So where can we get hold of extra time?

Since we can’t ‘buy’ time, we tend cut down spending hours on those activities we deem ‘unnecessary’. For most people, this unnecessary activity happens to be—you guessed it—sleep. Devoting a quarter of our 24 hours every day has become too precious for most of us. So we end up compromising our slumber.

However, let us imagine the ideal scenario where we have enough time in our lives to do all the activities we want. The question that arises then is, “How many hours should we sleep?”

Optimal sleep duration experiment

A study was conducted to find out the answer to this commonly-asked question. Simulating the lifestyle of ancient cavemen, volunteers entered a sleep lab every evening by 6 pm and left the lab by sunrise. The inside of the lab had been darkened completely and made sound-proof. The volunteers’ sleep was monitored and their eye movements were recorded to measure how much time they slept and the quality of their sleep. Also, there were no other activities that the volunteers could indulge in.

The result

Initially, to recover their accumulated ‘sleep debt’, they did sleep for 10 – 12 hours; but the following nights all of them slept for an average of seven hours and 45 minutes with a variation range of seven to eight hours. Surprisingly, the volunteers were in a happy state of mind during the entire experiment.

Across cultures and geographic regions the sleep hours are fairly similar, averaging about seven to eight hours. And this holds true even for the Norwegians living in the Arctic Circle where they experience extended durations of daylight and
night-time.

The affect of mental and physical health on our sleep

Our sleep duration also varies according to our health status. For example, a person with a mental illness such as schizophrenia has a reversed cycle of sleep and wakefulness, with the person sleeping only during the daytime. A person with hypothyroidism has an enhanced sleep requirement; such a person is inclined to sleep at anytime, even if they’ve had a restful sleep of eight hours at night.

How to measure your sleep debt

Sleep debt is related to ‘sleep latency’—which is the stretch of time between going to bed and falling asleep. This implies that the more sleep debt you accumulate over the week, the less time you will need to fall asleep. It is a simple test you can perform—just lie down and close your eyes for 20 minutes. If you don’t fall asleep during these 20 minutes, then your sleep debt is zero. This indicates that you have been sleeping enough. Note: this test of sleep debt presupposes that your inability to sleep is not due to pain or illness.

There is also a downside of having zero sleep debt, because it signifies that you will have a hard time in falling asleep. In other words, you need to build up some sleep debt, it should be just enough to be able to initiate sleep within a reasonable time-frame and maintain a moderate range of  ‘sleep latency’.

Restoring the sleep debt

Most people would have built up a sleep debt, either by studying through the night,  working long hours or by various other ways.

Does that then mean that once we start a sleep debt, we go on accruing it? No, you can restore your sleep debt accumulated during the week. This is done with planned naps. You should make the time to sit or lie down quietly for 20 minutes or more, two to three times during the day.

What is important in this ‘pay back’ of sleep debt is the duration of your naps. It must consist of several minutes; not the catnaps of one or two minutes that you get in a meeting, conference or lecture hall because of your high sleep debt. This method of renewing your sleep debt was proved in an extreme experiment.

Sleep ‘pay back’ experiment

The volunteers in this experiment were awakened every minute during their regular night sleep. They did fall back to sleep immediately within 10 – 15 seconds and they completed their eight hours of sleep. However, because of the repeated interruptions, the volunteers were sleepy and irritable the next day.

They tried to offset these symptoms by having short naps of 10 – 15 minutes. But towards the end of the day a new debt accrued and the sleep debt symptoms showed more intensely. This experiment shows that our ‘sleep bank’ doesn’t accept small piecemeal credits. We need sustained sleep of at least 20 minutes to partially offset our sleep debt.

Can you make up for lost sleep on the weekend?

Suppose you can afford only six hours of daily sleep during your working five-day week; you are therefore carrying a sleep debt of 10 hours during the week, given that you need eight hours of sleep every night. Thus, every night through the working week you continue to incur two hours of sleep debt. However, sleeping late on weekends and holidays will not help, because you have to balance your sleep debit with a credit of 10 hours of sleep. Also, this effect or recovery will be transient because your body clock will not allow you to sleep for long; your body will stop secreting the sleep hormone melatonin. And new sleep debt will begin to accumulate.

What is the way out then?

My solution to this problem of continually accumulating sleep debt is to have a regular sleep of about seven-and-half hours at night, followed by two or three bouts of 20-minute naps during the day. In this way, you can even anticipate a sleep debt coming your way.

If you have an upcoming party or conference call that you have to attend late at night, you can take preventative naps. But it is important to not make it a habit or you will end up with ‘sleep reversal’. You will find yourself dozing off in the daytime or going about your work in a drowsy state because of your reversed mind/body circadian rhythm.

So take care of your sleep debt and stay alert and happy.

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The hormone that controls the clock-work of the body is called Melatonin and it is produced while you are asleep. It comes from the tiny pineal gland, located in the center of the brain, also famous as Shiva’s third eye. Melatonin shot to fame with the best selling book The Melatonin Miracle [1995], that gave it the title of nature’s age-reversing, disease-fighting, sex-enhancing hormone. It has since ruled the fancy of the health conscious world as it controls the clock-work of hormones in the body. But it can do this only if you create the right ambience for your body to secrete enough of this hormone.

Sunlight, the Giver of Vitality

Of interest here is that it’s important to get enough exposure to sunlight during the early hours of the day to ensure that melatonin is adequately produced at night. As such, melatonin only begins to build up with the weakening of sunlight after 2pm and in fact, it is important to sleep in a pitch dark room at night so that this hormone is produced in good amounts.

Incidentally, cortisol—the stress hormone, also obeys the circadian rhythm. But contrary to melatonin, cortisol reduces as we approach dusk. So it is high in the morning hours and then begins to decrease as the sun sets.

The more we expose ourselves to light in the day, the more melatonin we release in the night. On cloudy days, we can beneficially ‘cheat’ our pineal gland by using a lamp with a 200Watt bulb placed at three feet distance for about 30 minutes, but take care to avoid skin burn.

Generally, we focus upon night time and the sleep phase of our circadian rhythm to fix our sleep problems. Surprise, surprise! Focus instead on the daylight and the waking state. Not just the sleep issues, even some types of mood disorder, such as the ‘seasonal affective disorder’ [SAD] can be helped with sunlight exposure or the 200 Watt bulb.

This means that sunlight is more than just a source of the ‘sunshine vitamin D’, it also helps reset our biological clock. Even the pattern of reversed sleep [common among student ‘night owls’] can be helped by sun-therapy. Here I recall a psychiatrist who came to me for his ‘dysthymic mood disorder’ —chronically sad mood—who shared with me the history of his younger days when he burnt the midnight oil preparing for his medical entrance exams. He recalled ‘that is how and when it all started’ and his faulty pattern of sleep had continued even to his adult life.

So the lesson here is that during the day, expose yourself to sunlight but start to reduce your exposure to light, after 2pm. Finally by 10 or 11pm cut off exposure to all light, including TV, computer, the bedside light, light from your digital clocks or mobile phone being charged. Try this for a month and see the results for yourself.

The Connection Between Vitamin B12 and Your body Clock

One exciting fact about the circadian rhythm is that we can tinker with it with the use of vitamin B12. This vitamin can help our body release melatonin earlier in the day. Japanese researchers have found that adolescents who slept at 2am and were unable to attend their morning classes, after just three days intake of 3000mcg of vitamin B12, started to sleep by 11pm and wake in time for their morning classes. These adolescents had no signs of B12 deficiency and their B12 levels were in the normal range, yet their sleep pattern improved with the extra dose of the vitamin.

The Fascinating Theta Waves

Our brain continuously generates electric activity. This activity can be picked up by electrodes on the scalp and recorded on a moving paper by an electro-encephalograph [EEG]. Many patterns of electric activity have been discovered in an EEG that correspond to different types of psychological states of mind. Theta type of brain waves in the range of 4 – 7 cycles per second correspond to creativity and imagery and our right hemisphere dominates relatively over our left hemisphere in such moments. Theta is a feature of stage-1 sleep or light sleep. Theta also occurs in REM or dream sleep but in this case it’s mixed with other kinds of brain waves.

Can We Train the Brain to Produce Theta Waves?

The answer is yes and no. It depends upon the method used. In the early 70s in the US, when the hippie movement was in full swing, there were the ‘alpha clubs’ in which one could take a trip into what they called ‘higher levels of consciousness’ with the aid of drugs such as marijuana.

But that’s about alpha waves. The brain can’t be conditioned by electronic gadgets to have a theta state. We can however learn to relax and meditate and at some point in time, with sustained practice of relaxation-meditation, specifically of the Zazen type [Soto school] we can rewire our brain to easily go into theta state.

In any case, allow yourself two or three 20-minute stretches of ‘just doing nothing’ during daytime working hours. These may even be in the form of cat naps.

Why You Must Take Time Out During the Day

Mind is said to be the function of the brain. At least one such function is now known to be cyclical. This function is fantasy, reverie, or free floating imagination.

The rapid eye movement [REM] sleep, indicative of dreaming, repeats in cycles of 90 – 120 minutes during sleep. But what is now known is that this cycle is not restricted to only sleep but also goes on through the day, in a milder form. During our working hours there are moments when we feel tired and, even if we don’t find time to rest, we yawn, stare into vacuum, look lost and spacey, absorbed in reverie, oblivious to the surroundings. This state may last for 20 minutes or less and it repeats every 90 – 120 minutes—much like the REM sleep in night. This daytime mind clock is called the ultradian clock.

Researchers are exploring if this 20-minute trough of the ultradian daytime cycles is a theta brain wave state of creativity in which great discoveries are done and great works of art are produced. There are indications, that the 20-minute trough between two ultradian cycles is a healing time for our mind. If we ignore it, crush it with stimulants such as coffee and sugar, accidents can occur. Typically, these happen at the workplace. And, if we habitually suppress these states, it leads to chronic illness. The top brain in theoretical physics, Stephen Hawking, took a 20-minute rest after each 90 – 120 minute work time. You’d say that he could afford the rest; he was, after all, “the Stephen Hawking”. Nevertheless, we, especially the workaholics among us, should take at least two or three periods of a 20-minute rest through the day. Just lie down [or sit] with your eyes closed.

This was first published in the May 2013 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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Use it or lose it

Engaging your brain in challenging mental activities as you grow older, slows down brain-ageing, keeps the brain young and prevents Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. An experiment with rats that had toys to play with showed that they had more synaptic neuronal connections compared to those rats that were deprived of such stimulation.

Brain exercises such as computer games, crossword puzzles, chess, learning music or a foreign language and memory exercises have been used to facilitate recovery from brain damage caused by head injury, stroke, diabetes, infarct and chronic schizophrenia. Back in 1915, American psychologist Shepherd Ivory Franz showed that persons paralysed for over 25 years were able to recover with brain-stimulating exercises.

Mental exercises can heal a sick brain. Scientist and mathematician John Nash is a striking example. He was seriously mentally ill, afflicted with schizophrenia for more than a decade. He was hospitalised at least thrice because he would escape each time and refused psychiatric drugs. Nash famous for his “Game theory”, later on went on to win the Nobel Prize in economics. In an interview, he specifically attributed his recovery to brain exercises like chess and computer games and calls this strategy ‘cognitive therapy’.

Do the new

Seniors who carry on working even after retirement often boast of being ‘active’. However, this kind of being ‘active’ doesn’t help the brain because they are only exercising the pre-existing old neuronal circuitry.

Old memories have had the advantage of repeated mental practice or recall over the years. Therefore, the cliche, ‘old memories die hard’, holds true. They are the last to fade away in dementia and Alzheimer’s. They are also stored in locations distinct from recent memory. It’s during learning that new neuronal connections are formed, says Professor Merzenich from the University of California, San Francisco.

Learning a new language or trying a mid-age career change involves having to learn afresh like a child, without the advantage of prior experience at the task. Our brain has to be in full focus on the task. This is hard work compared to the brain work required for practising the old skill. More neurochemicals acetylcholine and dopamine are released. On such occasions, our brain is becoming younger, generating new neurons!

Learn to change the brain

Once dead, brain cells cannot be brought back to life. However, new brain cells can be formed. This is neuro-genesis. And that happens when we learn a new skill.

When we are in the process of picking up a new skill, new nerve cells are generated in the hippocampus. And depending upon what brain region is engaged in learning the new task, these young nerve cells migrate to the engaged brain region and start to function in their new location. It’s in the hippocampus that new mental associations, new learning occurs before it’s shifted to higher brain regions for permanent storage.

If you can’t practice a new skill physically, just imagine yourself doing it. Scientists had one group of persons practice a skill for a week and saw the improvement not only in their performance, but also in the brain map of the corresponding brain region. But this was expected. However, what was unexpected was that the second group that ‘practised’ the same skill in their minds, too showed improvements in brain function and map. Admittedly, the changes in the ‘mental only’ group were weaker than in the first group but the point is that they had both structural brain change and also improvement in their functional use of the skill.

The brain is not a rigid structure but is easily malleable. Changes in the level of mental stimulation alters neural circuitry and consequently, the physical architecture of our brain, keeping it young. So keep it engaged!

Tools to keep it sharp

Chess

Anatoly Sharansky, the famous Soviet human rights activist of the late 1970s was imprisoned for his alleged spying against the then-Soviet Union. He was imprisoned for nine years, till eventually released due to political pressure and sent to Israel, where he became a cabinet minister.

During his prison term, Sharansky kept his brain in good shape by playing mental chess. He used to plan from both perspectives—a rare mental effort. Without the mental work, all his brain maps would degenerate. Several years later, when world chess champion Gary Kasparov played against the Israeli President and leaders of opposition in Israel, he defeated all but Sharansky.

Crossword puzzles

A study of 469 people over 75 years of age published in the New England Journal of Medicine, revealed that 124 subjects who later developed dementia, over the following five-year period, were the ones who were the least active among the lot. The non-demented active seniors regularly solved crossword puzzles, played board games, read books and newspapers and participated in group discussions.

Music

Brain imaging of musicians’ brains shows that many areas of their brains, such as the motor area [because they use fingers] and cerebellum, are larger than those of the non-musicians. Long-time musicians also have thicker fibres connecting the left and right sides of the brain.

This was first published in the June 2012 issue of Complete Wellbeing.

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To such people, spending an entire day, or even few hours, without a problem is unimaginable. The idea of a problem-free life is beyond them—in fact, it unnerves them. Surely, there is some hidden threat yet to be unearthed, they believe. They start to search for a problem, and aha! they find it. They feel a vague fear, a kind of uncertainty in a life sans axes to grind or issues to resolve—so they invent them. And then they consume themselves solving these self-generated problems. Such people may be called ‘problem generators’.

A typical problem generator

To problem generators, any change in their fixed routine is a source of tension. For example, they get stressed when they have to travel. They try to plan in advance to the minutest detail of their journey—they even stress about how many undergarments or pairs of socks to carry along. What’s worse, the planning continues even after they have safely boarded the train/aircraft. [One of my clients had been clinic-shopping because he thought that he may become impotent in future!]

This obsession to always anticipate problems causes suffering to others, who perceive them as self-centred and suspicious. They are unpopular among all—even their family and friends.

Being engrossed in one or the other—real or imaginary— problem, always trying to cross the bridge before it comes, makes them increasingly aloof from all. And their loneliness only increases with age.

At its advanced stage, this habit leads to depression, paranoia, or hypochondriasis.

Is it an illness?

By itself, the urge to find problems in everything is not an illness. It can even help you adapt to life better as you are prepared to solve problems. But as a compulsive habit, it is not only self-torture—because it keeps you from enjoying the natural flow of life—but also a sure shot-way of distancing yourself from near and dear ones.

The reason

The Thorndike’s Law of Effect, a behavioural law, states that any behaviour—overt or covert, physical or mental—that is followed by a satisfying experience gets repeated. The said ‘satisfying experience’ can be an external or internal reward. For problem generators, the reward is the pleasure sensation they derive when they find a problem. In the absence of a problem, they feel uncertain, fearful, and tensed, which releases adrenalin.

When they finally have a problem on hand, the tension is gone. The adrenalin levels diminish and they experience a pleasant feeling that accompanies dopamine release.

Scientist Kenneth Blum calls this phenomenon Reward Deficiency Syndrome [RDS]. According to him, some people are chronically deficient in dopamine and hence seek stimulation or excitement to sustain the levels of the hormone in their brain. The reasons for subnormal dopamine levels could be genetic. They could also be due to early environmental experiences and nutritional deficiencies. Maternal rejection is an environmental experience that plays an important role in this. It leads to weak formation of those neural circuits that are responsible for dopamine production. Among the nutritional factors, deficiency of specific proteins is among the key causes of low dopamine levels.

The way out

If you or your loved one shows symptoms similar to the ones described above, the following tips may help:

• Consume enough protein in your meals, taking care not to exceed 20g – 30g in a single meal. Eat vegetables as well; they are essential to absorb the protein in the small intestine and provide co-factors such as vitamins and minerals to convert the protein from food into dopamine.
• As you wake up and go through the day, avoid indulging in inventing a problem—force yourself if you have to.
• For few minutes a day, try going on the autopilot mode, functioning spontaneously, without planning. Keep the autopilot mode only as a small dose of psychological medicine in your life. Don’t do it if you have to force yourself. Then, it’s not auto-piloting. After a few weeks, slowly increase the duration and frequency of being on autopilot.
• Till auto-piloting comes naturally, before you start the autopilot mode, tell yourself: “Alright, I will hunt for the hidden problem but, before that, for some minutes I will be on auto mode after which, I will indulge in my habit”.
• After a few days of running on autopilot for some time during the day, move to the next step: imagine yourself enjoying a day [or even half a day] going through life for what life is. Don’t plan. Enjoy the spontaneity. A Zen Buddhist monk defined Zen [life] as “Eating when hungry, drinking when thirsty, sleeping when tired”. So, for one day live Zen.
• Set aside a few minutes every day as ‘worry time’. In this time, worry intentionally and intensively. You can even invent problems out of nowhere in this time.

But when your mind tries to cook up a problem outside of this designated worry time, tell yourself: “This problem is important, but I will deal with it in my worry time. Right now, I will stop and enjoy the flow.”

Try the above self-help methods for a couple of months. If they don’t work, consult a mental health professional trained in behaviour therapy.

The post Where is the problem? appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

So, the question that we need to ask is do these options really give us mental peace? For that matter, does even visiting a health resort or a religious place and taking a vacation, help us find peace?

Since there are so many means to achieving one end, we can safely conclude that no one formula is effective. What is amiss?

If we find what is missing, any method will work. If we don’t find the missing factor, none will.Be it shavasana, chanting, progressive muscle relaxation, guided visualisation or ‘think positive’ auto-suggestions, nothing will work if we are not really relaxed. We may go on chanting or jogging, but if we are not relaxed at the level of our autonomic nervous system, then these clutches will be rendered superfluous.

Your heart, thoughts and breathing may be racing even as you may be chanting a ‘relaxation mantra’, indicating that your autonomic nervous system, on which we normally have no voluntary control, is aroused.

We need a concrete and objective measure of our relaxation, which will tell us how relaxed we really are. Be it breath, heart rate count, thermal feedback [finger-tip temperature reading], or electro-encephalograph [EEG] feedback of our alpha brain waves—any of these methods can be used to get feedback, but it has to be physiologically true. Only then will you be truly relaxed.

In one experiment, the subjects were given false feedback of their heart rate. The feedback signals were intercepted and modified online to convey to the subjects that their heart rate had slowed down when, in fact, it had not.

Another group of subjects was given true online feedback of heart rate. The results showed that the heart rate slowed really in the subjects who received the true feedback.

We may do many things to calm down, but unless we are truly relaxed inside, we are only cheating ourselves. Forcing yourself to relax may, in fact, lead to a paradoxical situation, wherein the more you try to relax the more tensed you get.

You may catch yourself worrying, “I am really not relaxed” and this thought feeds on your inner tension. In such a logjam, the trick is to ‘not relax’. Just give up, just be. Sit for a while if you like, but just be with the honest intention to ‘not relax’. Like Sri Ramana Maharishi had suggested: “Don’t meditate, be; don’t think of being, be; don’t be, you are!”

Let’s call it paradoxical meditation/relaxation because the concept is similar to the Paradoxical Intention Technique used in behaviour therapy to treat anxiety neurosis. Just be patient, stay put, and gradually the autonomic physiological tension will settle down.

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Buddhism has taught us many kinds of meditations—the walking meditation, lying-down meditation, Vipassana and mindfulness or full mindedness meditations. It is said that you can meditate even while working. There is no need to set out a separate time for meditation. In any case, what is the use of meditation if its impact doesn’t extend to daily living? Work reaches its perfection when it links with meditation.

Meditation means loss of self or the awareness of self. Even a simple activity like drinking tea can become meditative if done artfully or rather tastefully. There should be no goal to achieve, no attempt even to do the work tastefully, no attempt or desire to lose the self.

Even today in India there are classical schools of music called gharanas that follow the master and disciple tradition, where the disciple lives with the guru for several years. The guru doesn’t let the disciple go fast with the lesson. He doesn’t let the disciple go on stage for public performance and applause. The disciple is made to repeat a single lesson monotonously for several months or at least 40 days called a Chilla.

Typically, the lesson is a fixed combination of sounds that the disciple has to practise nonstop for several hours at a set speed and comprises a set string of sounds. Even if the disciple feels that she can go faster or do better, she’s not allowed. Temptations of doing better or faster come and go as the disciple keeps on repeating the same lesson. No goal, no aiming for perfection.

Over time, effortlessly, the desire to do better is lost. The doing becomes effortless. The awareness of self and instrument is lost; the disciple is now aware only of the doing and of the satisfaction emanating from it.

This is meditation—identification with the act itself or true Karma Yoga. It is transcending the self and the instrument or the external world. It is the hallmark of mental health. This special meditation was the Buddha’s last lesson to his devoted disciple Anand Kashyap. And also to us.

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