Sleep on This!

Written by craig

Let's say you had a bad night, didn't get a wink of sleep. Want to know what happens to good nights when bad things happen? It's a real nightmare!

I ran across a fascinating article on sleep last week. It seems that the brain depends on sleep to file away the events of the day. The memories get sorted so you can "make sense" of them, and then they're archived so archived so you can find them maybe next week or next year. Going through a night without sleep is like when you were in school and the teacher erased the board before you could copy everything down. A lot of the info's just gone.

But wait, it gets worse. Not all memories are created equal. Your capacity to remember the good stuff drops by more than half, but the bad stuff . . . well, it comes through pretty much intact. Oh, and your capacity to pick up new stuff the next day goes into the toilet. You forget the acts of kindness and remember some of the slightest transgressions. Meanwhile, you're getting "low battery" signals from the old attention and alertness meters so getting info into the brain starts to get difficult.

Then there's the whole creative insight thing, where you manage to figure things out, see things in a different light. When people take an idea and get a chance to "sleep on it," their creative insight improves by a factor of three.

Finally, the emotions start to go haywire. As sleep losses mount, emotional disturbances increase. For some reason, you start to have real trouble getting along with folks.

Now, imagine missing ten days, or twenty days, or one hundred days in a row of sleep. Ask yourself how many of the symptoms from here you might have. In fact, you might want to just look everything over and then sleep on it.