Jul 08
Click the button below to join Digg.com as my friend right away… it’s free, easy, fun and it will only take a minute!
Jul 06
Get the full story here:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=76059
Jul 06
Brain Waves
Your brain produces electrical impulses all the time. These currents of electricity determine your state of consciousness and we refer to them as brain waves. For the purpose of this book, there is no reason to get very technical about this – a basic understanding will suffice. What you need to know is the fact that your brain emits waves of varying speed and that these brain waves are a measure of brain activity. High, intense, or fast brain waves mean high brain activity, whereas slow brain waves denote low activity. In other words, it is when your brain waves are fast, you feel most alert and energized. As brain wave speed decreases, you will feel less alert. When you are in deep sleep, your brain waves are at their lowest.
Why are Brain Waves Relevant?
Because your brain waves can be manipulated, and chances are that you are interfering with your brain waves every single day. Lifestyles choices such as what you drink during the day or even the way you think influence brain waves. We’ll examine the specific factors that interfere with brain waves in later parts of this book.
The 5 Stages of Sleep
During sleep, your brain waves cycle through five stages of sleep
Stage 1—Drowsiness also Known as Twilight Stage
This is a light sleep, when you drift in and out of sleep and can be easily awakened. Your eyes roll very slowly, muscle activity slows and relaxes, you breathe deeply and slowly, and you may move your limbs for five to 10 minutes. People awakened from Stage 1 sleep often remember fragmented visual images – like daydreaming.
Stage 2—Light Sleep
Now your eye movements stop and brain waves become slower, with occasional bursts of rapid waves called sleep spindles. Your heart rate slows and body temperature decreases.
These first two stages of sleep are of a relatively light quality, called transitional periods.
Stages 3 and 4—Deep Sleep
Almost all your muscles are paralyzed. Your body rejuvenates itself by healing damaged tissue. Blood that is stored in your organs during the day flow to the muscles to replenish them. Your brain predominantly emits delta waves that have low frequency and high amplitude (slow brain waves). You feel well rested after experiencing delta sleep, and it’s very difficult to awaken you during this period. There is no eye movement or muscle activity, and if you are awakened during deep sleep, you do not adjust immediately and often feel groggy and disoriented for several minutes after you wake up. It is very difficult to awaken from deep sleep because you are cut off from the external world. The brain and body are shut down.
Stage 5—REM Sleep, also Known as Paradoxical Sleep
When we switch into REM sleep, our breathing becomes more rapid, irregular, and shallow; our eyes jerk rapidly in various directions; and our limb muscles become temporarily paralyzed. Our heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, and males develop penile erections. When people awaken during REM sleep, they often describe bizarre and illogical tales—dreams. Scientists still don’t quite understand why we dream, but people kept from dreaming develop behavioral and mental problems, so REM sleep is clearly a critical behavior.
Understanding Your Sleep Cycles
It is important to realize that these five stages don’t just occur once per night. Throughout the night, you progress through the five stages like this: 1,2,3,4,3,2,REM,2,3,4,3,2,REM,2,3,2,REM,2,3,2,REM,2,REM,1
Okay, now we know that each cycle occurs several times throughout a normal night. As you may already have figured out, there’s more to it than that. Let me explain: The first sleep cycles each night contain relatively short REM periods and long periods of deep sleep. As the night progresses, REM sleep periods increase in length while deep sleep decreases.
By morning, most sleepers spend almost all of their time in Stages 1, 2 and REM sleep with very little or no deep sleep (Stages 3 and 4). To summarize, while we are asleep, our brains are on a bit of a “roller-coaster” through different stages of sleep. As we drift off to sleep, we first enter Stage 1 sleep. After a few minutes, the EEG changes to Stage 2 sleep, and then Stage 3 sleep, and finally Stage 4 sleep. Then it’s back up again: Stage 3, Stage 2, then a period of REM sleep… then it’s back down again, back up again, and down again! As shown in the figure above, in an 8 hour period of sleep, the brain cycles through these stages about four to five times. During the early part of sleep, deep-sleep periods sometimes last up to one hour, and, REM periods only last a few minutes.
However, as the night progresses and you sleep, your deep sleep periods become much shorter and REM periods grow longer – up to one hour. Think of it this way: during the first half of the night, you obtain most of your deep sleep. You receive most of your dream and light sleep in the second half of the night.
Jul 05
The Eight-hour Sleep Myth
Most insomniacs and people who have problems with daily energy levels fear that a lack of sleep will impair daytime functioning. You too are likely to be influenced by the media hype and sleep researchers telling you that everybody need eight hours of sleep to function during the day. This is not necessarily true! Yet most insomniacs and people who suffer from lack of energy during the day share a very common belief: “If I don’t sleep for eight hours or more I won’t be able to function tomorrow”. No one can tell you how much sleep you need, in fact it is very likely that you have unrealistic beliefs about how much sleep you need to function during the day.
There are many examples of people who sleep four, five or six hours per night and yet are perfectly capable of maintaining high performance levels during the day. Studies of transatlantic yacht racers, who intentionally limit their sleep to as little as possible, have shown that their performance is not impaired. In fact, studies have shown that those sailors who average just around five and a half hours of sleep perform the best.
You see, it isn’t really about how long you sleep. It’s really all about the quality of your sleep. However, over the next few chapters your will learn exactly what quality sleep really means.
The burning question,”how can I get more sleep,” should really be: “how can I raise the quality of my sleep?”
Raising the quality of your sleep is most definitely possible, because most people engage in daily activities that suppress the deep sleep stage and hence lowers the quality of your sleep. Our goal is to optimize your sleep system so the deep sleep stage is not suppressed.
Therefore, our mission is not necessarily to sleep longer; in some cases that won’t do any good. What is one to do then? Well, you want to raise the quality of your sleep. You want to optimize your sleep system and make sure that the all-important deep sleep stage that occurs during your core sleep is not suppressed, but rather optimized!
In fact, most people engage in a variety of activities that produce lighter stages of sleep throughout the night. If your activities and habits promote a lighter stage of sleep, naturally you will experience problems with daytime functioning.
In fact, your ability to function during the day is dependent on many other factors than simply how long you sleep. We will explore these in detail in the next chapter.
People who experience a high quality of sleep need far less sleep in order to rejuvenate themselves physically than those who experience a lesser quality of sleep.
Remember that most of your all-important deep sleep occurs during the first part of the night. In fact, you obtain 100% of deep sleep during roughly the first five and a half hours of sleep. Here we find a very important reason why you can perform on less sleep than you think.
Since the deep-sleep stage is responsible for your physical rejuvenation and therefore your daily energy levels, sleeping more than your core sleep will do very little—practically nothing—to help you feel rested and energetic during the day! It doesn’t really matter much whether you get six hours or 10 hours. The extra four hours contain extremely little quality sleep.
Nevertheless, it’s not that simple. If you sleep less and the quality of your sleep is reduced as a direct result of the thoughts and behaviors that we will examine, you will certainly feel tired and groggy, because your deep sleep stage was suppressed!
Furthermore, the extra hours only contribute to disturb your body temperature rhythm making it more difficult to fall asleep at night.
Sleep loss: The important realization here is that the worst thing that can happen is that insomnia affects mood – you may be slightly more irritable.
Research has shown that reduced sleep does not impair performance. In fact, studies have consistently shown that you CAN perform despite not getting the amount of sleep you thought you needed.
Bottom Line on Sleep Myths
There is no need to worry about losing sleep! You can perform well on less sleep than you probably think and furthermore the body has a natural mechanism that will compensate for any lack of deep sleep. So relax and keep reading!
Jul 05
Core Sleep
The term core sleep describes the minimal amount of sleep that an individual needs to perform properly during the day. This amount varies from person to person.
In a typical individual, the first 5.5 hours of sleep contain 100% of deep sleep. This stage of sleep is what is most important in terms of daytime functioning.
When you actively start to reduce the amount of time you sleep (more on this later) you will need to experiment to find your personal core sleep.
Keep in mind that even in the event that you do not obtain full deep sleep one night, your body’s natural sleep mechanism will make up for this by a prolonged period of deep sleep the next night.
Jul 05
Dear Reader,
I don’t get in touch often, but today I have an important message
for you, and I’m going to do something special for you as well.
A few weeks back I received an email from a young woman
in Bolivia who got my e-book and just wanted to say hello
because it had helped her.
Since she is the first person from Bolivia to get my book
I did a little investigating (I just happen love reading
about foreign countries). I found that the average monthly wage in
Bolivia is just about 4 times the pri.ce of my e-book. I replied to
Paola and we sent a few emails back and forth - I didn’t want to be
intrusive, yet I couldn’t resist asking her about her situation.
She reluctantly admitted that she works for 12 hours every
day and earns just a little over 100 dollars every month. Not only
is it hard for her to make ends meet, she lives in a country that
is full of crime and corruption. Yet she is positive, optimistic,
fluent in English, and well educated.
When I learned about her situation I was filled with both guilt and
admiration. I felt guilty because the price she had paid for my
course was literally a quarter of her monthly budget - and I felt
admiration because she is such a positive spirit despite her
situation.
I made a quick decision and decided that I am going to help her get
a computer and offer her the chance to work for me. She doesn’t
know about this and never asked me for anything. Right now she has
to visit an expensive Internet cafe to be able to access her
email. My hope is that I can help her afford a computer.
Hopefully, I will also be able to help her make a decent living
and in time she will be able to move to another country which is
her big dream. I made the decision because I know she is the type
of person who has potential to achieve so much more than her current
situation will allow. And she really deserves the chance. I know
this isn’t going to chance the world, but at least it’s a small
step in the right direction.
As a result of this situation, I decided to put together a package
for you. Please check it out now as it will probably never be
repeated again, follow the link below:
http://www.naturalsleepsecrets.com/paola.html
I will donate everything from this promotion to Paola so she can
get back on her feet. She really deserves it.
If you already own a copy of my e-book, please reply to me at martinbrock@gmail.com
with your name and I will make it up to you 
All the best,
Martin
Jul 05
Understanding the basics of sleep will be more helpful than you think. I have no way of knowing how much you already know, but if you are not familiar with the basics, this will definitely be the first step towards conquering insomnia/getting more energy in your life.
Understanding the underlying processes and mechanisms that control your sleep will give you a sense of empowerment; you can look down on your problem, rather than your problem looking down on you. The first step is to put you back in the driver’s seat so you can take control of the direction of your life.
What is Sleep?
It is not until recent years that scientists have actually possessed the technology to measure and study exactly what happens in the human mind and body during sleep.
Up until the 1950s, most people thought of sleep as a passive, dormant, and inactive state where the body and mind are turned off and had nothing to do with our daily lives.
However, we now know that our brains are in a very active dynamic state during sleep, and this greatly influences our waking hours. New technology gives sleep researchers the ability to measure the brain’s electrical activity. These activity levels are called Electroencephalographs (EEG) recordings or brain waves.
Each stage represents a different physical and mental state of the body during sleep. During some stages, the body is in a lighter sleep (faster brain waves) and can be awakened more easily, while others indicate a very deep sleep (very slow brain waves).
Why Do We Sleep?
No one knows for sure why we sleep, but there are two basic theories:
1. Sleep has a restorative function.
2. Sleep has an adaptive function.
3
Sleep as a Restorative Process
This theory of sleep suggests that sleep helps the body recover from all the work it did while awake. Experiments have shown that the more physical exercise we do, the more SWS (slow wave sleep) we have. If you are deprived of SWS you’ll likely experience being physically tired along with being anxious and irritable.
Sleep as an Adaptive Process
Sleep may have developed from our distant ancestor’s survival instincts to protect themselves during the night. Because they didn’t function well at night due to their inability to see, search for food, and defend against predators, they slept.
Sleep gives your body a rest and allows it to prepare for the next day. It’s like giving your body a mini-vacation. Sleep also gives your brain a chance to sort through things. Scientists think that sleep may be the time when the brain sorts and stores information, replaces chemicals, and solves problems.
Jul 04
A recent study links chronic insomnia with depression and anxiety
All the more reason to attack the root cause of insomnia before it develops into more than just a severe nuisance on your daily life.
You can read the full story here:
Jul 04
Whether you place the blame on the industrial revolution or the light bulb, there’s no doubt that ever since man met machine, sleep has gone down the drain! In the course of the last century or so we have brought a most unwelcome intrusion on the natural human sleep system – insomnia - which is exactly why so many people are suffering from lack of energy, and most of us don’t even know it!
From an evolutionary point of view, the human race has been pulled out of its natural habitat in a split second. Evolution is something that happens over the course of millions of years. Our sleep mechanisms, partly anchored to the most ancient rhythms of the planet and wired deep into our brains through millions of years, has been systematically tampered with—disrupted for a wide variety of reasons. This will become clear to you as you read this blog. You will discover why it’s really no mystery why you and so many millions of people around the globe experience a variety of symptoms—health issues and sleep and energy problems. It’s really no wonder we’ve had to resort to pills and medications of all sorts in order to lead what only can be called a semi-normal life.
Throughout this book, I will shed more light on these factors that have wreaked havoc on our delicate sleep systems and provide you with a step-by-step plan to deal with them. These are the very factors that are at the root of your sleep and energy adversities. Don’t worry if this seems a bit confusing right now. It will all become very clear to you as you read on.
The more you delve into it, the more you learn, the more you will start to perceive your condition as nothing but a bad habit, rather than a disorder. You will also begin to understand how this bad habit is something that can be replaced with healthy alternatives. You’re not alone and when you break it down, insomnia is a perfectly logical consequence of the lifestyles and habits of the world in which we live.
Recent Comments