Event review of Snooze your way to success! with Melanie Davies

Caring for our creativity isn’t always at the top of our minds, but it should be! At last night’s CamCreatives, Melanie Davies FCCT talked about how we need sleep to be our best creative selves.

The UK loses 200,000 working days a year from poor sleep. But probably more important is the productivity loss to the UK economy of c.£37 billion a year!

We’ve all had unproductive days when we’ve dragged ourselves to work after a bad night’s sleep and avoided all the complex problem-solving tasks from our to-do list!

Chronic poor sleep not only affects our productivity, but it has lots of physical health implications as well including dementia, diabetes, obesity and heart disease.

Melanie talked about two types of sleep – deep sleep and REM.

Deep sleep happens in the early part of the night and it’s for healing and securing memories.

REM sleep is where you dream, process emotions, and your brain makes new connections. It’s the REM sleep that can help your brain unlock your creativity.

When people lack REM sleep research shows that they can’t read emotions in others so well. If you’re in a meeting, for example, reading the room is important!

Sleeping on a problem is a good thing to do. Sometimes we dream about difficult things that are happening – like a relationship break-up. Research has shown that when you dream about your problems it helps desensitise you to those emotions and you can recover mentally more quickly.

So, how do we sleep better? Melanie’s sleep tips:

• Wake up at a regular time each day – this includes weekends as a long lie-in is like giving yourself jet lag
• Dim the lights in the evening – bright overhead lights trick your body into thinking it’s awake time
• Limit screen time in the evening and if you have to check your phone put it on greyscale
• Make sure you move during the day – a walk in the morning sunshine is perfect
• Have your bedroom cool, dark and free of electronic devices.
• Don’t get into the habit of working from your laptop in bed because you are conditioning your brain into thinking that the bed is a workspace. Train your body and brain to associate bed with sleeping.
• Limit caffeine and alcohol because they can disrupt REM sleep. Caffeine, on average, takes 5 hours to wear off.
• If you wake up in the night, don’t look at the clock!

When we are buzzing with ideas how do we turn off our creative brain? Make time before going to bed to get all your ideas down on paper, then enjoy a good sleep with plenty of REM where those ideas can percolate!

Our next meet-up will be the Christmas quiz – it’s more like Taskmaster than your average pub quiz. Don’t worry about coming on your own – most people do! We’ll get everyone into teams. Save the date: Tuesday 17 December.

If you have an idea for a talk get in touch with one of the team.