Bad sleep? Science will help you!

How many best cellists sleep? What happens if an old man is put in poker? Why do we stick our feet out from under the blanket when we sleep?

This article is an overview of research in the field of sleep.

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Cellists sleep

There was a famous long experiment of psychologist Anders Erikson, where he figured out the reasons for the success of the best cellists and the failure of outsiders. The study was very voluminous. Anders received many interesting conclusions and one of them concerned sleep.

Erickson calls the dream the second most important factor of success after directly the number of hours of music lessons. The best musicians, according to his calculations, slept an average of 8 hours a day, including a 20-minute "drem" after dinner. At that time, as the "bad guys" were not getting to normal.

Sleep and mental activity

In the book "Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School", the author cites data from experiments that showed the negative impact of insomnia:

• Dulling pain signals
• Deterioration of attention
• Reduced ability to focus
• The deterioration of all types of memory
• Deterioration of mood
• Confusion of logical thinking
• Falling Counting Abilities

Daytime sleep is normal

From the same book, we learn that it's not for nothing that we are dragging ourselves to sleep around 15-00. This is caused by a set of biochemical reactions in our brain. Fight against this with the help of various stimulants possible, but it is wiser to just sleep at least 15-30 minutes. Such a day's sleep will refresh you and make you smarter.

Sleep makes us happier

The book "NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children" tells about a curious experiment. A group of students, who did not sleep at night, were given cards with words and asked to remember. Later, in the process of "remembering" it turned out that the students were able to reproduce 81% of words with a negative connotation like "cancer" and only 31% of words with a positive or neutral like "sun" or "basket".

The thing is that the memory of negative data in a person is responsible for the cerebellar amygdala. While positive and neutral data are remembered by the hippocampus. The absence of sleep hits the hippocampus more strongly, which was confirmed by the experiment.

Bad sleep worsens decision-making

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An interesting experiment was conducted at the University of Massachusetts. They put two groups of people (one of whom was deprived of sleep) to play poker for money. And then they analyzed the decisions they made. Result: "sleepless" took the right decisions 4 times less often than their "cheerful" colleagues.

How many hours sleep? Eight!

Napoleon once said: "A man must sleep 6 hours, a woman - 7; more than 7 hours of sleep only children and stuffed fools. "

But the authors of the book "Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep" do not agree with him. They approve (and confirm this with various studies) that the optimal total sleep time is 8 hours per day.

Students must sleep longer

The authors of the book "Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You're So Tired" cite research data that suggests that young people need to sleep 8 to 12 hours a day. The criterion for evaluation is academic achievement.

The time zone change syndrome affects your effectiveness

A group of researchers from Stanford raised the game data in the National Football Association (NFL) for 25 years. They filtered only those games where teams from the West and East coasts met (between New York and Los Angeles, for example, the time difference is 3 hours). The team that had to "break" its daily regime lost 63% of the time.

Also performances of sportsmen of the most different kinds (golf, baseball, figure skating, swimming and others) were analyzed and a direct connection between the time of day and the level of performances was found. Thus, world records were recorded more often during periods of maximum power surge on the athlete's daily schedule. Conversely, the athletes, in whose native city the night was, showed results lower than expected.

The situation is important

Everyone understands that you should not drink coffee before going to bed, but you should not drink alcoholic beverages. Alcohol can help you quickly "fall through" into sleep, but then during the night the sleep will be very restless and intermittent. So affects the dehydration of the body.

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Bright light, including radiation coming from a laptop or TV, can be confusing to our brain and will be perceived by them as daylight. So to fall asleep lying in bed with a tablet is a bad idea.

Recent studies have shown that as sleep approaches, our body begins to lower its temperature. At the same time, the temperature of our hands and feet rises - it is through them that excess heat is removed. This explains why many people stick their feet out from under the blanket in the process of falling asleep. That's why some mattresses seem uncomfortable to us - it's "hot to sleep" on them. Researchers suggest taking a cold shower before going to bed, and the optimal temperature in a room for sleep is called 16-19 degrees Celsius.

Doing sports during the day favors a sound sleep, while a sedentary lifestyle on the contrary worsens your sleep.

Other tips of "sleepy doctors":

• Go to bed at the same time every day
• Use the bedroom only for sleeping and sex
• Half an hour before bedtime lower lighting

Perhaps all these tips seem to you trivial and in no way deserving of a proud title. Then just share your secret or complain about your problem in the comments!

Have a nice time. Steemon !