I get dismissive when I hear people habitually use trite, worn-out expressions as a response. It’s like they are pre-loaded on the tip of the tongue and just come driveling out. It feels to me that maybe it’s a crutch so they don’t have to think or process what the conversation is about. Especially so when the expression used doesn’t fit the context. They are not engaged, really, and maybe the use of these idioms helps them think they are. I know I should be more patient, hanging in there longer or trying something different to help usher them to more meaningful dialogue. But too often I don’t.
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This morning while talking with a friend, I smiled as I realized there is one such idiom that I use repeatedly: “sleep on it”. You know I have to justify myself, so here goes. Its common definition is: “to postpone a decision until the following day so that one has additional time to consider it”. In my experience though, it is not about just giving it time for more conscious thinking or about time’s thief, procrastination. It is about making a better decision, giving your brain the freedom to process your thoughts subconsciously. I found some scientific evidence to support my experiences in a research study linking sleep and memory that was carried out by Dr. Robert Stickgold, then assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues. While the study was focused on learning new skills, it applies to the processing of new information, which is what more challenging decisions demand of us. These researchers tested their hypothesis about the benefits of two types of sleep. They explained that during the first two hours of slow-wave sleep, “certain brain chemicals plummet and information flows out of a memory region called the hippocampus and into the cortex. During the next four hours, the brain then engages in a kind of internal dialogue that distributes this new information into the appropriate networks and categories. Then, a slow process of protein synthesis begins to strengthen connections between nerve cells that have this newly acquired information. Finally, in the last two hours of sleep, brain chemistry and activity again change drastically as the cortex goes into an active dreaming state. The hippocampus is shut off from the cortex as the brain literally solidifies the newly made connections throughout its memory banks. If you don't get good sleep and enough sleep after you learn new stuff, you won't integrate it effectively into your memories,'' Dr. Stickgold said. Making better decisions and committing to memory these decisions with the rationale and thinking behind them is the foundation of experiential wisdom. So, if your habit is to worry about decisions to be made to the point where they keep you awake or awaken you restlessly in the night cutting short your sleep, you’re not giving all these chemical processes enough time to complete their work. The quality of the decisions you make may suffer. ''This is the first study to show that humans have a sleep window for learning,'' said Dr. Carlyle Smith, a professor of psychology at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, and a sleep study expert. ''It means that people who cut their sleep short for the last couple of hours each night generally won't do as well as those who get a full night's sleep.'' ''In any kind of learning,'' Dr. Stickgold says, ''it's a great idea to sleep on it.'' That’s good enough for me, and I’m just going to continue to allow myself to unabashedly use this idiom and hope that others don’t tune me out because they’ve heard it before. |