Get adequate sleep before learning new material to optimize your brain’s capacity to initially imprint and lay down new memory traces, as sleep deprivation can lead to a 20-40% deficit in memory formation.
Sleep after learning is crucial for strengthening new memories, acting like a “save button” to prevent forgetting and future-proof information in your brain.
Utilize sleep to foster creative insights by allowing your brain to interconnect new memories with existing knowledge, leading to a revised understanding and novel solutions.
For motor skill learning (e.g., sports, musical instruments), ensure you get sleep after practice, as sleep is essential for enhancing performance speed and accuracy, even without further practice.
Prioritize sufficient sleep to enhance athletic performance, including peak muscle performance, vertical jump height, and time to exhaustion, while also significantly reducing injury risk.
When dieting for weight loss, ensure sufficient sleep, as sleep deprivation can cause you to lose lean muscle mass instead of fat, making weight management less effective.
Avoid pulling all-nighters before learning, as sleep deprivation can significantly reduce your brain’s capacity to form new memories, with deficits ranging from 20% to 40%.
To ensure long-term retention of learned material, prioritize sleep rather than cramming, as cramming without sufficient sleep leads to rapid forgetting over time.
Take a 90-minute nap after initial learning to restore and even boost your brain’s capacity to learn new information, potentially improving learning by about 20%.
If underslept, schedule important learning or performance tasks during your natural circadian peak of alertness (e.g., late morning for early chronotypes, midday for late chronotypes) to help offset sleep deficits.
Avoid cutting short the last quarter of your sleep, especially in the morning, as this period is rich in Stage 2 non-REM sleep and crucial for consolidating motor skills and enhancing physical performance.
Engage in physical activity during the day to improve the quality of your sleep, particularly increasing deep sleep at night.
Actively “sleep on a problem” to leverage sleep’s ability to cross-link new information with existing knowledge, fostering non-obvious associations and creative insights.
Upon waking, avoid immediately checking your phone for at least 30 minutes to allow creative insights and reorganized information from sleep to percolate into your conscious mind, rather than being eclipsed by external stimuli.
To capture creative insights, emulate Thomas Edison’s napping protocol: hold an object (e.g., steel ball bearings) over a surface that will make noise when dropped (e.g., metal saucepan), allowing you to drift into a liminal sleep state and wake up to record emerging ideas.
Be aware of a natural, transient increase in alertness that can occur in the evening before bedtime; recognize it will pass and continue with wind-down protocols to facilitate sleep.
Motor memories can be held for about 16 hours before sleep consolidates them; therefore, you don’t need to learn immediately before bed for sleep to enhance the skill.