Dysfunction Junction

Healthy Sleep Tips

Danielle — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:55:51 +0000

The following ten tips can help you achieve sleep and the benefits it provides. These tips are intended for “typical” adults, but not necessarily for children or persons experiencing medical problems.

1. Maintain a regular bed and wake time schedule including weekends.
Our sleep-wake cycle is regulated by a “circadian clock” in our brain and the body’s need to balance both sleep time and wake time. A regular waking time in the morning strengthens the circadian function and can help with sleep onset at night. That is also why it is important to keep a regular bedtime and wake-time, even on the weekends when there is the temptation to sleep-in.

2. Establish a regular, relaxing bedtime routine such as soaking in a hot bath or hot tub and then reading a book or listening to soothing music.
A relaxing, routine activity right before bedtime conducted away from bright lights helps separate your sleep time from activities that can cause excitement, stress or anxiety which can make it more difficult to fall asleep, get sound and deep sleep or remain asleep. Avoid arousing activities before bedtime like working, paying bills, engaging in competitive games or family problem-solving. Some studies suggest that soaking in hot water (such as a hot tub or bath) before retiring to bed can ease the transition into deeper sleep, but it should be done early enough that you are no longer sweating or over-heated. If you are unable to avoid tension and stress, it may be helpful to learn relaxation therapy from a trained professional. Finally, avoid exposure to bright before bedtime because it signals the neurons that help control the sleep-wake cycle that it is time to awaken, not to sleep.

3. Create a sleep-conducive environment that is dark, quiet, comfortable and cool. Design your sleep environment to establish the conditions you need for sleep – cool, quiet, dark, comfortable and free of interruptions. Also make your bedroom reflective of the value you place on sleep. Check your room for noise or other distractions, including a bed partner’s sleep disruptions such as snoring, light, and a dry or hot environment. Consider using blackout curtains, eye shades, ear plugs, “white noise,” humidifiers, fans and other devices.

4. Sleep on a comfortable mattress and pillows. Make sure your mattress is comfortable and supportive. The one you have been using for years may have exceeded its life expectancy – about 9 or 10 years for most good quality mattresses. Have comfortable pillows and make the room attractive and inviting for sleep but also free of allergens that might affect you and objects that might cause you to slip or fall if you have to get up during the night.

5. Use your bedroom only for sleep and sex. It is best to take work materials, computers and televisions out of the sleeping environment. Use your bed only for sleep and sex to strengthen the association between bed and sleep. If you associate a particular activity or item with anxiety about sleeping, omit it from your bedtime routine. For example, if looking at a bedroom clock makes you anxious about how much time you have before you must get up, move the clock out of sight. Do not engage in activities that cause you anxiety and prevent you from sleeping.

6. Finish eating at least 2-3 hours before your regular bedtime. Eating or drinking too much may make you less comfortable when settling down for bed. It is best to avoid a heavy meal too close to bedtime. Also, spicy foods may cause heartburn, which leads to difficulty falling asleep and discomfort during the night. Try to restrict fluids close to bedtime to prevent nighttime awakenings to go to the bathroom, though some people find milk or herbal, non-caffeinated teas to be soothing and a helpful part of a bedtime routine.

7. Exercise regularly. It is best to complete your workout at least a few hours before bedtime. In general, exercising regularly makes it easier to fall asleep and contributes to sounder sleep. However, exercising sporadically or right before going to bed will make falling asleep more difficult. In addition to making us more alert, our body temperature rises during exercise, and takes as much as 6 hours to begin to drop. A cooler body temperature is associated with sleep onset… Finish your exercise at least 3 hours before bedtime. Late afternoon exercise is the perfect way to help you fall asleep at night.

8. Avoid caffeine (e.g. coffee, tea, soft drinks, chocolate) close to bedtime. It can keep you awake. Caffeine is a stimulant, which means it can produce an alerting effect. Caffeine products, such as coffee, tea, colas and chocolate, remain in the body on average from 3 to 5 hours, but they can affect some people up to 12 hours later. Even if you do not think caffeine affects you, it may be disrupting and changing the quality of your sleep. Avoiding caffeine within 6-8 hours of going to bed can help improve sleep quality.

9. Avoid nicotine (e.g. cigarettes, tobacco products). Used close to bedtime, it can lead to poor sleep. Nicotine is also a stimulant. Smoking before bed makes it more difficult to fall asleep. When smokers go to sleep, they experience withdrawal symptoms from nicotine, which also cause sleep problems. Nicotine can cause difficulty falling asleep,problems waking in the morning, and may also cause nightmares. Difficulty sleeping is just one more reason to quit smoking. And never smoke in bed or when sleepy!

10. Avoid alcohol close to bedtime. Although many people think of alcohol as a sedative, it actually disrupts sleep, causing nighttime awakenings. Consuming alcohol leads to a night of less restful sleep.

Information provided by National Sleep Foundation.

Disconnected: A Documentary on Computer Addiction

Danielle — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:42:13 +0000

How To Learn New Things: Get Some Sleep

Danielle — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:23:45 +0000

As my psychology classes study for their first exam and prepare to begin Chapter Four: States of Consciousness, it seemed like a good time to emphasize the importance of sleep.

Educating mind and body III: Get some sleep

By Art Markman, Ph.D.

In Texas, the schools have been in session for two weeks now, and you can see the fatigue starting to set in. The initial excitement of being back in school has worn off. In the mornings, school parking lots are full of students with tired stares who are still getting used to getting up early for school. So, how important is it to get a good night’s sleep? What is sleep doing for us, after all?

It is strange that we don’t know more about what happens to the body and brain during sleep. After all, we spend about a third of our lives asleep. Think about it, by the time you turn 30, you have spent about 10 years of your life asleep.

A review paper in the September, 2009 issue of Psychological Bulletin by Matthew Walker and Els van der Helm discusses some influences of sleep on memory. They point out that there are a two key stages to learning new information. First, there is the period in which you are exposed to the information. Psychologists call that encoding. Then, there is the period after you have been exposed to the information in which the information has to be locked into memory by affecting the connections between neurons in your brain. This process of locking in the memory is called consolidation.

It turns out that sleep matters a lot for both aspects of memory.

Sleep deprivation (and particularly deprivation of a particular stage of sleep called Rapid Eye Movement or REM sleep) affects brain circuits that make it harder to remember new things. It has a particularly big effect on information that is emotionally positive or neutral. Because many things learned in school are emotionally positive or at least not negative, that means that lack of sleep can have a particularly large effect on information learned in school.

Sleep also affects the consolidation of memories. There are a few influences that sleep has on this consolidation process. First, quite a bit of memory consolidation happens during sleep, so disrupting sleep will make it harder for memories to be retained for the long term. Second, sleep helps to separate the emotional component of a memory from the other content of a memory. So, if a student has a bad interaction with a teacher or friend during the day, sleep will help make the memory feel less negative the next day.

Now, the way many people try to deal with a lack of sleep is to drink something with caffeine (like coffee, soda, or Red Bull). Caffeine does “wake you up.” But it does not seem to revive the brain circuits involved in helping you to form memories. Unfortunately, then, there is no liquid substitute for getting a good night’s sleep. In the end, you need to sleep both to be prepared to learn new things and to make sure that the things you learn get locked into your brain.

Published on Psychology Today (http://www.psychologytoday.com)

Six Myths About Stress

Danielle — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:12:43 +0000

Stress is a part of our lives and there’s no getting around it. But as much as we all live with it, many of us misunderstand some of the basics about stress and its role in our lives. Why does this matter? Stress has been indicted in many research studies in exacerbating very real physical illnesses — everything from heart disease to Alzheimer’s disease. Reducing stress can not only help you feel better, but also live a longer, disease-free life.

Let’s look at some of the common myths surrounding stress.

Myth 1: Stress is the same for everybody.

Stress is not the same for everybody, nor does everyone experience stress in the same way. Stress is different for each and every one of us. What is stressful for one person may or may not be stressful for another; each of us responds to stress in an entirely different way.

For instance, some people may get stressed out paying the monthly bills every month, while for others such a task isn’t stressful at all. Some get stressed out by high pressure at work, while others may thrive on it.

Myth 2: Stress is always bad for you.

According to this view, zero stress makes us happy and healthy. But this is wrong — stress is to the human condition what tension is to the violin string: too little and the music is dull and raspy; too much and the music is shrill or the string snaps.

Stress in and of itself is not bad (especially in small amounts). So while stress can be the kiss of death or the spice of life, the key is to understand how best to manage it. Managing stress makes us productive and happy, while mismanaging it may hurt us and cause us to fail or become even more stressed.

Myth 3: Stress is everywhere, so you can’t do anything about it.

So is the possibility of getting into an automobile accident everytime we get into our cars, but we don’t allow that to stop us from driving.

You can plan your life so that stress does not overwhelm you. Effective planning involves setting priorities and working on simple problems first, solving them, and then going on to more complex difficulties.

When stress is mismanaged, it’s difficult to prioritize. All your problems seem to be equal and stress seems to be everywhere.

Myth 4: The most popular techniques for reducing stress are the best ones.

No universally effective stress reduction techniques exist (although many magazine articles and pop psychology articles claim to know them!).

We are all different — our lives are different, our situations are different, and our reactions are different. A comprehensive stress management program tailored to the individual works best. But self-help books that can teach you many of the successful stress management techniques can also be of great help, as long as you stick to the program and practice the techniques daily.

Myth 5: No symptoms, no stress.

An absence of symptoms does not mean the absence of stress. In fact, camouflaging symptoms with medication may deprive you of the signals you need for reducing the strain on your physiological and psychological systems.

Many of us experience symptoms of stress in a very physical way, even though stress is a psychological effect. Feeling anxious, shortness of breath, or simply feeling run down all the time can all be physical signs of stress. Feeling overwhelmed, disorganized and having difficulty concentrating are common mental signs of stress.

Myth 6: Only major symptoms of stress require attention.

This myth assumes that the “minor” symptoms, such as headaches or stomach acid, may be safely ignored. Minor symptoms of stress are the early warnings that your life is getting out of hand and that you need to do a better job of managing stress.

If you wait until you start feeling the “major” symptoms of stress (such as a heart attack), it may be too late. Those early warning signs are best listened to earlier rather than later. A change in lifestyle (such as exercising more) to deal with those early warning signs will be far less costly (in time and economics) than dealing with the effects of not listening to them.

Article provided by The American Psychological Association

Just For Giggles….Or Is It?

Danielle — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:17:50 +0000

Strengthen A Muscle Just By Thinking About It

Danielle — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:45:01 +0000

In a fascinating experiment, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation discovered that a muscle can be strengthened just by thinking about exercising it.

For 12 weeks (five minutes a day, five days per week) a team of 30 healthy young adults imagined either using the muscle of their little finger or of their elbow flexor. Dr. Vinoth Ranganathan and his team asked the participants to think as strongly as they could about moving the muscle being tested, to make the imaginary movement as real as they could.

Compared to a control group – that did no imaginary exercises and showed no strength gains – the little-finger group increased their pinky muscle strength by 35%. The other group increased elbow strength by 13.4%.

What’s more, brain scans taken after the study showed greater and more focused activity in the prefrontal cortex than before. The researchers said strength gains were due to improvements in the brain’s ability to signal muscle.

This information provided by The Franklin Institute: Resources for Science Learning

Welcome

Danielle — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 02:16:08 +0000

I have been working on a blog in my head. A blog that would provide access to all the interesting psychological tidbits that I come across. I hope that this becomes that ‘relay station’. A place to ‘relay’ all the information for the many inquisitive minds that want to know and understand ‘just one more thing’ about human behavior and our mental processes.