How to Establish an Effective Sleep Routine to Boost Your Creativity

A bad sleep routine means a lack of mental energy. If you like to be creative, this can quickly become a problem! The brain is the biggest muscle in the body (unless you inject pure HGH daily, perhaps) and it needs rest just as much as any other part.

Recently, Penny Lewis and colleagues from Cardiff University have scientifically established what the old wives have always known: Great sleep means better problem solving while awake. The new discovery from Lewis, et al. is that non REM sleep and REM sleep work together more closely than we ever thought to produce the “refreshed” feeling that good sleep gives us in the morning.

SWS and REM

SWS is an important part of non REM sleep. SWS stands for “slow wave sleep.” During this time, the brain acts as a playback device, firing neurons in your sleep that closely follow the ones fired during your waking experiences.

If you went to a birthday party that afternoon, your mind would activate the same regions and connections in roughly the same order while in SWS. This helps to strengthen the connections you made while awake, connecting emotion to experience. 

REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep, comes after SWS. During REM, your brain seems to tell your conscious mind to take a break.

As you fall into this deep subconscious state, your brain begins to activate itself in a decidedly more random fashion. Neurons begin to make connections in weird patterns, which corresponds to a waking person connecting concepts that would not traditionally inspire a connection.

This is where composers get their best music from. It’s the birth of the “Eureka moment,” and we can all have them more often if we get our sleep routine to work in our favor.

Let’s take a look at some of the best tips to make this happen.

Find Your Comfy Place for Sleep

The type of mattress that you sleep on has a huge effect on the quality of your sleep. Certain kinds of mattresses are made for heavier sleepers, others for side sleepers, still others for people with partners who get up constantly during the night.

If you find that your sleep routine is not optimal, then you may need to change the type of mattress that you are sleeping on. Make it a point to consider only the mattresses with the profile that you select.

If you are a 250 pound side sleeper who rolls over during the night a great deal, then you need a firmer mattress with edge support and firmer coils. For instance, Saatva mattresses are considered to be a great choice at an affordable price; check out this detailed guide to Saatva mattresses.

However, it’s always better to do your own research and pick a mattress that is suited to your individual sleeping quirks. 

Your Routine Should Be a ROUTINE

Image: World Sleep Society. The 10 commandments of sleep hygiene for adults.

Doctors say that the best sleep routines pay attention to details. You should try to go to bed at the same time every night. If you eat dinner five hours before bed, keep the meal there. (Doctors also agree that eating big meals less than two hours before sleep is a bad habit.) If you take your bath at night, then don’t miss that time for anything.

Stop Working

No less than two hours before bed, you should put all of the day’s work to rest. Giving yourself this time to unwind will help your mind to prepare itself for sleep. This includes you college kids cramming for a huge final. Hey, you didn’t study anyway, so going into the test half-dead won’t help you any either!

Change Your Diet

Some people self-medicate with a beer before bed. Alcohol is a depressant, so it does slow the body down technically.

The effect wears off as the body breaks alcohol down into sugar, which is a stressful process. The liver is also removing the poison from your body, which is incredibly taxing. A holistic sleep routine will work much more efficiently than a Bud Light, and you won’t have to worry about any negative long term side effects.

Believe it or not, Mark van Rossum from the University of Nottingham is currently working on an AI that sleeps in the same way that the human body sleeps. The hypothesis is that this AI will grow in intellect faster, because it will be able to connect its own “neurons” in unconventional ways to better solve problems.

Time will tell if this will work, but we know it works on you. Take the tips above as a template to improve your sleep routine, and don’t be afraid to experiment under the watchful eye of a trusted doctor!