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You’re a busy person. Keeping up with your job, plus your life, has you constantly racing. It doesn’t help that when working, you’re distracted not only by your mobile devices, but also by your computer. You average 10 tabs open in your browser at any one time, and you compulsively click amongst them. One’s your email, which never stops flowing in. At the end of the day, you sleep less than you know you should, but as you tell yourself, there’s just never enough time.
If this is how you live, then Maria Konnikova has a simple message for you: Pause, step back, and recognize the actual costs of your habits. A psychology Ph.D. and popular writer for The New Yorker, Konnikova circles back, again and again, to a common theme: how we thwart our own happiness, and even sometimes harm our brains, in our quest for a simply unattainable level of productivity. “The way that we’ve evolved, the way our minds work, the way we work at our most optimal selves, is really not the way we have to operate today,” Konnikova explained on this week’s Inquiring Minds podcast. “I feel like I’m fighting a losing battle, but I hope that if there are enough voices out there, someone will finally hear that, ‘Hey, this attempt at hyperproductivity is making us much less productive.'”
https://soundcloud.com/inquiringminds…
Based on Konnikova’s writings, here are four ways that we can change our lifestyles so as to also improve our brains and how they function:
Maria Konnikova Margaret Singer and Max Freedman.
Sleep more. Science still has a lot to learn about how sleep deprivation affects us. But the research is starting to look pretty grave, especially in light of new studies (Konnikova has written about them here) suggesting that a crucial function of sleep is to purge the brain of biochemical waste products that are the result of conscious brain activity. This means that not sleeping enough could be contributing to the buildup of harmful proteins like beta-amyloids, which could in turn predispose us to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.
So how do you fix your bad sleep habits? Not easily: It requires nothing less than a major lifestyle change. “You can’t just think that, ‘Well, I’m not ever going to get enough sleep, but on the weekends I’ll sleep in and I’ll be okay,'” says Konnikova. “It doesn’t work that way.” Recovering from one night with too little sleep is easy, but recovering from chronic sleep deprivation requires nothing less than chronic sleep, er, restoration.
How much sleep? People vary, but the National Sleep Foundation says adults need seven to nine hours per night.
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