While I always have a book on my bedside table, waiting to be to read before I go to sleep, rarely do I have one that so absorbs my mind that sleep eludes me while I continue to turn pages. Richard Paul Evans' novel The Gift is one.
The Gift is admirable not just for its inspiring story, but also for the collected wisdom he puts into excerpts from the journal of Nathan Hurst, the story's protagonist, observer of life and receiver of "the gift" that makes him feel his life has value and meaning. (Before that he listened to others who treated him as a murderer.)
You can learn more about The Gift and the many other best sellers by this multi-award winning author from his web site at http://richardpaulevans.com
What I want to tweak your interest with is a few of those journal excerpts, one of which begins each chapter of the book. They stand on their own. As you read them, take a moment to consider each after allowing it to imprint on your brain. Each has a special value that deserves your consideration.
Having completed your read, consider that Richard Paul Evans has Tourette's syndrome and chronic tic disorder. Tourette's is "an inherited neurological disorder characterized by physical and vocal tics." The fact that Evans is a much sought after public speaker gives evidence that he has overcome a great deal.
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I don't believe society has ever grown more tolerant. It just changes targets.
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It's one thing to order an execution, it's a whole different matter to swing the axe.
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I feel like I've been handed a prize orchid. And I can't make a weed grow.
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Sometimes I think all I have ever known are McRelationships.
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The most important story we will ever write in life is our own--not with ink, but with our daily choices.
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I just want to get through life without ending up as a cautionary tale.
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I struggled to get out of bed this morning. I think I had an emotional hangover.
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Sometimes I wonder if it's not so much that we intend to do harm as we don't intend not to.
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Today Addison [Hurst's love interest] told me she loves me. I wasn't sure how to respond. I haven't much experienced with that sort of thing.
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To the thief, everyone's a crook. To the liar, everyone's a fraud. The curse of all sin is the mirror of false perception it traps us in.
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Heroes rarely look the way we draw them in our minds: attractive, imposing figures with rippling muscles and strong chins. More times than not they are humble beings: small and flawed. It's only their sprits that are beautiful and strong.
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I believe that the difference between Heaven and Hell is not so much the climate as the company. Living in a world populated by people like themselves would, for many, be Heaven. And for others, it would, indeed, be Hell.
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It is one thing to take joy in a child's achievements and quite another to aggrandize ourselves through them. It is emotional incest to live vicariously through a child's success.
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Small kindnesses often, unintentionally, produce the biggest payoffs.
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I feel spiritually cleansed and happy just reading these.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach life lessons to children before they need them, instead of trying to fix broken adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Showing posts with label sleep. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sleep. Show all posts
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Friday, March 09, 2007
Sleep Can Affect Every Part of Your Life
[Sleep is] the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.
- Thomas Dekker
No one knows for certain why we need sleep. Obviously we need to rest our body and our mind, as they can't go on indefinitely without aperiod for recuperation. Or can they?
It's not certain why even that is necessary. Within each cell of our bodies is, in effect, a biological engine. It consumes fuel and expels waste, just like a mechanical engine that we might expect to be able to work endlessly (except for periods of downtime for maintenance and replacement of parts).
Why sleep and not just rest? So far as anyone knows, essentially the same types of recuperation could take place whether we rest or sleep. In fact, some people who live in considerable pain have little more than a few minutes of light sleep each day. The cause of their pain may get worse, but it doesn't seem to be as a result of not sleeping.
Dreams have always presented opportunities for people to speculate as to their meaning. Can dreams be interpreted or not? Recent research suggests that dreams consist of parts of our brain at work without connection to other parts that deal directly with reality. That is, without the active participation of the frontal lobes that keep us on track as members of a functioning society.
For that reason, dreams have no connection with morals or societal norms, because these are known to be functions of the frontal lobes. In other words, dreams must be considered to be amoral. If we had only the same parts of our brain operating when we were awake as are in gear when we dream, we could likely be considered insane.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that those who lead active intellectual lives in their waking hours, ones requiring a great deal of thinking, may have relatively mild dreams. Those who have few mental demands during their waking hours tend to have more active dreams, like adventure or horror movies. This may be more the brain getting exercise or relaxing while dreaming, as needed, rather than doing something warranting our attention as prophesy or warning.
Several kinds of animals--sharks and dophins would be two examples--have two sides to their brains, as we do, but they must continue swimming day and night or they would die (either suffocating or drawning, depending on the animal). To accommodate the necessary brain function to continue swimming, they rest one side of their brain at a time, usually for a couple of hours each side before switching off the active side and switching on the sleeping side of the brain. Some migrating birds are known to do the same in flight.
Some people believe that humans do the same thing at certain times. Have you ever tried to adjust your car radio and drive at the same time? You can be in complete control of your car as it moves along the road, but also give attention to your fiddling with the radio until you find the station you want. Then you may have trouble remembering driving but you will retain full memory of what you did with the radio.
The two sides of our brain can therefore function separately, even if they do so seldom. Do we sleep with one side of the brain awake and dreaming while the other is asleep and resting? Research says no, there is no evidence of "sidedness" when we sleep or dream.
Dreams occur as deep in the middle of our brain as we can imagine.
Compared to the full size of our brain, very little is used when we dream. At this stage of research, no one knows what the rest of the brain is doing when the few small parts are dreaming.
The brain is easily the most mysterious and complex organ of the body.
Moreover, it almost totally controls the health of the rest of our body.
Even when we sleep and are not dreaming, it continually sends messages to the other body parts that control our autonomic systems, such as breathing and blood pumping. Cells get fed 24/7.
But cells can't work 24/7. Even while they continue to eat from blood supplies, they take rest while we sleep so they can perform when we are awake. Hair and nails grow more when we sleep than when we are awake. But these are the least sentient parts of our body.
As Dekker suggests, we may not know exactly how sleep works to keep us going, but our bodies don't work well indefinitely without enough of it.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic SocialProblems, striving to make sense of some of the mysteries of life.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- Thomas Dekker
No one knows for certain why we need sleep. Obviously we need to rest our body and our mind, as they can't go on indefinitely without aperiod for recuperation. Or can they?
It's not certain why even that is necessary. Within each cell of our bodies is, in effect, a biological engine. It consumes fuel and expels waste, just like a mechanical engine that we might expect to be able to work endlessly (except for periods of downtime for maintenance and replacement of parts).
Why sleep and not just rest? So far as anyone knows, essentially the same types of recuperation could take place whether we rest or sleep. In fact, some people who live in considerable pain have little more than a few minutes of light sleep each day. The cause of their pain may get worse, but it doesn't seem to be as a result of not sleeping.
Dreams have always presented opportunities for people to speculate as to their meaning. Can dreams be interpreted or not? Recent research suggests that dreams consist of parts of our brain at work without connection to other parts that deal directly with reality. That is, without the active participation of the frontal lobes that keep us on track as members of a functioning society.
For that reason, dreams have no connection with morals or societal norms, because these are known to be functions of the frontal lobes. In other words, dreams must be considered to be amoral. If we had only the same parts of our brain operating when we were awake as are in gear when we dream, we could likely be considered insane.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that those who lead active intellectual lives in their waking hours, ones requiring a great deal of thinking, may have relatively mild dreams. Those who have few mental demands during their waking hours tend to have more active dreams, like adventure or horror movies. This may be more the brain getting exercise or relaxing while dreaming, as needed, rather than doing something warranting our attention as prophesy or warning.
Several kinds of animals--sharks and dophins would be two examples--have two sides to their brains, as we do, but they must continue swimming day and night or they would die (either suffocating or drawning, depending on the animal). To accommodate the necessary brain function to continue swimming, they rest one side of their brain at a time, usually for a couple of hours each side before switching off the active side and switching on the sleeping side of the brain. Some migrating birds are known to do the same in flight.
Some people believe that humans do the same thing at certain times. Have you ever tried to adjust your car radio and drive at the same time? You can be in complete control of your car as it moves along the road, but also give attention to your fiddling with the radio until you find the station you want. Then you may have trouble remembering driving but you will retain full memory of what you did with the radio.
The two sides of our brain can therefore function separately, even if they do so seldom. Do we sleep with one side of the brain awake and dreaming while the other is asleep and resting? Research says no, there is no evidence of "sidedness" when we sleep or dream.
Dreams occur as deep in the middle of our brain as we can imagine.
Compared to the full size of our brain, very little is used when we dream. At this stage of research, no one knows what the rest of the brain is doing when the few small parts are dreaming.
The brain is easily the most mysterious and complex organ of the body.
Moreover, it almost totally controls the health of the rest of our body.
Even when we sleep and are not dreaming, it continually sends messages to the other body parts that control our autonomic systems, such as breathing and blood pumping. Cells get fed 24/7.
But cells can't work 24/7. Even while they continue to eat from blood supplies, they take rest while we sleep so they can perform when we are awake. Hair and nails grow more when we sleep than when we are awake. But these are the least sentient parts of our body.
As Dekker suggests, we may not know exactly how sleep works to keep us going, but our bodies don't work well indefinitely without enough of it.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic SocialProblems, striving to make sense of some of the mysteries of life.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Tomorrow Can Be A New Life
"Tomorrow is another day."
- King Valdemar of Denmark, 1340-1375. Valdemar has the nickname "'Nother-Day" (Atterdag) in Danish due to this famous and healthy attitude. Valdemar reestablished a kingdom that had been ripped to pieces under his predecessors.
Sometimes setting all the problems, grudges, disagreements and confusion aside is not just the best solution, but the only practical one.
Many people have said that taking a night to "sleep on a problem" has led to its solution. Often by the following day the solution seemed "so easy, so simple."
Our lives are neither easy nor simple. No matter what may be on our minds, many other matters impinge on us, needing to be attended to. These almost always add clutter to a brain that is trying to focus on one problem at a time.
The key to waking up with a solution seems to be to go to sleep thinking about its associated problem. At some point during the night, the brain selects out that problem and focuses on it. Not in a dream, but during a different period of sleep, usually after the REM and deep sleep that refreshes the brain. So it's a fresh brain that tackles one problem.
Many of us have a habit of making immediate problems seem important, giving them undue status. If they involve other people, those people sometimes do things that we didn't expect on following days, making the route through the mess to a solution much easier.
Tomorrow is also another day in a different sense, a more philosophical one. What happened yesterday to us is no different (in effect) than what happened 500 years ago in history. Events are cast in stone in terms of their times being past, but each is available for interpretation and remodeling as we see fit. Memory can be conveniently inaccurate.
Each morning brings not just a new day, but a new life. What we do with that life does not necessarily have to depend entirely on the life we remember from yesterday. We can forgive someone today, for example, where we might not have been willing to forgive yesteday.
We can look forward to each new life/day with anticipation because we can't be certain that it will turn out exactly as we had expected. Sometimes life simply looks different the next day.
Here's to a good day for your tomorrow.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to show you a better day tomorrow.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
- King Valdemar of Denmark, 1340-1375. Valdemar has the nickname "'Nother-Day" (Atterdag) in Danish due to this famous and healthy attitude. Valdemar reestablished a kingdom that had been ripped to pieces under his predecessors.
Sometimes setting all the problems, grudges, disagreements and confusion aside is not just the best solution, but the only practical one.
Many people have said that taking a night to "sleep on a problem" has led to its solution. Often by the following day the solution seemed "so easy, so simple."
Our lives are neither easy nor simple. No matter what may be on our minds, many other matters impinge on us, needing to be attended to. These almost always add clutter to a brain that is trying to focus on one problem at a time.
The key to waking up with a solution seems to be to go to sleep thinking about its associated problem. At some point during the night, the brain selects out that problem and focuses on it. Not in a dream, but during a different period of sleep, usually after the REM and deep sleep that refreshes the brain. So it's a fresh brain that tackles one problem.
Many of us have a habit of making immediate problems seem important, giving them undue status. If they involve other people, those people sometimes do things that we didn't expect on following days, making the route through the mess to a solution much easier.
Tomorrow is also another day in a different sense, a more philosophical one. What happened yesterday to us is no different (in effect) than what happened 500 years ago in history. Events are cast in stone in terms of their times being past, but each is available for interpretation and remodeling as we see fit. Memory can be conveniently inaccurate.
Each morning brings not just a new day, but a new life. What we do with that life does not necessarily have to depend entirely on the life we remember from yesterday. We can forgive someone today, for example, where we might not have been willing to forgive yesteday.
We can look forward to each new life/day with anticipation because we can't be certain that it will turn out exactly as we had expected. Sometimes life simply looks different the next day.
Here's to a good day for your tomorrow.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to show you a better day tomorrow.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
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