There you are in the wee hours of the night logged into a rack and trying to remember how the get NHRP to register in on the Hub Router in your DMVPN lab. You’ve configured DMVPN a number if times in the past but this time you’re running on fumes. You’ve had a long day at work. The kids/dog/wife/girlfriend/football game were demanding attention earlier and you couldn’t resist. Now your sitting in front of a terminal going cross-eyed and denying yourself some much needed sleep because you swore to yourself that you would finish this lab tonight. This situation is near and dear to my heard because I’ve done it before- many times. But what would you say if I told you that you may be doing yourself a disservice. In fact, what if I told you that you could probably finish the lab in half the time if you just went to bed and picked back up in the morning. Well guess what? That may in fact be the case.
Your Body Needs Sleep!
Our good friend Wikipedia has a little to say regarding Sleep an learning. Specifically it states that “recent evidence suggests” that sleep may consolidate and optimizes the layout of Procedural Memories. Exactly the type of memories that you may need for that DMVP solution your working on late at night. Relate that to the CCIE Lab for example, and we learn that Procedural Memories are long term memories, which is what we want come lab day.
An article by the Franklin institute states the following:
“Adequate sleep is crucial to proper brain function”
and
Any amount of sleep deprivation will diminish mental performance, cautions Mark Mahowald, a professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
The List Goes On
Paper after Paper, blog after blog, and research project after research project highlight the link between sleep and learning. Here are just a few that I found rather interesting:
The GlobalCongfig.net Recommendation
It’s pretty simple here:
Get Some Sleep!
Perhaps make the early morning hours your study time as I did in the final stages of my CCIE preparation. You can start the day off with a fresh mind and potentially have a more productive study session, wheter you are working on the CCIE, CISSP, JNCIE, or any other technology that you are studying.
“Now your sinning in front of a terminal…”
Hey, sometimes a guy gets lonely.