Author Archives: Carol Brennan
Study: Sleep Disruption Could Have An Affect On Your Gut Health
If you have trouble sleeping or your sleep pattern is disrupted, you may be surprised to learn that the bacterial colonies in your gut are also being disturbed.
Sleep Loss And Violence: Could The Two Be Linked?
I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know? Ernest Hemingway
Everybody enjoys a good night’s sleep. While there are different theories about why we first evolved the ability to sleep, it seems essential in purging the brain‘s toxins, promoting rest and regeneration, and even helping the brain encode new memories.
STUDY: A Man’s Sleep Habits Could Affect His Fertility
Sleeping too little or too much can affect a man’s ability to impregnate his partner, new research suggests.
Sleep Apnea: 8 Questions and Answers You Should Know About
Sleep apnea is a disorder characterized by brief pauses in breathing during sleep. The pauses cause a partial arousal from sleep and prevent a good night’s rest.
Whether you have just been diagnosed with sleep apnea or think your partner may have the condition, you probably have some questions. Learning more about the disorder and how it’s treated will help you manage the condition, decrease complications and improve your quality of sleep. Below are some common questions and answers.
Entrepreneurs Can Succeed And Get Proper Sleep
In order to be a successful entrepreneur, whether you are running a small business or a large one, you have to bring your A-game to work every day. The best way to do that is to get a good night’s sleep. And let’s face it, not many people who are under the kind of pressure it takes to build a business do. In fact, 40 percent of Americans report not catching as many Z-z-z’s as they should each night.
The hard truth is, if you’re not getting enough sleep, you are losing money. That’s a mighty bold assertion, but it makes sense when you think about it.
Can This $200,000 Bed Really Help You Sleep Better?
Can An Expensive Bed Help You Sleep?
Remember the days when memory foam was all the rage? There was that infomercial where the wine glass didn’t topple over while someone in mom jeans jumped on the other side?
Well, we’re way past that.
Now, there’s a mattress made of diamonds. There’s a mattress that unzips so that you can literally swap out the coils should you decide you want to go firmer. There’s one with gel foam, one you plug in and connect to Wi-Fi and at least several foam mattresses that arrive at your house, compressed in a tiny box.
But for those who want a mattress like no other, there’s Hästens’ new Vividus bed (photo, above). Each custom-built bed takes 320 hours of hand-craftsmanship to make and will set you back anywhere from $140,000 to $200,000, depending on what size you choose. (Yes, American dollars! No, the bed does not fly!)
Rest assured ― this is a quality mattress. Only “selected craftsman are permitted to work on Vividus [beds], each specializing in their field,” according to Hästens. And for the record, a redwood bed frame is included.
But at the end of the day, does custom stitching really help you catch more sleep? What about breathable latex?
“Maybe yes,” Terry Cralle, a certified clinical sleep educator and author of Sleeping Your Way To The Top, told The Huffington Post. A more expensive mattress might improve your sleep, but ultimately only if it makes you more comfortable, she explained. “Price is not paramount, comfort is.”
And comfort is incredibly individualized, she said. “The mattress I love will be the mattress you hate. It’s that personal.”
Studies in ergonomics and sleep medicine arrive at the same conclusion: your mattress is an important factor that either contributes to or harms the quality of your sleep. But there’s no one answer (or mattress) for everybody. And there’s no science to say spending more actually helps you get a better night’s sleep.
So how should you figure out what bed’s right for you?
Step 1: Find your perfect firmness
One study that compared individual’s sleep quality on mattresses of varying firmness with the quality of sleep on their own mattresses showed sleep preference really did depend on the individual.
The study included only nine men, but reported each man’s sleep quality on their own mattress, as well as on firm and soft mattresses. Four men slept better on the softer mattresses, two slept better on the hard mattress and the other three men showed no significant difference in their quality of sleep on either mattress.
The differences in sleep quality on the various nights when the men slept on the different beds were significant, but depended on individual preference, one of the study’s authors Gaby Badre, associate professor and sleep researcher at University of Gothenburg in Sweden, told HuffPost.
An Up Close and Personal Account of Having Sleep Apnea
This column is about sleep apnea. To be precise, my obstructive sleep apnea. I’m not going to apologize for writing about something that’s quite personal. I’m on a bit of a mission actually.
Can A Couple Survive If They Sleep Separately?
Can Couples Sleep Separately?
Do you sleep in the same bed as your partner or in separate rooms?
Can a Sleep Tracker That Wakes You Up Actually Help You?
If a partner or a pet kept waking you up three minutes after you fell asleep, you’d be kicking them out of bed pretty quickly, but a new sleep tracker does just that, with the goal of training insomniacs to fall asleep faster.
Based on research out of Australia’s Flinders University, Thim is a small wearable device designed to readjust a user’s sleeping cycles over the course of a week without too much disruption, and is also claimed to come in handy for better naps and more accurate sleep tracking.
Is the NFL Starting to Take Sleep Science Seriously?
Imagine a conference championship game five or 10 years from now. The road team, having traveled to London and Las Vegas for its previous playoff games, arrives in Foxborough and engineers a shocking upset with the help of a surprising strategy: Even though the team’s quarterback is an All-Pro known for picking apart defenses, it employs a scaled-back, run-heavy game plan.
