I am going to sleep This is a sweet thing to sleep on

[Matty]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apHMJOKdBW8

[Private Pickle]

Makes one wonder what's in the hand?

[Peter1469]

G' nite friends.

[waltky]

A new study may prove why people often don't sleep well in a strange place...
:huh:
New Study May Explain Poor Sleep in Strange Places
April 21, 2016 - Ever wonder why you don’t sleep well the first night in a new place? New research may explain the phenomenon.


Writing in the journal Current Biology, researchers from Brown University suggest that one-half of the brain “remains more awake” than the other, apparently to keep us prepared for potential trouble. The so-called “first-night effect” is commonly experienced by frequent travelers who often notice less restorative sleep during the first night in a hotel or other location. The phenomenon is also a problem for sleep scientists because test subjects are likely not to sleep well the first night in a sleep lab. "In Japan they say, 'If you change your pillow, you can't sleep,'" said corresponding author Yuka Sasaki, research associate professor of cognitive linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown. "You don't sleep very well in a new place. We all know about it."

To reach their conclusions, the researchers conducted three experiments to monitor brain activity over two nights of sleep, a week apart. Among the 35 participants, the researchers found that during the first night, the left hemispheres of the subjects' brains stayed more active than the right. Subjects, they found, were more easily awakened when researchers stimulated the left brain by playing “irregular beeping sounds” into the subjects’ right ear. They found that “a particular network in the left hemisphere remained more active than in the right hemisphere, specifically during a deep sleep phase known as "slow-wave" sleep.” During other phases of sleep, there didn’t appear to be any difference in activity between the two hemispheres.


http://gdb.voanews.com/932C84C7-2B1F-47C4-86CB-1DE4F973F511_w640_r1_s.jpg
A new study may prove why people often don't sleep well in a strange place.

On the second night of sleep, however,“there was no significant difference between left and right hemispheres even in the "default-mode network" of the left hemisphere, which does make a difference on the first night.” "To our best knowledge, regional asymmetric slow-wave activity associated with the first-night effect has never been reported in humans," the authors wrote. While the researchers believe their findings explain the first-night effect, they are still not sure what happens during other phases of sleep apart from the slow-wave phase. For example, they do not know if the left hemisphere “keeps watch all night, or works in shifts with the right later in the night.”

The default-mode network is also responsible for daydreaming during waking hours, according to some researchers and appears to remain active even when the rest of the brain may be less active. Questions remain, however. For example, researchers don’t know if other parts of the brain can enter an alert state in other phases of sleep. "The present study has demonstrated that when we are in a novel environment, inter-hemispheric asymmetry occurs in regional slow-wave activity, vigilance and responsiveness, as a night watch to protect ourselves," the study concludes.

http://www.voanews.com/content/mht-new-study-may-explain-poor-sleep-in-strange-places/3296907.html

[waltky]

Smartphone app may help warn of sleep crisis...
:huh:
Scientists using mobile app warn of ‘sleep crisis’
Sun, May 08, 2016 - Social pressures are forcing people to cut back on their sleep, contributing to a “global sleep crisis,” according to a new study based on research collected through a smartphone app.


It enabled scientists from the University of Michigan to track sleep patterns around the world — gathering data about how age, gender and the amount of natural light to which people are exposed affect sleep patterns in 100 countries — and better understand how cultural pressures can override biological rhythms. “The effects of society on sleep remain largely unquantified,” the study published on Friday in the journal Science Advances said. “We find that social pressures weaken and/or conceal biological drives in the evening, leading individuals to delay their bedtime and shorten their sleep.” Lack of sleep is mostly affected by the time people go to bed, the study found.


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Two men sleep on seats at Beijing International Airport

Middle-aged men get the least sleep, less than the recommended seven to eight hours. And age is the main factor determining amount of sleep. The research is based on data collected through the free smartphone app Entrain, launched in 2014 to help users fight jetlag. Scientists asked about 6,000 people 15 and older to send anonymous data about sleep, wake-up and lighting environment, enabling the scientists to obtain a large amount of data about sleep patterns worldwide. The app also asks users to input information about their ages, gender, countries and time zones. Sleep is driven by an internal circadian clock, a cluster of 20,000 nerve cells the size of a grain of rice located behind the eyes, and adjusted according to the amount of light captured, especially natural light.

The average amount of sleep in the world varies from a minimum of seven hours, 24 minutes in Singapore and Japan to a maximum of eight hours, 12 minutes in the Netherlands, the study found. Although a difference of 48 minutes may seem inconsequential, a lack of sleep for half an hour can have significant effects on cognitive function and health, the researchers said. People who need sleep suffer a reduction in their cognitive abilities without really being conscious of it, the new study said. “Impaired sleep presents an immediate and pressing threat to human health,” it said.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2016/05/08/2003645806

[waltky]

Granny used to let Uncle Ferd sleep with a stuffed zebra - till he was 34...
http://www.politicalforum.com/images/oldicons/icon17.gif
‘Cry it Out’ Sleeping Technique Does Not Harm Infants, Researchers Say
May 24, 2016 - It may be fine to let your baby cry until he or she falls asleep, according to a new study.


Writing in the journal Pediatrics, researchers from Flinders University in Australia say that letting a baby “cry it out” — in other words, cry itself to sleep — will not cause long-term psychological damage. The researchers came to the conclusion by studying 43 sets of parents with infants between the ages of 6 months and 16 months, all of whom had reported their child had problems sleeping. The infants were put into three groups. The babies in one group were allowed to cry themselves to sleep using a method called “graduated extinction,” in which parents check in on a crying baby less frequently until the baby falls asleep.

Another group of parents used bedtime fading, meaning they allowed their babies to stay up later in the hope that they would fall asleep quickly once in bed. In this method, parents usually stay in the room with their babies until they fall asleep. Yet another group did not practice either technique and were only given information about infant sleeping patterns.


http://gdb.voanews.com/BFA2CC65-AFD6-4E0B-82E6-76543245AE56_w640_r1_s.jpg
A new study says it may be OK to let your baby cry itself to sleep.

Babies allowed to cry it out woke up less and fell asleep faster. The bedtime fading method group also appeared to fall asleep more quickly. The cry-it-out group fell asleep, on average, 15 minutes faster than the control group, while the bedtime fading group fell asleep 12 minutes faster. "It looks like you've got two effective treatments that don't necessarily lead to negative outcomes," an associate professor at Flinders University told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The researchers were able to tell the level of stress in an infant by measuring a stress hormone called cortisol found in the saliva. They also used ankle bracelets to monitor the number of times the babies woke during the night. A year after the study, the babies in the two groups showed no difference regarding attachment issues and behavioral problems. This is not the first study to come to this conclusion. According to the CBC, a 2012 study of 326 infants found that crying it out had no long-term negative effects after five years.

http://www.voanews.com/content/mht-cry-it-out-sleepign-technique-does-not-harm-infants/3344054.html

[waltky]

Earn as you snooze...
http://www.politicalforum.com/images/smilies/icon_cool.gif
The company that pays its staff to sleep
Wed, 29 Jun 2016 - As businesses become ever more concerned about the impact of sleep deprivation, one company is now paying its staff to get a good night's shut-eye.


For staff at insurance group Aetna, it pays to get a good night's sleep. Specifically $300 (£225) a year. Such is the US firm's concern about the impact of sleep deprivation on employee performance, that it encourages its workers to sign up to a scheme that rewards them for getting at least seven hours of shut-eye per night. Aetna staff that participate can earn $25 for every 20 nights in which they sleep seven hours or more, up to a limit of $300 every 12 months. Introduced in 2009, about 12,000 of the firm's 25,000 employees participated last year, an increase from 10,000 in 2014.


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Staff can either record their sleep automatically, using a wrist monitor that connects to Aetna's computers, or instead are trusted to manually record how long they have slept every night. Kay Mooney, Aetna's vice-president of employee benefits, says that the sleep scheme is "one of many different healthy behaviours we wanted staff to track". The firm's staff also receive extra funds if they do exercise. Ms Mooney adds that regarding the sleeping programme, Aetna likes to view itself as a "living laboratory, to see if this is something effective for other large employers as well".

But is she concerned that some workers may be pocketing the cash without actually getting all the sleep? "We're not worried, it's on the honour system, we trust our staff," she says. Aetna's commitment to ensuring that its workers get enough sleep comes as a number of studies warn that not sleeping long enough can significantly affect our ability to do our job. In the US alone, the average worker loses 11.3 working days or $2,280 (£1,700) of productivity per year due to sleep deprivation, according to a 2011 report by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. It calculates that this adds up to an annual loss of $63.2bn for the US economy.

Find out more about sleep: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36641119)

[waltky]

Granny gets crabby when she don't get her beauty sleep...
http://www.politicalwrinkles.com/images/smilies/eek.gif
10 things to know about sleep as the clocks go back
Sat, 28 Oct 2017 - The clocks are about to go back in the UK. How does sleep affect our lives?


People across the UK will wake up having gained an hour's sleep on Sunday morning, as the clocks go back heralding darker evenings and shorter days. But how much do we know about sleep and its impact on our lives, from our health and mood, to how long we'll live?

1. We're told to get our eight hours

We often hear that we should all be getting eight hours' sleep a night. Organisations from the NHS to the US National Sleep Foundation recommend it. But where does this advice come from? Studies carried out around the world, looking at how often diseases occur in different groups of people across a population, have come to the same conclusion: both short sleepers and long sleepers are more likely to have a range of diseases, and to live shorter lives. But it's hard to tell whether it is short sleep that is causing disease or whether it is a symptom of a less healthy lifestyle. Short sleepers are generally defined as those who regularly get less than six hours' sleep and long sleepers generally more than nine or 10 hours' a night.


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Woman lying in bed

Pre-puberty, children are recommended to get as much as 11 hours' sleep a night, however, and up to 18 hours a day for newborn babies. Teenagers should sleep for up to 10 hours a night. Shane O'Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin, says that, while it's difficult to tell whether poor sleep is a cause or a symptom of poor health, these relationships feed off each other. For example, people who are less fit exercise less, which leads people to sleep badly, become exhausted and less likely to exercise, and so on. We do know that chronic sleep deprivation - that is, under-sleeping by an hour or two a night over a period of time - has been linked time and again by scientists to poor health outcomes: you don't have to go for days without sleep to suffer these negative effects.

2. What happens in your body when you don't sleep enough?

Poor sleep has been linked to a whole range of disorders. A review of 153 studies with a total of more than five million participants found short sleep was significantly associated with diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease and obesity. Studies have shown that depriving people of enough sleep for only a few nights in a row can be enough to put healthy adults into a pre-diabetic state. These moderate levels of sleep deprivation damaged their bodies' ability to control blood glucose levels. Vaccines are less effective when we are sleep deprived, and sleep deprivation suppresses our immune system making us more prone to infection.


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One study found participants who had fewer than seven hours of sleep were almost three times more likely to develop a cold than those who slept for seven hours or more. People who don't sleep enough also appear to produce too much of the hormone ghrelin, associated with feeling hungry, and not enough of the hormone leptin, associated with feeling full, which may contribute to their risk of obesity. Prof O'Mara explains that toxic debris builds up in your brain during the course of the day and waste is drained from the body during sleep. If you don't sleep enough, you end up in a mildly concussed state, he says. The impact of sleeping too much is less understood, but we do know it is linked to poorer health including a higher risk of cognitive decline in older adults.

3. We need different types of sleep to repair ourselves (http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41666563)