Monday, June 14, 2010

Sleep......quality matters

I haven't had anything up about sleep for a while. Sleep is so important - e.g. to sports performance or even to performing well on Guitar Hero - and personally I am very poor at the discipline of getting to bed early enough to get enough.

Anyway, there was an interesting article in the Independent the other day with some interesting material on sleep.

"The biggest myths are that we need seven or eight hours a day, or that we shouldn't wake up in the night," continues Ramlakhan. "But waking early in the morning is perfectly normal. Students can still function well in an exam if they don't sleep the previous night. I sometimes professionally advise football players and I tell them not to worry about sleep before a big game. Even if they don't manage to sleep perfectly they will still perform well." So what's the key to an effective slumber? Ramlakhan explains the dos and don'ts of catching Z's

3 comments:

Mike M. said...

There's a great book called: Lights Out: Sleep, Sugar, and Survival by Drs. T. S. Wiley and Bent Formby

Chris said...

Mike - that is a good book. I wrote about it here:

http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2007/10/sleep-darkness-fitness-health.html

Methuselah said...

Thanks - interesting article. I am a wee bit skeptical about the part where he says

"But it's more crucial that you eat breakfast first thing in the morning, in what I call a 'metabolic window'. It's a timeframe in which you can give your body an important message. It tells it that in your world there is an adequate supply of food, it can relax, and that it can fall into sleep mode when it needs to."

He doesn'treally explain why this is a message we can only give our body in the morning.