Can Sleep Improve Your Emotional Intelligence?

In a culture where more and more employers are looking for employees with high scores on emotional intelligence tests…

People believe EQ (Emotional Intelligence) is something one is born with and it cannot be improved much.

Well…

Improving your emotional intelligence may be as easy as getting more sleep.

Have you ever wondered how hard you should be working at solving a challenging problem in your life? We are constantly aware of a need to solve problems, if and when they arise, with our careers and jobs, our relationships with others, or our physical health ills.

No matter what the challenge may be, that little extra edge advantage may just lie in something that a lot of people seem to take for granted nowadays.

Recent sleep research suggests something as simple as getting enough quality, and consistent, sleep may just be one of the many different things we can use to help solve problems that we may not even be aware we have, sometimes. But, how will more sleep help us find more problem-solving answers?

Sleep investigators have discovered that, despite our apparent lack of physical inactivity and mental alertness, our brain remains rather active during sleep. Our brain seems to need, and use, this down-time to mainly allow itself the rest it needs to be able to fully process recent pieces of new information that it took in during our latest wake cycle.

Sleeping helps us strengthen our newly formed memories by copying, filing, and saving only the new pieces of information that will, eventually, become the most pertinent at solving our current dilemmas. The brain also needs time to temporarily shut down, by blocking out the constant influx of incoming stimuli.

Sleep Does More than Improving Our Memories...

Sleep seems to strengthen the emotional component we attach to new information we learn. After a few sleeping sessions, the brain culls out even more meaningless information and leaves, mainly, the emotional aspects about the memory intact. Therefore, sleep seems to play a pivotal role in our emotional memory evolvement as well.

That way, not only our emotional connections to memory improve.

Studies have shown that having enough quality sleep during the night makes us the ‘social animals’ we need to be in this modern world.

Sleep helps us become better:

✔ Team players

✔ Collaborators

✔ Coordinators

✔ Leaders

✔ Managers

✔ Problem solvers

✔ People :)

To put it short, sleep helps us become more interesting and more communicative people. A skill highly requested by employers in the 21st century.

And not only that, getting quality sleep allows us to take care and solve problems faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Sleep helped humans evolve in gaining the superior intelligence we enjoy today. It helped us solve the problems we had. And sleep deprivation helped create the problems we have.

This natural biological rhythm evolution was a manifestation that came from only a simple need to survive. Hunt and gather food by day, sleep, and rest at night.