Blog Posts 1–5, based on the United States of America Department of the Army Field Manual: Holistic Healing and Fitness, describe what really matters for your child’s sleep. If sleep is an important enough topic for national defense than surely sleep should be considered a serious topic for parenting!
Your child needs a healthy brain. A healthy brain needs healthy sleep.
The brain is the only organ in the body that requires sleep for its healthy development and function.
Use sleep as a tool to sharpen the brain.
BRAIN HEALTH #1 |
HEALTHY SLEEP DECLUTTERS THE BRAIN (Blog Post 15) The purpose of sleep is to weaken or prune the unimportant noise coming into our brain so that important signals remain stronger. During sleep, pruning or active forgetting is vital for “helping the brain forget new information that is not important. This culling of information allows more memory resources to be available to us the next day. Only during REM sleep, certain nerve cells started firing the electrical signals necessary to effectively remove unimportant memories. Experimental sleep restriction primarily leads to deficits in REM sleep, so maybe the brain gets cluttered with unimportant memories, making it hard for us to focus on the present. |
BRAIN HEALTH #2 |
UNHEALTHY SLEEP MESSES UP MELATONIN |
BRAIN HEALTH #3 |
UNHEALTHY SLEEP MESSES UP BRAIN CIRCUITS |
BRAIN HEALTH #4 |
SLEEP IS FOOD FOR THE BRAIN (Blog Post 38) Sleep is needed for specific brain regions to grow. Sleep is a key environmental contributor to brain optimization processes and plays a crucial role in brain maturation. |
BRAIN HEALTH #5 |
HEALTHY SLEEP IMPROVES NEURODEVELOPMENT (Blog Posts 75 and 76) Objective measurements of sleep duration in 5-13 years showed that longer sleep durations were associated with better cognitive function. IQ scores in 6-year-old children were higher in children with longer sleep durations. |
For more Instagram Reels:
Blog Post 90A: Fake News
Blog Post 95A: Sleep Tips
Blog Post 96A: Sleep Basics