care about is frequency. When we look at frequency, the delta wave is the absolute zero, or as close as we can get while we’re alive. 

Moving on.

Delta waves are all that really matter. When your brain is beating it’s slowest. Here’s the deal though, when you’re awake, you don’t actually get to the supposed delta state, but just like your heart rate [generally speaking] slower is better.

Lack of REM sleep can alleviate clinical depression. So wait, REM sleep is good for us, but a lack of it helps people with depression? Coming back to this question. The meditative sleep is the most important. REM sleep, I’m sure has it’s own purpose, but delta waves what we’re looking for.

The amount of time you spend in each stage also depends on your age. Wait, we know that our mind strain increases as we age. I think we’re finally getting somewhere. Elderly adults typically have relatively short periods of slow-wave sleep and fewer of them. In other words, sleep is lighter and more fragmented with brief arousals or longer awakenings throughout the night [article]. Given what we know, late childhood may well be the “golden age” of sleep during a lifetime. Beyond the age of 11 or 12, sleep disturbances begin to creep in. In fact, nearly 7 out of every 10 adults experience problems that affect sleep quality. [source] You know what else we say depends on age? Vision.

from Wikipedia:

Women have been shown to have more delta wave activity, and this is true across most mammal species. This discrepancy does not become apparent until early adulthood (in the 30’s or 40’s, in humans), with men showing greater age-related reductions in delta wave activity than women.

We have more delta wave activity as newborns than any other time in our lives.

Alcoholism has been shown to produce sleep with less slow wave sleep and less delta power, while increasing stage 1 and REM incidence in both men and women. In long-term alcohol abuse, the influences of alcohol on sleep architecture and reductions in delta activity have been shown to persist even after long periods of abstinence.

Other disorders frequently associated with disrupted delta-wave activity include: Narcolepsy, depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, and juvenile chronic arthritis. 

Delta waves are key to fully understanding the brain. Unless you decide to take the non-traditional approach: the eyes.

Good sleep is a symptom. Not of a disease or anything negative. Good sleep is an indicator that you’re doing something right. There’s an extensive list of reasons you may be sleeping poorly. I think there is only one. But let’s be clear and not put a number of recommended hours for sleep. If you wake up and you feel rested, you did it right.

You can’t control your sleep. Well, at least not directly. Control what you can. But make the right assumptions: you still have the ability to sleep just like you did when you were fifteen.

Here’s what’s important: you were designed to sleep perfectly. Just like you were designed to see perfectly. The further you are from your ground state, the more restorative sleep you’ll need every night to recover. If you can fix your vision and your mind, you will fix your sleep, and probably slow down the aging process.