One of the smartest things you can do

That's great advice, Herbie. Getting adequate sleep and variety in your life is a key part of TMS healing, but can improve anyone's life. One of my favorite talks at the Mind-Body medicine conference I went to recently was one given by Charles Czeisler, the Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He showed data about how the amount that we sleep has drastically declined with the advent of modern lighting technology. As it has become cheaper and cheaper to light up a room over the centuries, we have kept lights on later and later. With all of this light around us, our bodies don't release the hormone melatonin, and we can't sleep. As a result, while people used to get more than nine hours a night of sleep in the 1800s, now in the US it is six and a half! According to a recent New York Times article, "Between 1960 and 2010, the average night’s sleep for adults in the United States dropped to six and a half hours from more than eight. Some experts predict a continuing decline, thanks to distractions like e-mail, instant and text messaging, and online shopping." What a huge decline in amount of sleep!

Charles Czeisler recommended a program called f.lux which I run on my computer all of the time. Basically, a computer screen is like a giant lightbulb, casting light on our faces and preventing our bodies from letting us sleep. The program, f.lux, helps with this by changing the colors from our computer monitors during the night, so that help us sleep better. Basically, the cells that inhibit melatonin release in our eyes are less sensitive to "warm" light, so f.lux makes our computer give out more warm (reddish) light during the night. It's incredibly clever. Their website is called Just Get Flux
There is a great section of the flux website, entitled "Research," that explains why it works in fairly simple terms. An excerpt:

AMA Report
In 2012, the American Medical Association's Council on Science and Public Health made this recommendation:"Recognizes that exposure to excessive light at night, including extended use of various electronic media, can disrupt sleep or exacerbate sleep disorders, especially in children and adolescents. This effect can be minimized by using dim red lighting in the nighttime bedroom environment."

... We know that night-time exposure to blue light keeps people up late. We believe that f.lux adjusts colors in a way that greatly reduces the stimulating effects of blue light at night.

... The experimental research suggests that an average person reading on a tablet for a couple hours before bed may find that their sleep is delayed by about an hour. Clearly, the details are complicated, but that's why we get to cite so many very interesting papers.​

 

Another intersting discovery about sleep is that before electric light, we had so many hours of darkness that many people had two "sleeps" every night: "first sleep" and "second sleep." In between those two, they might tend the fire, read by candlelight or pray. The time between first and second sleep sounds quite restful and calm, though. To read more, visit "Your Ancestors Didn't Sleep Like You."