I’ve just read ‘Why we sleep’ by Matthew Walker. On the back cover it has the usual ‘OTT quotes to grab your attention’ although with this book I’ve had to retract somewhat on that comment. O’Connell (Guardian) says ‘it’s been an eye opener’ and now I am agreeing with him. McConnachie (Sunday Times) says ‘you’ll never think of your bedtime in the same way again’ and again for me, he’s right.

The book is an absorbing and sobering read.

It has a lovely balance between being readable and yet giving neuroscience or other hard-hitting facts. When I picked it up, I read 120 pages that day as it was fascinating. It was a little bit repetitious but methodically works it way through explaining various aspects and then various consequences. The underlying theme is that we are designed for a different way of life than we currently live and there are consequences to that.

My lasting thought is whether mobiles phones and tablets are the equivalent of 21^st century cigarettes: Addictive and carcinogenic.

He talks about how sleep is one of the most stupid things nature could allow us to do as we are so vulnerable, especially when paralysed in REM sleep. Therefore, it must be incredibly valuable. However, he also talks about how with ‘earlier risers’ and ‘night owls’, a group of people can effectively spread who is awake across 20 hours thus only being totally vulnerable for 4 hrs. It also means that for us night owls, early mornings required for work and school are not that healthy. Interestingly, dolphins rest (sleep) each hemisphere of their brain separately so that one half is awake and keeps them alive – being totally asleep underwater isn’t a good option. The info on birds made me smile. For birds that roost together in a line, say on a telegraph wire, everyone gets a full sleep except the ones at each end. They need to keep their outer eye, and therefore opposite brain hemisphere, awake to watch out for predators. So, half way through the night they supposedly turn around by 180^o so that they can rest the other half of their brain.

I hadn’t realised that sleep is driven by 3 facets: The circadian rhythm which is our 24hr 15min clock rises and falls twice a day which is why we have a lull around 3pm and 3am. Melatonin release is triggered as the light goes down and is the signal to the rest of the brain to shut down for sleep. Walker has a lot to say about the effects of being on electronic devices, LED lighting and general bright lighting and how much that delays this trigger happening. As the morning light rises the Melatonin concentration reduces and we wake up. So, if you are feeling groggy in the morning then bright light is useful but, in the evening, lower level or mood light is much better. This is one thing I have changed as a result of reading this book – I use lamps or use fewer lights and resist the urge to have brightly lit rooms. I also have the blue light filters on my electronic devices and being strict about switching the m off around 8pm. Even reading on a tablet will push out the melatonin effect verses reading a paper book.

The third item is a chemical called Adenosine which I hadn’t heard of before. Basically, Adenosine starts building up from the point you wake up. Its effect is to build up an ‘urge to sleep’. The longer you are awake the more pressure it puts on you to sleep which is why you start to feel tired after 16hrs awake. Then when you get 8hrs sleep the Adenosine is flushed out from the brain and you wake up refreshed. Any less sleep time and some of the Adenosine remains so that next day you have a higher starting level of it already and thus feel tired more quickly. There appears to be a lot of evidence for the effects of 6 or less hours sleep which he says is effectively self-euthanasia. (He’s very passionate about sleep.)

He covers how learning, memory and cogitative abilities are enhanced or impaired with sleep. This couples with the information in ‘Anxious’ as the proteins that build long-term memory need 4-6hrs to do so either through sleeping or through being more relaxed after learning something otherwise the process is interrupted. A thought for L&D people perhaps.

He quite graphically covers how lack of sleep kills you and a number of the various sleep conditions. Narcolepsy sounds terrible. One aspect is that the switch, which fully paralyses you during REM sleep (except your eyes), is faulty so that with any heightened emotion or startlement it flicks on and at that instance your body paralyses itself. Not a good outcome if you are up a ladder or swimming. Apparently, these people learn to nullify their emotions in order to reduce this happening.

He goes on to talk about how to get a decent night’s sleep (p291) and how to do that sensibly. I have to say having followed one or two relevant items for me, I am getting off to sleep much better these days and I am much more committed to doing that having read this book.

On a lighter note, a colleague sent me through this YouTube video, which covers everything you need to know about the brain and it is hilarious.

And on a final note, at Cambridge University’s 30^th Neuroscience Day I attended earlier this month, there was a research poster talking about how their ‘findings show that recalling more specific positive memories has long-lasting effects on cortisol and mood’ (reducing and enhancing respectively). This gives me more conviction when advocating this type of exercise to coachees.

I am off now to set-up the login to my new University Moodle website – 6 months after leaving the other one! Puts swapping banks or internet providers into context.

Happy New Year and best wishes for 2018.

Over Christmas I read LeDoux’s book ‘Anxious’. I like LeDoux as he seems to get concepts across well for me and he seems quite pragmatic. In Anxious he starts out by separating feelings (a human concept) from threat responses and neural defence circuits. I liked his thought that a mouse has a threat response via neural defence circuits but, without language, we don’t really know if it feels fear. For him, fear is the label we give to the collective biological activity that is happening at the point we focus on it.

Thanks to Ledoux I have now managed to detach my research from 'the Self' conversation – phew. Although I have noted down ten different ways in which authors, outside of psychology, are using the term and they vary from neural circuitry to conceptual notions: Often they mix them up as well.

The book is quite neuro-terminology heavy but it made me think a lot as I had not come across or thought much about everything it covered. It appears that we need language to have our type of consciousness which is where ‘we know we know’ and I have been trying to work out what it would be like to plan or decide without using words in my head. I think you must have a different level of consciousness then, like Damasio’s Core Self which is responding in the moment but has no past or future. It’s a bit like when you are engrossed in something, you aren’t thinking in relation to anything larger than what you are doing at that moment. He says that ‘the price of predicting the future is anxiety’ and I wonder if something that used to be a valuable human asset is now becoming our Achilles heel.

LeDoux feels that fear can only be a feeling if you are conscious of it. It also appears that if you can focus your attention firmly on something else then the visual networks responding to seeing a threat are dampened so the action of the amygdala is less. This is like when you are engrossed in a book and you notice less of what is happening around you so you feel calmer, or more likely, you aren’t really aware of how you feel. Attention is powerful and quite narrow as well.

If your attention is less focussed then external events can more easily creep into your consciousness. This matches with the reading I have done about how many people these days are easily distracted and how more anxious they are as well. I can see now why Mindfulness training can reduce stress so much, as you literally don’t see/ hear minor issues that don’t need your attention. However, if you did notice them they would spike a threat response of some level. Once the amygdala is triggered it makes the brain more active and therefore it becomes more effective at processing things it is attending to (threat) which is partly why that is quite tiring for any length of time.

He also cited an experiment where thinking of something pleasant whilst there was a threat stimulus reduces the amygdala’s activity which starts to back-up some therapeutic and NLP techniques. I am also beginning to experiment with purposefully and firmly focusing my attention on something else when I start to have unhelpful conversations in my head (that I don’t need to have) and it has helped.

He talks about extinction techniques where memories can be extinguished and I thought therefore they were erased but it doesn’t seem to be the case. It appears that what happens is that you create a new stronger positive association that becomes neutrally stronger than the old negative response. However, under stress or in certain key situations the old response may reappear. This is worth talking to coachees about if you are working on embedding a better response to something as it prepares them for that happening rather than them thinking it hasn’t worked and giving up on it.

On the DProf front, things have been going well and I am feeling upbeat about it going forwards. My application to join UWTSD should go through soon and I have just about completed the three assignments for this module. I like the slightly more structured approach with key touch points which doesn’t allow you to vanish for months.

Having pulled my project back into my coaching that has been very cathartic and energising. Also, it has helped with my interview questions as I have a real feel for what I want to do with the information at the very end. Plus, people I have tested my new angle on get what I am doing and why I am doing it much easier now.

l also know I am in a good place as I’m finding it easier to stand my ground and feel comfortable in doing that. One thing I learned from last year is to get the person raising the point to explain it a bit more rather than just react to it. It’s amazing how often there’s not much behind it even though it is conveyed with a certain ‘rightness’.

Having repositioned my research, I also reflected on my method. It relied heavily on a number of neuroscientists being involved over a period of time and that was worrying me but now I have been advised to use a Mixed Methods approach. This is a bit of a catch-all phrase but it has allowed me to separate the neuroscientist interviews away from the questionnaires which get the neuroscientists to rate the ideas given in the interviews. This means as long as I can get some neuroscientists to interview it is not so bad if the ratings part does not happen in full.

So overall it feels more worthwhile, simpler and doable. I also feel I am 100% doing my research now rather than what some else suggested, even though that is how it started.

Is it really a month ago since I did the last blog? I suppose that means a lot must have been happening. Not quite so much on the neuroscience side as I have been working hard to get my resubmission sorted but I am reading (trying) Damasio’s latest book ‘Self comes to mind’. I definitely think I have learned more about human nature and behaviour through reading these types of books than any ‘Neuroscience for ...’ book. I find the neuroscience elements go in subliminally as they are often being used and I don’t feel anxious that I need to know all that stuff. Anyway I have a proper textbook for that if I need it.

Let me give you a few themes from the book:

Simple cells, in order to survive, must be able to detect internal and external changes. They must have a response policy for these and be able to act to avoid the threat. The response policy needs to have conditions which if met trigger a movement as the simple cell does not ‘think’. It appears as if the cells act with intention but they don’t. They are just doing what they do which all adds up to a lot. Brains evolved to make this more effective and varied, so they can ‘sense, decide and act’.

The basic intention of the organism’s design is to maintain structure with the overarching purpose to survive so genes can be reproduced. (Easy to forget when life seems to be about which mobile phone or App to buy.) Therefore incentive mechanisms are needed for guidance, so chemicals are released to signal good things (dopamine, oxytocin) or threats (cortisol , Prolactin) to optimise behaviour towards or away from. However, if you have senses you have far more information on the external situation. Therefore, we have developed beyond mere survival to having certain ranges of well-being.

He’s also big on the brain making maps; maps of everything. Brains are constantly up dating their map of the body so it knows that it’s ok or whether it has to do something to get in back within that tight range of requirements needed for survival. He also suggests that event maps make up our memories. He feels that it is more efficient to store ways of recreating maps than every detail of a memory. In essence, the map retriggers the detail of that event within us. There certainly seems to be a lot of evidence that there is neural firing similar to the original event, which happens when we recall it. This can mean that if a memory gets triggered in some way – of which there are many – then a response happens whether we like it or not. Depending on its strength and our abilities to control it, it may undermine what we are doing at that moment. Sometimes we will know this is happening (typically from explicit memories) and sometimes we just know how we feel, and assume that the current situation is making us feel that way (usually from implicit memories). Useful to know when the other person acts ‘irrationally’.

He talks about how we might learn due to mirror neurons. These mimic in our brain what we see others doing. This means we encode how to do things and may be partly how we learn so many things as we grow up.  He talks about how if we have encoded it through mirror neurons then we can act it out as required. It makes me think in coaching that maybe I might need to do more real-plays of situations that my coachees want to handle so that they have a memory of doing it. In essence it puts it in their system. I wonder if this is why visualisation has an effect. Seems like a topic that could have more relevance once further explored and understood, so maybe one to look out for.

The saga of my panel has continued and it has been interesting to notice how I have been going through the change curve and what has helped that. It definitely helped to know that I have passed, although the conditions I need to meet are as stringent as I’d feared. Knowing was a mixed blessing as it rekindled some of the emotions but at I least understood the size of the task. Later that week we met as a group and it was helpful to talk about it. Partly it ‘normalised’ the experience and partly it enabled me to explore my options going forward. I also untangled what I felt I could have done differently, from the situation’s dynamic. This certainly helped me think more rationally and tempered the emotional response. I read in LaDoux that the emotional response is about creating action to re-stabilise the system and that once that action happens, the inhibitory neurons are fired to turn off the fight/ flight response. So the act of creating a response quenches what initiate it.

Another week passed until I spoke with my Advisor about the conditions, so I started by tackling the obvious ones. Doing one thing helped me to think clearer and then another condition made more sense, so I started working on that as well. Then I understood another, so by the time I spoke with my Advisor I had sent through my plan for addressing 5/6 of the conditions.

One useful outcome is that I now feel even more certain that my research method is well chosen as I have had to put up a stronger defence of it. Martin Seligman in ‘Authentic Happiness’ says that people move on when they can make something ‘good’ out of the situation, no matter how small. I’d go with that. And although begrudgingly at first, I have got to ‘acceptance’ on the change curve mainly because I have separated what I feel is inexcusable behaviour from the extra thinking the conditions have made me do. Now I can handle the two things independently.