"When your sleep is disrupted throughout the night, you don't have the opportunity to progress through the sleep stages to get the amount of slow-wave sleep that is key to the feeling of restoration."
"During the two hundred years that have followed the publication and subsequent censorship of Goethe's novel, social scientific research has largely confirmed the thesis that affect, attitudes, beliefs and behavior can indeed spread through populations as if they were somehow infectious."Fortunately, it's not only negative emotions that seem to spread like wildfire; positive emotions are contagious too. It's an important point to remember when choosing with whom to associate and spend your time, as surrounding yourself with happy people may be key to feeling happy yourself.
Fear is a part of everyday life, for all of us. We worry about the mortgage, about the way we look, whether we'll be fired. We worry whether we'll be able to take the kids on vacation, or how we'll afford to pay the bills. The fact is, the more stressed we are, the less healthy we are. Doctors and scientists point out parallels between our growing rates of trauma and questionable decision making, and the fact that they're leading to greater rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and high cholesterol. But when it comes to children, the effects of trauma can be much, much worse.
Scared Sick: The Role of Childhood Trauma in Adult Disease, the new book by Robin Karr-Morse and Meredith S. Wiley (respectively, a family therapist and a nonprofit worker with a background in family policy), explains just how profoundly babies and young children are affected by traumatic experiences. In the remarkably researched work, the two women show that early life malnutrition and abuse can affect a kid's nervous system well into adulthood. Children raised in traumatic environments are more prone to cancer, chronic pain and even diabetes. The duo's previous book, Ghosts From the Nursery, looked at the childhood roots of violence, but this new work is no less significant in its conclusions about American culture.
"The unexamined life isn't worth living."Socrates' observation also applies to business. When Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google, he famously said, "We run this company on questions, not answers."
Comment: More interesting information about how reading rewires your brain: