One of the smartest things you can do

[Eric "Herbie" Watson]

One of the smartest things you can do is to turn off the television and go to sleep by ten o’clock each night during the week. Sometimes, one extra hour of sleep per night can change your entire life.

Here is a rule for you. Take at least one full day off every week. During this day, either Saturday or Sunday, you must absolutely refuse to read, clear correspondence, catch up on things from the office or do anything else that taxes your brain. Instead, you go to a movie, exercise, spend time with your family, go for a walk or any activity that allows your brain to completely recharge itself. It is true that “a change is as good as a rest.”

Take regular vacations each year, both long weekends and one and two-week breaks to rest and rejuvenate. You are always the most productive after a restful weekend or a vacation.

When you go to sleep early five nights a week, sleep in on the weekends and taking one full day off each week you will have far more energy. This added energy will help you learn how to stop procrastinating and get started on your major tasks faster and with greater resolve than you ever could if you were tired out

 

[Forest]

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.​

 

[Forest]

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."

 

[Walt Oleksy (RIP 2021)]

Very interesting, Forest, about the first and second sleeps people had before the electric light.
After the electric light, some people had trouble dealing with electricity.
Humorist James Thurber said it scared his mother so much, she plugged a lamp or other appliance
into every electric socket. She was afraid electricity would leak out of the socket and "get her."

But those does before electricity do sound restful.

I have my "first" sleep when I begin to watch a movie on television, then dose off. After a while
I wake up and watch the rest of the movie, then at about 10 pm I go to bed for my "second" sleep.

Japanese offices and factories are suggesting their employees take "nap breaks" of 15 minutes.
Special nap rooms are set up with cots. They're awakened after 15 minutes because it's more
beneficial than longer naps. More productive, too, I bet!