Sleep, Creativity and Learning Styles

• I know about sleep. But what are learning styles?

A learning style is the unique set of preferences and non-preferences that determines the optimal way in which an individual concentrates and works.

• Does your learning style help you solve problems and be creative?

In a nutshell, yes. If you work in an environment compatible with your learning style, you will be more productive, more creative and more able to solve problems.

• Oh. Is that all?

No, not at all. Did you know what the latest research discovered? They looked into the correlation between sleep and problem solving, and they discovered that people who’ve “slept on it” are generally more able to solve the problem in question than those who stayed awake trying to solve it.

· And the link to learning styles would be...

Simple. If your learning style allows you to stop the task you have just begun and go off have a nap, it’s good news according to Sara Mednick, University of California San Diego, who conducted the study into sleep and creativity.

Mednick summarised her findings as follows: "We found that for creative problems you've already been working on, the passage of time is enough to find solutions. However, for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity."

So...

• What is your learning style?

Sleep and Learning Styles

Research studies show that we don’t get enough sleep. Teenagers and people in their twenties often sacrifice sleep time in favour of parties, computer games or TV. Adults forego sleep in order to cram more tasks into the day. Even young children, over-stimulated by their flashy toys and classes for tots, find themselves unable to settle down at night.

And yet our ability to learn is directly related to how well we can memorise new things, while our ability to memorise depends on our sleep patterns. We all know that we need enough sleep for our brains and memory to function properly, but what’s surprising is the fact that information becomes "cemented" in our brains as we sleep.

One study suggests that it is valuable to study right before going to sleep because sleep helps you store what you’ve learnt. In other words, if your Learning Style calls for evening-time studying, you may be better off than somebody who is a morning person.

What is your Learning Style? If you’re new to this site, click here to find out.

Learning Styles - How Your Learning Style Can Make You Feel Sleepy

If you know a little about learning styles and working styles, you will know that learning and working in a style that clashes with your own unique preferences will - inevitably - make you feel stressed and tired.

However, recent research indicates that the problem goes a lot deeper than that. Dr Nakamori Suganuma, of Osaka University, Japan, and a lead researcher into the issue, discovered that people who spend more pre-bedtime hours using the Internet or watching television are more likely to report that they don't get enough sleep.

This is even though they sleep as long (or almost as long) as people who spend fewer pre-bedtime hours in front of a computer or television screen, because longer Internet and television use before bedtime did not correlate with getting less actual sleep.

The research, therefore, implies that electronic media have an effect on sleep demand and sleep quality, either making the users THINK they’ve had too little sleep whereas in fact they may have had enough, or causing the users to need more sleep than those who don’t use computers and TV in the pre-bedtime hours.

So, what does that have to do with learning styles? Quite simply, your learning style will often dictate how much TV you will watch and how long you will spend on the computer. If you are predisposed towards e-learning, for example, chances are, you will spend more time on the computer than somebody who is not.

Also, learning styles are responsible - to a large extent - for determining WHEN you will use the computer and watch TV, particularly for work and learning purposes.

To find out what your learning style is and whether it might be responsible for making you crave more sleep, please click here.

Learning Styles and Your Sleep

What’s your Learning Style when it comes to the preferred time of day? I’m a true-blue night owl, and if I had the world my way, we would all go to bed at 3 a.m. and sleep till lunchtime. But is it such a good idea?

“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise,” goes the old saying. I usually paraphrase it as “Early to rise and early to bed makes you no fun before you’re dead.”

Then there is “The early bird catches the worm” with the caveat that “It’s the early worm that gets caught”.

So many sayings, so much folklore. Even your mother probably told you that sleep is best before midnight. I didn’t believe her: after all, the body doesn't know what time it is, so it can’t possibly matter what time you go to bed. Surely, when they say “sleep before midnight is the healthiest for you”, they must mean “the first two or so hours of your sleep are the most important”.

However, I've just read an interesting article that explains why our mothers were right all along. Research has shown that sleeping from 10pm to 6am results in much more rest than sleep from 12-8 or 2am-10am. It's to do with the body's natural clock: our sleep hormone (melatonin) is released an hour or two after it gets dark outside. That’s our natural biological cue for banking the fire in the cave and burrowing down into the bed of straw and furs.

If you miss that cue, you will have to wait another 90 minutes or so before the second wave of sleepiness hits you... but this one will not produce sleep that’s as sound and healthy as that first hormone-laden wave.

This means that night owls are at a disadvantage biologically, because we do our best work after dark. So we have a choice:
· get some healthy sleep and miss out on our productive time (this may lead to stress because we are then forced to work in a time slot that goes against our Working or Learning Style),
· or work in your preferred evening time slot, but miss out on the health benefits of sleep before midnight.

So what is a night owl to do? You may like to alternate your late evening activities: use it for sleep every second or third day, for example. It’s also important to have a look at your Working or Learning Style report to see if there is another time slot that you can use for working on something new or difficult.

If you are forced to work in a non-preferred time slot, then at least make sure that all your other preferences (environmental, physical, social, and so on) are satisfied in order to minimise the stress you will be placing on yourself by working against your Working or Learning Style.

(To assess your Working or Learning Style, please visit us on www.clc.co.nz.)

Tired? Working Styles Can Help

Are you constantly tired? Is your mind buzzing with plans, to-do lists and feelings of guilt over the things you should-have-done? Perhaps you are trying to do too much. Or perhaps you are trying to do it in a way that’s not suitable to your Working Style.

For example, if you get up earlier than usual every morning in order to catch up on your chores, you may find that easy tasks are harder than you expected while difficult tasks are almost impossible. It might also lead to your feeling a lot more fatigued than you would have expected due to a shorter night. If that’s the case, it may be that you have a Working Style non-preference for working in the early hours of the morning and that you should consider another time slot for putting in additional hours.

What about multitasking? In our modern lifestyle, it’s not unusual to be in the middle of an online chat conversation about a project while at the same time conducting a phone conversation and trying to scan through your emails to fish out the really critical ones. This method of working is appropriate for people whose brains process information in a simultaneous way, but can be really tiring and stressful for those whose brains process in a sequential manner.

There are many more factors in your Working Style that could be contributing to your fatigue levels. Please visit us on www.pss-styles.com to read more.
(Coming next: in a week’s time, we’ll be looking at sleep patterns and how they can affect your wellbeing. Remember to visit our blog next week.)