Charles Lau dot Com

Have you ever noticed yourself able to think even better when you are about to sleep, or even in the middle of the sleep when you suddenly have a good idea about doing a business really big? Well, that happens to me and I think it might happen to any one of you here too. But why is this so? While we are at work on the desk, it seems like we are only focusing ourselves on finishing up the daily work as a routine… And sometimes, we just couldn’t remember that certain thing when we are trying so hard to retrieve that piece of memory in our brain… It may be in a moment of only 5 minutes ago when you were talking to a friend about something, but 5 minutes later you forgot what you were talking about when you switched topic…

Let me introduce you two things in life which explain why we think best when we rest…

1. Sleep
2. Brain

Sleep
Sleep is a way of recapping what you have learned for the day.  Did you notice why your baby is able to sleep so much everyday?

Just imagine yourself as a baby who is just born into this fantastic world… You start to see a lot of fascinating things happening around you, you can’t stop learning who your daddy is, who your mummy is, how your house looks like, how to eat and drink, why you are here, why your daddy and mummy making faces in front of you and you are really amused by it with your laughs, you start to put everything that you can hold into your mouth, etc…

As a baby, you are learning so many things about life and its meaning.  There seems to have a never-ending things to learn from… And you will start to get really tired mentally… So you sleep… Sleep is the only way to rejuvenate yourself and it is the moment when your brain is doing some categorization of your memory (See next paragraph about Brain.).  You have so much things to digest, that you eventually sleep even more to digest them all before you open your eyes for even more feeding of information!

When you grow up into an adult, you may sleep even less than normal sleeping time… You will start to have missing information here and there about the things you have learned yesterday.  And people will start to wonder why they are having lost memory… And they knew themselves, saying “Probably because I didn’t have enough sleep…”

Sleep is even more important when you are embarking into a new business, or learning something new from an education course you are taking, or learning a new job you are undertaking.  Sleep will help to make your learning curve much faster!  Because what you have learned for the day, you will digest them all properly in your sleep and you will be able to apply them in your work the next day with both fully-freshed person as well as maintaining a good memory of your work.

On the other hand, over-sleeping is actually making an adverse effect on yourself!  When you have nothing to learn for the day, and you kept on going for a sleep you will start to make your brain even more lazier… Because your brain will have nothing to digest while you are sleeping!  And it will eventually make your whole life really lazy because of your lazy brain… And all the bad things will start to happen one after another… You will not have a fulfilling life ahead!

Brain
Thoughts are being stored in different “directories” in your brain.  And they actually work 24 hours a day!  So make sure you don’t have a dead brain!  While you are doing something, you will start to learn something as well.  But when you are doing a routine everyday which you have already learn and hence your brain has nothing to do but to wait, you will start to experience sleepiness… That’s when your brain is telling you “I am switching off myself first, since there is nothing to do right now.”  It is especially dangerous if you are driving along the road which is the usual route every day… When you are very seasoned with your driving and route, you basically have nothing to teach your brain… And when your brain is switched off, so is yourself and you might just fall asleep while driving!  So please be careful while you are driving on the same route on a routine basis…

Ok, your brain is very much uncontrollable by you… What do I mean by that?  I show you a step by step of how your brain works:

1. When you learn something, you are telling your brain that you have this piece of new information to store.
2. Your brain gets the information from you, and start to put inside a directory where it feels correct without your input.
3. And when you want to retrieve that information from your brain again, you start to ask your brain and your brain will start to give you all sorts of “relevant” information…
4. Sometimes, the brain will give you the correct information so that you can work properly!  But it happens that you just couldn’t get the information that you want!  That’s because the brain has categorized it in the wrong directory!  So, when you were doing something else which is totally not related, you might sometimes get that lost information out of nowhere!  That’s when you start to “scold” your brain for putting it in the wrong directory…. And your brain will start to store it “correctly” again… But still, the brain might not have put in the exact directory that you want!

Just like any topic that we are blogging about… A topic can be categorized into  one or a few categories in your blog… So how do you usually categorize it?  Do you tag it with all the relevant categories altogether?  Or you would just choose one category which you feel most appropriate?  It is the same analogy where your brain might not know where to categorize that piece of information!

So if you have learned a great deal of things for the day, remember to sleep more… Because sleeping is to stop yourself from telling your brain even more things to store, while your brain is busy storing all the unprocessed information in that few hours of sleep…

Try to associate the things you have learned with something very relevant so that your brain will understand better which directory to store your piece of information!  Well, you can try to ask more questions about that certain topic that you are learning so that you can associate with more things… Try to say it out too to further confirm what you have learned!

Conclusion
I hope this article is helping you to work better in any environment you are in… It has assisted me a lot in my business endeavors and I believe it will help you too!  Remember to sleep more if you have learned a great deal of information for the day… And try to associate your lessons learned with more things which are relevant…