SLEEP FOR THE BRAIN

Sleep is not the absence of wakefulness. It is far more than that.

Described earlier, our nighttime sleep is an exquisitely complex, metabolically active, and deliberately ordered series of unique stages.

Numerous functions of the brain are restored by, and depend upon, sleep. No one type of sleep accomplishes all. Each stage of sleep—light NREM sleep, deep NREM sleep, and REM sleep—offer different brain benefits at different times of night. Thus, no one type of sleep is more essential than another. Losing out on any one of these types of sleep will cause brain impairment.

SLEEP TO FORGET?

Up to this point, we have discussed the power of sleep after learning to enhance remembering and avoid forgetting. However, the capacity to forget can, in certain contexts, be as important as the need for remembering, both in day-to-day life (e.g., forgetting last week’s parking spot in preference for today’s) and clinically (e.g., in excising painful, disabling memories, or in extinguishing craving in addiction disorders).

Moreover, forgetting is not just beneficial to delete stored information we no longer need. It also lowers the brain resources required for retrieving those memories we want to retain, similar to the ease of finding important documents on a neatly organized, clutter-free desk. In this way, sleep helps you retain everything you need and nothing that you don’t, improving the ease of memory recollection. Said another way, forgetting is the price we pay for remembering.

Book: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

You Can’t Live an Extraordinary Life Sitting on Your Couch

“You can’t understand the world if you never see it.”

Traveling is the best education you will ever receive.
It immerses you in another culture.
It shows you how other people live day-to-day.
And it gives you a greater appreciation for your own opportunities and privileges.

You are going to die — we each get a finite amount of time on this earth.
So do something bold.
Something courageous.
Something ambitious.

Book: How to Live an Extraordinary Life by Anthony Pompliano

The 2nd Form of Wealth

Health is a type of wealth.
If you don’t feel good physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, all the money, possessions and fame in the world mean nothing.

“When we are young, we are willing to sacrifice all of our health for the pursuit of wealth
and once we are old, we become willing to sacrifice all of our wealth for even one day of good health.”

All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end.
And that nothing tastes as good as top health feels.

Book: The Wealth Money Can’t Buy by Robin Sharma

Where Attention Goes, Energy Flows

“Since where you place your attention is where you place your energy, when you wake up in the morning and immediately start putting your attention and energy on all the people you have to see that day, the places you have to go, the objects you own, and the things you have to do in the three-dimensional world, your energy becomes fractured.

All of your creative energy is flowing away from you, to all the things in the outer world that compete for your attention—your cell phone, your laptop, your bank account, your house, your job, your coworkers, your spouse, your kids, your enemies, your pets, your medical conditions, and so on.”

“Every person, object, thing, place, or situation in our familiar physical reality has a neurological network assigned to it in our brain and an emotional component connected to it because we’ve experienced all these things.

Therefore, as you place your attention on all these elements, your energy is flowing away from you and it leaves little energy in your inner world of thoughts and feelings to create something new in your life.”

Book: Becoming Supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza

Avoiding Pain > Pleasure

Very astute and observant people know that what a person insults you with is often nothing more than the label they can’t acknowledge they actually give themselves.

If you realize this, you can keep your cool in such a conversation.
If not, you may get hooked into a mutual ego-defense session—i.e., an argument—with the person, unknowingly accepting their invitation to play a particular shadow game with them.

People work harder to avoid pain than to get pleasure.
While everyone wants pleasure as much as they can get it, their motivation to avoid pain is actually far stronger.

So when faced with the prospect of pain, the brain will work harder than it would to gain access to pleasure.

Book: Read People Like a Book by Patrick King