One of my favorite scriptures.

Doctrine and Covenants 88:124

"Cease to be idle; cease to be unclean; cease to find fault one with another; cease to sleep longer than is needful; retire to thy bed early, that ye may not be weary; arise early, that your bodies and your minds may be invigorated."

One of the best feelings is having rested well the night before and rising early the next morning to have a full, beautiful, energized day before you. So much you can do! So much time!

Even Superheroes Need Sleep

From the National Sleep Foundation

1. You can "make up" sleep you miss: Actually, as the NSF states, you can't "cheat" on sleep. As you repeatedly don't get enough sleep it builds up as a debt within your body - A deficiency per say that you need to fill. Your body has the natural response to "make up" sleep after your first moment of sleep deprivation, but as it builds up, you body doesn't trigger that response any longer so you don't actually make-up sleep.

Look at this study from Fred W. Turek, professor of neurobiology and physiology and director of Northwestern's Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology.

"In the study, the researchers kept animals awake for 20 hours per day followed by a four-hour sleep opportunity, over five consecutive days. The team monitored brain wave and muscle activity patterns in order to precisely quantify sleep-wake patterns.
After the first day of sleep loss, animals compensated by increasing their intensity, or depth, of sleep, which is indicative of a homeostatic response. However, on the subsequent days of sleep loss, the animals failed to generate this compensatory response and did not sleep any more deeply or any longer than they did under non-sleep deprived conditions (baseline measurements). At the end of the study, the animals were given three full days to sleep as much as they wanted. Amazingly, they recovered virtually none of the sleep that was lost during the five-day sleep deprivation period."

2. Sleep deprivation is not related to disease: Well actually it is very strongly related to several health issues and can result in early death (as mentioned before!!). Some of the correlated health issues are: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and depression.

The American Cancer Society reported that people who sleep 6 hours or less per night (had death rates 1.8 times higher than those who sleep normal hours), or who sleep 9 hours or more, had a death rate 30 percent higher than those who regularly slept 7 to 8 hours.

3. Sleeping is a waste of time: While it may look like we aren't doing much as we sleep, we actually are! Scientists haven't agreed on why sleep is necessary but they do have lots of theories and lots of proof that without sleep we die. Here are some theories of why sleep is important:

- It lets our brain recharge
- It helps us adapt
- It allows our body to conserve energy
- It restores our body
- It polishes our brains so unimportant info is removed and important info is organized
- It maintains our body's rhythms such as Circadian

Much love!

January: Sleep

For the month of January it's time to make sleeping a PRIORITY!!

In sixth grade I began school at a private all-girls catholic school. It was perhaps the most incredible academic experience I have had yet, but it was also the most challenging. I began my pattern of not sleeping in 6th grade staying up late to finish those history projects and biology papers. In high school I could go longer than a week without sleeping (no caffeine mind you) and my body quickly learned to live on less sleep. Now, as I'm getting older :( I'm starting to see the benefits of sleep and how much better my brain and body work with it. While I USED to think that sleeping was a waste of time that I could use to accomplish and LIVE more, I now know that sleep is incredibly vital and results in longer life, better quality of life, and greater capacity.

My goal: Sleep no less than 6 hours every night and try, try, try, TRY, TRY for 8 hours every night.

Two presentations at Hopkins told me that if I didn't I would die young. Being that, at 25, I am close to that "die young" age, I need to start NOW!!

Note to self... I will also try to look this beautiful while sleeping

The Better List

Being that today is the first day of a BRIGHT NEW year, i thought it the perfect time to introduce a little project I am excited to begin.

I call it The Better List.

From my little experience, I think pretty much everyone spends a lot of time thinking about who they are and who they are becoming, especially at the beginning of a year when the canvas is clear and the paint in hand.

In my life, there is so much that I am working on in order to become who I want to be. It will take every day of my beautiful life to become that vision of myself and is the one To Do List in life that is never complete. But that's the joy of it!!!

So I've started a little project. Well that's a loose use of the word "start" since this is probably close to version #10. After months of tweeking and experimenting however, I think I've come up with something that will work and last. And the mission of it all: to better myself.

When I first began The Better List I was overwhelmed by the amount of areas I saw that I needed to improve before I would become the best version of myself I could envision. I didn't know where to begin! So I started with one of my FAVORITE things, lists. I sat down one lovely sunday and wrote every single thing I could think of that I wanted to improve. From hobbies like cooking, dancing and running, to virtues like patience, hope and fearlessness, to practical skills like flossing and nutrition. I put it all on one very long list. For some that long list might have just increased the feeling of being overwhelmed, but for me it made me SMILE. I was excited to see everything I would work on and incorporate in my life over time and I was calmer now that everything was there, not to be forgotten, but not to be done right away. So then I went and JUMPED IN. I began putting the list into action, but had trouble being patient and giving myself enough time to actually change myself. I wanted the change to occur over a single day or week and I wanted multiple things to change all all the same time. But that didin't work.

So the new, improved Better List now goes like this: Each month I choose one thing from my list to focus on. Not only do I strive to be what this thing is every day, but I learn as much as I can about it so that my mind, heart and actions are all "becoming" in the process. At the end of the month this thing should be incorporated enough that it is now a part of who I am and I can choose a new thing to work on. This project isn't about feeling my weaknesses or focusing on how far I am from my dream of myself, it's about seeing the beauty of who I am today and letting it continue to grow.

So every month starting with this brand new one before us, look forward to a little focus on some aspect of life. Here perhaps you can learn a little bit as I learn and find a comrade in the search to change oneself into all that our potential gives us the opportunity to be.