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sleep wasn't a problem before electric lights came along people went to bed when the sun went down and if they did anything you couldn't do much under candlelight is that right but insomnia is a huge problem today and there are a few reasons so we'll put our resident y here why why are people having trouble with sleep well proverbs 14 verse 6 says knowledge is easy to him that understands so what my aim is is to give you an understanding of sleep i want to show you what happens when you sleep and when you understand what happens when you sleep you begin to you begin to have a knowledge on the important times to sleep and why there's a little tiny gland in the base of the brain and it's called the pineal gland and the pineal gland is about the size of a maybe a a macadamia nut and it's right in the base of your brain and the pineal gland releases four hormones every night but only in certain hours in the winter time it's between nine and two and i think your summer time ends end of october is that right we call it daylight saving so in australia i think daylight savings just about begun and that when daylight savings so at the moment you're still on summertime yeah so at the moment it's between 10 pm and 3 a. m why only those times it has much to do with the moons and the tides light and dark signals are fed through the optic nerve to a control center in the brain where your body clock is located and your body clock communicates with the pineal gland and these are the hormones that are released one is melatonin a lot of people have heard of melatonin some people that don't sleep very well take melatonin well we naturally release melatonin in that time and it's called the fix and rejuvenite nighttime hormone so it is this hormone that probably is mostly responsible for the fix and rejuvenation that's happening in our brain and our body while we sleep another hormone is serotonin that's the mood hormone so if you want to feel good go to bed early what are the kids like if they have a late night not not very happy either either of the adults another hormone that's released in these hours from the pineal gland is argonine vazotosin those kids are having a ball out there somewhere yeah argonine vazotosin is our natural painkiller did you know you have a natural painkiller when you go to bed in these hours your natural painkiller is released but your natural painkiller when it's used it leaves a waste and if that waste hasn't been released then the next night argonine vazotosin won't be released so how do we get bit of the how do we get rid of the waste from using our argonine vazotosin that's exercise when you exercise in the day as you perspire you are letting go of the waste and that's why exercise is so important to be able to increase your ability to sleep ecclesiastes says the sleep of a laboring man is sweet in other words when you physically move through the day you get physical exhaustion at night and you can sleep better so argonine vesatosine is your natural painkiller an argonine and puts you into a deep sleep so the earlier you go to bed the more likely you are to fall into a deep sleep the other hormone that's released is epithalamine an epithalamin is a hormone that increases learning capacity god designed our brain to be learning new things right up until the day we die many people's brains deteriorate because they stop learning new things we should ever learn new things i love the story of the 90 year old man who learned to play the piano and the 92 year old man that graduated from law school after hearing the lecture on renewing the mind a 75 year old man came up to me he said i recently put away my most difficult violin pieces he said i'm going home to get him out again so epithalamon increases learning capacity so to be able to understand and retain the new things that you're learning we need to go to bed early you ask any teacher they can tell the children that had a late night because they just don't get it they don't retain epithalamine increases learning capacity an epithalamin slows down aging everyone over the age of 25 likes that one so these are the hormones that are released in these hours every night but more comes into the equation and i was reading a book called why we sleep by dr matthew walker and there's some fascinating research that he quotes in there and this research was first started probably in about the 1950s and they were doing research on rats because you know they research on rats a lot because their digestive tract and many things are very similar to humans and they live two years so they can see what would happen to a human in say 80 years would happen to a rat in in two years and they found that there were periods of the night where the where the eyes the eyelids are closed but the eyes are active and moving and then there are periods of the of the night where the eyes were still so they put electrodes on the brain and on the eyes and what they found is when when the eyes were active the brain was active but when the eyes were still the brain was a little bit more still some of the researchers even their two-year-old children they had all white up while they sleep and you know they had lots of volunteers come in sometimes they did it on themselves and they found that across board the same thing was happening so what they did was they called the uh i'm moving fast rapid eye movement time and the eyes moving slowly non-rapid eye movement time so let me show you what happens in those times so in non-rapid eye movement time they found that in the brain there's a courier service happening now all through the day everything that happens to us is stored in our hippocampus back here it's called the short-term storage unit while we sleep there's a courier service that takes all of those memories from the day up to the cortex up the top so that's a courier service happening in non-rapid eye movement time the other thing that's happening in non-rapid eye movement time is the cleaning system we just mentioned that the glymphatic system so cleanings happen what they found is that the brain cells seem to shrink up a bit allowing more fluid between them and so this cleaning system is happening so what's cleaned up waste from neuronal activity waste from the combustion of glucose and oxygen in the energy cycles in the cell but also negative emotions which we just discussed and that happens after we make the decision to forgive so when we forgive that seems to trigger this lymphatic system to start cleaning up the waste so these are the two things that happen in non-rapid eye movement time in rapid eye movement time this is where dreaming happens no wonder the eyes are moving fast the dreaming also in rapid eye movement time is a filing system now what dr matthew walker was amazed at in the research that he was doing and he's an atheist and this is what he said he said it's almost as if sleep has an intelligence this is an admission from an atheist and if i was there talking to him i'd say of course mate it has an intelligence it was designed by god these incredible things were designed by god to happen at that time in the night so what's happening with the filing system remember the courier has brought all the day's memories up to the cortex and what appears to happen is the dreaming that happens sorry just not that the dreaming that happens have you noticed things from long ago things you're thinking about through the day all sorts of things come up and it appears that that happens so that the brain knows how to file he says the filing is done in order isn't that incredible so negative things that happen there's a negative section wonderful things that happened that goes into the wonderful section and that caused dr matthew walker to say it's as if sleep has an intelligence and of course it does the intelligence is god so filing happens in rapid eye movement time this is where our inventions happen my father was an inventor and my brother is an inventor so i grew up with dad and dave who who were both inventors in fact every machine that came to our house dad and dave pulled the whole thing apart and pulled it all back together so i grew up with inventors but i think it's something we all have in us and you could almost say it's also creativity isn't it something else happens in rapid eye movement time and that is a consolidation of the things that you learnt through the day you could say a consolidation or a confirmation of the things you learned through the day dr matthew walker found that these happened in 90 minute intervals so let's have a look at that so let's do my favorite nine to five so the first 90 minutes is 9 p. m to 10 30.

so from 9 p. m to 10 30 non-rapid eye movement takes up 80 percent and rapid eye movement takes up 20 percent so it's in the first part of the night that most of the cleaning happens so now we've got 10 30 to 12 midnight so at midnight 10 30 to midnight we've got 60 percent rapid eye movement time and 40 rapid eye movement time so from 12 to 130 it's about 50 50. so 50 rapid eye movement and 50 non-rapid eye movement but as the night goes on we have a change so from 1 30 to 3 to 3 a.

m we've got 40 non-rapid eye movement and 60 percent rapid eye movement so from three to five the last two hours we've got twenty percent non-rapid eye movement time and eighty percent rapid eye movement time so this is what's happening in the night have you found that if you wake at three or four and then goes back to sleep when you wake up again you remember all your dreams that often happens to me because most of you dreaming is happening in the second part of the night and the cleaning system most of that's happening in the earlier part of the night so what happens if someone goes to men at midnight someone goes to bed at midnight not only have they cut down by almost half their melatonin serotonin and again vasitosis and epithalamine but they've also lost some of their cleaning and what can also happen is they can wake up in the morning and they've still got memory from the day before in their short-term memory unit because there wasn't enough time to get it into the rapid eye movement time dr matthew walker and his associates they did a lot of research with this and they got 20 students and 20 students all learned the same things and 10 of the students had six hours sleep a night and 10 of the students had eight hours sleep a night and they found after three months the ones on eight hours sleep a night retained almost double what the six hours sleep at night you see they lost some of that consolidation that confirmation of the things that they'd learned through the day dr matthew walker he was a is a professor and he was asked to write study tips for the university and so the study tips that he gave for the university are very interesting number one he said sleep with your windows open here's the pure air in fact these are all things we just listed he said have some sunshine every day and i discovered that sunshine was the key to recovering from jet lag when i go out in the sun when i get into a say america i find going back to australia is not as bad because i think i'm going with the revolution of the earth but coming from america sorry coming from australia to america it's not easy but i discovered that if i sat in the sun and i put my head up to the sun with my eyes closed and let the sun's rays go through my eyelids and then i put my head down after about 30 seconds and open my eyes and just sit outside then i sleep the next day do you remember one of the first things i said was light and dark signals are fed through the optic nerve to a control center in the brain where your body is located and the body clock communicates with the pineal gland so sunshine in the day helps us to sleep better at night because it resets that body clock it's called your circadian rhythm you've heard of the circadian rhythm it is reset by sun's rays going through the ice now i never suggest we look at the sun our eyes will tell us not to do that you could look at it today though couldn't you it was a funny hazy ball behind behind the clouds but those sun's rays helped to reset the circadian rhythm dr neil nedley he found that oh up to 80 of his depressed people their circadian rhythm was out he also found that a lot of his depressed people were going to bed very late and they were watching movies or playing games or on computer til late so a couple of things were happening there number one they were missing out on the on the rest and rejuvenation that god planned us to get every night but they were missing out on the early morning sun he says that first hour of light in the day it resets your circadian rhythm so sunshine's important now remember dr matthew walker he's writing this article for better study habits temperance he was very strong on the dangers of caffeine and refined sugar and how many students are sipping coffee late at night till midnight trying to get their study in but what matthew walker found they don't retain they retain almost half as much as the people that stop the stimulants and go to bed early that's a big difference huge difference so your stimulants we'll put a big no there no stimulants and of course four this is eight hours sleep a night eight hours not negotiable when i turned 50 i found that i started to have about six hours sleep a night and i felt good i used to tell people since i turned 50 i i don't need as much sleep once i read this book well i very quickly have trained myself back into eight hours because that's the danger of the six hour you feel okay but it's a great deception because all of these things aren't happening what dr matthew walker showed is that people with alzheimer's little amyloid plaques in every case of alzheimer's they found little little amyloid plaques which are like little calcified deposits building up in the prefrontal cortex now when someone's got alzheimer's how's their reason intellect and judgment it's not there is it it's not there what matthew walker found that when you sleep these hours your cleaning system prevents the buildup of the amyloid plaques and the people that have boasted of five hours sleep a night let's have a look at how their their latter years are and remember god never meant anyone to get alzheimer's he meant our mind to be brighter and smarter with age so eight hours is not negotiable so the next one is exercise if you want to sleep good at night get physically active in the day if you can't run try the exercise bike try the rebounder try swimming but some sort of physical exercise remember ecclesiastes the sleep of a labouring man is sweet because that man is physically exhausted from his physical exercise and so many people today are at the computer they're not doing physical work they're doing brain work yes the brain does need a rest when it's been working hard but it needs that physical many guests that have been to our program they buy the little rebound you know the little mini trampolines in their office and everyone in the office does one minute every hour one minute every hour now you could even do it if you had 60 people in the office couldn't you 60 minutes in an hour six proper diet now what we're going to talk about here is timing dr matthew walker he showed that eating a huge evening meal interfered with sleep when we sleep at night our stomach wants to sleep but when we're in a huge evening meal then by the time we go to bed it's usually still all in there and your body has to keep working it's got to keep working otherwise that will in that warm environment it would start to rot it would start to go bad so eating breakfast like a king lunch like a queen and tea or supper like a pauper now if you've got young men who are working physically hard all day their evening meal might be a bowl of thick soup or it might be a smoothie but for people that aren't working really physically hard and especially people trying to lose a bit of weight they're better to go maybe just a uh a herb tea or maybe just a um a light soup you will sleep better if your stomach is allowed to sleep too and number seven hydration we lose water every night i don't know if you've ever slept on a mattress on the floor and when you wake up in the morning and you lift the mattress you notice it's all damp because we lose moisture every night the most dehydrated time of the whole day is when we wake up in the morning i say to my grandchildren when they stay have you watered your garden yet it's their garden down there sometimes they come out and say grandma we've watered our garden i said great it's ready for breakfast it's ready for breakfast i try always have water next to my bed if i wake in the night i have a few sips you just have it always with you when you are well hydrated you will sleep better now i drink most of my water in the earlier part of the day some people can drink 16 ounces of water before they go to bed and sleep for eight hours i can't if i ate that much water i have to get up a couple of times i learned a few years ago not to have watermelon for tea too it was such a beautiful watermelon i had several slices i think i've got up six times and and yet some people don't you gotta get knowing what you can do so i try and have probably only about two glasses of water in the afternoon before i go to bed and then i can usually sleep the whole night something that keeps most people awake most people that can't sleep worry have you heard of the chat room my brain tends to go into the chat room if i wake in the night now what am i going to do about this now and i solve this i'm a problem solver i'm always trying to and if you stay in the chat room you'll never go to sleep so how do you get out of the chat room well there's lots of things you can do to get out of the chat room you can um hum hymns songs you can what i do is i recite bible verses i've memorized some whole chapters so i've memorized chapter one james chapter one and there's about 27 verses there i don't have a great memory this took me about six months to do that one but i've done it and it's really in cement now so i can easily relate it so i start going through that and do you know that i get to the third verse and my brain tries to jump into the chat room and pull it back pull it back pull it back there's your prefrontal cortex pull it back and up get to the sixth verses trying to jump into the chat room again and i pull it back i pull it back i see the prefrontal cortex like the reins well pull that horse back pull it back pull those emotions thoughts and feelings back and then in the morning when i wake up i think now what first did i get to i usually get to verse 13.