How much Sleep

The optimal amount of sleep for an average adult man is at least an hour more than what you used to getting. The average man sleeps about seven hours a night. In contrast, most men need between eight and nine hours in order to stay fully alert – a little more or less depending on your genetic predisposition. When you try to get buy with less, you miss out on the most important sleep cycle, the one that occurs between the seventh and eighth hour of sleep.

During that time, you enter the final stage of sleep, when the brain’s neutral network is stimulated – the equivalent of recharging the brain’s batteries. The recharge allows you to retain and gain new ideas and insights, strengthen your memory, and acquire new mental material of different kinds. If you fail to stimulate the neural network the brain begins to deteriorate.

To give your brain the peak performance during working hours, you need about four of five 90-minute sleep cycles a night, a combination of deep and REM, or rapid eye movement sleep.

A group of researchers believes that REM sleep stimulates the metabolism to release chemicals in to the brain, chemicals that make learning easier. Men who believe they can scrimp on sleep are depriving themselves of peak performance.

When you first go to sleep, you experience slow-wave (also called non-REM) sleep, which is usually divided into four progressively deeper stages as the brainwave frequency becomes slower. At the same time, your body temperature, metabolism, blood pressure, pulse rate, and respiration all drop.

Every 90-minutes or so after the fourth stage of slow-wave sleep, you experience a period of REM sleep, lasting from 5 to 30 minutes. REM sleep is less restful than slow-wave sleep – the brainwave activity is similar to when you’re awake. Your pulse, blood pressure and breathing become irregular and you eyes dart rapidly back and forth beneath your eyelids.

As the night progresses, most of us will pass through four or five sleep cycles, although illnesses and sleep disorders can disturb the patters and prevent you reaching the deepest, most restful sleep stages.

Be sure to make your bedroom a restful place. Do not work in your bedroom watch TV. Make you bedroom the environment your brain is familiar to sleep with. Make sure that you bedroom has a relaxing color mood and not shocking pink. Make your bed comfortable so your body can rest comfortably.

Don't let the worries of the world inhabit your bedroom.