You can’t expect your body to provide you with regular rhythms such as consistent sleep when you aren’t providing it with balanced rhythms to work on and are running at a white hot level of arousal.

without sleep, our brain reverts to a primitive pattern of uncontrolled reactivity. We produce unmetered, inappropriate emotional reactions, and are unable to place events into a broader or considered context.

the REM-sleep gift of facilitating accurate recognition and comprehension allows us to make more intelligent decisions and actions as a consequence. More specifically, the coolheaded ability to regulate our emotions each day—a key to what we call emotional IQ—depends on getting sufficient REM sleep night after night.

if your eyes are open and you are looking around you, you can lapse—without knowing it—into a state called “local sleep.”