Capla

[For the past few months I’ve been undertaking a mostly independent study of sleep, and looking to build a coherent model of what sleep does and find ways to optimize it. I’d like to write a series of posts outlining my findings and hypotheses. I’m not sure if this is the best venue for such a project, and I’d like to gauge community interest. This first post is a brief overview of one important aspect of sleep, with a few related points of recommendation, to provide some background knowledge.] In the quest to become more effective and productive, sleep is an enormously important process to optimize. Most of us spend (or at least think we should spend) 7.5 to 8.5 hours in bed every night, a third of a 24 hour day. Not sleeping well and not sleeping sufficiently have known and large drawbacks, including decreased attention, greater irritability, depressed immune function, and generally weakened cognitive ability. If you’re looking for more time, either for subjective life-extension, or so that you can get more done in a day, taking steps to sleep most efficiently, so as to not spend more than the required amount of time in bed and to get the full benefit of the rest, is of high value. Understanding the inner mechanisms of this process, can let us work around them. Sleep, baffling as it is (and it is extremely baffling), is not a black box. Knowing how it works, you can organize your behavior to accommodate the world as it is, just as taking advantage of the principles of aerodynamics, thrust, and lift, enables one to build an airplane. The most important thing to know about sleep and wakefulness is that it is the result of a dual process: how alert a person feels is determined by two different and opposite functions. The first is termed the homeostatic sleep drive (also, homeostatic drive, sleep load, sleep pressure, and process S), which is determined solely by how long it has been since an individual has last slept fully. The longer he/she’s been awake, the g