Practices for a Mindful Living

As usual I am reminded of a well known quote, which I have stuck on my laptop. "Early to bed and early to rise, keeps man healthy, wealthy and wise."

The quote always reminds me to improve on my sleep quality and maintain a sound mind in the morning. As a practitioner of yoga and meditation, I have experienced the benefits of sleeping early and rising early. As with the popular debate on whether it is good to sleep for 6 hrs or 7 hrs or more, I have a simple answer. What determines your daily performance is ultimately the sleep quality - how relaxed your body and mind becomes as you take rest. Although not a medical student, I realize that there is a inherent body clock which synchronizes with the circadian clock (Sun's timings). All bodily enzyme secretions are initiated when it is best rested. Another fact is the 'Blue-screen syndrome'. In the present times, people are so obsessed with their gadgets that the effect of these perpetrates into their sleep and hence increases the time to reach the deep sleep state. This factor significantly increases the REM (stands for Rapid Eye Movement) sleep and hence disturbs your night sleep.

What factor affect your sleep?

Although an exhaustive list is not possible, here are a few important causes that impact the sleep. The first important factor is your diet. Avoiding a heavy meal in the night has proven  to produce a nice sleep at night. Keeping away from hot beverages (tea/coffee) approximately 8-10 hrs before bed will  improve the sleep quality. 

Systematization of Knowledge

In research we always encounter three classes of works - previous works, recent works and upcoming works. Many of us take plenty of time to understand what others have done, without any solid idea of what we want to do. To avoid such a wasted effort the process of literature survey  is recommended. But there is more than that we should do, that is what I try to convey here.

It is said that to master a field an average human being requires 10,000 hrs ~ 417 days to be spend on that subject. And research is kind of mastery of a small subfield in the vast discipline of your interest. The journey in research mostly starts with a literature review - familiarization with the history of the work done in that field. This often deals with reading, sometime doing experiments, and some other times just skimming. In my experience, literature survey also happens to act as a filter (-I am from a DSP background) for choosing the right problem statement. It also helps in identifying opportunities and finding gaps in existing tree of knowledge. I would like to call this procedure more as a systematization of knowledge (or SoK, I heard this phrase in a talk few days back).  The reason being that, it give much more meaning to the purpose of the activity. In my opinion research work should also balance between theory and practice. I would like to share an analogy to make it clear. Imagine how a one winged bird will fly. The one winged bird cannot fly too long as it will always be changing direction because of the imbalance. Similar is the case with doing research with only theories. Unless the theory is brought into practice, the piece of work flies like a one winged bird.

Happy SoKing