Brenda Skidmore's Health Tips

While it is true that improving your diet, exercising regularly, and getting plenty of fresh air and sunshine will go a long way in keeping you feeling energized and fit for life, those things alone are not capable of solving all of your problems. Undoubtedly, it is a good beginning, but it is only half done.

Whether very many of us would choose to believe it or not, there is another really simple thing anyone can do to help boost their intelligence, strengthen memory recall, and stabilize emotions. Take a guess as to what you think that, really, simple thing might be.

Allowing yourself more sleep time. Yes, nothing more than sleep. For a lot of people, sleep seems to be low priority or a dirty word. Sounds easy enough in theory, yet how many of us think we need to burn the candle at both ends these days? Getting enough sleep on a regular basis seems to be one of the hardest things to do in this high-tech age.

Everyday we are bombarded with thousands of different types of distractions ( stimuli ). We, often, try to catch the last few minutes of a television broadcast, surf the net one last time for the day, or try to iron out family differences right before we go to bed for the night. These are a few of the first steps we take in cheating ourselves out of more sleep time.

And it can get worse, once you finally make it to bed and lay yourself down, many times you find your brain does not want to cooperate in becoming relaxed enough to drift off to sleep. Pessimistic or problematic thoughts can keep you from relaxing enough to go to sleep, or keep you up half the night, cheating you out of even more sleep. Sleep deprivation builds up over days, weeks, and months. It is not easy to make up the loss once it begins to stack up on you.

Current research is showing and uncovering every day, that the brain remains extremely active while we are asleep. During sleep, our brains are busily copying, filing, and storing bits and pieces of information that got past our perception filters during our awake time.

While we are asleep, one of the many tasks our brains perform is helping us to find meaning in the bits and pieces of, seemingly, random information we have learned throughout the day. The brain repeats the patterns of neural activity performed during the wake cycle, thus helping the strengthening of your memories long-term potentiation (recall) at will.

So, it definitely looks like getting more sleep will help make us smarter, more physically coordinated, and emotionally stable. Like duh, who doesn't know this? The big question is how do we go about getting more of it? I believe it comes down to making it a top priority in your life.

We sleep through about one third of our lives, yet why we must has remained a mystery up until now. Everyone is a little different when it comes to sleep requirements. Some of us feel refreshed on as little as six hours a day, while others need, seven, eight, nine, or even ten. It is agreed by most sleep experts though, that any less than six hours on a regular basis is trouble waiting to happen.

Lack of sleep can cause all kinds of problems.

It may be mainly psychological, but when I can't fall asleep (which is more of a problem for me than waking and not being able to go back to sleep) I find that drinking a glass of raw milk before bedtime helps relax me better. I think a lot of people use this technique.

But, whatever works for you is great, if it works, right?