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Health: Sleep

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B.C. professor's NEW SLEEP TRICK gets attention from Oprah, Forbes, Guardian. A B.C. -based researcher has caught Oprah's eye with a technique he came up with to help people fall asleep faster. Luc Beaudoin's "cognitive shuffle" helps redirect a person's focus away from stressful thoughts that could otherwise keep them awake.

Earlier this month, the method was featured in O Magazine. It's also been mentioned by Forbes and The New York Times. "I guess word gets around," said Beaudoin, who's also an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University. To do the shuffle, people first imagine a word — that doesn't repeat any letters — as they're lying in bed. Then they think up lists of words that start with each letter of the root word they chose. So, for example, if someone picked "bird," they would come up with four lists of words starting with the letters B, I, R and D. Beaudoin, who tested the method with over 150 students, said people often start to feel tuckered before they're done with the first letter. "You shuffle your thoughts to sleep," the professor said.

Waking Up Is Hard to Do – Matter – Medium. Attempt 6 Calibrate, calibrate, calibrate There are lots of elements of personal wellness that aren’t a matter of opinion. Don’t smoke. Eat a balanced diet. At the end of my month-long test, I decided to stick with what worked best for me so far: a consistent sleep pattern of between seven and eight hours, the Wake-Up Light, a large glass of cold-brew coffee, a fiber-heavy breakfast juice, and some intense early-morning exercise. Of course, I’ve only scratched the surface. The big lesson of wake-up science is that one person’s perfect morning is another person’s hell. All of this testing and tweaking might sound like too much work for the average person, but—as I hope to prove with the rest of “Self-Bettering”— it’s easier than it looks. Next month: I perfect my bathroom routine.

What Is Sleep Inertia, and How Can I Beat It? | Huffington Post. If you’re like most people, the first 15 minutes after you wake up aren’t your finest moments. Aside from morning breath, bed head, crusty eyes and grumpiness, you’re not firing on all cylinders, mentally speaking, right after getting out of bed. This transitional state is known as sleep inertia. It’s a period of grogginess when your body is actually still in a sleep state, including some parts of your brain that haven’t quite warmed up.

Yeah, just brushing my teeth feels complicated right after I wake up. The brainstem arousal system is the part of the brain responsible for basic physical functioning. During that time, our memory, reaction time, alertness and ability to perform various analytical tasks are not in full working order. Why is our PFC so sluggish? Kenneth Wright, a neuroscientist and chronobiology expert, thinks it’s due to displaced melatonin, the hormone responsible for regulating sleep and making us sleepy. How long does sleep inertia last? Unbiased Sleep Number Bed (Select Comfort) Reviews 2013 : Ratings For Classic, Performance Memory Foam Innovation : c2 c3 c4 p5 p6 i8 i10 m7 m9 : Comparison Complaints : Consumer Reports.

Mattress Ratings >> Airbed Reviews > Sleep Number Bed Reviews Based on 1,642 Consumer Experiences January 27, 2014 What You Need To Know THE GOOD. The Sleep Number Bed offers adjustable firmness / comfort for each side. Pain-relief potential and lifespan / longevity are above average. Owners who approve of the bed tend to highly approve. THE BAD. THE COMPANY: Sleep Number / Select Comfort makes permanent-use air beds ranging in price from $700-$4400 (queen, no foundation). THE COMPETITION. Contents About Our Sleep Number Bed Research The research findings are based on 1,640 Sleep Number (Select Comfort) bed owner reviews and comments collected from hundreds of online message boards and other credible sources.

Sleep Number Bed Ratings: Overview The ratings below are based on 1,640+ consumer reviews for various Sleep Number models including Classic (c2, c3, c4), Performance (p5, p6), Memory Foam (m7, m9), and Innovation series (i8, i10) as well as similar discontinued models. Owner Satisfaction. Make Your Own Padded Air Mattress.

How to Make Your Own Mattress In the fall of 2011, my husband and I had a serious problem. The mattress I had been sleeping on for several years had finally given up the ghost, and we did not have enough money to replace it. A used mattress was not an option (can you say eeewww!?) , and continuing to sleep on my old, worn-out mattress was giving me back pain, making the tired all the time, and (most significantly to my husband) making me irritable in a way that usually happens once a month. After thinking about it for a little while, Hubby came up with an unorthodox solution.

If you ever find yourself in the same situation, you can do what we did and save yourself some serious cash. You will need Your (clean!) Using a utility knife, cut apart your old mattress. Remove all the padding from your old mattress. When you have finished removing all the padding from the old mattress, take the spring frame to a scrap metal recycling center. Make your bed away you normally do. Safety note: Nutrition Inc. » Do you wake up at 2-3 every morning? HomeBlogDo you wake up at 2-3 every morning?

Jan 29 2013 by Kate 11 Comments If you are one of the many people waking up at 2 or 3 in the morning and can’t get back to sleep, you might want to read this… While you could pop an over-the-counter sleep aid, there might be a better choice out there for you. First off, you are facing a laundry list of side effects, but also people with sleep aids often do sleep but the sleep they get is not productive. In other words, they get no rejuvenating deep sleep so they find themselves just as tired the next day. So maybe you could just pop a natural supplement instead, right? So what’s one to do? The solution to the root cause of the problem is likely to be blood sugar control.

So maybe you are not convinced. . - Do you get shaky, irritable, or lightheaded if you miss meals? If your answer is yes to either one of those, you do belong to those with blood sugar imbalances. What does this all have to do with you waking up at 3am? * Copy This Password * Alternative Sleep Cycles: 7-10 Hours Are Not Needed. The average person requires 7-10 hours of sleep per night according to the National Sleep Foundation. But is it possible that using different sleep cycles, where the benefits of sleep are still achieved, we can sleep less? Much less? Most of us are familiar with what is called a monophasic sleep cycle.

This cycle is used by most people as it’s what we hear about and learn the most. For some, this cycle is practical although inefficient. Fact is, there are 4 other sleep cycles that can provide all the benefits of sleep, while sleeping much less. For me, this is good news as I am not a huge fan of sleeping for long periods of time. Not only that but sleeping has always been something I wish I could do when I felt like it and not because I’m ‘supposed to.’ if I could spend less time lying awake at night trying to sleep, then great. The Monophasic cycle consists of various stages of sleep with REM (rapid eye movement) being the most important. How will you sleep? SLEEP!! Jolie Goodnight - All of my life I've been accused of... Of all the events we experience each day, which will be retained and which forgotten? JN2013. How Sleep Deprivation Decays the Mind and Body. I awoke in a bed for the first time in days. My joints ached and my eyelids, which had been open for so long, now lay heavy as old hinges above my cheekbones.

I wore two pieces of clothing: an assless gown and a plastic bracelet. I remembered the hallway I had been wheeled down, and the doctor’s office where I told the psychiatrist he was the devil, but not this room. I forced myself up and stumbled, grabbing the chair and the bathroom doorknob for balance. In those first moments, I remembered the basics about what had landed me in the hospital: Some pseudo-philosophical ranting and flailing brought on by a poorly executed experiment to see how long I could last without sleep. I was 18, in Italy, on a school-sponsored trip with that pompously misnamed group for American teens who earn As and Bs, the National Honor Society.

Why? To this day, I am not sure how many consecutive nights I spent awake, but it was at least four. “It may be the biggest open question in biology,'' Dr. Dr. Sleep spindles in midday naps enhance learning in preschool children. Author Affiliations Edited by Terrence J. Sejnowski, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, and approved August 19, 2013 (received for review April 5, 2013) Significance Lacking scientific understanding of the function of naps in early childhood, policy makers may curtail preschool classroom nap opportunities due to increasing curriculum demands.

Abstract Despite the fact that midday naps are characteristic of early childhood, very little is understood about the structure and function of these sleep bouts. Footnotes Author contributions: R.M.C.S. designed research; L.K., K.D., and R.M.C.S. performed research; L.K., K.D., and R.M.C.S. analyzed data; and L.K. and R.M.C.S. wrote the paper. Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.