Written by: Dawn Bates, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
We all know the bedtime story routine, and for those of us who are parents we have often sent ourselves to sleep reading the same bedtime story we’ve read a thousand times over to our little ones.
We also know the perpetuated scene of studying so hard we fall asleep at our desk, and hopefully not at the dinner table with our faces in the plate we have been eating from!
Our brains will always tell us we need to sleep by gifting us confused moments and text distortion, before it smacks us around the face with a full on migraine.
If we still don’t listen and take notice, brain fatigue will set in for days and will sometimes trigger further problems with our health the more we ignore the cerebral love nudges.
That is until we embrace the idea of having an afternoon nap, also known as a siesta in the Spanish speaking world – and trust me as someone who has been living as a digital nomad travelling through Spanish countries around the world for the last three years, I can tell you embracing the nap whole heartedly has been the best thing I have ever done for my health and my writing.
For those of you who are new to my space, allow me to introduce myself. I’m the author of several international bestselling books on multiple continents all in the realm of social justice and human rights. And I say realm because I find the word genre limiting both in an energetic sense as well as the literary and meta data sense.
Becoming known around the world as a ‘writing machine’ because of the amount of written content I have produced, I’ve been called upon by different publications at the last minute to help out with a tight deadline and have ‘smashed out’ an article, such as this, within 30 minutes.
I’ve also written five of my own books in less than a week – all of which are around 40,000 words of deep content written without the need to plan, simply embracing what I call the purity of Conscious Unconscious Creation© something I go through with my clients who choose me as their author coach.
This ability to write at light speed and with clarity comes from many years of practice and researching the topic I am choosing to write about – and napping often.
With a career which requires hours and hours of cross referencing facts, and the fictions, as well as going down rabbit holes and meeting Alice and the Caterpillar for tea on numerous occasions during in the week, I have to rest my brain with a nap.
It’s tiring work wading through the amount of data and vanilla content out there working out how to put the jigsaw pieces of knowledge together to write something informative – and hopefully entertaining.
The ability I have is not something unique to me, there are many fast writers and lovable geeks out there, and yet I do credit my love of naps with the increased clarity and ability I have to just open up my laptop and start writing, often not knowing where the article will start or end up.
I trust myself, my knowledge, and my intuition that what needs to be seen by others will flow through me – a process which has served me well for many years.
Without a nap, my productivity and clarity of thought suffers greatly. Researching a topic and allowing my subconscious mind to work it’s magic putting all the above mentioned jigsaw pieces together pays dividends, and not just for writers and authors like myself, but for anyone seeking to find a solution to a challenge they face.
For years many people laughed and mocked me for my ‘Nanna Naps’ but then when research shared in Arianna Huffington’s book ‘The Sleep Revolution’ came out revealing that a lack of sleep is costing Australia $31.4billion a year, the UK is experiencing a £453 million loss in productivity and a mind blowing $76.6 billion was spent around the world on sleep products, the very same people who laughed and mocked me started to pay attention.
They paid even more attention when they saw the level of productivity I have – and when my ever increasing youthful looks became obvious without the need of collagen creams and other big pharma products destined to poison my body and weaken my self-confidence.
Add a litre or three of water a day to the magic potion of one of my Nanna Naps and nourishing my inner child, I can ‘anti-age’ any anti-aging product on the market, but that is another article for another day.
As an author of books and writer of many long social media posts and articles, I have been told people have a shortened attention span, so best write something ‘short and snappy’. I disagree wholeheartedly.
And here’s why.
Our brains are very capable of giving attention to things which we deem important. Put a TV on and it will gain someone’s attention for hours. Look at how long people scroll through endless amount of vanilla content on the internet – their attention is on the scroll, the fast moving imagery, due in part to the calcification of the penial gland leading to what has been dubbed ‘The Fluoride Stare’.
The truth is, we give our attention to the things that matter most, and sadly when you look at families and groups of friends out to dinner with each other, the thing that matters most to them is the world inside their phone rather than the people surrounding them.
Great news for Zuckerberg and his MetaVerse then.
When we look at the research for the cognitive brain function of those who choose to learn and up-level their lives we see a different level of brain activity, which is very clearly demonstrated in their productivity, level of conversations and length of concentration.
The penial gland has become so badly damaged in the majority of people, they fill their days with things which are not adding value to their purpose, allowing themselves to be distracted by the shiny object syndrome, and absorbing the scarcity tactics modern manipulative marketeers love to use when selling a product: The Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO for short.
From my own research I’ve found that many people will read fiction books for hours. They will read self-help books which they think will help make them loads of money, lose weight or defeat the narcissist they are living with.
And yet for a large percentage of people, reading a book of hard hitting subjects which remind them of the teacher who traumatised them at school the number of readers drop.
It is one of the reason when I write the books I do, in the way I write them, I make sure people like my mum and dad will want to read them – when really all my dad wants to read is news on the best carp fishing gear and how the latest baits are going to catch him the biggest carp ever to have lived.
Human rights, social justice, articles of biology and chemistry to help aid understanding of some of the biggest health scams the world has ever seen and you can guarantee most people will switch off.
Hence why it is important that people like myself who are prepared to open ourselves up to the traumas of the world, the human rights violations and the high level academic papers – as well as underground think tank publications – have a nap on a regular basis. We can’t switch off if we are destined to be part of the solution to many of humanity’s problems.
To keep us balanced and happy, we need the double hit of magic that exists inside sleep, which happens when the dopamine D4 receptor connects itself on the outside of the pineal gland cells, whilst the norepinephrine receptors pull up alongside it to tango the hours away dampening the melatonin-secretion signal, which we experience when we wake up.
Dawn Bates, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
"Dawn Bates is a true international bestselling author multiple times over on five continents. She specialises in developing global leaders into real authorities who wish to give a voice to the voiceless whilst working with them to create brand expansion strategies through activism and authorship.
Profound truths, social justice and human rights underpin everything she does, and at the core of her soul is a passion for being of service to humanity, giving hope, courage and confidence for others to stand in their truth and live a life of conviction.
She writes for various magazines, sails around the world on yachts as a digital nomad and is currently working towards her PhD in Human Rights and Social Justice with the University of Oxford, whilst also hosting her own podcasts The Sacral Series and The Truth Serum.
Her books are powerful and comprise of solo compilations and multiple collaborations of the highest caliber. Dawn brings together the multi-faceted aspects of the world we live in and takes you on a rollercoaster ride of emotions, whilst delivering mic dropping inspiration, motivation and awakening. Her work captures life around the world in all its rawness.
Dawn’s expertise and insights will make you rethink your life, whilst harnessing the deepest freedom of all: your own truth. She’s an authority on leading others to create exceptional results by igniting the passions and fires deep within to speak and live powerfully. "
