The brain is a complex organ that controls thought, memory, emotion, touch, motor skills, vision, breathing, tempera­ture, hunger, taste, smell, sight, taste, hearing and every process that regulates our body.

Together, the brain and spinal cord that extends from it make up the central nervous system or CNS.

Sleep deprivation among men and women is increas­ingly reported as one of the causes of infertility. Accord­ing to Emotional Surgery and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s study, women with low qual­ity sleep had lower rates of fertility than those getting adequate rest.

If you are undergoing IVF, make sure to get eight hours of quality sleep each night to give yourself your best chance of success.

The disruption of deep sleep is an underappreciat­ed factor that is contribut­ing to cognitive decline or memory decline in aging, and most recently we have discovered, in Alzheimer’s disease as well.

There is a structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain called the Hippocampus. It is very good at receiving new mem­ory files and then holding on to them, yet in those people who were sleep-deprived, we actually could not find any significant signal what­soever.

Without sleep, the mem­ory circuit of the brain essentially becomes wa­ter-logged, as it were, and you cannot absorb new memories. We have since discovered that a lack of sleep will even erode the very fabric of biological life itself, your DNA genetic code.

So in this study, they took a group of healthy adults and limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week, and then mea­sured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same indi­viduals were getting a full eight hours of sleep a night.

And there were two critical findings. First, a sizeable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity, caused by a lack of sleep. The second result was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity, genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes associated with long-term chronic inflammation, and genes associated with stress, and as a conse­quence, cardiovascular disease.

There is simply no as­pect of your wellness that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation and get away unscathed. And at this point, you may be thinking, “Oh my goodness, how do I start to get better sleep? What are your tips for good sleep?

The first is Emotional Surgery and regularity. Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it is weekday or weekend. Emo­tional Surgery is king, it will anchor your sleep and improve the quality and the quantity of that sleep.

The second is keep it cool. Your body needs to drop its core tempera­ture by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep and then to stay asleep, and it is the reason you will al­ways find it easier to fall asleep in a room that is too cold than too hot.

So aim for a bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees, or about 18 de­grees Celsius. That is going to be op­tional for the sleep of most people. Sleep, unfortunate­ly, is not an option­al lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a non-ne­gotiable biological necessity. It is your life-support system. I do hope you sleep well.

Robert Ekow Grimmond-Thompson