Sleep & Stress

Reference Article Linked Here.

Did you know that short term memories are converted to long term memories during deep restorative sleep? Did you know that healing our chronic disease or our acute injuries, or repairing our DNA occurs during deep restorative sleep?

Recent work on animal models have suggested that the neurotransmitter noradrenaline has a profound effect on sleep and how easily memories are formed and behaviors are learned. Science is so amazing. Medicine is so very amazing!! 

Consider this: a person can work very hard during the day to try to improve their health behaviors and implement new ways of living, then go to sleep and have these new patterns of thought or behavior be put into long term memory thus creating new neuronal pathways that are easier to implement the next day. ORRRRR maybe that’s not your experience and each day seems like just as hard a piece of work as the previous day. Could this be because your learning is not being retained into long term memory.

This study sheds some light on the process and relates it to the stress hormone that the nervous system secretes. Noradrenaline is one of the neurotransmitters that makes our brains on edge, vigilant, and reactive. At night this molecule (along with others) determines how easily and rapidly we slip into and out of sleep. If we are too reactive, we may not spend much time in restorative sleep or we may slip out of sleep very rapidly. It would appear that a more relaxed brain retains memories more easily.

If you want to test this for yourself, consider using Yoga NIdra before sleep and to get back to sleep after having awakened in the middle of the night. Consider gentle yoga to prepare yourself for sleep. And consider adopting a dream work process which can program your dreams for explorative inspiration dreams rather than reactive stress inducing dreams.

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