The Sleep Revolution

Lack of sleep impairs a child’s ability to learn, their emotional well-being (mood swings, anxiety, depression, hyperactivity and other behavioral problems) and even leads to many health problems like infections, high blood pressure and obesity.”

I’ve come to see it as a great lesson for living life as if—as the poet Rumi put it—everything is rigged in our favor.

humans has shown that attention span and several other aspects of cognition may not normalize even with three days of recovery sleep, raising the question of lasting injury in the brain.” Up until recently, she added, “no one really thought that the brain could be irreversibly injured from sleep loss.”

The results won him the Nobel Prize in 1936. The lesson: if your subconscious plays your dream a second time, pay attention to it. And write carefully—good penmanship is an underrated virtue.

Researchers found that lack of sleep in older adults increased the pace of brain-ventricle enlargement and decreased cognitive performance, the very markers of brain aging associated with the onset of Alzheimer’s.

“Dream sleep appears to reset the magnetic north of our emotional compass. One question is whether we can now enhance the quality of dream sleep, and in doing so, improve emotional intelligence.”

And there is an increasing awareness that sleep helps us to perform better both physically and cognitively, to learn faster, to consolidate memories, and, generally, to be healthier. Sleep deprivation undermines all these things.

Do they have enough time for unstructured play and downtime? Are they spending too much time on their laptops, their smartphones, or watching TV, especially in the hour or so before bedtime? Asking them to get more sleep without helping them to make changes in their day won’t work; only by changing some of the factors in the equation will they arri

Then there’s the energy conservation theory, in which sleep, by putting our bodies into a slower metabolic state, developed as a way to reduce the number of calories, or energy, we need to consume and expend each day. Think of it as lowering your monthly expenses to make you financially healthier in the long term. The third theory is the restorativ