Studies have shown that meditation can change your neural circuitry in ways that make you more compassionate.Getty Images
A growing body of neuroscience research shows that meditation can make us better to each other.Finding the best ways to do good.Eight weeks ago, I started meditating every day. I knew I’d be going home to visit my family at the end of December, and well, I have a bad habit of regressing into a 13-year-old whenever I’m around them.
All my old immaturities and anxieties get activated. I become a more reactive, less compassionate version of myself. But this holiday season, I was determined to avoid fighting with my family. I would be kind and even-tempered throughout the visit. I knew that in order to have a chance in hell of achieving this, I’d need a secret weapon.
That’s where the meditation came in. Starting in 2005, Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar began to publish some mind-blowing findings: Meditation can literally change the structure of your brain, thickening key areas of the cortex that help you control your attention and emotions. Your brain — and possibly, by extension, your behavior — can reap the benefits if you practice meditation for half an hour a day over eight weeks.
Just eight weeks? I thought when I read the research. This seems too good to be true! I was intrigued, if skeptical. Above all, I was curious to know more. And I wasn’t the only one. By 2014, there had been enough follow-up studies to warrant a meta-analysis, which showed that meditators’ brains tend to be enlarged in a bunch of regions, including the insula (involved in emotional self-awareness), parts of the cingulate cortex and orbitofrontal cortex (involved in self-regulation), and parts of the prefrontal cortex (involved in attention).
A host of otherstudiesshowed that meditation can also change your neural circuitry in ways that make you more compassionate, as well as more inclined to have positive feelings toward a victim of suffering and to see things from their perspective.
Further research suggested that meditation can change not only your internal emotional states but also your actual behavior. One study found that people made charitable donations at a higher rate after being trained in meditation for just two weeks. Another study found that people who get that same measly amount of meditation training are about three times more likely than non-meditators to give up their chair when they see someone on crutches and in pain.
Still skeptical, I fell down an internet rabbit hole and soon found many more neuroscientific studies. Looking closely at them, I did find that a fair number are methodologically flawed (more on that below). But there were many others that seemed sound. Taken together, the literature on meditation suggested that the practice can help us get better at relating to one another. It confronted me with evidence that a few weeks of meditation can improve me as a person.
I say “confronted” because the evidence really did feel like a challenge, even a dare. If it takes such a small amount of time and effort to get better at regulating my emotions, paying attention to other people, seeing things from their point of view, and acting altruistically, then … well … am I not morally obligated to do it?
The science behind mindfulness meditation and how we pay attention to others
The word “meditation” actually refers to many different practices. In the West, the most well-known set of practices is “mindfulness meditation.” When people talk about that, they’re typically thinking of a practice for training our attention.
Here’s how Jon Kabat-Zinn, a scientist who helped popularize mindfulness in the West, defines it: “Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally.”
And here’s what mindfulness meditation practice often involves: You sit down, close your eyes, and focus on feeling your breath go in and out. When you feel your attention drifting to the thoughts that inevitably arise, you notice, and then gently bring your attention back to your breath.
This combination of attention training and direct observation is the basic practice. Sounds simple, right? But according to some studies, it can have profound effects on your brain.
In a 2012 study, people who were new to meditation underwent eight weeks of mindful attention training, practicing for around four hours each week. Before the training, they got fMRIs, scans that show where brain activity is occurring.
While they were in the MRI scanner, they viewed a series of pictures, some of which were upsetting (like a photo of a burn victim). After eight weeks of mindfulness meditation, when they viewed the upsetting pictures in the scanner again, they showed reduced activity in a crucial brain region: the amygdala.
The amygdala is our brain’s threat detector. It scans our environment for danger, and when it perceives a threat, it sets off our fight-flight-freeze response, which includes releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. It glues our attention to the threat, making it hard for us to focus on anything else…
Summary. Of all the interview questions job applicants prepare for, the most obvious ones sometimes get the least attention. Yes, you came ready to share your biggest flaw, your greatest strength, a moment when you shined, and a concept you learned, but what do you do…
Sometimes the toughest job interview questions are also the simplest and most direct. One you should always expect to hear and definitely prepare for:
“Why do you want to work here?”
Like a similarly problematic interview question — “Tell me about yourself” — “Why do you want to work here?” requires you to focus on a specific answer without any clues, contexts, or prompting from the interviewer. It’s a blank space — but that doesn’t mean you can wing it and fill it with just anything.
How to Answer “Why Do You Want to Work Here?”
Drawing from my 16 years of experience as a communications coach as well as someone who’s sat on both sides of the interview table many times, I recommend three basic approaches:
Express your personal passion for the employer’s product/service/mission.
Explain why you would enjoy the responsibilities of the role.
Describe how you can see yourself succeeding in the role, given your skills and experience.
You can use any combination of these three approaches so long as you keep your answer concise. Here’s how to tackle each approach effectively along with sample answers to use as a guide.
1. Express your personal passion for the employer’s product/service/mission.
Employers want to know you’re passionate about what they do, whether it takes the shape of a product, a service, a mission, or a brand. You can also connect your passion to the company’s core values, which can often be found on their website. Showing you’re passionate about the position is particularly important if you’re applying for a role at a nonprofit where the mission matches your personal values.
But how do you convey this enthusiasm? CEO consultant Sabina Nawaz offers useful tips in her HBR piece, “How to Show You’re Passionate in an Interview.” As she writes, “When you’re passionate about something, it tends to spill over into other aspects of your life.” Identify those examples in your own life and share them during your interview. Expressing enthusiasm is not about “display[ing] the kind of full-throated, table-thumping behaviors companies tend to equate with passion,” Sabina explains. It’s about conveying “what matters most to you.”
And remember to be clear about why you are passionate, not just that you are passionate. Simon Sinek has schooled us all on the importance of “why,” and it’s no less important in a job interview than it is in a sales call or CEO keynote.
Sample Answers
Here are examples of responses that effectively connect passion to mission.
“For most of my adult life, I’ve strongly supported X because I believe that Y…”
“X is very important to me in both my professional and personal life because I strongly believe that…”
“I’m very passionate about X and would be thrilled to work for an organization that subscribes to the same core values…”
2. Explain why you would enjoy the responsibilities of the role.
It’s no secret that we work harder, better, and longer when we enjoy the work, and what employer wouldn’t want that dedication from their staff? But it’s your responsibility to make that connection between job and joy clear. That connection can be as simple as “X is something I enjoy,” but expressing how or why you enjoy it makes that point even more valuable and memorable.
Sample Answers
Here are examples of responses that connect job to joy.
“I always enjoy helping other people learn — from my tutoring work in school to the training experiences I had at my last job — which is why I feel so fulfilled working in L&D.”
“I’ve always loved to write and edit — from my days at the college newspaper to the web content I worked on as an intern — so I’m excited to see that writing is a big part of this job.”
“Analyzing data has always been fun for me — the challenge of using numbers to tell a story and convey an idea — and I look forward to the data visualization work we’ll be doing on this team.”
3. Describe how you can see yourself succeeding in the role, given your skills and experience.
While the interviewer is hiring you for who you are and what you can do now, they’re also interested in what you can achieve in the future. After all, they’re not just hiring you; they’re investing in you.
Express confidence about your ability to succeed and grow in the role. Use phrases like “Given my experience in X, I can see myself succeeding…,” “I look forward to using my skills to…,” and “I think I will contribute by….” The key is to describe how your previous experience has prepared you to hit the ground running.
Sample Answers
Here are examples of responses that paint a peek at what may be.
“I can see myself succeeding in this position because I’ve done similar work in the past and know what it takes to engage these particular consumers.”
“I’ve found I work best in a collaborative environment, so I look forward to working with several departments to align on and achieve our goals.”
“After learning more about this job, I’m sure I can help you find ways to manage projects more efficiently and effectively.”
Combining the Three Approaches: Sample Answer
Here’s a sample answer using a hypothetical marketing position for a health care company where writing, creativity, and collaboration are key priorities:
I want to work here because, with physicians in my family, I’m passionate about helping people address their health challenges and make smart decisions about their bodies and their lives. I also love copywriting and diving into editorial strategy — especially in social media — and enjoy brainstorming with colleagues to come up with the best creative ideas. When I think about the needs of this role and the integrity of the corporate mission, I feel incredibly inspired and can see myself contributing in a big way.
Key Tip: Be Specific
As you develop your answer, understand that the more specific you are, the more powerfully your answer will resonate. Conversely, the vaguer you are, the more generic — or even canned — the response will seem.
In the example above, the writer alludes to health care professionals in their family, focuses on copywriting and editorial strategy — not just writing — and mentions brainstorming, a more specific form of collaboration. These are all examples of specificity that make the answer seem more personal and unique.
What Not to Say
It’s obvious how you shouldn’t answer the “Why do you want this job” question, but it bears repeating. Don’t say you want the job because:
You like the salary
You like the perks or benefits
You like the title
You want to work remotely or in a particular location
You couldn’t get another job you really wanted
Before your next interview, practice your response to “Why do you want to work here?” out loud, not just in your head. And keep in mind that the best answer is less about why you want them and more about why they should want you. If you convey passion, enthusiasm, and optimism with specificity, you’ll connect to the interviewer’s wish list in a way that will leave them thinking, “This is why we want you to work here.”
You’re a highly empathic person. You fully and intently listen to others. You tend to focus on others’ emotions, often feeling them more so than your own. In fact, it’s like you feel someone else’s pain deep inside your bones. It’s that visceral.
And you frequently find yourself utterly exhausted because tending to others comes more naturally to you than tending to yourself, according to Joy Malek, a marriage and family therapist who specializes in working with people who are intuitive, empathic, creative and highly sensitive.
And this struggle includes setting boundaries. Your discomfort with boundary setting may stem from these three reasons, Malek said: You don’t know your needs in the first place—and only realize that a boundary was necessary after the fact. You fear that the validation you receive for being so caring and nurturing will disappear, and when you say no, others will no longer see your value. And many of the suggestions on boundary setting stress assertiveness, which to you might actually feel aggressive.
So you have a tough time ending conversations when you’re tired, or declining requests when you’re completely drained and desperately need downtime. So you remain silent when you’re uncomfortable, or don’t ask for help when you’re hurting, too.
When you do try to set boundaries, you might find yourself over-apologizing, and minimizing your concerns so you can again focus on the other person’s feelings, Malek said.Ultimately, you conclude that you’re just “bad at boundaries.” In reality, however, “you haven’t found a style that feels organic to your nature.”
Here, Malek shared invaluable insight for setting boundaries that protect your needs and boundaries you feel good about.
Identify your own needs. “Empathic people can especially benefit from boundaries that put limits around the amount of time and energy we give to others,” Malek said. “Without these limits, we often find that our needs are met last, or not at all.”
Take the time to think about your needs. How much space and solitude do you need to feel your best? What genuinely refreshes and recharges you? What tends to drain you? What people tend to drain you? When do you feel your best? When do you feel your worst?
Start creating boundaries around your responses, and check in with yourself regularly. Because our needs change and evolve. You might check in with yourself every hour or so for only a few minutes. Then you might do a more thoughtful check-in every evening, and journal about your thoughts and feelings for 15 minutes.
Pause before saying yes. When someone asks you to do something, you might blurt out, “yes, of course!” without even thinking about it. Your automatic response is to help—and you might feel awkward saying anything other than yes. Plus, sometimes the other person creates a sense of urgency that doesn’t exactly exist (or we somehow feel one).
However, Malek suggested simply pausing before committing. You can always say, “I’m not sure. I need some time to think about that,” or “I need to check my schedule, but I’ll definitely let you know tomorrow.” “In that pause, we can ask ourselves how we actually feel, and whether we have the time, energy and desire to accept the request.” Which means that it’s totally OK if you have the time and energy but simply don’t want to. Your wants count, too.
Shift your perspective. When you want or need to say no, think about how you’d like someone to decline your request, Malek said. For instance, this might include expressing empathy for the other person, and explaining that you’re unable to meet their request, she said. What does this actually look like?
For instance, Malek shared these examples of kind, empathic personal boundaries:
“I know you’re hurting and I really want to be there for you, but the truth is that I’m struggling right now, too. I’m looking forward to supporting you once I’m back on my own feet, emotionally.”
“I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and part of me doesn’t want it to end! I’m noticing, though, that I’m getting really tired, so I’m going to head home.”
Malek also shared these examples of professional boundaries:
“I’d really like to take that project on, but I know I’d be compromising the quality of the projects that are already on my plate. It’s my priority to do a great job with what you’ve entrusted to me.”
“I’m in the office during business hours Monday through Friday, and I return calls, texts and emails during those times. If you reach out in the evening or on a weekend, I’ll look forward to following up with you during the next business day.”
See reactions as valuable signs. Pay attention to how others react to your boundaries. Do they push against them? Do they have a hard time taking no for an answer? Do they make you feel guilty or bad about yourself in some other way? Do they take you seriously or think your boundaries are unreasonable or don’t apply to them?
All of this is helpful information about the quality of that relationship, Malek said. Of course, it really hurts when the people we love and care for don’t have the same consideration for us.
However, “It makes sense to invest more in relationships where our boundaries and needs are respected than in those where they are not.”
When you’re a highly empathic person, setting boundaries can feel impossible. But it can absolutely be done. The key is to find a style that works for you, and to keep practicing. Boundaries can be kind and loving—and remember, as Malek said, your needs are legitimate, too.
Also, don’t wait until you’re completely exhausted and overwhelmed to care for yourself and to protect your energy. Start setting boundaries that are respectful of yourself and your natural tendencies right now.
Humans have been fascinated by dreams throughout history. Ancient civilizations regarded what we see in our sleep as powerful messages from deities or an essential way to make sense of waking life.
Even today, there are societies with deep-rooted “dream cultures,” said Rubin Naiman, a fellow with the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and clinical assistant professor of medicine at the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. “They believe dreaming is as important as waking,” he said, challenging the “wake-centric” perspective the rest of us impose on the world.
While we can’t definitively say what role dreams play in our waking lives, we do know they are important. Science shows that brain scans light up with activity when people dream, and there are physical responses that seem hardwired to encourage it, including body systems that essentially render you unconscious, paralyze you, and then wipe your memory of the dreamlike state. Yet the question remains: to what end?
If our body is supposed to be resting and restoring, why does your brain serve up seemingly senseless scenarios like a mash-up of snakes, school, and someone you ran into last week? Here are some of the reasons why you dream and the things that happen in your waking life that can influence them.
What is a dream?
A healthy sleep cycle rotates through four stages, said Chelsie Rohrscheib, head sleep specialist and neuroscientist at Wesper, a digital sleep clinic that aims to help people manage sleep disorders and improve sleep quality. Stages one through three flow through a light, medium, and deep state of rest, with your body gradually relaxing more and more. You then enter into REM — or rapid eye movement — sleep, when your brain looks almost as active as it does when you’re awake.
Most people who wake up during REM sleep will report having dreams, but dreams can also occur in different stages of sleep as well. A few physical changes play out during this part of our sleep cycle as well, Naiman said. The body and mind seem to separate.
First off, measures like your heart rate, breathing rate, and blood pressure start bouncing all over the place, looking more like what happens when we are awake. “We also experience something called REM atonia, which is fundamentally a paralysis of our voluntary muscles,” he adds. “We actually can’t move, and this makes sense — mother nature wants to protect us from acting the dream out.”
In fact, a (very) small percentage of the population has REM sleep behavior disorder, or a breakdown of this REM atonia process. According to research published in Frontiers in Neurology, people with the condition usually find out after winding up at the doctor’s office from injuring themselves or their partner “due to violent movements during sleep.” (There’s also something called sleep paralysis, where atonia persists even after you are conscious, temporarily making it impossible to move or speak.)
Then there’s the brain during REM sleep. While it starts powering up to resemble wakefulness, there are some key differences. “There’s a profound disconnect between the prefrontal cortex — our executive function — and what goes on in the lower limbic areas, particularly the hippocampus,” Naiman said.
In a nutshell: The parts of your brain responsible for logic and reasoning stop communicating with the parts involved in emotion, creativity, and memory.
Why don’t you remember your dreams?
This intra-brain disconnect is a big reason behind why your dreams often make no sense. With our logic centers more or less switched off, unrealistic scenarios like having the ability to fly feel real, Rohrscheib said. It’s also why you might struggle to remember dreams.
“We don’t actually activate our memory centers when we’re in REM sleep, because the brain is actively working on those centers,” Rohrscheib said. “So it kind of shuts down the process of forming new memories while you’re dreaming.”
If you do remember your dream on waking — even if it’s very fleeting — that just means you probably woke up in the middle of this REM stage.
So, why do we dream?
Science can’t exactly prove ancient civilizations wrong, but our understanding of why we dream has evolved. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic approach in the early 20th century regarded dreams as messages from our own subconscious — reflections of our deepest desires and unfulfilled wishes.
Then there was the activation-synthesis hypothesis. Developed in the 1970s, this theory posits that dreams are nothing more than random series of images created by our brain’s REM activity. Any symbolism we impose on them is simply subjective.
“So we have these two extremes. One is deeply psychological, and the other is deeply biological,” Naiman said. While scientists still aren’t certain why you dream, today’s leading theories fall more in the middle of the spectrum.
You dream to form long-term memories
Each day is full of new experiences and information to process, much of which gets temporarily stored in our short-term memory, Rohrscheib said. Then overnight, the transfer of this short-term information into long-term memory requires your brain’s neurons to “replay” the initial experience, a process called consolidation. Much of this occurs during REM sleep.
But this sequence of neurons firing doesn’t necessarily follow a narrative or storyline — it can be totally random and disorganized from our perspective. “And that can result in weird dreams,” she said.
But it’s clear that dreams do play an important role in learning and memory, even if they don’t seem to make sense. Research shows, for example, that people learning a new physical skill, like playing tennis, perform better after sleeping compared with a similar amount of time spent awake.
The research also suggests that if you’re studying for a big test, you’re more likely to remember the information if you memorize it and then get some sleep, rather than pull an all-nighter.
You dream to process emotions
“There’s a bit of a consensus emerging that dreams are there to deal with emotionally challenging or difficult issues that a person is grappling with in their lives,” said Alan Eiser, a clinical lecturer at University of Michigan Medical School and faculty at the Michigan Sleep Disorders Center.
Naiman said to think of it like this: just like our gastrointestinal system is responsible for making critical decisions about what it allows in the body, REM sleep is like our brain’s gut.
“If you eat something that’s difficult to digest, it takes a little more effort on the part of the gut,” he said. “Likewise, experiences that are difficult to digest when we’re awake get processed symbolically in a dream state.”
This is why dreaming — not just sleeping — may actually be essential to our mental health. “We’ve known for 50 or 60 years that damaged dream patterns are associated with clinical depression,” Naiman said. “If we don’t dream, we suffer from a sort of psychological indigestion, which can show up as mood disorders.”
Research published in Current Biology points to a theory behind this emotional digestion. The study shows that during REM sleep, neurotransmitters associated with stress and anxiety in our waking life start to plummet. In the absence of these chemicals, our brain may be better equipped to process highly emotional or difficult experiences.
Dreaming may help you manage your stress response
“We also think [REM sleep] may be priming the area of your brain that responds to stress,” Rohrscheib said. She said to think of it like a full brain reboot after your neurons have been using energy all day to make connections. That’s why if you don’t get a sufficient amount of sleep, things that wouldn’t normally bother you suddenly set you off.
Dreams may even act as a sort of training exercise to deal with stress. A study published in the Journal of Sleep Research suggests that during REM sleep, you have high levels of activity in the amygdala (the part of the brain associated with our fight-or-flight reaction). While research is ongoing, this activity could be the brain’s way of prepping you emotionally to respond to stresses in waking life.
What affects dreams?
There’s still a lot we don’t know about dreams.
For instance: “We don’t understand why certain dreams are super common in the general population,” Rohrscheib said, such as dreams many people have experienced, like having your teeth fall out, flying, or being naked at school. “Why are these so similar across a vast variety of demographics?”
But researchers have homed in on some ways that behavior influences the brain’s REM sleep — and, therefore, may impact your dreams (for better and for worse).
Medication
“Certain antidepressants — like SSRIs and SNRIs — tend to suppress REM sleep early in the night,” Eiser said. “And then, late in the night, you get very dense REM periods.” That means there’s intense rapid eye movement happening and very vivid dreaming.
SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, include drugs like fluoxetine (Prozac) or sertraline (Zoloft), and SNRIs are serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, which include venlafaxine (Effexor) and duloxetine (Cymbalta).
But a laundry list of prescriptions list vivid dreaming or nightmares as potential side effects, including blood pressure medication, antihistamines, steroids like prednisone, cholesterol-lowering statins, the anesthetic ketamine, and drugs used to treat Parkinson’s disease.
Health conditions
Whether you got into a fight with your partner, have a big deadline coming up, or are nervous about a first date, everyone has bad or anxious dreams from time to time.
But you shouldn’t have consistent, chronic nightmares, Dr. Rohrscheib said. “It may be tied to your mental health, but other sleep disorders can cause nightmares, like narcolepsy or sleep apnea.”
People with anxiety or depression tend to be more likely to report having nightmares or bad dreams. A 2018 study in the journal Scientific Reports found that people who had more peace of mind in their waking life also had dreams to match, reporting more positive dreams where they felt amused or inspired. In comparison, people with anxiety tended to have more dreams with negative emotions such as fear or upset.
Nightmares are a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder and often involve reliving the traumatic event. They are also a defining symptom of night terrors, which is when people (most often children) wake up screaming in intense fear but usually don’t remember the episodes in the morning.
About 20% to 30% of children have frequent nightmares compared with only 5% to 8% of adults.
Stress
“Stress affects the areas of the brain that are highly active during REM sleep,” Rohrscheib said.
Scientists believe that during REM sleep, these areas work to condition our brains so that we’re better able to cope with stressful situations during the day. So if you add more stress (or an anxiety disorder, for example), it could result in more stressful or bad dreams than usual.
Not enough sleep
If you’ve pulled a few all-nighters recently, research shows your brain actually tries to “catch up” on its REM cycles. It’s called the REM rebound effect and refers to how the frequency, depth, and intensity of REM sleep increases when we’ve been sleep deprived — all of which can trigger much more vivid, wild dreams.
Too much sleep
On the flip side, overindulging your snooze button could weigh down your dreams. A study published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology explored why people have nightmares.
While the team homed in on causes you might expect, like having anxiety or feeling negative emotions, they found that people who slept more than nine hours a night also reported more frequent nightmares.
Exercise
Some research suggests that regular exercise might lower the risk of nightmares and even dreaming in general by reducing both depression and time in REM sleep while increasing the amount of time spent in deep, restorative sleep.
But like most things in life, balance is key. A recent study published in Frontiers in Psychology suggests that people with either extremely low or extremely high activity levels can experience poor sleep quality.
Your period
If you get a period, you can thank your hormones for odder-than-usual dreams in the premenstrual phase of your cycle.
Research published in the Journal of Sleep Medicine and Disorders suggests that hormone fluctuations often alter sleep patterns — especially REM. While this can mean less time in dreamland, such disturbances can also wake you up more frequently, so you remember your dreams more vividly.
Still, these disturbances may come with a silver lining. A study published in Medical Sciences found that most people experience more pleasant dreams as their hormones bounce around before their period. And if you take a hormonal contraceptive, you may be even more likely to recall your dreams.
Alcohol
Having a nightcap may help lull you off to sleep, but alcohol actually suppresses REM sleep early in your slumber, which can lead to more extreme dreams later in your sleep cycle. “Then people tend to get a REM rebound with very vivid dreaming at the end of the night,” Eiser said.
Withdrawal from alcohol or drugs, like barbiturates and benzodiazepines, are associated with nightmares because of the REM rebound effect.
Cannabis
Marijuana users commonly report using the drug as a sleep aid, but consistent use actually suppresses dream states, Rohrscheib said, and recent research adds some context to this understanding.
A study published in Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine found that regular cannabis use was linked to unusual sleep patterns, with users more likely to say they were sleeping less than six hours a night or more than nine hours a night compared to nonusers.
Those longer and shorter sleep patterns could be linked to more vivid dreams, although it’s not clear if the cannabis use was the cause of the sleep patterns, the result, or unrelated. Because researchers suspect that cannabis suppresses our REM cycle, quitting may lead to some pretty strange, vivid dreams thanks to the rebound effect.
Sleep hygiene
Good sleep hygiene promotes good dream hygiene, according to the experts. In other words, doing those things that help promote sleep — like making sure you’re in a quiet, dark room and making other sleep-promoting lifestyle changes — can help dreams too.
“The goal is to get a sufficient amount of each sleep stage,” Rohrscheib said. “But if you don’t follow good sleep hygiene, you can, unfortunately, limit your brain’s ability to move through those sleep stages efficiently.” This means you might experience more sleep fragmentation — aka nighttime awakenings.“This can result in undercutting the amount of deep sleep and REM sleep you’re getting.”
So how do you build dreamier sleep hygiene? Rohrscheib said to stick to a strict sleep schedule (even on the weekends!), avoid things like alcohol, sugar, and caffeine before bed, and don’t lie in bed staring at a screen — the blue light it emits can keep your body from preparing for sleep. While there’s still a lot that we don’t know about dreams and what influences them, one thing seems certain: They’re important to our well-being.
“REM is the least understood sleep stage; we can only hypothesize why dreams happen,” Rohrscheib said. “But without REM sleep, we know it’s difficult for us to learn, to remember things, and we can even start to have issues with our stress response and overall mental health.”
Internal Revenue Service computers keep spitting out perplexing letters and notices to taxpayers, and today the agency announced that it’s going to stop the machines, at least temporarily, in an effort to help taxpayers and tax pros. The 2022 tax season kicked off on January 24 for filing 2021 tax year returns, but millions of taxpayers are still waiting for the IRS to process last year’s returns.
Example: You filed your 2020 tax return last April. The IRS cashed your check. Why are you getting an alarming CP-80 Unfiled Tax Return notice that says: “We haven’t received your tax return. What must you do immediately? If you’re required to file, please file today. If you’ve already filed, please send a newly-signed copy.”
Savvy tax pros know that the IRS is woefully backlogged, and the best response is to wait it out. A California tax preparer who filed on paper with a check attached last April emailed me that he got a CP-80 notice last month. The IRS cashed the check, but hasn’t gotten to his return—10 months later.
His plan: “IRS thinks I have overpaid; I can wait 6 months to see if they catch up on paper.” In the meantime, the IRS has updated its web site, Understanding Your CP80 Notice, to tell folks who are getting CP-80 Notices who have already filed their 2020 returns: “DO NOT refile.”
That’s all the IRS needs—more paper! As of the February 7 update to the IRS Operations page, the IRS has made some progress on whittling down the number of amended tax returns for tax year 2020 in processing (2.3 million as of January 8), but it hadn’t updated the number of outstanding individual returns for 2020 (6 million as of December 31).
“The IRS is opening mail within normal timeframes and all paper and electronic individual refund returns received prior (emphasis added) to April 2021 have been processed if the return had no errors or did not require further review.”
That backlog is causing problems down the line. Hence, the decision — after outcry from tax professionals and members of Congress — to stop sending some taxpayer notices and letters for now.
The IRS announcement notes that these automatic notices have been temporarily stopped until the backlog is worked through, and that the agency will continue to assess the inventory of prior year returns to determine the appropriate time to resume the notices. Some taxpayers might still get these notices and letters in the next few weeks. “Generally, there is no need to call or respond.” But watch out: If you believe a notice is accurate and you have a balance due, the IRS says that interest and penalties can continue to accrue.
Here’s the rundown of suspended notices and letters:
CP-80 Unfiled Tax Return(s) 1st Notice: This notice is generally sent when the IRS credited payments and/or other credits to a taxpayer’s account for the tax period shown on the notice, but the IRS hasn’t received a tax return for that tax period.
CP-59 and CP 758 (Spanish version): The IRS sends this notice when there is no record of a prior year return being filed.
CP-516 and CP-616 (Spanish) Unfiled Tax Return(s) – 2nd Notice: This notice is a request for information on a delinquent return as there is no record of a return filed.
CP518 and CP618 (Spanish) Final Notice -Return Delinquency: This is a final reminder notice that the IRS still has no record of a prior year tax return(s)
CP-501 Balance Due — 1st Notice: This notice is a reminder that there is an outstanding balance on a taxpayer’s accounts.
CP-503 Balance Due — 2nd Notice: This notice is the second reminder that a there is an outstanding balance on a taxpayer’s accounts.
CP-504 Final Balance Due Notice/3rd Notice/Intent to Levy: The IRS sends this notice when a payment has not been received for an unpaid balance. This notice is a Notice of Intent to Levy (Internal Revenue Code Section 6331 (d)).
2802C Withholding Compliance Letter: This letter is mailed to taxpayers who have been identified as having under-withholding of Federal tax from their wages. This letter provides instructions to the taxpayer on how to properly correct their tax withholding.
Two business notices are also being temporarily paused.
CP259 and CP959 (Spanish) Return Delinquency: IRS sends this notice when there is no record of a prior year return being filed.
CP518 and CP618 (Spanish) Final Notice -Return Delinquency: This is a final reminder notice that the IRS still has no record of a prior year tax return(s)
A coalition of taxpayer professionals, the Tax Professionals United for Taxpayer Relief Coalition, including the AICPA and H&R Block, is calling for more. They’ve asked the IRS to pause all automated compliance actions and provide relief from underpayment and late payment penalties. Stay tuned.
I cover personal finance, with a focus on retirement planning, trusts and estates strategies, and taxwise charitable giving. I’ve written for Forbes since 1997. Follow me on Twitter: @ashleaebeling and contact me by email: ashleaebeling — at — gmail — dot — com
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