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1-Page Summary of Night School
Overview
When people talk about how to improve their lives, the most common goals include losing weight, exercising more and eating healthier. But have you ever heard someone make a resolution to sleep better?
People often use sleep as an excuse to be lazy. However, it’s actually a very important process that influences how well we can do other things. How do you get better at sleeping?
In this chapter, we’ll look at what happens to us when we sleep. We’ll also examine how lack of sleep affects us and the factors that can improve or impair our sleep.
In this passage, you’ll learn why most people don’t get enough sleep and how that can affect things like their environment.
Big Idea #1: A good night’s sleep involves five stages where muscles relax, brain waves decrease and dreams begin.
While most people think of sleep as a daily routine, it’s actually an amazing process. It is fascinating and complex.
When we fall asleep, our brain waves slow down from 12 to 30 per second to 8 to 12. During this time, the creative and less rational side of the brain begins producing images and ideas that can be used for art or other projects. Salvador Dalì was able to take advantage of this by holding a spoon over a glass while he fell asleep; when his muscles relaxed enough for him to drop the spoon into the glass, he would wake up with an idea for his artwork.
In the second stage of sleep, your body becomes more relaxed and your breathing deepens. Your throat muscles relax, which can cause you to snore. After the second stage of sleep comes deep sleep with only one or two brain waves per second. During this time, it’s difficult to wake someone up because they are completely disconnected from their surroundings; when someone wakes up from this state of consciousness, they will feel groggy for a while and have difficulty focusing on anything.
Stage five is the last stage of sleep. The sleeper’s heart rate increases and rapid eye movement begins, which means he/she is dreaming at this point. From here the cycle repeats itself until the person wakes up in stage one again.
Big Idea #2: Ever since the invention of the light bulb, we’ve been getting less and less sleep.
If you’ve ever slept in a cabin away from electricity or gone camping, you may have noticed that your sleep improves. This is because the invention of light bulbs changed our relationship with sleep.
Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb and one of the greatest American inventors, believed that sleeping was a waste of time. He would rather be in his laboratory working on inventions than sleeping. However, he couldn’t work at night because there were no artificial lights available at that time.
Edison was determined to create an electric light source. He knew that it would be brighter than any other artificial light, but he needed to figure out what kind of filament could make the bulb glow consistently. Eventually, Edison settled on carbonized bamboo and created a long-lasting bulb.
The light bulb’s benefits were not only about being able to work at night. People could socialize more freely than before and go out for longer periods of time. As a result, everyone was sleeping less. We’ve continued to progress technologically since then, which means people are even more sleep deprived today as they have access to 24-hour television stations, internet access and smartphone notifications.
A study from 2000 showed that only 15% of participants got eight or more hours of sleep per night. The same study also found that 50% felt they needed at least eight hours of sleep.
