The Importance of Sleep for
Learning Japanese (or anything
else)
We spend so much time sleeping but yet most of us do it wrong. No,
this isn’t an advertisement for some sort of space-age bed,
although the ones that float with magnets are pretty cool. This is
an editorial about how most of you can get more benefits with a
some adjustments with your life with some science backing it up.
You’ll be able to remember things better, you’ll be more excited to
learn, you will have more useful hours in a day and you’ll even be
a happier person as a result.
Too Long, Don’t want to read, here’s a
summary:
This article is quite lengthy with about 2955 words, I’m certain
many of you will want a summary. I basically talk about the
different stages of sleep, the importance of it and how you can
benefit from having a healthy sleeping cycle. You would quit
electronics at around 8PM and wind down to try and sleep between
8:30 and 9PM. You would develop a habit of waking up early like
3:30 AM – 4:30 AM and the results would be as followed:
You would feel energetic for the day once it becomes a
habit. You will develop a stronger immunity, bones, muscles and
tissue. You will have a happier outlook on everything. Your memory
will increase a lot and your focus and attention to detail will
sharpen. There are many other benefits and this lifestyle change
will ultimately make you feel awesome like a super
hero!
If you’re ready to keep reading the finer details you may do so
now, but I strongly recommend you at least give this article a
try.
Sleep is meditation, sorta
The purpose of sleep is to sort out your thoughts into a convenient
indexed library, self-reflection, relaxation, and to give your body
and mind some rest so you can heal. Yes, your body needs to heal,
and any physical trainer will tell you to sleep a good number of
hours or else you will not recover and only get worse over
time.
You wouldn’t workout without sleep, so why
study with little sleep?
Realize this, your body needs a lot of sleep to recover from the
stress of a workout but what about your brain? It functions as the
most important “muscle” (notice the quotes) of your body and you
need to keep it in shape! Sure, comparing neurons to muscle fibers
is a bit strange but point is simple, you need adequate rest time
to improve and your brain is the nexus to all that.
The Science and Cycles of Sleep!
There’s a lot of research in this field for both academic purposes
and commercial because companies want to learn how to create pills
so you don’t need to sleep and there are a lot of brain related
diseases which need a cure. Unfortunately, we don’t know much about
the human brain, really, almost nothing. But that’s not to say we
don’t understand some of what’s going on inside that squishy pink
thing.
Sleep Cycles
Let’s begin with the sleep cycles. Your brain goes through sleep
cycles which is normal for almost everyone except with those
diagnosed with certain medical conditions. You close your
eyes, you clear your thoughts (or attempt to) and you begin to
relax. Your breathing starts to slow down and you enter the first
stage of sleep.
After a few minutes you relax even further, and your breathing
slows down a lot and your body temperature drops. Your body enters
a circadian rhythm and activate your sleep drive. You are now fast
asleep.
You continue to sleep until you enter a stage called NREM, in this
stage you will likely feel really weird if someone woke you up.
Your brain now starts operating on your body through maintenance
and builds up your muscle, bone density, immune system, regenerates
tissues of all kinds and you are ultimately improving yourself.
You continue to do this for about 90 minutes which is when you
enter REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Mind you that you can enter
REM before or after 90 minutes, it’s not a hard rule but a general
rule of thumb. REM is another crucial part of sleep. REM is a time
when your brain is the most active and about 20% of your sleep or
roughly 1.5 hours should be REM. Your dreams in REM are more
likely to be remembered as they are likely more intense, but you
still have dreams in any other stage of sleep which is contrary to
popular belief.
After REM you restart the cycle again and repeat everything until
you wake up. Repeating these cycles too often will make you tired
and waking up at the wrong cycle will make you feel groggy and may
take a few minutes to hours to truly wake up.
REM is theorized to be associated to processing memories, stress,
emotions and overall information that you’ve attained. However,
this is still speculation debated and there may be more to it than
just that. Although if you are that interested in the finer details
you should certainly look up science documents relating to it,
which is out of the scope of this editorial.
Hormones and light
You are human (I think?) and because of that you are a
hunter/gatherer by day and you are expected to go to sleep when the
sun goes down and wake up when the sun comes up. Well, at least
that’s how it was for a long time. You might think like I did in my
youthful days that you are a night dweller and you are the complete
opposite but that is likely just you convincing to yourself.
You see, we are surrounded by technology. We have LED light bulbs
which are really bad for you (incandescent are actually much
better), television screens, computer monitors, cell phones and
tablets which radiate a lot of light.
Our brain is reactive meaning it reacts based on the stimuli that
we get. If our brain sees light what happens? It says “it’s still
day-time, let’s keep producing hormones that keep us up” but if it
sees darkness it does the opposite and helps you wind down so you
can fall asleep.
We also tend to go on YouTube, play games and really amp up our
brain at night when in reality we should be winding down and
feeling relaxed. We don’t go out and hunt and gather anymore so our
bodies have all that excess energy (often times) that want to
escape which we sometimes confuse with stress and just stimulate
ourselves one way or another to burn it before going to sleep.
True, we are loaded with daily stress and anxiety which is nothing
compared to the kind of stress and anxiety our ancestors had to
bare; but it’s still there and it’s something we have to deal
with.
Other Triggers that may harm your
sleep
There are many other things that can impede your sleep schedule and
patterns. For one, we tend to ignore our need for sleep. We go to
bed at midnight and wake up at 4 or 5AM. While this is fine for a
different kind of sleep schedule where you take incremental naps
during the day, most of us do not do that and we rely on a 6-8 hour
sleep schedule (whichever works for you). Putting off sleep
just a bit longer can make the difference between sleeping well and
waking up tired. Maybe set a time like 8PM when you stop looking at
a bright screen and start winding down and hope for a 8:30 – 9PM
sleep schedule?
Routines should be your ritual. A bedroom should be a place of
relaxation. Don’t ground children to their bedroom and avoid any
kind of entertainment in them. Certainly never argue in a bedroom
and make it that “Safe place” for you to enjoy. Kids these days are
found to be a lot more sleep deprived than any generation before
them. Why? Because they are surrounded by entertainment that
stimulates them late at night, they are sneaking a peak at
late-night YouTube, play video games and watch anime until 3 in the
morning. Sure, anyone can survive this but the long-term health
effects are not good. Not only that but children even in their
teens are told to go to their bedroom as punishment, but then they
MAY subconsciously associate the bedroom with punishment if it
happens a lot. This is also not good for deep sleep!
But you’re an adult or
teen….
Kids aren’t the only ones without good sleep patterns, adults
suffer as well! I could name a very large percentage of people
which includes most but really what good does that do for you? Ask
yourself this, do you feel like you have enough sleep? Why are you
reading this article? Odds are, you are missing sleep and you might
wonder how to improve it. We go back to nightly rituals and I don’t
mean cast a spell like harry potter, no… Our lives are full of them
like waking up taking a shower, eating, drinking coffee, brushing
teeth, go to work etc... You have a morning ritual that wakes you
up but what about a nightly ritual that puts you to sleep?
Some people will take a bath at night and relax with candles and a
good book. Others might turn off their computer at a reasonable
time and relax in bed using various means. There are so many things
that you can do to relax but the point is that you shouldn’t go
from entertainment to “oh, it’s 11PM I need to sleep”. This is what
gets most people and why you should reconsider your lifestyle.
Waking up naturally and Breaking
Habits
You can sleep and wake up early naturally, without the alarm! If I
were to be a doctor and prescribe you anything it wouldn’t be
anti-anxiety medicine, sleeping pills or something else that is
medicated. Nope! I would start with a healthy diet, no caffeine
after lunch, a nightly ritual to sleep, sleeping early and waking
up early without an alarm
(have a backup alarm just in case
though). That’s not to say you should stop taking any
medication, please keep using them and consult your doctor for any
possible changes with them.
I spent so many years since my early teenage years secretly going
to bed at 3 in the morning and waking up at 7 or 8. There was even
a time when my hours were the opposite, sleeping at 4am and waking
up at noon, it was weird and miserable, and my life felt like it
had twisted upside down like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. But let
me say this, I thought I was a night dwelling otaku but the truth
is, I was normal like everyone else, I had just developed a
BAD
HABBIT and it kept getting worse.
This problem eventually turned into a 2-year ordeal of waking up in
the afternoon and doing nothing with myself, I truly was lost and
depressed. Don’t let it happen to you and if it already has
happened and you want a way out you will need to break the habit
just like I have!
It’s hard at first but you can do
it!
There’s a saying that habits are made in 21 days and it does hold
some truth to it. You have to keep your focus set for the long-run.
Once you have made it into a habit, you’ll think nothing of it and
keep going. It’s so easy to go back to your bad habit after a
week but it’s not so easy once it has turned into a new habit.
Don’t forget to try it again if you fail and fail again! It often
takes more than one attempt to break the habit and you can break it
with other people, just make sure that you do it with a group and
not just one friend. If your friend breaks the habit, you are
likely to break it as well. But as a group, you are supportive of
each other! The exact time it takes to form a habit is up to
you, it could take a day or it could take a month or even two. The
21 days thing is just a saying, there is no science behind it but
there is a good meaning behind it.
Waking up early means you feel amazing!
The power of overcoming your bad habit is a wonderful thing but
there’s a side effect that is actually even more empowering and
that is waking up before everyone else. You’d be waking up at 3, 4
or 4:30am each day and the sun isn’t even out yet! You have plenty
of time before school and work to accomplish whatever you want and
you did so without the need of a traumatizing alarm clock which
interrupts your beautiful sleep cycle. Remember when I said earlier
that if someone wakes you up at a certain stage you’d feel groggy?
Say good-bye to that and hello happy smiles!
When you do this for the first few days you may or may not feel
good about it. In fact, when I did it, I had to force myself into
reasonable hours because I can’t just sleep if I’m not tired. So I
watched the most boring shows as I could to fall asleep (just
kidding) but I did actually start sleeping 30 minutes earlier each
day until I could reach my goal of 8:30PM. Now I wake up feeling
energized while before I would be groggy ALL DAY. I didn’t know
what was making me feel that way but it turned out I had a horrible
sleep schedule.
The second week or so came by and I would wake up feeling happy
again, no more would I think thoughts like “
oh, I need to work
on Jappleng again? What a bummer…” Now I could think of things
like “
Oh, what a beautiful morning, I feel great, energized, I
have a lot of energy and I can work happily on Jappleng!”. My
point of view was entirely different and from what I’ve gathered
from others, this is how it should be. I have spent half my life
feeling miserable/depressed and that’s because I didn’t know the
power of a good sleep schedule!
Good-bye depression and anxiety! Hello
benefits!
While a good sleep schedule may not be the absolute cure for
everyone, it was for me. I stopped having anxiety problems at
night, my days were no longer groggy, I felt happy and my chronic
depression disappeared in just two weeks of keeping up with my new
sleep schedule. My attention span was much greater, my memory
started to work again, and I was eager to learn something new every
day!
How it benefits you to learn Japanese or
anything else
As I’ve mentioned earlier, a better sleep schedule will make you
happier and being happier leads to being able to engross yourself
with anything easily. You can be more interested in Japanese or
Japan or any of your studies and love it just that much more. Your
“happy hormones” are wild when you have good sleep and wake up just
at the right time. Try studying for a test when you’re
stressed and try studying the same material when you’re not
stressed and doing it because you love it. You will retain the
information so much easier and for longer!
Your focus will be there, you will be able to focus for longer
periods of time because you can actually keep attention and aren’t
so interested in sleeping the whole day. You might even be able to
read this article in full by then!
You have time to workout in the morning and your body will
appreciate it since mornings are the best time to workout. Yes,
there’s a lot of studies on this! Go to bed with your workout
clothes and have your shoes next to your bed. Wake up, put on your
shoes and look at that, you can’t go back to bed anymore.
There’s almost nothing happening on social media and online games
are pretty baron compared to after school / work so you can focus
on what’s important.
You can have time to meditate which is also super effective at
boosting your brain. You can learn about that in another but
shorter article here.
You have time to make yourself a nice healthy breakfast every
single day. No more skipping breakfast or eating unhealthy cereals.
It’s a time for a happy breakfast!
There are a lot of other benefits, and it’s really strange to look
back and think that I used to sleep for half the day when I could
be living it in happiness. I challenge you to do this for at least
2 months, if you’re not completely satisfied then you can do
whatever you want with your life but at least try it out and see
how much it changes your life for the better. It’s free to try
and you will be able to learn Japanese so much faster
too!
Still don’t believe me? Search for 4am is the most productive time
or hour of the day on your favorite search engine and you’ll see a
lot of news articles, scientific papers and people vouching for
this. It truly is a remarkable thing and cannot stress the
importance of this lifestyle change. Once you start this path,
everything in your life will become so much easier. Trust me, I’m a
Doctor, or at least I play as one in my dreams.
