Book 122 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title: Sleep on It!

Book – Why We Sleep! Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

Book Description: Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when we don't sleep. Compared to the other basic drives in life—eating, drinking, and reproducing—the purpose of sleep remained elusive. An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming. Within the brain, sleep enriches our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming mollifies painful memories and creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge to inspire creativity.

Reflection:

My ClubAny Cofounder, Trieu, read Why We Sleep a few months after we paired up together and began to create the beginnings of our infinite game that is ClubAny. It felt like every single night when we would hold our standing daily meeting, he would find some way to drop a Why We Sleep reference on whatever topic we were discussing. He would tell me about how awesome this book was, how much he learned, and how he had applied it already in many areas of his life. He was obsessed with it, and it clearly had made an impact on his life.

Specifically for Trieu, he quit drinking caffeine cold turkey immediately after he finished reading it and has never looked back. This was a big deal for him as he was a self-proclaimed caffeine addict. I think he told me that he normally drinks up to 4 cups of coffee a day for most of his adult life. That all changed for him after reading this book from Matthew Walker.

After hearing from him for months about this book, I finally decided to give it a try. Shocker…I was blown away from what I learned as well. From the jump, this book had me hooked.

We all “know” that sleep is important, but why? I had never really given it a single thought in my entire life. In the opening few pages of the book, the author talks about how we spend more time sleeping than any other activity in our lives and most of us never give it a second thought. For some reason, that thought hit me like a ton of bricks. I was like, “Damn, he’s right…I’m ready to learn!” I was now officially ready to take this journey, and I’m glad I did.

Sleep has massive ramifications for seemingly all dimensions of our life and keeping us fine tuned and balanced. Whether it be our metabolism, immune system, emotional health, appetite, learning, memory, and creativity…sleep touches it all.

The biggest A-HA for me was the importance that sleep plays on the brain’s ability to learn, memorize, and spark creativity. I had this, “OH!!!!...SHIT!!!!” moment after I finished the book.

Have you ever heard the saying, “Sleep on it”?

People will say that to each other when you are stumped on problem you are trying to solve and just can’t find the answer, when you’ve hit a wall trying to memorize new things, or when you’ve run out of patience on trying to master a new skill. I always thought “sleep on it” was because you just needed a break from what you were doing and to give your brain some time off to come back it fresh and ready to try again. Turns out that I was way off as usual. The real reason we say “sleep on it” is that when we are sleeping is when all the real magic of learning, memory, and creativity really happens.

There is an explosion of creativity and learning in your mind every night when you sleep. The brain seemingly rewires and reprograms what we learned, creates connections, and forges new memories to lock it all in place and help you remember. All of the sudden, you seemingly wake up remembering all you were struggling to do before you went to bed and have no idea how.

It’s like real magic! I’m truly blown away more and more each day with new things that I learn about this world.

If imagination is our superpower like we’ve learned earlier in this journey, then sleep must be the playground in which we give our brain a safe space to let unleash our superpower and really see what it can do. I imagine our minds walking onto a playground each night like Adam Sandler in the movie Billy Madison carrying a dodgeball and telling all the little 10 year olds around him, "Now you're all in big, big trouble!"

This world, our bodies, our brains are incredible! For the rest of my life, I will never forget to “SLEEP ON IT” to give my imagination the space it needs to work its magic.

Question: Have you ever seemingly woken up with a new idea or understanding of a concept seemingly out of nowhere?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - Why We Sleep! Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker