Proponents of hainvg two sleeps a night with a period of wakefulness between, say it’s a great way of getting things done – everything from writing a bestseller, to learning a language, making babies or getting closer to your God.

One of the problems of this segmented sleep approach, though, is that you have to go to bed earlier and will probably end up rising later. There may not be enough hours in the day (or night). If you end up cutting your total sleep-time you’ll not only build up sleep-debt, but you’ll also end up interrupting what sleep you do get, and that leads to all sorts of problems, chief among which according to new research is the dampening of feelings of positive emotions.

Everyone likes to think they have plenty of grey matter, as it correlates with heightened abilities in many skills, and it seems that being a practising musician or meditator will build that stuff in your brain. Science.Mic cites Massachusetts General Hospital research which suggests that while nothing is a universal panacea “Meditation is like a super-vitamin for your brain. It targets and boosts the parts that are already strong, and improves their functionality to make them even stronger.” As an added bonus “when people began meditating, their amygdala got smaller. That is the area of the brain most closely associated with fear and aggression”