Many of the consequences of insufficient sleep are highlighted in Matthew Walker's illuminating and up-to-date, popular-scientific review. His 2017 book is titled, Why We Sleep, Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. The extracts I'm quoting come from his penultimate chapter, "Sleep and Society."
"I find myself reconstructing people using mental bricks and mortar. The bricks are the memories, feelings, and sensations my clients offer as descriptions of their world. The mortar is their relationship to these, of which
"Living systems, like us, engage our environment. We interact, express, modulate, and are modulated by our environment... We are not just 'subject to' or 'creatively imagining'; we do both. Their combination is how we control our world..."
"There are many forms of relaxation: mental, physical, visceral, temporal, pertaining to health, exercise, work, play, or relationships, for a start. These feel different, require different means, and have different ends, but we distinguish them
"A long time ago, before I can even remember, I saw a picture of a balloon-like animal conjectured to live in the atmosphere of Jupiter. That image caught my imagination, and stuck with me... and now I have
On the Subject of Pain Control "Hypnosis can be used to reduce pain. Pain comes with sensation, and sensation is particular, so everyone's pain is a little different. To manage it, you must get a
This piece is about what we think is real and the difference between sensation and feeling. It is about the worlds of imagination and dreams, and the process of making feelings into sensations, that is making dreams real.This confusion about real and imagined disease is just plain dumb. It is a fallacy that imagination is not real, it can have as much effect as any other perception. In fact, everything sensed through perception is an act of imagination.
"One of the paradoxes of sleep is that the harder you try, the less you get. It would seem you are responsible, but lack the authority to procure it. The fundamental rule that authority must come with responsibility doesn't apply to sleep... It's a paradox for me too. I can see a person's problem, and what he or she needs. I could sell them an illusion that there is something they can do, but it would never work. What they need is not to do, and not to try. You cannot force your way into a sleeping state of mind..."
"If we don’t approach change correctly, we can’t make it happen. If you want to make better changes, you need a better understanding of how things change. This applies as much to your
"Reality consists of our assumptions about things we have not experienced: the common elements. We fill in the blanks by social contract, seeing the same things in a world of which we're mostly unaware. Everyday events are so familiar as to mean little. We 'think' strings of events and actions into stories flat and forward looking. And when we're finished building our flat story, with idiosyncrasies removed, we call it reality. The 'real world,' as opposed to the dream world..."
I've published the book the audiobook The Path to Sleep. The Path to Sleep leads you through 27 hypnotic meditations to integrate mind and body; paths of attention that underlie your thought patterns. I read the whole book once, and you repeat the practices to absorb the rhythms and patterns. The book is presented as an album, as music, so you can repeat the practices, which are separate tracks.
"Focus your attention on your hands, and let them relax. Let them grow large in feeling, and feel a wave unfold from your shoulders, past your upper arms, elbows, forearms, wrists, and into your hands.
