Thursday, 19 June 2014
Tips for A Good Night's Sleep
Getting a good night's sleep can be easier than you think, if you just keep in mind some of these helpful tips. Remember, sleep is supposed to be relaxing and helps to renew your body every night. Do not make sleep a competition or skimp for too long (longer than a few days) on getting a good night's sleep of at least 8 hours per day. Everybody has trouble sleeping from time to time, so don't worry if you're having a stretch of having trouble sleeping. Try these tips to help return to a restful, natural sleep.
Sources: American Academy of Sleep Medicine; James Walsh, Ph.D., National Sleep Foundation
- Set a schedule and keep a regular sleep schedule
Go to bed at a set time each night and get up at the same time each morning. Disrupting this schedule may lead to insomnia. "Sleeping in" on weekends also makes it harder to wake up early on Monday morning because it re-sets your sleep cycles for a later awakening. Do not nap within 8 hours of bedtime.- Exercise
Try to exercise 20 to 30 minutes a day. Daily exercise often helps people sleep, although a workout soon before bedtime may interfere with sleep. For maximum benefit, try to get your exercise about 5 to 6 hours before going to bed. Do not exercise within two hours of bedtime.- Avoid caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol
Avoid drinks that contain caffeine, which acts as a stimulant and keeps people awake. Sources of caffeine include coffee, chocolate, soft drinks, non-herbal teas, diet drugs, and some pain relievers. Smokers tend to sleep very lightly and often wake up in the early morning due to nicotine withdrawal. Alcohol robs people of deep sleep and REM sleep and keeps them in the lighter stages of sleep. Avoid all of these things at least 6 to 8 hours before sleeping if you want a good night's sleep. Also, try to avoid eating any kind of large meal within two hours of bedtime.- Have a relaxing bedtime ritual
A warm bath, reading, or another relaxing routine can make it easier to fall sleep. You can train yourself to associate certain restful activities with sleep and make them part of your bedtime ritual.- Sleep until sunlight
If possible, wake up with the sun, or use very bright lights in the morning. Sunlight helps the body's internal biological clock reset itself each day. Sleep experts recommend exposure to an hour of morning sunlight for people having problems falling asleep.- Don't lie in bed awake
If you can't get to sleep, don't just lie in bed. Do something else, like reading, watching television, or listening to music, until you feel tired. The anxiety of being unable to fall asleep can actually contribute to insomnia. Return to bed when you begin feeling sleepy, and try to avoid sleeping in locations other than your bed.- Control your room environment and temperature
Maintain a comfortable temperature in the bedroom. Extreme temperatures may disrupt sleep or prevent you from falling asleep. Ensure a dark, quiet environment whenever possible. Try to avoid going to sleep with the television or radio on, because it can be a bad habit that leads to the need to have the TV or radio on every time you try and sleep.- See a doctor if your sleeping problem continues
If you have trouble falling asleep night after night, or if you always feel tired the next day, then you may have a sleep disorder and should see a physician. Your primary care physician may be able to help you; if not, you can probably find a sleep specialist at a major hospital near you. Most sleep disorders can be treated effectively, so you can finally get that good night's sleep you need.
Table of Contents
- An Introduction to Sleep Disorders
- How Much Sleep Do We Need?
- Insomnia
- Sleep Apnea
- Restless Legs Syndrome
- Narcolepsy
- Tips for a Good Night's Sleep
- Learn more about Circadian Rhythms
- Learn more about Dreaming and REM Sleep
» Next in Series: Circadian Rhythms and Sleep
Symptoms of Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behavior Disorder
Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behavior Disorder is characterized by
repeatedly waking up after REM sleep, which may include vocalizations or
complex motor behaviors. The “complex motor behaviors” are in reaction to
events occurring in one’s dream state, and are often called “dream enacting
behaviors.” For instance, a person might move one’s arms in a fighting manner,
because of fighting that is occurring within one’s dream. Other behaviors might
include running, punching, thrusting, hitting, kicking, or falling out of bed
due to physical movements.
This is a rare disorder and occurs in less than 0.5 percent of
the population.
Specific Symptoms of Rapid Eye
Movement Sleep Behavior Disorder
1. Repeated episodes of arousal during sleep, associated with
vocalization and/or complex motor behaviors.
2. These behaviors arise during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep
and therefore usually occur more than 90 minutes after sleep onset. They are
more frequent during the later portions of the sleep period. While they may
occur during daytime naps, it is uncommon.
3. Upon awakening from these episodes, the individual is
completely awake, alert and not confused or disoriented.
4. Either of the following:
- REM sleep
without atonia on polysomnographic recording.
- A history
suggestive of REM sleep behavior disorder and an established
synucleinopathy diagnosis (e.g., Parkinson’s disease, multiple system
atrophy).
5. The behaviors cause clinically significant distress or
impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning
(which may include injury to self or the bed partner).
6. The disturbance is not attributable to the physiological
effects of a substance or another medical condition.
7. Co-existing mental and medical disorders do not explain the
episodes.
Sleep-Deprived Nation
By MARIE HARTWELL-WALKER, ED.D.
The student who asked to see me looks
exhausted. I’m used to sleepy students. It’s an occupational hazard of teaching
the 8:30 a.m. class. But I’ve been worried about this young man for several
weeks. He seems to be fighting especially hard to keep his head from hitting
the desk during every class. Ironically, we’ve been covering sleepdisorders in our psychology seminar and
he sent me an urgent request for an appointment.
Now at my office in the late afternoon, he
doesn’t look much better. “Were you serious that people sometimes feel so
paralyzed when they wake up that they can’t move?” he asks. “Is it really true
that people can hear voices just because they are sleep-deprived? How about seeing
ghosts and spirits?”
“Yes. Yes. And yes,” I tell him. “Those are
all symptoms of sleep disorders.” He lets out a big sigh. He seems very, very
relieved. “I thought maybe I was going insane.”
My student’s sanity is not in question, at
least not yet. However, his chronic insomnia is causing him more and more
trouble. What he had thought were paranormal experiences or symptoms of mental
illness are most likely a consequence of inadequate and frequently interrupted
sleep. Untreated, his health, his ability to think clearly, and his capacity to
make good judgments are likely to deteriorate.
He’s certainly not alone in his inability to
get sufficient sleep. A recent study released by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention found that 41 percent of Americans report that they have
not had sufficient sleep for nearly 2 weeks of the past month. Only one third
of adults report they get enough sleep every night. This doesn’t surprise me.
My clients and my friends regularly report lack of sufficient sleep; sometimes
with near-disastrous consequences. Stress, financial pressures, overuse of
technology, (did I mention stress?) and the conventional wisdom that people
don’t really need as much sleep as once was believed are all conspiring to
increase our expectations for productivity and decrease our time relaxing,
recovering, and sleeping.
One man I know–let’s call him Ted–awoke in his
car as he was being shaken by a local police officer. He’d pulled into a
driveway, thinking it was his own, and promptly fallen asleep. Alarmed by the
presence of a strange car idling in their yard at 3 a.m., the homeowners had
called the police. My friend had driven 100 miles to get home after a long day
of meetings to avoid having to pay for a hotel room. He could have paid with
his life – and the lives of others.
Trying to meet the demands of work and responsibilities
to family sometimes makes people take chances. Alex drove 15 hours straight
rather than stop for rest, pushing to get home in time for his daughter’s
birthday. During the last hour, he kept seeing phantom vehicles bearing down on
him, only to evaporate like mist. Freaked by the hallucinations and obsessed
with getting home, he pushed on. Fortunately, he was traveling in the wee hours
of the morning when few others were on the road. In a somber moment, he
acknowledges that wrapping himself around a tree would not have been a
wonderful birthday surprise for his daughter. But at the time, he’d been just
stressing about getting home. He made it but, like Ted, it was more a matter of
luck than skill that got him there.
Financial pressures sometimes make people give
up on sleep. Ciel is a hardworking single mom who is doing her best both to
support her kids and increase her prospects for a better job by going to
school. She works third shift as an awake overnight staff member at a
residential school for troubled teens. The overnighter pays better than day
work and she can study when the residents are asleep. She gets off at 7:00
a.m., takes an 8:00 and a 9:30 college class and gets home at about 11:30. She
sleeps until 3:30 when the kids come home. The hours from 3:30 to 7:30 are
dedicated to doing household chores,
having dinner with her children, and getting them started on homework. If she’s
lucky, she fits in another nap from 8:00 – 10:00. She is getting only about 6
hours in a 24-hour period and that 6 hours is neither continuous nor
predictable. If a child is home sick, if a school project requires more
mom-time to get done, if she’s behind on laundry, she often sacrifices even
more hours of sleep. Her persistence in both meeting her goals and being there
for her kids is admirable. But the quality of her work, her parenting, and her life in general suffers.
Not too surprisingly, she collapsed during the holidays and ended up in a
hospital for acute exhaustion. She slept for the first 26 hours of her hospital
stay!
Technology can also be blamed for disrupting
our sleep. The constant input of emails, texts, and social networking, video
and online games, and TV on demand, all the time, puts the brain into a
constant active state. A brain that’s wired up has difficulty settling down
when it’s time to sleep. Often enough, a person who tosses and turns trying to
get to sleep gives up – and goes back to the computer! So much for quieting the
unquiet mind!
For these many reasons, the average American
is getting slightly more than six and a half hours of sleep a night. That’s a
drop from an average of eight hours a night 50 – 100 years ago. Although it is
true that not everyone needs the same amount of sleep, most of us do need 8 – 9
hours of rest. The reduction of over an hour on average means that many people are
losing almost a complete cycle of restorative sleep.
The result is the increase of sleep disorders
and related illness. More and more people are showing up in clinical offices
with symptoms of narcolepsy, sleep paralysis, night terrors, sleep phase disorders,
or chronic insomnia. Often psychiatric disorders like depression andanxiety are secondary to insufficient
sleep, as are medical diseases like hypertension, high cholesterol, and
diabetes.
Like my student, many people are in denial
about the impact of their sleep habits on their general health and wellbeing or
have resigned themselves to a pattern of inadequate sleep. Others have
convinced themselves that they really don’t need more than 5 or 6 hours of
sleep to be at their best and scold themselves for being tired. Still others
have developed dependence on over-the-counter sleep aids or think that getting
extra sleep on the weekends compensates for inadequate sleep during the week.
Nightly restorative sleep is essential to
wellbeing, productivity, and creativity. If you are among the millions of
people who are simply depriving themselves of rest, give yourself the gift of a
good night’s sleep. If you’ve developed a sleep disorder, a visit to a sleep
clinic or to a clinician trained in treating sleep disorders can result in a
plan for re-establishing healthful and restorative sleep. Ah – to sleep. More
important: To sleep enough. It’s what the body and mind really needs.
Can fMRI Tell If You’re Lying?
The
simple answer is, no. You can now go back to work, content in that little
tidbit of brain knowledge.
So
you can imagine the challenges that might be faced when you connect this kind
of brain measurement to a legal proceeding. Areview article on
the use of fMRI for lie detection basically found that the science isn’t there.
Researchers
cannot even reproduce their own findings when it comes to fMRI, which is the
core and basic tenet of research. If results are not reliably and consistently
reproduceable, what you have discovered is a random effect, not a
reliable scientific finding.
Vaughan
over at Mind Hacks has the full story and a lot more commentary about recent
court cases that Wired has covered about defendants now trying to get fMRI
scans admitted into evidence as a lie detection evidence. Vaughan is far more
optimistic about the fMRI lie detection data than I am — I believe the core
scientific foundation doesn’t even exist for this technique. He believes there
may be enough data to piece together using an fMRI as one possible datapoint of
evidence in a court case:
Most
of the arguments from neuroscientists focus on the scenario where someone
‘might be sent to prison’ on the basis of fMRI evidence, but Schauer notes that
this is only a tiny proportion of court cases and that evidence should be
evaluated depending on the context.
This,
Schauer says, could be where technology like fMRI lie detection could play a
part. If it is 60% reliable and is simply a small part of a larger picture it
seems daft to not allow it when similarly ‘unreliable’ evidence is admitted all
the time. As he notes “Although slight evidence ought not to be good enough for
scientists, it is a large part of the law.”
I
don’t know. If I have a technique that is basically little better than chance
to determine if you’re lying, that hardly seems very scientific. Or useful.
Might as well roll some dice or flip a coin to determine if a person is lying.
Worse, if you can’t reproduce that result reliably, then it really is no better
than flipping a coin.
People
have the mistaken belief that lie detection is widely accepted, reliably
administered, and easily interpreted, but nothing could be further from the
truth. Lie detection instruments as they exist today vary in their reliability
and evidence from lie detection interviews is rarely admitted into court.
Despite lie detection’s problems, it is still used regularly in job screening
and sensitive positions, like the FBI. fMRI is an attempt to improve the
science behind lie detection, but it’s still at its earliest stages and has a
long way to go before it becomes reliable.
Read
the full article: fMRI lie detection and the Wonder
Woman problem
Medication Library
Knowledge galaxy Staff
Welcome to our medication library. Within this
section, you will find general information about some of the most
commonly-prescribed medications for mental disorders. This information includes
proper use of the medication, common side-effects, and the interactions the
medication may have with other medications or over-the-counter drugs.
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