Daily Dose of English 87
Sleep
Daily Dose of English 87
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about sleep or slumber or, uh, nighttime, uh, rest, naps. All those different things are just words for sleep. And sleep is one of the most fundamental things that we do as people. Everybody sleeps. Everybody spends hours of their life every single day resting and sleeping. And it's very, very important for us as people. In a lot of ways, we sleep so that we can be awake. everything else, it's really important for us to sleep because if we didn't, we couldn't be awake otherwise. It is really good for our body, it's really good for our minds, it's really good for everything. I mean, we are sort of just body and mind, right? But it's really good for our digestion, our learning, our just health in general, our muscle growth, our Aging, everything is so important. It's very important that we sleep, basically. And it's hard for a lot of people. Sleep is not something that is easy for everybody, despite it being so, so critical and fundamental to our life. In a lot of ways, it's kind of like eating. A lot of people struggle with eating and with food and with nutrition, despite it being such a basic thing for human survival. Everybody knows that we must eat, and yet it still can be hard. right? Especially with so much bad food out there and bad advice or if people don't want to cook or they don't know how to cook or they don't like food and all these different things make food a difficult problem. It is not really anybody's fault if they have trouble with food. It's the school's, education institution's fault. It's not necessarily each individual person's fault. And a similar thing goes for sleep. Most people don't know what it is or why it's important. They don't know how to get good sleep. They don't understand their own sleep. Because I think one of the problems with sleep and with health in general is that it's often said that Like something works for everybody, right? Oh, everybody has to sleep, so everybody must sleep the same. Well, not really. Everybody sleeps a little bit different. Some people sleep longer, some people sleep for shorter. At different ages in your life, you sleep different amounts. Some people have problems when they sleep, sleep apnea. That's a problem where you have trouble breathing when you're asleep. and people with sleep apnea need a machine that will help them breathe at night so that they don't get terrible sleep. And a lot of people who don't have a machine to help them breathe that have sleep apnea, sleep terrible and they don't really know it. They wake up dozens if not hundreds of times every night for a few seconds because they can't breathe. And their body's like, okay, wake up for a second, hang on, we're gonna die. And so the machine can help them change their life because they can actually sleep. And there's all sorts of things like that. People that dream more, dream less, people that fall asleep easier or faster or slower. And so understanding your sleep health and your own personal needs is really important for getting good sleep. Um, sleep is something that I'm always, I've not always been interested in, but for a while, I've been interested in sleep. Um, especially after I read a book called why we sleep, um, which is a very good book. It's about sleep and different studies and what we know about sleep and somebody who's essentially devoted his life to studying sleep. Um, and it was a very interesting book and very, I think very, very important to know about. Just as a person, it's because it's so important to us, right? Sleep is also critical for language learners. If you want to learn English well, you have to sleep. You can't just replace an hour of sleep every day with an hour of learning and expect that to be a good change because you will suddenly have an hour less of sleep, which you might need. And so if you want to be a good language learner, focus on your sleep health and make sure that you are getting enough of it. Something that we do at Refold is think about, that's the company, the language learning company I work for, is make sure that we are providing good language learning advice for anybody who wants to learn a language. And so we talk a lot about this in the background or like in behind the scenes as a team. And one of the things that we realized is needed, is necessary for language learning is a bunch of these things that aren't related to language learning necessarily. So health and habit building and all these things are incredibly important and yet every company out there pretty much ignores this and just focuses on things like verbs and grammar and vocabulary because that's what's obviously like language learning related, right? But people who don't have good habits and learning systems in place to make sure that they learn every day don't make it. They don't succeed. Same goes for people that don't get much sleep. If they feel terrible every single day, their learning is just not as good. And you need to make sure that these things are taken care of or else you're not going to be the same level of language learner. We've been working a little bit and thinking about all the various things that go into being a good language learner and health, so physical and mental health are a big part of that, and sleep is a whole section that we put in the list. We're still working on all this, so I don't really have anything else to say about it, but we understand and I understand just how important it is to sleep good and well and get enough rest or else you will not learn well. So something that I find interesting also is that everybody has different amounts of sleep that they need. Some people function very well with only seven hours of sleep, but some people need nine to feel rested. And that's fine. That's a pretty large number, large fluctuation. I've been doing some tests and trying to figure things out on my own. And I think that I need about eight hours to feel well rested, eight hours straight. And so I'm still figuring that out. It's not, it's like not a thing you can just learn in a day or two. It takes a while to realize exactly what amount of sleep your body needs on an average day. Of course, there's going to be days where you need more or need a little bit less. Um, but on average you need. a certain amount and you can figure that out for yourself and find what number works for you. Personally though, I am interested in finding ways to feel better and not like impact my health, but be able to sleep less. I've been waking up at 6 a.m. for the past several months. At this point, it's normal for me, probably like six to eight months I've been doing it. And I do feel pretty tired in the morning. I feel groggy. And so unless I go to sleep at 10 p.m., which is kind of too early for what I want. And something that I heard about many years ago that I want to explore more is called polyphasic sleep. And in a nutshell, polyphasic sleep is the practice, is something where you try to sleep less but sleep better. I'm not gonna go too far into it, but the main idea is that we have a couple of different kinds of sleep. There's just the regular sleep, but then there's also REM, which is a very important part for like your brain function, that sort of thing. And there's another one called like RSM or something. I don't remember the exact name. But those two numbers, we only get a couple hours per day. It's only like two or three. And the rest of our sleep is just normal, essentially resting. And so the idea behind polyphasic, poly being multiple and phase being phase, is that you sleep a couple times in the day. So you have a nap and then you have your normal sleep during the night. And you do a couple things to increase your, to not decrease your important sleep time and instead decrease your regular sleep time and then just rest in other ways. And the idea is that you can have the same amount of energy and good sleep by reducing a little bit of the not as important sleep. You can read a lot more about it on polyphasic.net. There's a lot of great information there. I'm still figuring out what I want to do. I haven't started trying it yet, but I'm interested in being able to not feel like shit in the morning, basically. And so that's sort of my goal with it is to, when I do try it, we'll see how it goes. I'll probably make an episode on it once I've been doing it for a little while, but currently I'm still not at the place where I've been able to start. But I find it very interesting because it makes sense on the surface logically to me. And there seem to be a bunch of people that it works very well for. And so I'd like to see if that works well for me. And I'm not sure if it would for you, but if you're curious, you can at least read about it, right? That won't hurt. It's in English and you can practice that. But anyways, that's enough for this episode. I've been recording this for a little bit longer than I'd like. Thank you so much, very, so very much for listening and I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye-bye.
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