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Quote of Today
"Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve"
☀️ Happy Super Bowl Sunday to all our football fans! Where the Kansas City Chiefs face the Philadelphia Eagles at 6:30 PM EST. For all the non-football fans, enjoy newsletter #2.
⚡️Focus of Today
💤 "Sleep is essential to every process in the body, affecting our physical and mental functioning the next day, our ability to fight disease and develop immunity, and our metabolism and chronic disease risk". However, Dr. Jansen is not the first person to stress the importance of sleep, and if she is... that's worrying. Stay with us.
😴 There are libraries of research papers advocating for better sleep but rarely do we hear actionable advice on how to sleep better. Until now. Here are a few ways...
Weekly golden nuggets:
Use your phone before bed. The blue light emitted by your cell phone screen restrains the production of melatonin, the hormone that controls your sleep-wake cycle. Put the phone away.
In fact, it's best to charge your phone away from arms reach or even outside your bedroom. Buy an alarm clock. Or stay subscribed, and we might send one your way. 👀
Listen to your sleep cycle. We all sleep on roughly 1.5 hour intervals and cycle between REM, deep, and light sleep. When you wake up feeling groggy, you most likely woke up during a deep sleep. Calculate your preferred bedtime here.
Be consistent. Go to bed at the same time each night and get up at the same time each morning, including on the weekends.
Avoid large meals, caffeine, and alcohol before bedtime
🛌 Sweet Dreams!
📖 Content Feature
“Why We Sleep is an important and fascinating book…Walker taught me a lot about this basic activity that every person on Earth needs. I suspect his book will do the same for you.” — Bill Gates
Sleepy yet? Great. 'Why We Sleep' covers the topic in a lot more depth than we did above and has some useful insights on sleep. For example, sleep benefits the brain with 3 main cognitive benefits:
Improved memory
Improved motor task proficiency or “muscle memory”, and
Improved creativity. REM sleep connects your different memories, experiences and skills to create new ideas and insights
See you all next Sunday!
With love,
—Amir and Erik
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Fan Feature
“Loved how easy it was to learn something new, the informal and friendly approach to the writing gets me excited for next Sunday! My favorite part was the "weekly article nugget section"