This article talks about how you can use your sleep to improve your learning of an up and coming performance task.
Click on the image above to find a new piece of research, which evidences how the mind replays pre-sleep learning events, during sleep, to help improve our learning of a performance task.
This learning happens specifically during slow wave sleep in the motor cortex, within the brain.
If we get a good quality night sleep, we will have 5 rounds of slow wave sleep. That means there is potentially 5 opportunities every night to replay, on autopilot, what we are trying to learn or get better at.
Other research confirms there is a ‘remarkable capacity of subcortical motor circuits to execute learned skills and a previously unappreciated role for motor cortex in ‘tutoring’ these circuits during learning’.
This is great and not so great news, depending.
It’s great news if you want to learn something specific. So if you want to remember something, read and imagine that something before going to sleep. The mind will then replay it in slow wave sleep which will help to develop a deeper level of learning and memory for that something.
This is how my 16 year old actor son remembers his theatrical lines. He recites them before going to sleep and imagines himself delivering the script. This process is optimised further by using a technique called Self-Havening
Havening helps reduce stress and to deepen his resonance with the lines and performance. Then he goes to sleep and his mind (in the motor cortex) replays those lines during 5 rounds of slow wave sleep. He wakes the next day knowing his lines, perhaps with some refining to be done. The added benefit of using havening is that it helps him to de-escalate any stress/tension that could have otherwise got in the way of learning, which increases the capacity for creative imagination. Similarly this can be done the night before a presentation or other performance event. Indeed athletes use visualisation ahead of the performance event, which is now an increasingly used strategy to optimise their performance.
It’s also great news if we want to help prime our mind for a better day the next day. Before going to sleep imagine how tomorrow will be a great day, imagining a a specific performance task, resonating with the positive thoughts and emotions you’re hoping to feel and actions you want to take and desired outcomes of that action. By doing so your sowing seeds into your unconscious ready for replay in your slow wave sleep.
However, its not so great news if you go to bed worrying or anxious about something. It follows that if the purpose of replay is to strengthen the thing you are replaying then the risk is that an aspect of the worry and anxiety will deepen, perhaps the cognitive aspect, that is the part that impacts on our learning and what we think about, ie the thing we are worrying about.
Fortunately the brain is your onboard therapy machine, so it’s intention is to help you process/de-escalate the emotion, not just replay, so that you wake up the next day feeling better. As per research, it appears there are 2 parts to slow wave sleep. Each time you have a round of slow wave sleep, replaying images in the mind related to the worry and anxiety, the mind will also engage delta waves to de-escalate the emotional charge so that by the end of the night, after 5 rounds, you wake up hopefully feeling refreshed. That is, after all, one of the purposes of sleep. To process the days events before, to consolidate learning and to let-go of stressful emotions and related toxins and then wake up the next day feeling refreshed, recuperated and even better consolidated our learning of something,
However, what if there is simply too much accumulated stress, worry or anxiety to process. Perhaps due to work, personal issues, stressful events or unresolved emotional stuff. The mind, all night long, is working hard to process all that but it may not be able to do so before waking up the next day. Often clients say to me they wake up the next morning feeling tired. For me, this is an indicator that daily stress is too high, the mind is overwhelmed, and they are relying too much on just sleep to process their stress.
There are lots of self-care measures we can use during the day to help process stress but we can find ourselves too busy to use them. The result is relying solely on our sleep to process the stress. It’s like a bottleneck. Which becomes even more if we don’t get enough sleep. If we don’t get 6.5 to 8 hours sleep per night, or enough quality sleep, we don’t get enough of the 5 rounds of slow wave sleep we need to give us the best chance of recuperation.
So if there is just too much stressful emotions to process in one nights sleep, it follows that you could get stuck in a tiring worry/anxiety replay loop.
What is the solution?
WHAT IF you habitually integrated into your day self care routines that helped to you de-escalate stressful emotions and process negative thoughts. Certain types of exercise help you do that, ie bouncing, High Intensity Interval Training, intervals of walking and running. Certain types of productive rest techniques help you do that, ie Havening.
WHAT IF, just before going to sleep, we managed to squeeze in a positive narrative, linked to a desired outcome/performance goal, that could also feature in the slow wave replay? Then we literally have an opportunity to positively influence our dreams for the better.
Even better, WHAT IF just before sleep you could use a simple technique, called Self-Havening, a neuroscience informed technique that basically mimics slow wave sleep, to help let-go of unhelpful emotions and then imagine that better day tomorrow, elevating that positive narrative even further, ready for sowing into your slow wave sleep?
Which, may I remind you, will more likely happen on auto pilot, 5 times in the night, if you take time to optimise the quality of your sleep, ie by integrating Self-Havening and other self care routines as standard into your days.
Since we have this potential for 5 rounds of autopilot healing every night, why wouldn’t we want to help optimise our onboard therapy centre, that is sleep, to make it a essential ingredient towards being the best version of our ourselves. To learn better, to perform better, to feel better.
Click here or on the image to read about the research. Find out more about Havening on the website.
Author
Jan Carpenter
Found of Turn Over A New LEAF
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