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clairemann

Is It Bad To Get Too Much Sleep? | HuffPost Life - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...eep_l_6042b664c5b613cec15da45f

psychology science research knowledge brain science

shared by clairemann on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • For years, we’ve been told how detrimental a lack of sleep can be for our mental and physical health.
  • But is it bad to get too much sleep — and if so, how much is too much?
  • “It’s important to remember that not everyone’s ‘too much sleep’ is the same,” sleep psychologist Jade Wu, a researcher at the Duke University School of Medicine, told HuffPost. “And sleep needs change over the lifetime. For example, a teenager or young adult may very well need nine or more hours per night, whereas a retiree likely doesn’t.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Oversleeping — typically defined as more than nine or 10 hours in research studies — is associated with certain health risks, including stroke, obesity, depression, diabetes, heart disease and dementia. However, it’s not clear if oversleeping causes these conditions or if it’s just an indicator that something else is wrong.
  • “In other words, we don’t know if it’s the long sleep that’s causing problems over time, or if some underlying health problem is causing someone to sleep longer,”
  • “If someone seems to be an unusually long sleeper, it’s possible that they are simply wired to need more sleep,” Wu said. (That said, it can’t hurt to mention it to your doctor if you have some concerns.)
  • “A number of factors, such as medical conditions, medication side effects, and undiagnosed sleep disorders, can lead to poor sleep quality and non-restful sleep,” she added.
  • if sleep quantity isn’t the issue, then sleep quality probably is. Conditions like sleep apnea can disrupt sleep and leave you feeling fatigued even after spending ample time in bed.
  • “Poor quality sleep means that an individual does not get to the deeper stages of sleep or REM sleep, which restore the brain and body and makes you feel refreshed and rejuvenated the next day,”
  • “Get lots of sunlight, get physically active — or at least decrease long stretches of sitting — and go out of your way to plan some fun and social activities,” Wu said. “Make efforts to prioritize physical and mental health. You may find yourself waking up with more energy after making these changes.”
katherineharron

Year-long resolutions don't work. Here's how to make 12 'micro-resolutions' instead - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • A mini- or micro-resolution is any behavior you commit to for four weeks. And even longer-term goals to, say, eat better or learn a new skill, can be broken down into more achievable goals on the way. Before you can land on Mars, focus on landing on the moon.
  • To create your micro-resolutions, you can start by thinking of 12 "bad" habits or indulgences you'd like to cut back on or give up entirely. This is what I did last year for what I called my "Year of Abstinence." My plan was to learn something about myself through self-denial, and it worked: I gave up alcohol, sweets, television and nine other things, but just for a month each. The mini-resolutions were as positive as they were eye-opening.
  • In order to simply increase my own, general awareness, every day in January my goal was to notice something new. I kept my eyes open, looked a bit longer, stopped to read the history markers, noticing buildings or took a different route than normal -- small ways to avoid sleepwalking through life.
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  • Sleep is tied to many positive health outcomes according to a constant stream of medical research, much of which recommends more than seven hours a night. My goal was to sleep eight hours each night, and for the first two weeks of the month I tried and failed. I didn't manage it once. It started stressing me out.Wake up, people: You're fooling yourself about sleep, study says I did get more sleep than I would have otherwise because I prioritized getting to bed earlier. But between work, training for a marathon, kids' bedtimes and evening plans, my life was not conducive to that schedule. But since I'm making up the rules (and you make up yours) I gave up on sleep.
  • Research ties nature exposure to both longevity and happiness, so I made it a goal to commune with nature every day. This could include a run through a park, stopping to hug a tree (which I did at least once), or watching a convoy of ants cross a sidewalk.
  • Another super-habit for mental and physical health, I made an effort to incorporate meditation in some form -- whether it was 10 breaths, 30 minutes, guided, formal, mantra-led, what have you -- every day.
  • To complement March's switch-up, my plan for June was the same split: 8 hours of sleep at night and active listening with the kids. I didn't think I could pull a straight fortnight of great sleep, so my aim was for 15 nights of sleep and 15 days of not doing something else while listening.
  • At CNN, I sit near a constant pile of sweets. And that combined with my weakness for them equals a snacking problem. So in July, my goal was to make fresh fruit my standard snack of choice and eat at least one piece or serving a day. And more water -- at least a pint before coffee in the morning.
  • In August I attempted to not stay seated for more than 30 minutes during waking hours. Recent research has associated a number of poor health conditions with a sedentary lifestyle. And while no one can definitively say how much sitting is bad for us, moving every 30 minutes has emerged as a good guideline.
  • My commitment in September was 15 minutes of some form of creative writing each day, almost entirely in a writer's notebook that I've had since college. It's full of random dialogue, lists and story plots, and I used to write in it often but not so much in recent years.
  • Read a novel. That was it. Given that I mainly read non-fiction, this idea seemed rather novel (sorry).
  • My intention was to make a daily gesture of gratitude -- an emotional state with its own positive health outcomes -- and I quickly fell behind. I decided instead (because, again, I make up the rules) to make the goal a total of 30 thank yous, one for each day of the month, and I managed to cram them all in.
  • In another attempt to combat unhealthy snacking, my final goal for 2019 was to convert my diet into one filled with non-processed, whole foods. Carrots and peanut butter instead of donuts; almonds instead of old Halloween candy -- you get the idea. I also declared my intention to track my progress and give myself a daily score.
Javier E

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...534198

smartphone generation social media psychology teen

shared by Javier E on 03 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
  • The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household
  • Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.
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  • the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind.
  • The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.
  • it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.
  • theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen
  • Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet.
  • iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.
  • . I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.
  • More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.
  • Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
  • the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.
  • But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.
  • Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating.
  • only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.
  • The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer
  • The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991.
  • Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school.
  • In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.
  • In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half.
  • Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.
  • In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.
  • eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s.
  • The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.
  • So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.
  • despite spending far more time under the same roof as their parents, today’s teens can hardly be said to be closer to their mothers and fathers than their predecessors were. “I’ve seen my friends with their families—they don’t talk to them,” Athena told me. “They just say ‘Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on their phones. They don’t pay attention to their family.” Like her peers, Athena is an expert at tuning out her parents so she can focus on her phone.
  • The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently.
  • Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.
  • The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.
  • The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.
  • There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness
  • Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media
  • If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen
  • Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.
  • This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online.
  • Teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person, on average—highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less so.
  • The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.
  • It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out
  • Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.)
  • Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.
  • For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out.
  • Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups.
  • Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them.
  • Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people think and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a certain amount of likes on a picture.”
  • Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today’s teens. Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent—more than twice as much
  • The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys
  • Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.
  • I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed. They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the morning
  • the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep: Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived
  • Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.
  • Two national surveys show that teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 28 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those who spend fewer than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are 19 percent more likely to be sleep deprived.
  • Teens who read books and magazines more often than the average are actually slightly less likely to be sleep deprived—either reading lulls them to sleep, or they can put the book down at bedtime.
  • Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues, including compromised thinking and reasoning, susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who don’t sleep enough are prone to depression and anxiety.
  • correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone.
  • What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them
  • Significant effects on both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.
sanderk

Why Getting Too Little Sleep Could Lead To Risky Decision Making - 1 views

www.forbes.com/...-lead-to-risky-decision-making

decision making sleep social media phones

shared by sanderk on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The list of physical and mental problems that we know come from sleeping too little is getting longer.  A new study suggests another: shorting ourselves on sleep may lead to making riskier decisions, and we may not even realize we’re doing it.
  • The researchers were also interested in how the participants perceived their decisions—if they saw them as more risky than they’d otherwise be, given a few more hours of sleep. Most of the participants said they didn’t see any difference. “We therefore do not notice that we are acting riskier when suffering from a lack of sleep," said Christian Baumann
  • The good news is that for most of us this is a problem with a solution, although we’re up against some tough distractions to reach it. A diet of streaming, social media and video games is eating up more of our evening hours, along with the traditional sleep erasers like stress.
  • sanderk on 21 Oct 19
     
    Until I read this article I never knew that the lack of sleep actually leads to riskier decision making. I always thought that the lack of sleep would just cause people to become easily irritable and groggy. There is a very simple solution to this problem and it is just getting more sleep. However, I feel that it is very difficult for students to get enough sleep because of stress and schoolwork. Some of this stress can be eliminated by not using your phone as much. Also, by not using your phone as much, you will have more time in your day to accomplish work. This applies to our class discussions because we allow our phones to influence much of our day. Also, we need to be able to make good decisions in our everyday lives without taking too many unnecessary risks.
knudsenlu

Why Do We Need to Sleep? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549473

sleep science psychology research

shared by knudsenlu on 13 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In a way, it’s startling how universal sleep is: In the midst of the hurried scramble for survival, across eons of bloodshed and death and flight, uncountable millions of living things have laid themselves down for a nice, long bout of unconsciousness. This hardly seems conducive to living to fight another day.
  • such a risky habit is so common, and so persistent, suggests that whatever is happening is of the utmost importance. Whatever sleep gives to the sleeper is worth tempting death over and over again, for a lifetime.
  • “What is so important that you risk being eaten, not eating yourself, procreation ... for this?”
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  • Biologists call this need “sleep pressure”: Stay up too late, build up sleep pressure. Feeling drowsy in the evenings? Of course you are—by being awake all day, you’ve been generating sleep pressure! But like “dark matter,” this is a name for something whose nature we do not yet understand.
  • The search for the hypnotoxin was not unsuccessful. There are a handful of substances clearly demonstrated to cause sleep—including a molecule called adenosine, which appears to build up in certain parts of the brains of waking rats, then drain away during slumber. Adenosine is particularly interesting because it is adenosine receptors that caffeine seems to work on.
  • For instance, if adenosine puts us under at the moment of transition from wakefulness to sleep, where does it come from? “Nobody knows,” remarks Michael Lazarus, a researcher at the institute who studies adenosine. Some people say it’s coming from neurons, some say it’s another class of brain cells. But there isn’t a consensus. At any rate, “this isn’t about storage,” says Yanagisawa. In other words, these substances themselves don’t seem to store information about sleep pressure. They are just a response to it.
  • A few years ago, the group discovered a mouse that just could not seem to get rid of its sleep pressure. Its EEGs suggested it lived a life of snoozy exhaustion, and mice that had been engineered to carry its mutation showed the same symptoms. “This mutant has more high-amplitude sleep waves than normal. It’s always sleep-deprived,” says Yanagisawa. The mutation was in a gene called SIK3. The longer the mutants stay awake, the more chemical tags the SIK3 protein accumulates. The researchers published their discovery of the SIK3 mutants, as well as another sleep mutant, in Nature in 2016.
annabaldwin_

How Getting Enough Sleep Can Make You Less Afraid - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...543573

REM study sleep brain-activity fear

shared by annabaldwin_ on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • A new study suggests that people who naturally get more REM sleep may be less sensitive to frightening things.
  • For the study, a team of researchers from Rutgers University sent 17 subjects home with sleep-monitoring devices—headbands that monitor their brain waves, wristbands that track arm movements, and sleep logs—and asked them to sleep as they normally would for a week. They were monitoring how much sleep they were getting—especially REM, or rapid-eye-movement sleep.
  • Each night, most people sleep about seven or eight hours, about two hours of which is REM sleep, the stage of sleep in which the body relaxes fully and most dreams occur.
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  • The researchers then conditioned the participants to be afraid of certain images by showing them pictures of ordinary-looking rooms lit with lamps of various hues, some of which were paired with a mild shock to the finger. Through the shocks, they were taught to fear the rooms that were lit by certain colors.
  • The subjects with more REM sleep also had less activity in those areas of the brain. That suggests that the more well-rested subjects may not have been hard-wiring those fears into their brains quite as strongly.
  • PTSD is already known to be associated with sleep disturbances, and past studies have shown that sleep-deprived people have more activity in their amygdalae upon being shown upsetting pictures.
  • “REM is very unique because it’s the only time that area of the brain is completely silent,” said Shira Lupkin, one of the study’s authors and a researcher with the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University.
  • Because of that, people who get plenty of REM sleep might be less reactive to emotional stimuli.
  • If the study is replicated, there could be real-world implications for stopping trauma—before it starts.
charlottedonoho

Go to Sleep: It May Be the Best Way to Avoid Getting Alzheimer's | TIME - 0 views

time.com/...sleep-alzheimers-disease

health sleep science brain

shared by charlottedonoho on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • “What we think we found is a new way that disruption of sleep contributes to the pathology that can disrupt the cementing of memories,” says Bryce Mander, a post doctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley, and lead author of the paper. The findings also resolve one of the puzzling questions in Alzheimer’s disease: why buildup of amyloid starts initially in areas of the brain that don’t have anything to do with memory. Mander and Walker’s team found that the protein does deposit, however, in areas of the brain that generate the wave patterns of deep sleep.
  • The relationship between sleep and amyloid is likely a two-way street, they say, in which the more amyloid that builds up, the worse the sleep, and the more disrupted the sleep, the more amyloid that gets deposited. Other studies have shown that deep sleep can cement memories as well as clear away amyloid. Not getting enough deep sleep, then, perpetuates the poor memory cycle.
  • When the team studied 26 cognitively normal older adults, they found that higher amounts of amyloid, the protein responsible for the hallmark plaques found in Alzheimer’s disease, were linked with more disrupted deep sleep patterns.
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  • Poor sleep may be contributing to the buildup of the brain plaques that drive the disease
  • “Sleep is a great early warning beacon, a distress call that we can latch onto, to potentially alert us to the beginnings of Alzheimer’s,” says Walker.
blythewallick

Better sleep habits lead to better college grades: Data on MIT students underscore the ... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...191001083956.htm

psychology research knowledge brain science education

shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Two MIT professors have found a strong relationship between students' grades and how much sleep they're getting. What time students go to bed and the consistency of their sleep habits also make a big difference. And no, getting a good night's sleep just before a big test is not good enough -- it takes several nights in a row of good sleep to make a difference.
  • 100 students in an MIT engineering class were given Fitbits, the popular wrist-worn devices that track a person's activity 24/7, in exchange for the researchers' access to a semester's worth of their activity data
  • One of the surprises was that individuals who went to bed after some particular threshold time -- for these students, that tended to be 2 a.m., but it varied from one person to another -- tended to perform less well on their tests no matter how much total sleep they ended up getting.
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  • "What we found at the end of the day was zero correlation with fitness, which I must say was disappointing since I believed, and still believe, there is a tremendous positive impact of exercise on cognitive performance," Grossman says.
  • "When you go to bed matters," Grossman says. "If you get a certain amount of sleep -- let's say seven hours -- no matter when you get that sleep, as long as it's before certain times, say you go to bed at 10, or at 12, or at 1, your performance is the same. But if you go to bed after 2, your performance starts to go down even if you get the same seven hours. So, quantity isn't everything."
  • those who got relatively consistent amounts of sleep each night did better than those who had greater variations from one night to the next, even if they ended up with the same average amount.
  • The overall course grades for students averaging six and a half hours of sleep were down 50 percent from other students who averaged just one hour more sleep. Similarly, those who had just a half-hour more night-to-night variation in their total sleep time had grades that dropped 45 percent below others with less variation. This is huge!"
dicindioha

BBC - Future - The strange case of the phantom Pokemon - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...ge-case-of-the-phantom-pokemon

shared by dicindioha on 24 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Her terrifying hallucination reveals the mysterious 'twilight zone' between waking and sleep — a strange state of consciousness that may also lie behind various phenomena, from the Salem Witch Trials to alien abductions.
  • But my first thought, as an experimental psychologist with a particular focus in anomalous perceptual experiences was, “Well, that could have happened to anybody.” Although it’s impossible to definitively explain this woman’s experience, I nevertheless felt quite confident that this late-night Pokemon assault fit neatly into our existing understanding of sleep.
  • The short, seemingly paradoxical, explanation is that she could have been awake and she could have been dreaming.
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  • The technical term that might apply here is ‘sleep paralysis,’ a subtype of parasomnia, or sleep disturbance. Beyond the inability to move, these periods of wakeful paralysis are often accompanied with vivid multisensory hallucinations.
  • Effectively, imagery from your dreams can actually intrude into your waking reality.
  • Records of incidents attributable to sleep paralysis can actually be found throughout history and across cultures with records dating back at least as far as 400 BC.
  • For comparison’s sake, consider this account by Jon Loudner, who gave ‘evidence’ during the infamous Salem Witch Trials in 1692:
  • Witchcraft is a less popular explanation for contemporary sufferers, but even today, the precise physiological mechanisms that result in sleep paralysis are still not entirely understood.
  • a circuit breaker; it effectively blocks your brain’s motor planning signals from becoming motor action signals
  • However, our brains are highly complex systems, and, as such, are prone to the occasional glitch.
  • Researchers have shown that sleep paralysis experiences can be induced in laboratory participants when they are repeatedly woken from deep sleep.
  • Given their highly subjective nature, dreams are notoriously difficult to study scientifically.
  • In fact, the connection between video games and dreams is one of the better documented areas of research on the subjective experiences of dreamers. 
  • This evidence has been used to support the idea that sleeping might serve to ‘consolidate’ memories from our waking life - consolidation is term that refers to the process of reinforcing and strengthening newly created memories.
  • Various experiments have demonstrated that people who are given memory-based tasks will perform better if they’re given the opportunity to sleep after learning
  • In both rats and humans, the hippocampus is the part of the brain, which among other functions, is strongly associated with the way we form memories of physical spaces.
  • As the rats slept, the cells in the hippocampus would light up with activity. And not just any activity – the patterns of activations that occurred while the rats slept corresponded with the pattern associated with the correct maze runs
  • One caveat is that none of this work proves a direct causal link between dreaming and memories: dreaming itself might not cause the memories to be reinforced, but could simply be a kind of side-effect of the consolidation process. 
  • dicindioha on 24 Mar 17
     
    Our experiences in daily life can translate to our dreams, and having dreams that relate to something that recently occurred to someone might support the idea that sleeping functions to process and reinforce new memories.
Javier E

Living Another Day, Thanks to Grandparents Who Couldn't Sleep - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...ep-grandparents-evolution.html

sleep science psychology research brain science

shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • A new study, published Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that the way sleep patterns change with age may be an evolutionary adaptation that helped our ancestors survive the night by ensuring one person in a community was awake at all times. The researchers called this phenomenon the “poorly sleeping grandparent hypothesis,” suggesting that an older member of a community who woke before dawn might have been crucial to spotting the threat of a hungry predator while younger people were still asleep. It may explain why people slept in mixed-age groups through much of human history.
  • The Hadza sleeping environment may have similarities to that of earlier humans, researchers said. They sleep outdoors or in grass huts in groups of 20 to 30 people without artificially regulating temperature or light. These conditions provide a suitable window to study the evolutionary aspects of sleep.
  • more than 220 total hours of sleep observation, researchers found only 18 minutes when all adults were sound asleep simultaneously. Typically, older participants in their 50s and 60s went to bed earlier and woke up earlier than those in their 20s and 30s. On average, more than a third of the group was alert, or lightly dozing, at any given time.
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  • “We have a propensity to overcategorize things as disorders in the West,” said David Samson, an author of the study and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. “It might help elderly individuals to know changes they’re experiencing have an evolutionary reason.”
  • “The variation may be partially explained by genetics,” she said, “but there are environmental conditions too.” As people age, their social needs and level of activity change, potentially affecting their sleep patterns.
  • there is evidence of a genetic link, she added, pointing out that sleep quality declined among the older Hadza even while they remained active hunters and gatherers.
blythewallick

School Start Times and Teens' Sleep Needs | Psychology Today - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...rt-times-and-teens-sleep-needs

science psychology research brain science knowledge education

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • In 2014, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that middle and high school start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. And just this week, California was the first state to pass into law school start times of no earlier than 8 a.m. for middle schools and 8:30 a.m.
  • We know that adolescents undergo significant biological changes that impact their circadian rhythm—as a result, their biological clocks shift so that their bodies naturally want to go to sleep later. However, in many communities, these biological shifts are at odds with school schedules which often have younger, elementary school age youth beginning school later, and older, high-school teens beginning school earlier.
  • As a result of the mismatch between biological changes and earlier school start times, teenagers are often unable to sleep the recommended 8-10 hours per night that is recommended for this age. In fact, national studies show that teenagers are one of the most sleep-deprived groups in the country with only 15 percent getting the recommended hours of sleep.
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  • The research is clear that sleep is critical for healthy functioning and development at all points across the lifespan. Sleep disturbances have been linked to a host of outcomes including more difficulty concentrating and learning new material, lower academic performance, higher rates of obesity, increased inflammation, higher mortality, and compromised psychological health.
  • researchers found that students slept an average of 34 minutes more after the start time delay. Moreover, the increase in sleep duration was explained by students waking up later (that is, students were still going to bed around the same time). In addition, delaying school start times was also associated with higher grades, lower levels of daytime sleepiness, and fewer first-period tardies and absences. 
  • With California schools leading the way in implementing a delay at the state level, in the next three years, it is my hope that we will have more information and data about all the ways in which school start times impact all levels of a school system (e.g., bus drivers, teachers, students, parents, families, administrators) and for all students.  
Javier E

Getting Older, Sleeping Less - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...tting-older-sleeping-less.html

sleep research psychology science

shared by Javier E on 13 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Insomnia, Dr. Alon Y. Avidan says, “is a symptom, not a diagnosis” that can be a clue to an underlying and often treatable health problem and, when it persists, should be taken seriously.
  • Unless noted by their bed partners, people with primary sleep disorders may not know why their sleep is disrupted. An accurate diagnosis often requires a professional sleep study: spending a night or two in a sleep lab hooked up to instruments that record respiration, heart rate, blood pressure, bodily movements and time spent in the various stages of sleep.
  • Nonmedical causes of insomnia are often successfully treated by practicing “good sleep hygiene,” a concept developed by the late Peter J. Hauri, a sleep specialist at the Mayo Clinic. That means limiting naps to less than 30 minutes a day, preferably early in the afternoon; avoiding stimulants and sedatives; avoiding heavy meals and minimizing liquids within two to three hours of bedtime; getting moderate exercise daily, preferably in the morning or early afternoon; maximizing exposure to bright light during the day and minimizing it at night; creating comfortable sleep conditions; and going to bed only when you feel sleepy.
kaylynfreeman

How the brain paralyzes you while you sleep -- ScienceDaily - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210114085417.htm

science research knowledge technology brain science

shared by kaylynfreeman on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In reality though, narcolepsy, cataplexy, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder are all serious sleep-related illnesses. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba led by Professor Takeshi Sakurai have found neurons in the brain that link all three disorders and could provide a target for treatments.
  • In reality though, narcolepsy, cataplexy, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder are all serious sleep-related illnesses. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba led by Professor Takeshi Sakurai have found neurons in the brain that link all three disorders and could provide a target for treatments.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Cures or fixes to these disorders would change a lot of peoples lives.
  • Instead of being still during REM sleep, muscles move around, often going as far as to stand up and jump, yell, or punch.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      It makes sense that this would lead to poor sleep!
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • When the researchers blocked the input to these neurons, the mice began moving during their sleep, just like someone with REM sleep behavior disorder.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      It's really cool that they found a source! How is this information applicable to a cure? Where do they go now?
  • Narcolepsy is characterized by suddenly falling asleep at any time during the day, even in mid-sentence. Cataplexy is a related illness in which people suddenly lose muscle tone and collapse.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Are they associated with REM?
  • They tested their hypothesis using a mouse model of narcolepsy in which cataplexic attacks could be triggered by chocolate. "We found that silencing the SLD-to-ventral medial medulla reduced the number of cataplexic bouts,"
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Interesting
  • The glycinergic neurons we have identified in the ventral medial medulla could be a good target for drug therapies for people with narcolepsy, cataplexy, or REM sleep behavior disorder,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Cool! So there's a shot at a fix.
  • "They were connected to neurons that control voluntary movements, but not those that control muscles in the eyes or internal organs. Importantly, they were inhibitory, meaning that they can prevent muscle movement when active."
  • "The glycinergic neurons we have identified in the ventral medial medulla could be a good target for drug therapies for people with narcolepsy, cataplexy, or REM sleep behavior disorder,"
margogramiak

Mothers, but not fathers, with multiple children report more fragmented sleep: Study tr... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210112163627.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Mothers with multiple children report more fragmented sleep than mothers of a single child, but the number of children in a family doesn't seem to affect the quality of sleep for fathers, according to a study from McGill University.
  • Mothers with multiple children report more fragmented sleep than mothers of a single child, but the number of children in a family doesn't seem to affect the quality of sleep for fathers, according to a study from McGill University.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I'm sure this has to do with internalized sexism and gender roles. We talked about this is class briefly.
  • mothers of single-parent families
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I guess they didn't have to do with the men vs. women study
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • "Experienced mothers perceived their sleep to be more fragmented than that of first-time mothers.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I guess experienced mother knew how to better deal with children who couldn't sleep.
  • Participants' sleep patterns were studied for two weeks. Mothers with one baby reported having less interrupted and better-quality sleep than mothers with more than one child,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Well of course!
  • No difference was noted in fathers.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      ...
  • These interventions should be tailored to each family member, depending on their situation.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's interesting.
  • he researchers aim to explain the differences between mothers and fathers, and determine why mothers with more than one child report worse sleep.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      This is the part I was most interested in!
Emilio Ergueta

Notes Towards a Philosophy of Sleep | Issue 91 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

philosophynow.org/..._Towards_a_Philosophy_of_Sleep

sleep philosophy psychology science brain science

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 27 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Meeting Christopher after a long interval reminded me of his excellent book Living Philosophy: Reflections on Life, Meaning and Morality (2001). The volume includes a fascinating essay entitled ‘The Need to Sleep’, where he notes that philosophers have not paid sufficient attention to this extraordinary phenomenon. Well, a decade on, this is the beginning of a response to Christopher’s wake-up call.
  • If I told you that I had a neurological disease which meant that for eight or more hours a day I lost control of my faculties, bade farewell to the outside world, and was subject to complex hallucinations and delusions – such as being chased by a grizzly bear at Stockport Railway Station – you would think I was in a pretty bad way.
  • Of course, sleep is not a disease at all, but the condition of daily (nightly) life for the vast majority of us. The fact that we accept without surprise the need for a prolonged black-out as part of our daily life highlights our tendency to take for granted anything about our condition that is universal.
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  • Honest philosophers know they cannot complain about casting their philosophical pearls before drowsy swine, because they, too, have fallen asleep over the works of philosophers greater than themselves.
  • Not only is sleep a reminder of our ultimate helplessness, or even of how circumscribed a place thought sometimes plays in our lives, there is also the fear of contagion, as if talking about sleep might induce it – just as this reference to yawning will get at least 50% of you yawning in the next 15 minutes. (It’s a fact, honest!)
  • Since all animals sleep, we assume it has a biological purpose. The trouble is, we don’t know what that purpose is. There are many theories – energy conservation, growth promotion, immobilisation during hours of darkness when it might be dangerous to be out and about, consolidation of memories – but they are all open to serious objections.
  • Dreams, of course, have figured more significantly in philosophy. Being a mode of consciousness – prompting Aristotle to say that “the soul makes assertions in sleep” (On Dreams 458b) – dreams seem one step up from the mere putting out of zzzs.
  • they place a philosophically interesting question mark against our confidence in the nature of the world we appear to share with others.
  • Naturally, dreams preoccupied him as much as the daily resurrection of the self. He suggested that dreams might be an attempt to make sense of the body’s passage from sleep to wakefulness.
  • nothing is more sleep-inducing than the egocentric tales of someone else’s solipsistic dreams. We long to hear that magic phrase “And then I woke up.”
proudsa

Introducing Sleep + Wellness | Arianna Huffington - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...sleep--wellness_b_8834258.html

shared by proudsa on 18 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Introducing Sleep + Wellness
  • . Scientists are confirming what our ancestors knew instinctively: that our sleep is not empty time.
  • Sleep Number is known for its SleepIQ bed technology, with sensors that track and monitor your sleep and then offer suggestions to improve it.
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  • no better time to put a spotlight on all the innovations in the world of sleep health. Technology has given us an unprecedented ability to learn more about ourselve
  • , 43 percent of those polled said they've tracked their exercise workouts and 41 percent have tracked their diet.
  • Sleep + Wellness has already kicked off with a range of perspectives on sleep and how it can improve our lives.
charlottedonoho

Gender and racial bias can be 'unlearnt' during sleep, new study suggests | Science | T... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...uring-sleep-new-study-suggests

gender race memory biases sleep science

shared by charlottedonoho on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Now scientists have found a more noble purpose for the technique in a study that suggests deep-rooted biases about race and gender could be “unlearnt” during a short nap. The findings appear to confirm the idea that sleeping provides a unique window for accessing and altering fundamental beliefs – even prejudices that we don’t know we have.
  • Simply playing auditory cues while people slept partially undid racial and gender bias, the study found, and the effects were still evident at least a week later.
  • “These biases are well-learned,” said Hu. “They can operate efficiently even when we have the good intention to avoid such biases. Moreover, we are often not aware of their influences on our behaviour.”
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  • The study, published in Science, began with two Pavlovian-style conditioning exercises designed to counter race and gender biases.
  • However, they caution that the use of the technique in future would need strict ethical guidelines. “Sleep is a state in which the individual is without wilful consciousness and therefore vulnerable to suggestion,” they add.
  • Scientists believe the technique works because we consolidate memories by replaying them during sleep and transferring the information from the brain’s temporary storage to long-term memory. Hearing the distinctive sound would trigger the memory to be replayed repeatedly, the scientists said, enhancing the learning process.
  • “We call this Targeted Memory Reactivation, because the sounds played during sleep could produce relatively better memory for information cued during sleep compared to information not cued during sleep.
proudsa

Why Future MDs Need More ZZZs | Arianna Yanes - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-need-more-zzzs_b_8912452.html

shared by proudsa on 08 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • In an environment where it is expected -- and sometimes even seems trendy -- to not get enough sleep, it has been hard to remain steadfast with my habits.
  • The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute recommends 7-8 hours of sleep per night for adults, with some variation from person to person. Insufficient sleep is associated with numerous chronic conditions including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and depression.
  • getting sufficient sleep is not a luxury -- it is a necessity -- and should be thought of as a 'vital sign' of good health."
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  • Sleep deprivation has consequences for cognitive function, namely for attention and memory, two of the most crucial functions for any medical student.
  • If drinking alcohol before an exam is ludicrous, shouldn't an all-nighter be too?
  • The Institute of Medicine estimates that 50 to 70 million U.S. adults have a sleep or wakefulness disorder
  • If we do not find ways to make time for sleep now, we will face greater difficulty in finding balance when the hours become more demanding in our clinical years, in residency, and beyond.
  • "our ability to address and solve the problems we're facing as individuals and as a society.
  • "If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process ever made."
sissij

Sleeping Wipes Out Certain Memories - And That's a Good Thing, Reveal Studies | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...pruned-properly-when-you-sleep

science brain science research

shared by sissij on 07 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • But what is its evolutionary purpose – what kind of changes do our brains undergo when we sleep?
  • suggest our brains undergo a pruning cycle while we rest.
  • Its important to note these studies are still in their early stages. The tests were done on mice.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • letting us forget the less relevant information while strengthening memories that may be important.
  • However, modern humans don't abide by a natural sleep cycle anymore – we look at our phones before bed and expose ourselves to things that cause our brains to think sleep is not on the menu.
  • they might not require a chemical crutch to get some rest.
  • sissij on 07 Feb 17
     
    This article shows that how unreliable our memory is. Every night when we go to sleep, our memory is edited and our brain would delete some irrelevant things. So our memory is not a primary source and I think the words of witnesses on the court can only be a reference, not a direct evidence. Also, in this article, the author states the uncertainties and limits of the experiment, showing that the result of the experiment in this stage can only serves as a suggestion, not a direct evidence. --Sissi (2/7/2017)
ilanaprincilus06

Octopuses, Like People, Seem To Have Active Stages Of Sleep, May Dream : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...eams-but-theyre-probably-brief

octopus sleep

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Octopuses have alternating periods of "quiet" and "active" sleep that make their rest similar to that of mammals, despite being separated by more than 500 million years of evolution.
  • During their active periods of sleep, octopuses' skin color changes and their bodies twitch,
  • And to make sure the animals were genuinely sleeping, the researchers checked to see if they would respond to a video of a swimming crab, a favorite food item, or to a vibration made by a hammer tapping on the tank.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The scientists found that the octopuses had periods of quiet sleep, when they were pale and still, followed by short bursts of active sleep. This cycle repeated every 30 to 40 minutes.
  • "For around 40 seconds, they dramatically change their color and their skin texture. Their eyes are also moving,"
  • Their dreams, if they have them, can't be terribly complex or symbolic, given how short these active phases are, says Medeiros.
  • "because they are a separate example of the evolution of large brains. And so they are telling us something fundamental about what it is to have a large brain and what you need as part of that."
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