The Many, Many Benefits of Sleep For Creativity and Happiness Part 1/3: Sleep and Learning by heymattsokol

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The Many, Many Benefits of Sleep For Creativity and Happiness Part 1/3: Sleep and Learning
Note: This is a 3,000+ word original article so I am splitting it into three parts.

![1_hTP-rut4FHw_6_xkAS1NVg.jpeg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmXo6eNG1BzcwuXVUZPQf4WxD5TMr1w8APr58G1beYwFoQ/1_hTP-rut4FHw_6_xkAS1NVg.jpeg)

<h2>Intro: Why Learn About Sleep Science?</h2>

Sleep makes life worth living.

It has been proven to have an impact on emotional regulation, with more sleep leading to greater emotional control and happier feelings. Sleep helps you store new facts and names in your long term memory. 

You’ll feel better and remember more if you get more sleep.

Unfortunately, sleep is at odds with hustle culture. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is the sort of mindset that I lived in during my formative years. My crew was made up of some the most ambitious musicians at Berklee College of Music during the years 2009-2012, and we were more likely to be in the studio for a 2am-6am session than to get a good night’s sleep.

Even back then, we saw the value of occasional sleep cramming. My roommate and I called a 10+ hour night of sleep a “Big Sleep” and considered this a great virtue to achieve.

For the most part sleep was considered laziness. You wanted to sleep as little as possible, and sleep strategies were more likely to focus on efficiency (i.e. the discredited uberman method) than on maximizing sleep time. 

Outside of school, I spent a lot of time at the now-defunct UNRegular Radio - a cannabis-themed station that focused on music concerts and festivals. My show, “The Smokol Show” was 1-3am. Sleep health: not good.

In retrospect we were well-intentioned but way off base with our eager work schedules. There’s a reason why the musicians at the one of the world’s most famous music schools, Juliard, are officially encouraged to take two hour naps.

<h3>Sleep Science Explosion</h3>

There has been a recent explosion of interest in sleep science. 

Arianna Huffington put out a book evangelizing the benefits of sleep in 2015: The Sleep Revolution. There was a lot of press around the book and it was the first time in recent memory that sleep science hit my radar.

That book was one-upped by a PhD sleep scientist named Dr. Matthew Walker who released a truly wonderful book called Why We Sleep. This book is cram packed full of so much science and passion for the benefits of sleep that it won me over immediately. 

It wasn’t a hard sell. Prioritize sleep and feel better? Sounds good to me.

But *why* is sleep worth it? Isn’t it true that sleeping less and working more helps you to get ahead? It seems like more hours of work will help you to reach your greatest levels of productivity, even if you have to be tired.

In my experience and opinion, it is the opposite. Being well-rested is the first principle of doing anything good. I’d rather have 4 hours of work per day in a truly rested and nourished state than to have 12 hours of work while tired and stressed - not just because it would feel better, but because I honestly believe I’d get way more done in the 4 hours.

This isn’t a given - it’s something I learned for myself and through other peoples’ reporting.

The rest of this article is comprised of anecdotes and scientific examples that are meant to get you feeling excited and passionate about sleep. I hope that this will get you so interested in sleep health that you’ll sleep more hours per average after reading. 

If I’m able to convince you to sleep more each night for a few weeks, you will probably feel a big improvement in your life and then you’ll continue to do it. That is the goal.

At the very least I hope you will find this entertaining and informative. Let’s go.

<h2>Part 1: Sleep and Learning</h2>

Sleep is a learning enhancer.

Sleep has many benefits for retaining information that we learn. It’s true for facts as well as for kinetic information or “muscle memory” — whether you want to learn all the state capitals or learn to juggle, you’ll need to sleep to make it stick.

This is a great place to start thinking about sleep because the scientific backing for it is very clear.

<h3>Learning Physical Skills</h3>

For musicians, being able to do a thing accurately at high speed is important. It’s amazingly difficult to play riffs or beats at any real speed.

Which is why it’s relevant that a good night’s sleep will increase the maximum accurate speed of a learned physical skill by 20%. In other words, you can play a piece of music 20% faster if you get good sleep the night after practicing it.

The same idea applies to esports. If you do a bunch of shooting + aiming drills in a Battle Royale game, then you get a good night’s sleep, you’ll be boosting your in-the-moment reaction time by 20%.

That 20% may not seem like much, but it is a huge bonus. It’s more clutch wins instead of near-misses. The coolest part is that it will appear in your life as “effortless mastery” - with the same effort, you will perform better by having accrued more sleep.

This also suggests that sleep is a way to break through performance-related plateaus. If you are struggling to achieve a competent speed in anything - language recall, yoga poses, whatever - the first thing to do is to get more sleep. That alone, with no other adjustments in technique, could break you through to a higher level. 

<h3>Applied Creativity</h3>

Another aspect of learning is creativity. This is the opposite of accuracy. It’s the ability to explore new ideas, which should get better as you learn new things.

REM sleep in particular helps the brain to create new associations between pieces of information. Your brain recognizes new patterns that can unlock new “aha” moments of insight in the following 24 hours. If you learn a lot of information and get a good night’s sleep, you can really expect to have creative insights in the following days.

This is trippy. What if you could reliably have “aha” moments within 48-72 hours of encountering problems? If it works even some of the time, this is a big deal.

It’s better to learn new information in the hours right beore sleep. If you sleep soon after you study, you’ll retain more and have more ability to remember unusual combinations of ideas. This surprised me, since I like to read books early in the morning. Unfortunately that means I’m less likely to apply that information in a creative way, compared to reading before bed.

Reading a physical book before bed might be the perfect pre-sleep activity. As just mentioned, you are more likely to retain the information. It also gets you off of the computer a while before trying to sleep.

<h3>The Irony of Early School </h3>

Kids often have to go to school at extremely early times of day. This is as ironic as it gets.

Teenagers naturally don’t fall asleep until 11pm. The American Academy of Pediatrics officially recommends that school times should start later for this reason. I remember when I had to get up before 6am to get to school on time. Sometimes I would have to wake up even earlier, before 5am, for before-school rehearsals.

Having school that early interrupts the brain at exactly the time when it is most prone to experience REM sleep. It stops the very thing that would allow for information retention. 

It’s hard for many grown adults to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Why should teenagers be expected to deal with this against their natural physical state and against a lot of cultural pressure too? It’s madness.

School should start later. Even if it had to end at the same time, it would be better to delay the start time by an hour or two to allow kids to get the sleep their growing brains need.

Stay tuned for part 2 coming tomorrow or you can find the full article immediately over at Medium: https://medium.com/@heymattsokol/the-many-many-benefits-of-sleep-for-creativity-and-happiness-6fc649b9a051
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