The great virtuoso pianist Artur Schnabel commented, “The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes — ah, that is where the art resides!” Creating a brain-enhancing environment, learning new things, cultivating a vibrant social network, and implementing a program of exercise and diet are all positive actions you can take to improve your mind as you get older. And one of the most important aspects of healthy aging focuses more on the art of non-doing — the space “between the notes” of your positive actions. Understanding how to rest and recharge will help you to achieve greater health of body and mind.
It is sweet to let
the mind unbend.
— HORACE,
Roman poet
How important is it to sleep well? “Sleep is as critical as food and oxygen,” cautions Walter M. Bortz, MD. “Generally, we need eight hours a night. That is one of the most important determinants of how long people live.”
Sleep is something that many folks take for granted, but since it takes up about one-third of our lives, it’s worth considering carefully. Besides the obvious benefit of providing time for cell regeneration and repair, eight hours of regular, sound sleep sets you up for optimal functioning of mind and body. It strengthens your immune system, improves your mood, and sharpens your alertness and powers of attention. Getting sufficient sleep lowers your risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, and it makes you less susceptible to accidents.
Sleep also plays a critically important role in memory consolidation and creative thinking. Most people have experienced “sleeping on” a problem and awakening with greater clarity and insight about it. Robert Stickgold, PhD, of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School is trying to understand why and how this happens. Stickgold notes, “The fundamental purpose of sleep is to catch up on processing information received during waking hours. Parts of the brain that do this are not available when you are awake; they are busy with other tasks.” Or as Sigmund Freud expressed it in The Interpretation of Dreams, “The dream acts as a safety-valve for the over-burdened brain.”
Comedian Steven Wright jests, “When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‘Did you sleep well?’ I said, ‘No, I made a few mistakes.’” Below is a simple guide to mistake-free sleep.
• Darkness helps. Darkness stimulates the production of the hormone melatonin, a key catalyst of sleep.
• Quiet is best. Sleeping through a noisy night can raise your blood pressure, even when you’re unaware of it. You can use earplugs or white noise generators to block out disturbing sounds.
A well-spent day
brings happy sleep.
— LEONARDO DA VINCI
• Be cool. A cooler temperature makes it easier to sleep. Keep your bedroom below seventy degrees Fahrenheit. (Take a hint from bears — they hibernate for up to seven months in caves that are dark, quiet, and cool.)
• Find the right mattress. Discover the level of support that works best for you. Also consider the sheets, pillows, and blankets that make you most comfortable. Many people find that they sleep better when they use all-cotton sheets and avoid synthetics.
• Avoid caffeine after noon. Caffeine can stay in your system, and keep you awake, for eight to twelve hours.
• Exercise, but avoid vigorous exercise before bedtime. Vigorous exercise will help you sleep better as long as you don’t do it within four hours of attempting to sleep.
• Create rituals that help you relax. A relaxing prebedtime bath, a spray of lavender scent, reading from an inspiring text, writing in a gratitude journal — these are just a few suggestions for helping you ease into a night of restful sleep. Create a ritual that works for you.
• Try natural sleep aids. If you have trouble falling asleep, you may wish to try some natural sleep enhancers. Valerian is a sleep-inducing herb that many people find helpful. Melatonin supplements may help regulate your circadian rhythms. Other potentially useful supplements include magnesium citrate or magnesium glycinate, calcium, theanine (an amino acid from green tea), GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), 5-HTP (5-hydroxytryptophan), passionflower, and magnolia. The homeopathic formula Calms Forté can also work well without any side effects. (Consult your health-care practitioner to determine the sleep aid and dosage that are best for you.)
• Keep a regular schedule. Aim to keep a regular sleep schedule. Ideally, you go to sleep and wake up at the same times, but if you have to choose, put the emphasis on the consistency of your waking time. This helps to regulate your internal body clock.
• Listen to the Slow-Wave Sleep audio download included with this book. It combines the soothing sound of ocean waves with delta waves to gently lull you to sleep.
THE POWER OF REST:
WHY SLEEP ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH
Matthew Edlund, MD, is the director of the Center for Circadian Medicine in Sarasota, Florida. Based on his extensive clinical research, Edlund discovered that many people are, as he describes it, “rest deprived.” Although he offers excellent advice on sleeping well, Edlund emphasizes that sleep is just part of the larger spectrum of rest. Our systems are overloaded with stress, and our natural rhythms of rest and refreshment are obscured by the hectic pace of contemporary living. Edlund proposes that we relearn how to rest. The first step in doing this is to recognize that you will feel better and work more effectively if you are well rested. Edlund offers plenty of evidence to this effect, plus guidance on four essential dimensions of rest:
• Physical rest. In addition to sleep and naps, Edlund recommends soaking in a hot tub or relaxing in a yoga pose.
• Mental rest. Mental rest involves reconfiguring one’s mind to quickly and easily obtain a sense of relaxed control. Edlund recommends self-hypnosis, relaxation exercises, and positive visualization.
• Social rest. Edlund explains that social rest involves “using the power of social connectedness to relax and rejuvenate.” He highlights the fact that feelings of belonging and togetherness are essential for our well-being.
• Spiritual rest. Edlund recommends daily practice of meditation, prayer, and contemplation.
Thomas Edison filed for his 1,093rd patent (a record number) when he was eighty-three years old. Leonardo da Vinci created one of history’s greatest masterpieces, the Mona Lisa, when he was in his fifties. Edison, da Vinci, and many other great geniuses all practiced the art of napping. As Frank Dyer and Thomas Martin explain in their biography of Edison, “[He] would use several volumes of Watt’s Dictionary of Chemistry for a pillow, and we fellows used to say that he absorbed the contents during his nap, judging from the flow of new ideas he had on waking.”
For centuries, we had only anecdotal evidence to affirm the value of napping, but contemporary science is now validating the practice. Harvard’s Robert Stickgold explains, “[Napping] helps clear out the brain’s ‘inbox’ and integrates that information into memory. During most of history, humans took siestas for this purpose. Modern men and women are perhaps the only advanced species of animal that goes 16 hours or more a day without a nap.”
Think what a better
world it would be if we all, the
whole world, had cookies and milk about
three o’clock every afternoon and then lay
down on our blankies for a nap.
— ROBERT FULGHUM, author of
All I Really Need to Know I Learned
in Kindergarten
A strategic nap is an effective way to heighten alertness and enhance performance, according to Mark R. Rosekind, PhD, former director of NASA’s Fatigue Countermeasures Program. Rosekind and his team found that aviators who took naps averaging twenty-six minutes improved their performance by up to 34 percent. He advises limiting naps to less than forty minutes to avoid grogginess, and most expert “napologists” also recommend napping prior to 5: 00 PM to avoid interference with evening sleep.
In Take a Nap! Change Your Life, Sara C. Mednick, PhD, makes a compelling case for the benefits of napping. Her research demonstrates that in addition to raising alertness and improving your mood, naps can sharpen your memory and boost your creative problem-solving skills. A student of Robert Stickgold, Mednick confirmed through her work what Leonardo and Edison had both intuited: “Learning after a nap is equal to learning after a full night of sleep.”
Although the Dalai Lama advises that “sleep is the best meditation,” His Holiness begins each day with four hours of meditation practice. But the Nobel Prize—winning monk and spiritual leader notes that just five minutes of daily meditation can have profound benefits. Contemporary science supports the Dalai Lama’s contention.
“The effects of meditation can counter the effect of age,” according to Sara W. Lazar, PhD, and her colleagues at Harvard Medical School. Their work has shown that meditation practice improves memory and concentration as well as correlating with positive physical changes in the thickness of the prefrontal cortex. Lazar and her colleagues state, “Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being.”
To the mind that
is still, the whole universe
surrenders.
— LAO-TZU,
father of Taoism
In 1982, Robert Keith Wallace, PhD, and his associates published their findings regarding the effects of meditation on aging in the International Journal of Neuroscience. They reported that subjects who had been practicing Transcendental Meditation for five years or more had a biological age averaging twelve years younger than their chronological age. In other words, a fifty-year-old meditator had the physiology of a thirty-eight-year-old.
Why does meditation offer such profound benefits? The answer, according to research, is that stress is the single greatest contributor to the symptoms associated with aging, and meditation is a powerful antidote. “If we can affect the stress response, we can affect the aging process,” reports Eva Selhub, MD, an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “There’s a reason why experienced meditators live so long and look so young.”
Bernie S. Siegel, MD, author of Love, Medicine and Miracles, explains it this way: “Peace of mind sends the body a ‘live’ message, while depression, fear and unresolved conflict give it a ‘die’ message.” Siegel additionally notes, “The physical benefits of meditation have recently been well documented by Western medical researchers.…Meditation also raises the pain threshold and reduces one’s biological age.…In short, it reduces wear and tear on both body and mind, helping people live longer and better.”
Herbert Benson, MD, is one of the pioneers of mind-body medicine and a trailblazer in the scientific study of meditation. Benson, a cardiologist, published The Relaxation Response in 1975. In this groundbreaking book, Benson introduced the idea that meditation serves as an antidote to stress. He elucidated the nature of the fight-or-flight response and documented the ways in which the stresses of modern living tend to overactivate it. Benson studied a variety of approaches to meditation, searching for the elements that help to counter the effects of chronic stress. The genius of his work is in his focus on separating meditation practice from religious and cultural associations in an attempt to discover the elements that facilitate measurable physiological benefits.
Benson demonstrated that meditation creates conditions that are the opposite of the fight-or-flight response and bring about what he called the “Relaxation Response.” He showed that meditation practice regulates blood pressure as it slows heart rate and respiration and that meditation serves as a concentrated form of rest and recovery.
You can evoke the relaxation response by following these simple directions:
• Sit quietly in an upright, comfortable position.
• Gently close your eyes.
• Scan your muscles — beginning with your feet and progressing up to the top of your head — and gently request that they relax.
• Bring your attention to your breathing (breathe through your nose, if possible). Keep your attention on the flow of breath, and as you exhale, say the word “one” silently to yourself.
• Breathe easily and naturally. Just silently repeat the word “one” with each exhalation.
• Continue for twenty minutes. (It’s fine to open your eyes from time to time to peek at the clock; or just set a timer.)
• Avoid worrying about how well you did. As Woody Allen said, “90 percent of success is just showing up.” This is especially true for meditation. If you just sit and maintain a receptive attitude, the relaxation response will take place. When your mind wanders, just return to the awareness of your breath and to the repetition of “one.”
• For optimal results, practice twice a day. Avoid practicing after dining, as meditation is much easier on an empty stomach.
Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, the founder and director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, collaborated with Herbert Benson. His extensive studies on patients with chronic pain were featured on the PBS series Healing and the Mind with Bill Moyers. Kabat-Zinn’s research has consistently demonstrated the value of meditation in reducing many kinds of pain, even for patients who were unresponsive to standard medical treatments.
Moreover, a study published in the journal Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging in 2011 reports strong evidence that meditation can significantly change the structure of the brain. Britta K. Hölzel, PhD, and her colleagues discovered that meditating for just thirty minutes a day for eight weeks can increase the density of gray matter in brain regions associated with memory, stress, and empathy.
You
can download
your complimentary
audio program at www.brainpowerdownload.com
(coupon code: MeditateMe).
A CD can also be purchased
at the same website.
Hölzel and her team tracked sixteen novice meditators who were participating in Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. For decades, participants in the MBSR program reported feeling less stress and more positive emotions. But in this study, the researchers weren’t just asking the participants how they felt; they were examining the participants’ brains — two weeks before and just after the eight-week program. Over the same period, they also scanned the brains of a control group, which didn’t receive the meditation training.
The control group, as you might imagine, didn’t show any changes in their brain structure. The brain scans of the MBSR meditators, who spent just half an hour per day meditating, showed that their gray matter had become significantly thicker in several regions. One of those regions, the hippocampus, is an area of the brain that is crucial for learning, memory, and the regulation of emotion.
Regular meditation practice offers many measurable ben-efts. Specifically, meditation
• Helps oxygen to be utilized more efficiently
• Reduces the perception of pain
• Regulates blood pressure
• Deepens relaxation and reduces muscle tension
• Lowers levels of cortisol and other stress hormones
• Improves breathing for asthma patients
• Strengthens the immune system
• Helps alleviate headaches and migraines
• Reduces symptoms of premenstrual syndrome
• Facilitates faster postoperative recovery
• Supports emotional stability and resilience
• Relieves symptoms of anxiety and depression
• Increases feelings of happiness, contentment, and peace
• Improves memory and reaction time
• Develops coordination
• Enhances coherence of brain wave patterns that correlate with improvements in learning ability and creativity