Hidden potential!

How much attention and opportunity do we really give or allow ourselves? Are we really using or wasting our potential? Do you sleep enough?

The National Sleep Foundation (NSF) reports that:

•The average adult sleeps under 7 hours a night during a work week.
•33% of adults surveyed sleep only 61/2 hours nightly.
•40% of adults admit that the quality of their work suffers when they're sleepy.
•68% say their ability to concentrate is diminished by sleepiness.
•19% report making mistakes and errors due to sleepiness.
•Sleepy drivers cause approximately 100,000 car crashes annually.
•33% of adults surveyed would nap at work, if allowed.

Certain things interfere with the quality sleep and disrupt one or more of these stages. Alcohol, prescription sleeping drugs and drugs in general, poor nutrition, a lack of physical activity and unhandled stress all reduce the quality of sleep and can all be causes of sleep deprivation.

Sleep offers us an opportunity to process the back log of information accumalated during the day. The unconscious mind has a chance to review our wakeful life without the interference of the conscious mind's rigid style of reasoning, limited creativity, habitual patterns of thought, and restricted access to psychological and spiritual resources which are available to the unconscious mind. Nietzsche said that dreams are a training ground for life.

Dreams are very often weird because of our rationality being effectively deactivated during our dream sleep. We rely solely on internal perceptions and memories, we only have certain information to work with to convey the images we are seeing. When we are awake we can look and check what is around us, in a dream the dream itself is that reality check.

I read something else interesting about sleep. And that is that sleeping in total darkness makes for more restful sleep. This may sound stupid, but think about it. How many of you sleep in total darkness? Even the dim light from a street light or a TV screen or computer monitor means you need an extra hour of sleep to be fully rested, and people sleeping in fully lit rooms or in daylight, need up to 10 hours in bed to be as rested. This again might sound stupid, but think about it. In these spring/summer months, we're getting sunrise as early as 4am! Might be time to invest in those 'total blackout curtains/blinds'
Sleep well folks,
Dave :lol: zzzZZZ
Sweet dreams, MTFBWY

"Now, blessings light on him that first invented sleep! It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even."
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605