Happiness Express Read online

  After a substantial period of work, taking a break makes learning more natural and easier. You may even get flashes of insight as the dendrites keep forging new connections during this interval.

  Do one thing at a time. The brain doesn’t know how to multitask.

  The brain copes with short-term intense stress remarkably well. It’s pathetic at handling prolonged periods of low-level stress that most people are constantly subjected to. Ancient Indians had some solutions to counter this dangerous evolutionary response of the brain. They’re called yoga and meditation.

  When you’re stressed, the chemical cocktail your brain releases inhibits your neurons from firing correctly. When relaxed, endorphins are secreted. Your neurons love being relaxed and calm. They can then get on with their jobs in peace and work towards making a better, smarter you.

  The brain cannot distinguish between a vpmrieaghlok and an irritated lover. Sleeping 7.5 hours each night is one of the simplest, most potent recipes to stay healthy and smart.

  Understanding the basics of how the brain works and using those to your advantage will make living life a piece of (truly delicious) cake!

  Chapter 2

  SLEEP

  Sleep is the longest uninterrupted activity that a human being routinely does. Or, should do. If you live to be 90 years old, you would have spent about 32 years sleeping!

  It has to be one of the most dangerous things we do. Sleep is an extremely hazardous endeavour. You are blissfully lost to the world when you are asleep. Anything could happen.Ÿ.Ÿ. You could get robbed, kidnapped, even killed. You have no idea whether you would even wake up. And if you take yourself back a few thousand years and think about it, going to sleep had to be an open invitation to all sorts of nasty predators. Sleep is equivalent to screaming, ‘Come, eat me!’

  Given the inherent peril of sleep, evolution should have made it vestigial. However, it’s the absolute opposite: sleep is critical for the smooth functioning of the body and mind. Everyone needs sleep and, as we shall see, the lack of it can cause major health issues.

  I love sleeping, always trying to squeeze in ‘a few more minutes’. Back in the day, my mother would do everything she could to wake me up, including switching off the fan or air conditioning and putting our dog, Bobby, in my bed. Yet I’d continue to snooze in delight—even Bobby would snuggle up to me, lick my face, and doze off. When Mom would call me ‘lazy’ and a ‘slacker,’ I’d have an irrefutable counter to her accusations. ‘All those wars and terrible man-made disasters happen when people are awake. If they only slept more, many of these problems would have been solved.’ Mom would laugh and hug me in response, or just whack me to get me out of bed. At the time, I had no idea how true my innocent logic actually was.

  Sleep is mysterious, and we have hardly begun to understand why we do it. I guess the biggest reason we sleep is empirical—it allows us to overcome sleepiness. When we aren’t drowsy, we are more productive, creative and efficient, and function better. Sleep re-energises the body’s cells, clears the brain of toxicity, and plays a huge role in learning and memory. It plays a vital role in regulating our appetite, mood and libido.

  Poets and writers, the bards of yore, conjured up beautiful, evocative words to describe sleep.

  Shakespeare says:

  ‘Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care

  The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath

  Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

  Chief nourisher in life’s feast.’ —Macbeth

  ‘Enjoy the honey heavy dews of slumber.’ —Julius Caesar

  John Keats makes sleep magical.

  ‘O magic sleep! O comfortable bird,

  That broodest over the troubled sea of the mind,

  Till it is hush’d and smooth.’

  For Robert Leighton, sleep is mystical and beguiling.

  ‘Fair Sleep! mind-soothing, soul-bewitching Sleep!

  Come, fair enchantress, I would with thee speak—

  O come, and fan this fever from my cheek:

  I now with Thought no more communion keep;

  Be not afraid, fair spirit, to alight;

  Thy breath will soothe me into slumbers deep;

  My weary brain hath need of them tonight—

  Come Sleep!’

  And quite in tune with the science of today, Charles Reade says:

  ‘Sleep is life’s nurse, sent from heaven to create us anew day by day.’

  In those days, many people had two sleep phases each night separated by an hour or two of chores. The first typically from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., and the second from 3 or 4 a.m. until daylight.

  I remember that my own grandmother used to sleep twice in a night. She would go to bed at around 10 p.m. and be up at around 3.30 a.m. There would be a clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen while she would cook for the day ahead. Once she was done, she would go back to bed until 7 or 8 a.m.

  Just about a century ago, people would easily clock in 8-10 hours of sleep every night.

  Then 1869 happened.

  That was the year Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and vandalised the darkness, magic and mystery of the night. Very quickly, with the advent of cheaper electricity, light blazed forth in our cities percolating down over time to the smallest of villages.

  Our relationship with sleep changed. Instead of a ‘fair enchantress’ it became a monster to be conquered and tamed. You were considered more of a man (or woman, but through experience it’s mostly man.Ÿ.Ÿ. women typically don’t boast about sleeping less) if you got by on less and less sleep. You were braver and cooler if you skimped on sleep.

  Consider these quotes, the first one from Edison himself:

  ‘Sleep is a criminal waste of time, inherited from our cave days.’

  Or,

  ‘Sleep, those little slices of death. How I loathe them.’

  —Edgar Allan Poe

  Or,

  ‘It is one of life’s bitterest truths, that bedtime so often arrives just when things are getting really interesting.’

  —Daniel Handler

  Finally, from a woman:

  ‘Sleep is for wimps.’ —Margaret Thatcher

  To be fair, many people from modern times have glorified sleep too. However, they remain a minority. The hours that ‘civilised’ society slept started to dwindle. The early 1900s saw sleep dropping to 9 hours each night. By the 1950s, television reduced it to 8 hours, and now with 24-hour programming on TV, the internet and all the other distractions of this century, the average human being in 2018 sleeps just 6 and a half hours or less!

  Sleep deprivation has become the bane of our ‘civilised’ society.

  Sleep Deprivation Can Kill

  Dinesh and I were teaching Art of Living courses in Mumbai and we were scheduled to go back to Bangalore in a few days. Dinesh’s parents lived in Pune, which is a quick 3-hour drive from Mumbai at the right time of the day. Dinesh decided to give his parents a surprise visit. Early one morning, he and a few other friends went on a day trip to Pune, planning to come back in the evening to Mumbai.

  The night before we had all gone out for dinner and, in true Mumbai style, returned home only by 1 a.m. I was too sleepy to join them that morning and drowsily waved bye to them before going back to bed.

  A few hours later, I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing. It was Dinesh. He said they had met with an accident and were in the hospital. He sounded all right. Nobody was hurt too much, he assured me, and they’d soon be in Mumbai. We talked a little more, and he sounded tired so I didn’t press him for more details. That could wait for later.

  The story unfolded upon their return. It was not a simple accident like he had made it out to be. It was spectacular car crash. Dinesh was driving at over 100 km/hour on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway and had dozed off at the wheel for just a few seconds. The car crashed into the wall of a toll booth, which was fortunately unmanned. The others in the car had been snoozing and slept through the mo
st dramatic car crash they would hopefully ever be in. They woke up woozily in hospital. No one had any serious injuries. The car, however, was completely wrecked. Seeing pictures of it was scary. The fact that they survived, with almost nothing to show for the horrific disaster they had been in, was nothing short of a miracle. All of them had been given a second chance at life.

  Many aren’t so lucky. An astounding 31% of drivers worldwide fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their lives. When you are speeding at 100+km/hour, your car moves quite a lot in the few seconds that you may nod off. Drowsy driving kills more than 5900 people each year in the US alone.

  You start your Friday at around 7 a.m. and work through the day.Ÿ.Ÿ. just your usual routine stuff, looking forward to the evening and a lazy weekend. You head out for a fun evening with a bunch of friends.Ÿ.Ÿ. You are enjoying great food and fabulous company.Ÿ.Ÿ. and suddenly realise it’s almost 1 a.m.! You know there is the whole of Saturday and Sunday ahead to catch up on your sleep, so you are not too bothered. In a while, you say your goodbyes and start your drive back home. You have not had any alcohol.

  If this has been your Friday, your alertness and reflexes to what’s happening on the road while driving will be the same as those of one inebriated beyond the legal limit. This is drowsy driving and, around the world, statistics show that it kills more people than drunk driving.

  The Chernobyl disaster could be related to lack of sleep. The engineers involved had been working for at least thirteen hours.

  The Challenger space shuttle, which exploded within seconds of its January 1986 lift-off, killed all seven members of the crew. A few of the managers who were part of the launch had slept for only two hours before reporting to work at 1 a.m. The Presidential Commission on the accident admitted the danger of this sleep deprivation in its June 1986 report, saying, ‘The willingness of NASA employees in general to work excessive hours, while admirable, raises serious questions when it jeopardises job performance, particularly when critical management decisions are at stake.’

  Remember the Exxon Valdez oil spill? The supertanker ran aground in Alaska in 1989, causing catastrophic damage to wildlife and spilling 2,58,000 barrels of crude oil into the sea. The Anchorage Daily News reported that the crew had just put in a 22-hour shift loading oil onto the ship. Third mate Gregory Cousins only had time for a quick ‘catnap’ in the 16 hours before the crash. Allegedly, he had fallen asleep at the helm and therefore couldn’t turn the ship in time to avoid disaster.

  Sleep deprived people cannot think clearly. Worse, a person who is sleep deprived may not even feel sleep deprived. An alarming rise in suicides is being attributed to feeling super tired all the time.

  Sleep Deprivation Is Expensive

  Absenteeism and presenteeism (employees physically at the workplace but mentally elsewhere) cost businesses an estimated $411 billion in the US every year. In the UK, one in every five employees has missed work or arrived late due to fatigue. This dip in productivity amounts to $50 billion per year. Japan loses $138 billion annually; Germany $59 billion. Canada sees a drain of over $21 billion, with one-third of its adult population frequently complaining of exhaustion. This unhealthy trend is fast catching on in India as well.

  If Americans who slept under 6 hours a night simply increased their sleep time to between 6 and 7 hours, it would add an estimated $226 billion to the US economy. The amount of money we could add to our country’s economy just by sleeping longer is incredible!

  Sleep Deprivation Makes You Dumb

  Let me quote a poster I spotted in a dorm at an American university where I was teaching an Art of Living course. It said, ‘Great Grades, Superb Social Life, Enough Sleep—Choose Two.’

  No points for guessing what students all over the world would choose. In our university campuses almost everywhere, young people are horrifically sleep deprived.

  We even had a saying in IITB: ‘Sleep. What’s that?’

  Exams and all-nighters usually go hand-in-hand. There was a particularly difficult subject I had to work for and I did what students all over the world would do: slogged through the night, before finally collapsing in bed at around 6 a.m. My exam was at 11 a.m., so I had time for at least 5 hours of sleep. I went to sleep and woke up refreshed and ready—at around 1 p.m. In my super sleepy state, I had forgotten to set my alarm.

  Fortunately for me, the professor in charge was an alumnus from IIT and had done something similar in his days as a student so he allowed me a re-exam without any fuss the next week. This is something that can happen in an IIT.

  Missing a board exam or entrance test that happens once a year can be catastrophic to your confidence and career, simply because you didn’t wake up on time.

  The deprivation doesn’t just cost you your exams. If you make a straight-A student sleep an hour less for only one week, their performance will plummet to the level of their bottom-rank classmates who clock enough sleep. Worse, it will take that student almost a month to return to their peak performance and pay off their sleep debt.

  There’s a story of a clutch of students who complained to their professor about the grades he had given them. He created a questionnaire to give them a reality check. There were many questions: Did you attend all lectures? If you didn’t, did you make sure you covered the material taught? Did you submit your assignments? If you had trouble with them, did you consult a tutor? Did you discuss your work with your classmates? .Ÿ.Ÿ. and so on The professor told the students that if they answered ‘No’ to even two or three of these, they shouldn’t be surprised at their bad scores.

  The last question in the list was: Did you get enough sleep the night before the exam? If the answer to this question was No, it didn’t matter what they answered for all the other questions. They should not be surprised if they got a bad grade.

  Sleep deprivation makes you dumb.

  Don’t believe me yet?

  Let’s talk a bit about our brain.

  The adult human brain weighs about 1400 g. A liquid called the Cerebro Spinal Fluid (CSF) is slowly and continuously secreted in the third and fourth ventricles of the brain. It surrounds the brain and runs all the way down our spinal cord. It mixes with the blood in the upper regions of the skull and is then taken for elimination in a 6 to 7-hour cycle.

  And so, the brain floats in our skull and has a net weight of just 200 g! This is great news, because if the CSF was not there, the brain’s own weight would cut off blood supply and we wouldn’t last very long. The entire assembly of the skull rests on two really small vertebrae, the atlas and the axis, which would never be able to hold the actual weight of the brain along with all the surrounding paraphernalia. We would literally lose our head. It would simply fall off. Nature has cleverly injected that 125 ml or so of CSF into our system so that these niggling problems can be resolved.

  The CSF makes our brain float. That’s pretty cool. We all have a floating brain! That’s not all that the CSF does though. There is one more critical function that the CSF has.

  The brain is a bubbling cauldron of chemical reactions that would put an alchemist to shame. As we’ve seen in the Brain 101 chapter, it generates electrical charges equivalent to a microscopic thunderstorm every few seconds. More than 1,000 litre of blood per day fuel this frenetic activity. And basic thermodynamics tells us that when fuel burns, waste forms. The waste produced in the course of the normal functioning of the brain is known as amyloid beta. I call it brain shit.

  Amyloid Beta

  Amyloid beta is a particularly toxic protein implicated in various degenerative brain diseases and needs to be eliminated quickly. Here’s where the continuous secretion and elimination of CSF come in. The CSF surrounds the brain, goes into its many folds and flushes out this unwanted substance.

  When we are awake, the chemical-electrical storm in our brain doesn’t allow the CSF to penetrate into the deeper regions of the brain. There is simply no space.

  Make a tight fist and immerse it in water. Very little water will b
e able to go inside the fist. For the water to get into the fist, the fingers need to loosen. Similarly, for the CSF to reach the deeper parts of the brain, the crazy activity in the brain needs a pause. That pause is sleep.

  When we’re asleep, the interstitial spaces (spaces between the tissues) in the brain increase by around 59%. The brain loosens up. This allows the CSF to get deep inside and get rid of that molecular trash. That’s why when you wake in the morning after a great night’s rest, you say, ‘I am feeling fresh.’

  Obviously! The brain shit got flushed. You got a clean brain.

  Imagine not flushing and cleaning your toilet and letting everything pile up for a while. It would stink and soon become completely unusable. The same happens to your brain when you don’t sleep. If the brain is not cleaned, it’s an open invitation to all sorts of terrible diseases to invade your body and mind. The cleaning happens only when you sleep. Please sleep.

  This is why, before any critical event, be it an exam, interview or presentation, make sure you get a good night’s sleep. Else, you will show up for that all-important occasion with a brain full of shit, and perform accordingly.

  In many premier universities and institutions the world over, including IITs and IIMs, surviving on less sleep is almost a holy tradition. It’s supposed to prepare you for life. What it does is only prepare you for a premature onset of unpleasant maladies. Have you seen the recent statistics on heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, depression and anxiety? These illnesses which were the bane of growing older are now affecting people in their early 20s!

  Sleep Deprivation Accelerates Ageing

  A good eight-hour sleep is far more effective than any cosmetic or medical salve we could massage onto our skin.

  Collagen is the most abundant protein in the human body—it forms 30% of the total protein in the body and around 70% of the protein in the skin. It keeps the skin and hair strong and helps the connective tissue hold everything in place. It also guards the skin from bacterial invasions, improves its elasticity, and preserves the youthful, healthy look that everyone craves for. Plus, it is an in-built, natural protection from UV radiation.