Bathing before bed is linked to falling asleep faster, sleeping for longer and sleeping more efficiently, studies show.
The link between poor sleep and nutritional deficiency is particularly strong in women.
A fascinating cure for poor sleep hygiene.
Sleep can help to clear the brain of toxic substances that lead to Alzheimer’s disease.
In this state, people are particularly vulnerable to distractions.
This is how your relationship affects your sleep.
This is how your relationship affects your sleep.
Having a responsive partner is linked to better sleep, research finds.
Responsiveness means more than just listening, it is being tuned in to your partner’s needs and feeling compassion.
The most powerful way of being responsive is firstly, listening to and understanding what they are going through and secondly, responding with sympathy and compassion.
Responsiveness creates a sense of validation and feeling cared for.
Dr Emre Selçuk, the study’s lead author, said:
“Our findings show that individuals with responsive partners experience lower anxiety and arousal, which in turn improves their sleep quality.”
Sleep has the most restorative effect when it is high quality and uninterrupted.
People sleep better when they feel safe and secure, Dr Selçuk said:
“Having responsive partners who would be available to protect and comfort us should things go wrong is the most effective way for us humans to reduce anxiety, tension, and arousal.”
The conclusions come from 698 married and cohabiting couples.
All completed measures of partner responsiveness and any sleep problems.
The results revealed that those who felt the most cared for, validated and understood had the best sleep.
Dr Selçuk said:
“Taken together, the corpus of evidence we obtained in recent years suggests that our best bet for a happier, healthier, and a longer life is having a responsive partner.”
The study was published in the journal Social Personality and Psychological Science (Selcuk et al., 2016).
This sleep pattern was also linked to lower blood pressure and less risk of heart disease.
Why 75% of depressed people also report sleep problems like insomnia or difficulties falling asleep.
The ‘melanopic display’ is able to reduce or increase the colour.
The ‘melanopic display’ is able to reduce or increase the colour.
Cyan — the greenish-blue colour that smartphones and other devices emit — could stop people sleeping properly.
People exposed to screens which emit less cyan felt more sleepy and had higher levels of the ‘sleep hormone’ melatonin in their system, new research finds.
However, those exposed to more cyan felt more awake and had lower levels of melatonin in their system.
The researchers developed a new type of visual display for their tests.
The ‘melanopic display’ is able to reduce or increase the amount of cyan, while keeping colours true.
Here are some different types of cyan:
Professor Rob Lucas, study co-author, said:
“This outcome is exciting because it tells us that regulating exposure to cyan light can influence how sleepy we feel.
Our study also shows how we can use that knowledge to improve the design of visual displays.
We built our melanopic display by adapting a data projector, but we would expect that this design could be applied to any type of display.
Such displays could, for example, help phone obsessed teenagers to fall asleep, or support alertness in people who need to use a computer at night.”
For the study, people watched a movie either with or without cyan.
Both movies looked the same as the technology balances out the other colours.
Melatonin levels were tested from saliva samples and people were asked how sleepy they felt afterwards.
Dr Annette Allen, the study’s first author, said:
“The new display design could actually have a wider benefit, as it seems that this technology also improves image appearance.
Like adding salt to food, we aren’t necessarily aware that it’s been done though we appreciate the effect.
Exploiting metamerism to regulate the impact of a visual display on alertness and melatonin suppression independent of visual appearance”
The study was published in the journal Sleep (Allen et al., 2018).
It almost doubled the amount of times that people awoke during the night.
It almost doubled the amount of times that people awoke during the night.
The blue light emitted by screens damages the length and quality of sleep, new research finds.
Screens that emit redder light, though, do not damage sleep in the same way.
Professor Abraham Haim, one of the study’s authors, said:
“The light emitted by most screens — computers, smartphones, and tablets — is blue light that damages the body’s cycles and our sleep.
The solution must be the use of the existing filters that prevent the emission of this light.”
Screens are particularly damaging to sleep if used at bedtime.
The screens suppress the secretion of melatonin, the hormone that helps control the body’s sleep-wake cycle.
One of the ways blue light damages sleep, the researchers found, was by interrupting how they body regulates its temperature.
Professor Haim said:
“Naturally, when the body moves into sleep it begins to reduce its temperature, reaching the lowest point at around 4:00 a.m.
When the body returns to its normal temperature, we wake up.
After exposure to red light, the body continued to behave naturally, but exposure to blue light led the body to maintain its normal temperature throughout the night — further evidence of damage to our natural biological clock.”
Blue light compared to red light almost doubled the amount of times that people awoke during the night.
Professor Haim said:
“Exposure to screens during the day in general, and at night in particular, is an integral part of our technologically advanced world and will only become more intense in the future.
However, our study shows that it is not the screens themselves that damage our biological clock, and therefore our sleep, but the short-wave blue light that they emit.
Fortunately various applications are available that filter the problematic blue light on the spectrum and replace it with weak red light, thereby reducing the damage to the suppression of melatonin.”
The study was published in the journal Chronobiology International (Green et al., 2017).
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