At SPN we love blueberries and almonds because they reduce decision fatigue. But a dump truck worth of blueberries will only turn you purple if you haven’t slept. A cup of almonds is a rounding error in brain health compared to the zzz’s. Sleep is the real productivity drug.
Here are three things that sleep does to make you super-productive.
1. Wipe Your Brain Clean
Imagine if you never forgot anything, you’d have such a confusing life. If someone were to say “Jennifer” every single Jennifer you’ve ever met or overheard in the TSA line would pop into your head. It’d take you days to sift through all those Jennifers before you could recall the one you work with. Fortunately, you forget stuff all the time. This happens when you sleep.
When you lay down your head tonight, the first 4 hours of sleep, will be dominated by deep sleep-the non-dreaming sleep. During this deep sleep your brain will send a synchronized pulses from your forehead through to the back of your brain. This pulse is as consistent as metronome. During this time your brain is wiping your brain clean of memories it has deemed useless. (This also is the time your brain cleans out toxins that may cause dementia—need more research to really prove that).
This brain wiping frees these neurons up to be used for new more important memories. Memories currently in your hippocampus.
2. Dump your Hippocampus.
Every day you stuff your brain with new facts. Some important, such as new coaching technique or policy idea. Others not so important like the color of the chairs in a Starbucks. Your short-term memory is stored in your hippocampus, a part of your brain that looks like two fingers. After day of learning, or just an hour talking to Lynn, your hippocampus fills up. These are those moments when you can’t retain anything no matter how many times you reread a paragraph.
Fortunately, you can dump your hippocampus and free it up to learn more information. All you need to do is sleep.
During your deep sleep, the same time your brain is wiping itself clean, a fascinating transfer of memories is occurring, called a sleep spindle. It’s called a sleep spindle because of how it looks on a sleep-brain-wave graph.
A sleep spindle is your brain transferring memories from your short-term memory to your long-term memory. In short bursts your hippocampus fires of millions of electrical signals that fly across your brain and land somewhere in the neocortex. This process solidifies what you’ve learned and frees you up to learn more tomorrow.
You can dump your hippocampus with a nap. If you’re feeling your brain is full take a short nap to free up some space. I proudly admit I nap during work—it is productive!
3. REM-arkable Insights
After your brain has wiped itself clean and splattered new memories along the neo-cortex walls, your sleep will begin to be dominated by Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. This is the dreaming part of sleep. It occurs throughout the night but most dreaming is done in the last four hours of sleep.
During REM sleep your brain is attaching all of those new memories to existing memories. It is building neurological connections between the ideas in your head. This makes those memories more durable. In addition, the flinging of memories around your brains leads to serendipitous collisions that could be creative insights!
In 1884 a man name Samuel W. Francis had a memory of Spoon in his neocortex and then a new memory of Fork flew from his hippocampus and smashed into the Spoon neurons. And the spork was born.
Use the power of sleep to your advantage
- Take a nap between 12pm and 3pm. It will flush your hippocampus and maybe a creative insight. I’ve taken to doing this and find I get much more work done in the afternoon. Snoozing on the job is nothing to be ashamed of!
- An hour before you go to bed, write down a few big ideas relevant to your work on paper, avoid your phone or computer. This will plant them in your hippocampus and maybe shoot them into a neuron that sparks a breakthrough insight.
- Keep a notebook by your bed for your sporky insights.