Why a rest is as good for you as a sleep:

As we rush around madly trying to squeeze as much as we can into every waking hour, the
latest news that lack of sleep can cause depression, weight gain and even premature death
comes as grim reading - especially for men, who are particularly at risk from these effects.
Now a new book by eminent U.S. sleep specialist Dr Matthew Edlund suggests if you can't
sleep, a rest can be just as curative as sleep.
The key is how you rest.
As a sleep-deprived medical student working 110-hour weeks, Dr Edlund became obsessed
with sleep and the impact that a lack of it has on our health and ability to function.
For years, he lectured on the vital role sleep plays in our health, from cell renewal to weight
control and mental health.

Put your feet up: Passive rest can be as good as

sleeping to restore your body and mind

But after years of prescribing sleep strategies, he realised sleep was not the cure-all he'd
thought.
Even when he helped patients get more and better sleep, sometimes their health remained
poor. He discovered that rest plays a very important - and often neglected - role in the
rebuilding and rejuvenation of the body, and now believes rest is as important as sleep to
our long-term health.
'Many of us are so busy we see rest as a weakness - a waste of precious time,' he says, 'but
rest is, in fact, a biological need. All the science shows we need rest to live, just like we need
food.'
However, 'rest' does not mean simply plonking yourself on the sofa in front of the TV.
Dr Edlund regards watching television as 'passive' rest. Although this downtime does
allow for a degree of cellular renewal, the brain will still be buzzing (indeed, studies show

that in some of the brain's 'rest' states, more energy is used up than when the brain is
performing set tasks)
He says what we need is 'active' rest - this can make you more alert and effective, reduce
stress levels and give you a better chance of a healthier and longer life.
Dr Edlund describes four different kinds of active rest: social, mental, physical and spiritual
(using meditation and prayer to relax).
While he doesn't set out how long you need to do them for, he believes it's vital to factor
each into your daily life.
Here, he explains their powerful impact on our health:
SOCIAL REST
This is defined as spending time with friends and relations and even chatting to colleagues.
No matter how busy you are, it is vital to build this into your day. A famous U.S. study in the
late Seventies found that socialising isn't just pleasant, it is crucial for our survival, with
sociable people at reduced risk of heart disease and other serious illnesses.
More recent studies have confirmed this link, proving that social support helps you survive
a cancer diagnosis, fight off infectious illness and ease depression as well as reducing your
risk of dying from heart attack.
Just chatting with friends has been shown to reduce levels of stress hormones and provide
hormonal and psychological benefits. Indeed, most researchers argue that social
connections are at least as significant to your rate of survival as obesity or whether you
smoke.
The good news is that sex also counts as social rest.
MENTAL REST
Today we all try to do too many things at once - texting while driving, eating while
watching TV - and we've lost an understanding of the brain's need to focus on one thing.
Doing this for even a short period has been shown to affect the nervous system, change
blood pressure, heart rate and body temperature. The idea behind mental rest is to get so
engrossed in something simple that the big stuff no longer bothers you.
One way is to teach yourself a very simple form of controlled concentration. Look straight
ahead and roll your eyes up to the top of your head as if you're staring at the ceiling.
Next, with your eyes looking straight up, slowly close your eyelids. A really good 'eye roll'
such as this will show lots of white on your eye as you close the eyelids.
Concentrate on keeping your eyes looking up while your eyes are closed. Take a deep
breath in to the count of four, and out to the count of eight. As you exhale, feel the sense of
relaxation spreading from the back of your neck down your body, until you feel it spreading
to your toes.
Now try to visualise something such as a beach on a sunny day, or a sun-dappled forest.
IImagine yourself walking in this environment and take note of what you see.
When you are ready to finish, keeping your eyes rolled up, breathe in deeply and open your
eyes. Then roll your eyes down.

PHYSICAL REST
This is about actively using the body's processes, such as breathing, to calm body and mind.
The best way to do this is to stop and take a few really deep breaths. Breathing deeply fills
the lungs with oxygen, opening up collapsed air spaces, sending richly oxygenated blood
around the body.
Try this technique. Stand up straight with your feet shoulder- width apart, toes facing
forward. Look straight ahead and try to align your ankles, knees, hips and shoulders into an
imaginary straight line. Roll your shoulders back, tuck in your chin and breathe in deeply
for the count of four, feeling the air filling your lungs as your chest expands.
Breathe out slowly to the count of eight, hearing and visualising the moving air as you
breathe. Focus only on two things: keeping your alignment straight and breathing deeply
and evenly. Another excellent form of physical rest is to nap (for 15 to 30 minutes) if you're
feeling tired.
A Greek study showed that a 30-minute nap at least three times a week cuts your risk of
heart attack by 37 per cent, and a Nasa study found a nap of 26 minutes could improve
work performance on some tasks by 38 per cent.

People who mediate expand their brains, research shows.

SPIRITUAL REST
Brain scans have shown that people who meditate are able physically to expand parts of
their brains, growing bigger, fatter frontal lobes - the part that controls concentration,
attention, focus and where we do much of our analysis of problems.
Meditators are also able to build up more grey matter in the midbrain (which handles
functions such as breathing and blood circulation) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
(important for muscle co-ordination and active memory).
They also show changes in the structure of the thalamus, a part of the brain critical for
processing information flow from all parts of the body.
Praying has similar benefits. U.S. research has shown that people who regularly attend
religious services live longer than those who do not. Although some of this benefit must lie
in the social connection, scans show the brain responds in a similar way to prayer as it does
to meditation.

Why Does The Rejuvenation of Sleep Come From Being Unconscious?

Sleep, more like the Sister to death. Why does the rejuvenation of sleep, come from being
unconscious? Have you ever wondered, Why do we as humans sleep? If we humans were

the machine-like creatures of classical Newtonian physics we would not need sleep, only
simply a steady source of fuel, until the internal parts are corrupted beyond repair, and can
no longer function properly as a unit. But humans cant really continue without sleep, using
fuel as our only source of energy, can we?

We are born sleepers; a newborn sleeps approximately 20-22 hours a day for its first
weeks upon arrival of this dense planet. No matter how much you try to arouse their
attention to the world of matter, they remain non-physically focused within their physical
bodies. Short, emergent burst into to their waking world, for fuel and data, then back to
dreamland for a newly arrived humans. This sort of behavior continues for the first three
months of life, while the sleep begins to taper off as they become more accustomed to the
3D environment. So why is sleep so important? Why does one need the tool of removing
ones attention from the world that is perceived through our 5 senses? If you are to take an
objective look at sleep and its components, what happens during sleep to the human body
and what are the repercussions of not sleeping? It begins to become easy to hypothesize
that wherever we go when we lay down our physical bodies and withdraws our
consciousness from the world perceived with our senses, is the place that we prefer on
some level.
First lets tackle the question, why is sleep so important? While researching information for
this essay, I interviewed several people and it was a general consensus that we all need
sleep to rest or for rejuvenation. I asked one college student and his reply was because
I need the energy what a paradox, to gain energy for the waking world, one must lose
consciousness, this remains a paradox because even though it seems as if your body is in a
state of restfulness, the inner workings of your body have not ceased at all.
During sleep the human body and brain goes into action, every night your brain performs a
tune-up, Brain cells that were active all day shut down for repair. Chemicals clean up from

brain cells activity and in some places new brain cells grow, during REM sleep your brain
gets so busy that the blood flow is nearly doubled, which means theres still active
communication between your mind and heart, arteries, organs cells, bones, limps all never
stop doing what they do during sleep, really .. The only part that shuts down is our thought
center, the frontal lobe located within your brain.
The frontal lobes are considered our emotional control center and home to our personality.
This part of our brain is the only part that is no longer active, which lends to the question,
why does the personality part of our body remove its focus upon the body? And why does
this process of allowing our conscious mind remove itself from the unity of human bodily
function, seem to replenish our energy??
If our conscious mind is replenishing itself from some other source then it must be a
postulate that is not yet being considered. What is this source of energy? Have we begun to
consider the magnitude of its power? If you understand the amount of time you sleep,
usually between 6-10 hours for the average human, which is around 18-20% of each day
spent in an unconscious state. And this state by all accounts is what we need to receive
energy, by this clear statement it seems easy for this writer to see how somehow the source
of human energy is non-physical and our immortality lies in knowledge that we humans
need sleep to survive the waking world of matter. Which leads to the idea that maybe we
are not as much human as we think, but more this non-physical energy that sustains our
human body, Humans need non-physical retreat from waking consciousness to continue to
use the extremely limited however fine-tuned 5 senses to perceive the world of matter, if
this is true, and it is, then we can easily consider that ones permanent withdrawal of
consciousness from the 3D world of matter, the idea that we call death can be no more
than the full focus upon this non-physical source on which we have drawn upon, by way of
sleep, during the entire human lifespan.
Sleep must not only be a cousin to death, but more closely related as in a sister. These are
two ideas, born from the same notion. In a sense we each die every night, each night
removing your consciousness from your world, your world that you see, smell and taste
and touch, to replenish ourselves but really when you think of it, what part of our bodies
are really being replenished? Our human form lives on food, gets its energy from
carbohydrates, proteins, sugars, but somehow without the releasing of our consciousness
from this world once every 24hr orbit of the Earth, we cannot even focus our minds on this
waking world.
Our human bodies are clearly mechanisms of wonder and delight, however cannot be the
dwelling place that is commonly perceived, sleep is the clear indicator of this perception.
Moreover, if our human bodies purpose serves to function more like vehicles, using sleep
or the removal of consciousness for fuel, then its possible that death is the removal of that
vehicle, not the driver.