Sleep:Redefining the Concept of Sleeping!

'Yawn! Oh I just didn't sleep well!' How many mornings do you say this to yourself and your family? Most of the things you plan to do that day, the first thought that comes to the mind is that you didn't sleep well the previous night, so should you continue the planned task today or tomorrow.?If you analyse the whole scenario, your body is not complaining, but its your mind that is complaining!

Sleep does two things to your body; it gives rest to the physical body, and it shuts down all the thoughts in your brain and rests it while you are asleep. The physical rest can be attained just by sitting down in a relaxed position, or by lying down;one does not have to sleep. So, even if you don't sleep too well, your body will not complain, its just the mind, because it's so used to sleeping longer hours.

'I am feeling tired as I didn't sleep well at night!' What is tiredness?. There are two kinds of tiredness, physical and mental. The physical tiredness happens to people who do physical labour the whole day, they are the ones who need 7-8 hours of sleep. People like us have no chance of getting physically tired except on very few days of our lives, when we do some physical activity; what happens to us is mental fatigue, because our brain is all the time active. Try the 20 min routine I will suggest in one of the following paragraphs.

The 7-8 hours of sleep concept was formed hundreds of years ago, when people were outdoors and doing 95% physical activity, their bodies needed that kind of rest to recuperate. Today we are doing 95% mental work, hardly any physical work, but we are still sleeping for the same duration of time.

The concept of sleep needs to be redefined, how is it that world leaders like Abdul Kalam,Trump, Modi ,Obama, and other successful people like Bill Gates, Sadhguru, Shah Rukh Khan, are only sleeping for 3-4 hours every night?

Doing the 5% physical work that we do, we just need about 3-4 hours of sleep, not more than that. What we need to do is to shut down our thoughts from time to time during the hours that we are awake, for about 15-20 minutes. Our brains will reboot for sure!

What do you do when your phone slows down? Don't you shut down all the open windows, and the phone is automatically rebooted.Similarly all our thoughts need to be shut down, one by one, and then the brain will reboot.

Whenever you feel tired, close your eyes, roll your eye balls up, and focus on your breathing. Many thoughts will keep coming initially, you just keep focusing on your breathing, the thoughts will fade away. You will reach a no thoughts zone, or you might doze off. try it out, do this for 15-20 min and see for yourself, you will wake up feeling fresh!

Essentially one needs to accept the fact that we do not need so much sleep. Once you do that, then it won't bother you, and we will have so much more time in our hands, and the best part would be that so many people could stop using sleeping tablets too!

-Dr Manoj Kuriakose