Sleep = Memory Sleep = Health

Cory Herter

Did you know that individuals who practice good sleep habits are many times happier than those who don’t?

They are also healthier and live longer lives filled with a sense of purpose and fulfillment. Good sleeper’s minds are also sharper and they have much greater problem solving abilities.

Did you also know getting 7-9 good hours of sleep per night, combined with properly balanced Beta, Alpha, Theta & Delta brain wave states, dramatically increases mental health?

In fact, sleeping problems are almost always involved in mental disorders, including depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and symptoms are strongly influenced by the amount of sleep a person gets.

So with all of these obvious benefits, why isn’t everyone making the effort to get better sleep? The answer is simple…time, amount of conscious effort and hectic schedules.

To get these results the National Sleep Foundation suggests the following:

• Avoid napping during the day.

• Avoid stimulants such as caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol too close to bedtime. And, remember, chocolate has caffeine.

• Relaxing exercise like yoga, can be done before bed to help initiate a restful night’s sleep. However vigorous exercise should be taken in the morning or late afternoon.

• Stay away from large meals close to bedtime.

• Ensure adequate exposure to natural light. Light exposure helps maintain a healthy sleep-wake cycle.

• Establish a regular relaxing bedtime routine. Try to avoid emotionally upsetting conversations and activities before trying to go to sleep. Don’t dwell upon, or bring your problems to bed.

• Associate your bed with sleep. It’s not a good idea to use your bed to watch TV, listen to the radio, or even to read.

• Make sure the sleep environment is pleasant and relaxing. The bed should be comfortable, the room should not be too hot or cold, or too bright.

There is no way you or I could ever be expected to follow all these rules to have a healthy sleep, and even if we did, there are still more factors involved.

It’s no wonder people are turning to doctor’s for a quick fix, a pill or two that will hopefully make up for our insatiable lack of healthy sleep habits and time or energy to implement them.

But guess what? Even if we could change our whole life to support optimal continuous healthy sleep every single night or even if there was a pill that would induce 7-9 hours of sleep a night, the body would still break down. Our health would continue to dissolve and our physical, emotional and mental energy would not reach an optimum state.

While thousands of studies are proving the importance of sleep to overall health, the “why” is still a mystery?

What if I told you that good continuous healthy sleep, just like taking a pain killer for a headache, would only address the symptoms and not the real underlying problem?

I am about to share with you a secret, a science and a new technology that will forever change the way you look at sleep for the rest of your waking life.

The #1 reason the body breaks down is because there is a lack of energy, but not just the kind of energy you think you get from sleeping. There is more to energy than a good nights sleep. Did you know that everyday you are actually losing energy, more than you are recovering from sleeping?

Where does this energy go and more importantly, how can we get it back? What would you think if I told you that the energy is stored as positively or negatively charged emotions locked within your memories? Takes the concept of “emotional baggage” to a whole new level doesn’t it?

Try this, think back to a major event in your life, positive or negative. Sit with your memory for a few minutes and notice the emotion that will surface.

Emotion or E-Motion is Energy in Motion

This means that this energy is currently being utilized by the body in the form of emotion, emotion that is stored in a past memory. Whether it is a positive or negative emotion does not matter.

All e-motion is energy that the body normally uses to operate itself, but now is trapped in past memories.

To truly function in the moment at our maximum efficiency, we must clear the emotions that bind us to our past.

Everyday, our brain is storing millions of memories. Some of our experiences throughout the day are extremely intense, while the majority of them are all just subtle memories. The more e-motion in an experience, the more energy stored in the memory.

At night time when we sleep, our brain processes all these memories by clearing out the emotions, cataloguing the lessons we learned and storing them into long term memory changing who we are. Every morning we wake up, we are not the same person we were when we went to bed. Day by day, our body changes in a subtle way.

The problem is that the body doesn’t process the same amount of energy it is storing, which means every single day we lose a bit more of the energy required to operate our body at 100% health and functionality.

Over the years, the body needs to cut back on functionality to keep the body alive. This dulls our senses, slows down the speed of our brain and shuts down functions in glands and organs required to create a rich and fulfilling experience. Eventually, something in our body will have to be shut down due to a lack of energy, which results in dis-ease, and eventually death.

“All disease, including old age, is actually a memory problem because our brain cannot process as much information at night than it stores during the day.”

Scientists have shown numerous ways in which sleep is related to memory. In a study conducted by Turner, Drummond, Salamat, and Brown, working memory was shown to be affected by sleep deprivation. Working memory is important because it keeps information active for further processing and supports higher-level cognitive functions such as decision-making, reasoning, and episodic memory. Turner allowed 18 women and 22 men to sleep only 26 minutes per night over a 4-day period. Subjects were given initial cognitive tests while well rested and then tested again twice a day during the 4 days of sleep deprivation. On the final test the average working memory span of the sleep-deprived group had dropped by 38% in comparison to the control group. This demonstrates that there is clearly a connection between sleep and memory.

Neuroscientists now believe sleep is crucial to brain development, and necessary to help consolidate the effects of the waking experience by converting memory into more permanent and/or enhanced forms.

Did you know that typically before the age of four, the body’s natural built-in emotional clearing process begins to breakdown and the body is no longer capable of clearing as much energy as it is storing. Once this delicate balance is tipped, the body is thrown into “survival state” and for the first time is conscious of not having enough energy to run itself; it is dying. The survival state puts us into a place of resistance so we conserve as much energy as possible, slowing the downward spiral towards death, as the body tries to understand why.

The easiest method to identify the point where survival state kicks in, is when a child stops sharing and starts hoarding toys.

What is Healing?

Did you know, with the right kind of stimulation, dreams could be increased not just for processing old memories, but also for gaining new insight into our lives?
If our brain is processing memories from the day, and we’re working on developing new ideas and goals, then this clearing will also help acquire new perspectives, thus helping us reach those goals even faster.

People have proposed many hypo-theses about the functions of dreaming. Sigmund Freud postulated that dreams are the symbolic expression of frustrated desires that had been relegated to the subconscious, and he used dream interpretation in the form of psychoanalysis to uncover these desires. Scientists have become skeptical about the Freudian interpretation, and place more emphasis on dreaming as a requirement for organization and consolidation of recent memory and experience. Reference Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams.

Rosalind Cartwright stated that, “One function of dreams may be to restore our sense of competence…it is also probable that in many times of stress, dreams have more work to do in resolving our problems and are thus more salient and memorable.” She also stated that dreams are more a state of problem solving, and has a better and fully creative point of view, because there is no logic that restrains it since the unconscious doesn’t have a logic, or a presence of time in space.

Dreams can become a phenomenal insight tool for our lives, if we could have them consistently and of course, remember them.

Four Brain Wave States, Sleep & Emotional Clearing

Many are familiar with the four Brain Wave States: Beta, Alpha, Theta & Delta. Did you know each of these states represents a different phase of the self-development process?

Each brain wave state is responsible for clearing certain kinds of memory. This is why it is absolutely crucial that we are cycling through all four states each night. Unhealthy sleep patterns, created from being locked into one or two types of sleep only, are usually caused by an unhealthy lifestyle that does not store information in all four brain wave states during the day. A healthy lifestyle will usually generate the energy requiring the constant cycling all four types of sleep, while an unhealthy lifestyle will only generate the energy to process through one or two types of sleep.

It is very important to understand the direct connection between what happens while we are awake and while asleep. For this reason, I am going to re-introduce you to the four brain wave states, and how they influence health, well being and self-development.

The four brain wave states are examined in detail to help us understand where our brain might not be processing completely while we sleep.

Beta (14 - 30 Hz) Physical State

• Are you the kind of person who tosses and turns all during the night?

• Do you use stimulants such as caffeine, sugar, and energy drinks etc?

• Do you either exercise obsessively or not at all?

• Do you experience sudden bursts or rage and/or long periods or lethargy?

• Do you feel like you are caught in a repetitious daily routine that you are not satisfied with?

• Do you feel like nothing in your life is moving forward?

If yes then you may be stuck in Beta. This is the type of sleep that people with certain sleep disorders have. Although labeled a disorder, it is simply a form of sleep. Tossing and turning is the body’s way of releasing the stuck physical energy that is building up daily. Beta is known as the “physical state” and is responsible for regulating physical output.

Beta During The Day - Beta can be linked to the physical body and the actions that drive us forward in the moment. When existing in the Beta state, life is simple, quick and straightforward. This is a beautiful performance state that let’s us feel alive and connected with our family, friends and external surroundings.

Theta (4-7.9Hz) - Mental (Connecting and Storing New Information) Dream State

• Do you either take everything at face value or analyze everything to death?

• Do you make quick uninformed decisions or find yourself unable to make any decision at all?

• Is your mind usually a blur or do your thoughts ramble on continuously throughout the day?

• Do you feel like you have a ton of information and education but can’t seem to use it to create something new for your life?

If yes then you may be stuck in Theta. This type of sleep helps you to connect new realizations creating new patterns for your daily routine. This type of sleep is required to ensure you are developing your life by clarifying and refining what you do everyday. Dreams are used in Theta to help bring awareness of patterns you are playing out that you are unaware of. The inability to move out of the Theta state will result in a hazy mind, continuous thoughts that ramble on through your mind all day and the inability to make quick and well educated decisions.

Theta During The Day - Theta is associated with our mind and activates when we are trying to solve information. In order to access highly creative thoughts, connect new information from within, as well as shift beliefs and patterns, we need to access the theta state.

Alpha (8-13.9 Hz) Emotional (Memory Processing) Dream State

• Are you either highly emotional or emotionless?

• Do you consider everything to be either positive or negative basically seeing the experience of life as either black or white?

• Are your dreams highly charged with either positive or negative emotions so you have only two types of dreams: good or bad?

• Can you go to bed in one mood and wake up in the complete opposite mood?

If yes then you may be stuck in the Emotional Alpha State. Dreams are used by the brain to process memories and link together many memories into groups for processing larger amounts of emotion at once. Dreams can be either positive or negative depending on the type of energy being processed. This sleep is required to release the e-motion (energy-in-motion) and information out of memories helping to heal the body, eliminate stress and gain new insight.

Alpha During The Day - Alpha, linked to our emotions, is activated when we slow ourselves down out of the moment. This state is utilized to connect and clear emotions out of memories from our past or reactions to the present moment.

Delta (0.1-3.9Hz) Spiritual - Deep Sleep (Celebration and Integration)

• Do you feel either completely unconfident and incapable or overconfident and egotistical about yourself and your abilities?

• Do you find it difficult to receive a compliment or celebrate and give yourself a break when you have done a good job?

• Are you in a constant state of fun that results in not getting anything started, accomplished or completed?

• Do you find it easy to party and hard to get to work?

If yes then we are most likely stuck in Delta. This type of sleep is required to integrate our lessons into our core programming which will increase personal development. The complete integration of experiences allows us to move ourselves into the next level of development, preventing repetitious experiences. Increase in confidence, self-recognition, morals and values are all part of this cycle of sleep development. Indicators that we are not getting this cycle of sleep include ego, vanity, self-obsession, bragging, always reflecting on past accomplishments never on the present moment.

Delta During The Day - Delta is deeply associated with the spirit and allows us to experience ourselves and our environment as a witness with no judgment or attachment and enjoy the bliss of celebration and the calmness of silence and inner peace.

True Freedom? The key to true freedom is discovering how to unlock and restore the energy from within…the energy stored in our very own memories.

Cory Herter is president of Wish For Love and inventor of L.O.V.E. Technology. For the complete article visit: http://www.wishforlove.com/pages/scienceSleep.html or Visit www.WishForLove.com