Sleep = Healthy & Successful Lives

Sleep, you need it like you need oxygen

Admit it. That whole work/life/balance thing is the biggest hunk of hooey you’ve ever heard. Between work, kids, chores, extended family – who has time for the fairytale of sleep? We sympathize but the sad truth is that while balance is difficult (and something that must be negotiated daily), it is possible. And if we don’t find it, we’ll quickly learn the high price we’ll pay when we sacrifice our sleep in favor of everything else.

Diet, exercise, sleep and beyond

We’ve been making mattresses since the great depression, way back when black and white TV’s were a luxury, long before cell phones, microwaves and debit cards. The Internet and jet planes were starry-eyed pipe dreams and sleep was something you did – rather than worry about. We’ve grown up with you, honing our mattress-making skills with cutting edge technology (like temperature-controlled sleep), meshing the timeless need for sleep with our cutting edge materials and designs.

But mattresses aren’t miracles and if you don’t make time for sleep, even the best won’t help you get and stay healthy. We’ve found a few articles online this week that we think will help us all prioritize sleep in our lives. The underlying theme? Sleep is not a task – it’s a nightly event and you’re the only one who can make time for it.

The key to success?

Get more sleep, says media mogul Arianna Huffington. Ditch that phone and catch some shut eye, the Huffington Post founder said this weekend at a literature and arts festival, likening sleep to ‘a miracle drug.’ Political and business leaders across the world, and the people who work for them, are often living lives of sleep deprivation and burnout in pursuit of the two traditional measures of success – money and power. But those who chase these two goals alone are likely to come crashing down. “This is like trying to sit on a two-legged stool. Sooner or later you fall off,” she said. Read more on NYDailyNews.com.

Hack creativity while you sleep

Research has repeatedly found that sleep improves people’s ability to come up with creative solutions to problems. Psychologists from UC San Diego found that REM sleep improves the creative process more than any other state–asleep or awake. And often the solutions to problems come to us when we are sleeping because of a phenomenon cognitive scientists call “pattern recognition.” Read more on FastCompany.com.

The third metric ~ sleep

There’s no doubt that sleep – for men and for women – is key to brain health. Memory formation happens during slow wave sleep, during very deep sleep. There’s a special form of brain activity that links together the parts of your brain where memories initially form to the parts of your brain where they’re stored long-term. So learning is something that occurs partly when you’re awake and partly when you’re asleep.

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