Sleeping Habits Impact Your Dream Recall

Learn to sleep.

Sleeping, like lifestyle and diet affects your overall health. It impacts your physical mental health. The following tips, gleaned from health magazines, Runner's World, and psychology journals, have benefited me:

1. Establish a regular sleep habit. Your body will know exactly how much time it has, and will begin preparing to sleep as your regularly scheduled bed time approaches. Keep this schedule even on holidays and weekends as much as life allows.

2. Between bed time and waking, move the bed time when life gives you fewer hours to sleep. For example, a major project is due the following day. You have 10 hours of work and 4 and a half hours of sleep ahead of you. Your regular wake time is 6:30 am. So, work until 2, then hit the sack.

3. Buy a good pillow. Sleep impacts your overall health. You invest hundreds of dollars in workout clothes as an investment in your health. Get a good pillow.

4. Sleep in intervals of 90 minutes. The sleep cycle- the time it takes for your brain to move into deep sleep and then return, averages out to about 90 minutes for most people. Mine is 87 minutes. Waking up at the top of the sleep cycle, when the brain is most nearly to the state it enjoys during normal waking hours, is easy. You will wake feeling clean and crisp.

Contrarily, waking at the bottom of a sleep cycle feels like being fired from a cannon out of a wonderful dream.