By Catherine E. Myers, Ph.D.

Imagine being distracted even when no one is distracting you. It is a frustration like no other… the reason is because you couldn’t blame it on anybody else but yourself.  However before you go beating yourself up about it, understand this: It may not be your mistake at all. It might be your boss’s problem.

As counter-intuitive as it might sound, sleeping might enhance your productivity just as brain exercises would.  A large number people today just don’t have adequate sleep.  They drink caffeine in an effort to increase productivity… however the fact is, sleeping let your brain to work at its best. The following are several advantages of sleeping… and afternoon naps!

1. A study had discovered that a 20-minutes afternoon nap, enhance your memory like memory exercises do. This study was backed by a test NASA did: Their aviator improved their performance by 34% through having a short 26-minute afternoon sleep!

2. Sleeping is necessary to consolidate the things you have acquired in your waking time. The more better you sleep, the more you’ll remember whatever you’ve learned yesterday.

3. According to scientists from Washington University School of medicine, your brain require sleep to make room for new learning. That means, sleeping is like the process of shelving. When you sleep, you brain shelved what you have acquired today memory improvement in this way you could learn new knowledge for tomorrow.

4. Sleeping, useless to say, improves concentration just because your brain will cease battle against itself on two different goals: Staying awake (your conscious mind) and shutting down (your subconscious). Trust me, your subconscious mind will always score.

5. Even EXPECTING afternoon sleep had been shown to reduce blood pressure.

Note: In regarding to to how many hours of sleep, no one really knows. The common “8 hours” of sleep is the same useless advice as “8 glasses of water”. The amount relies on a few things which include: age, puberty, the quantity of work you do, what type of work and so on. Try and see how many is the best for you.

So there, your employer objectives to increase productivity by appointing you to work through the afternoon may not be such a great idea after all.

Interrupting sleep seriously disrupts memory-making, new research suggests. But taking a nap may boost a sophisticated kind of memory that helps a person see the big picture and get creative.

‘Not only do we need to remember to sleep, but most certainly we sleep to remember,’ Dr William Fishbein, a cognitive neuroscientist at the City University of New York, told a recent meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.”….

“Dr Fishbein suspected a more active role for the slow-wave sleep that can emerge even in a short power nap. Maybe the brain keeps working during that time to solve problems and come up with new ideas. So he and graduate student Hiuyan Lau devised a simple test: documenting relational memory, where the brain puts together separately learnt facts in new ways.

First, they taught 20 English-speaking college students lists of Chinese words spelled with two characters, such as sister, mother, maid. Then half the students took a nap, being monitored to be sure they did not move from slow-wave sleep into the REM stage.

Upon awakening, they took a multiple-choice test of Chinese words they had never seen before. They did much better at automatically learning that the first of the two-pair characters in the words they had memorised earlier always meant the same thing – female, for example.

‘The nap group has essentially teased out what’s going on,’ Dr Fishbein concludes. These students took a 90-minute nap, quite a luxury for most adults. But even a 12-minute nap can boost some forms of memory, adds Dr Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School.

Conversely, Wisconsin researchers briefly interrupted night-time slow-wave sleep by playing a beep – just loudly enough to disturb sleep but not awaken – and found those people could not remember a task they had learnt the day before as well as those whose slow-wave sleep was not disrupted.

Myfitbrain brain games

It’s a given that each case is different and should be evaluated by a physician, but walnuts and walking might have some special treats to offer in relation to the mind. Most people have heard of serotonin. It’s a neurotransmitter that affects the central nervous system. It affects mood, sleep, energy and metabolism in our bodies. Serotonin has been called the “feel good” chemical.

Too little serotonin and we become anxious, overly timid and depressed. Too much of it and we become angry, aggressive and possibly even violent. Certain foods contain tryptophan, which is synthesized in the brain into serotonin. Walnuts contain the most tryptophan of any food at 100-400 mg. Meats like turkey also contain tryptophan, but in order for synthesizing to take place, a little carbohydrate is necessary to increase insulin in the blood. With the insulin slightly increased, amino acids are lowered and the desired chemical reaction in the brain takes place. That’s why walnuts are ideal, because they contain the highest amount of tryptophan and a few carbohydrates to boot. Enjoy a half a cup of shelled walnuts every night before you go to bed and see what happens. So, you could accurately call walnuts “brain food”, and not just because they resemble little brains. Walnuts promote healthy brain chemistry.

Walking fits into the better brain chemistry picture because it also increases serotonin, leaving you with a relaxed and content mood. Exercise in general helps regulate serotonin, but keep in mind that too much of a good thing can be bad. Over exercising can deplete adrenaline, causing stress on the thyroid gland. Any kind of body stress lowers serotonin, making it difficult to sleep. That in turn, creates more stress on the body and the vicious cycle begins. That’s why walking is ideal, because it is just the right amount of exercise to raise serotonin. Walking for at least twenty minutes, 3-5 times a week is plenty. So, if you give these suggestions a try, who knows, your doctor may decide that you don’t need your Prozac anymore.

Throughout the day you collect lots of miscellaneous facts. Almost none of this gets put into long term memory until you sleep. If your sleep too short, some of it gets left out of long term memory never to be heard from again.

Think of it like this: you have just thrown everything in your apartment on the floor, thus nothing is organized. Eventually it would be hard to find things. In trying to find specific items, you break your belongings, unless of course, you are extremely careful. So, you call a maid in to clean up while you step out.  The maid is smart and knows exactly where to put everything so you can find it later.

When you sleep, it is like that smart maid comes into your brain.  Your brain goes into hyper drive to clean up all the facts from the day and put them away for long term retrieval.  Some facts that were not very important and you thought about only once get discarded so as not to clutter up your long term memory.

If you only sleep a short time, it is like interrupting the maid.  Not everything is cleaned up and put away.  Some people have more efficient maids and only need 6 hours of sleep, but most people need more to get all the information from the day cleaned up and organized.

People who go days without sleep really begin to see drastic effects.  If they go long enough without sleep they can even begin to hallucinate.  The human brain has evolved to only hold so much information before it needs to get organized.  Its like reaching a point when you your is so full of stuff you can longer walk around in it, much less find anything.

If you fall asleep with a problem on your mind, your brain will even work on that while you sleep.  Sleep is an especially good time for the brain to work on problems that you are stuck on trying to figure out.  Your brain can be very creative during this time and often you can awake with a brand new solution to try.  So, do not stay awake trying to figure it out, but sleep on it.

So for your brains sake, get a full nights sleep so that all the prior days information is properly put away and you can begin a new day with lots of room for new information.

The human body cannot function without sleep. When you fall asleep, your body begins to replenish and repair the damage done when you are awake. Sleep is also when your body regulates growth and you will not grow taller without it.

Gravity is your biggest opponent to growth. The cartilage in your body that holds your bones and spine together is filled with fluid. Cartilage that has a lot of fluid is thicker and makes you taller. Unfortunately, gravity pulls on your spine and squeezes the fluid out of your cartilage. This makes your body shrink. You can overcome this type of stunted growth by getting the right type of sleep.
Want to know how to get “the right type of sleep?” Follow the link and read the rest of this article: Gaining Height

Who would have thought that one could improve brain health? I mean, if I go to the gym and do biceps exercises, or squats, there is a way to measure my progress.

Muscles grow and can be measured or I can move more resistance, lift a heavier weight, and I feel better, (because of the endorphins released when I resistance train) but if I go read classical literature or research in a field I am unfamiliar with, I cannot measure my brain’s health or growth in the same way as I can a muscle’s growth or health.

(When was the last time anyone complimented you on your axon definition? See?)

If I am still thinking, creating words in my brain, then it must be healthy, right?

Not necessarily. Changes in my brain’s health are subtle and cumulative, and we are not sure that once things like Alzheimer’s disease have begun that cognitive function can be regained.

It turns out that I need to take care of improving my brain’s health just like I do my musculature and skeletal health.
Continue reading about how to improve and keep your brain healthy at: Brain Health