Learn How To Sleep Like A Baby

Sleep like a baby. It's what we all strive for, now that we know how important sleep is. It's that feeling that you have just come out of the deepest, most pleasant, and refreshing moments of your life, and not a sound, a light, or care in the world could have disturbed you. One natural way to get that feeling is through the build-up of sleep pressure, or slow waves (brain rhythms), which involves maximal use of your brain when you are awake. This is something babies "learn" to do over the first year of life. Newborns sleep about 16 hours a day, but as they age they develop a homeostatic mechanism that balances their increasing ability to stay awake and their ongoing need for sleep. The circadian rhythm of sunlight and darkness helps to drive one part of this mechanism. There are specific neurons located in our eyes that uses the presence of blue light to inhibit the production of melatonin, a hormone, which helps to induce sleepiness. This fairly recent discovery, and supporting research, likely motivated Apple to implement the "Night Shift" feature on our devices, which filters blue light after sunset. The developing circadian rhythm is highly influenced by environment, and balanced by an internal system of neuronal activity. This involves a group of brain rhythms known as slow waves, or delta and theta (in infants) frequency waves, which are the other part of the mechanism, and are a measure of sleep pressure. Slow waves have gained much attention in our understa...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news