How the New iPhone Update Can Help You Get Better Sleep

I am one of those people who got to sleep with my phone in my hand. I know I am not alone. It’s just addicting to stay hooked about every other news that pops up, whether it’s Tom Hiddleston giving you weather updates or this new mash-up for Rihanna’s “Work.”

 Either way, staying up because of your phone isn’t just how intriguing the latest news is, it also has something to do with how the light on your phone can suppress the melatonin (the hormone responsible for making you sleepy) in your body.

The smart people over at iPhone then developed Night Shift. A new update along with the iOS 9.3, Night Shift adjusts your phone’s light and screen colors so you won’t mess up your melatonin even if you’re updating yourself with everyone’s else Snapchat story at 10 p.m. In the morning, Night Shift will shut off to allow your phone to adjust back to your regular settings.

Watch this Instagram video to know how to activate Night Shift on your phone.


Sweet dreams, everyone!
[Allure]


Photo courtesy of Petra Collins’ Instagram account

source: preen.inquirer.net

Sleep-deprived kids are more tempted by food

Children who don’t get enough sleep might be more tempted by food, a new study suggests.

Five-year-olds who slept less than 11 hours a night were more eager to eat at the sight or reminder of a favorite snack, compared to those who slept longer, researchers reported in the International Journal of Obesity.

The children who slept less than 11 hours at night also had a higher body mass index – a measure of weight in relation to height – than those who slept 11 hours or more. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends 11 to 12 hours of sleep for pre-school children.


“There is now accumulating evidence in both children and adults to suggest that short or insufficient sleep increases reward-driven ('hedonic') eating,” said Laura McDonald, the study’s lead author and a researcher at University College London, in email to Reuters Health.

“This is, of course, a concern,” she added, “given that we live in a modern ‘obesogenic’ environment” where tasty, high-calorie foods “are widely available and cheap to consume.”

Previous studies have shown that too little sleep significantly increases the chances that a child will be overweight or obese, McDonald and her team point out. But less was known about how sleep affects daily calorie intake.

“Some studies using brain imaging in adults have shown that sleep restriction increases responsiveness in reward centers of the brain in response to images of palatable food . . . however, no studies in children have examined whether sleep changes food responsiveness,” noted McDonald.

The new study involved 1,008 five-year-olds born in 2007 in England and Wales. The researchers had mothers answer a questionnaire about their youngsters’ responsiveness to food cues and their behavior toward food when they were presumably full, soon after eating.

The average sleep duration for the children in the study was 11.48 hours.

Among kids who slept less than 11 hours a night, food responsiveness was 2.53 on a scale of 1 to 5, compared to 2.36 for those who slept 11 to 12 hours, and 2.35 for those who got at least 12 hours of sleep a night.

“In children who do not get enough sleep at night, limiting exposure to palatable food cues in the home might be helpful at preventing overconsumption,” McDonald said.

The study found no link between sleep duration and whether kids were still willing to eat when they were full.

While the study can’t prove that less sleep causes more eating, McDonald said another possibility is that the reverse might be true. “It is definitely a possibility that food responsiveness might impact sleep behavior,” she said. “For example, it could be that children who are more food responsive are also more difficult to settle at night (when adults or older children might be eating).”

Emerson Wickwire, director of the Insomnia Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told Reuters Health by email that the study adds a new twist to research showing sleep is a risk factor for obesity.

“The current study suggests a new potential explanation (hedonic eating) for weight gain among children who sleep less . . . in other words, kids in the study who slept less were more susceptible to unhealthy food cues in the environment,” said Wickwire, who was not involved in the study.

Wickwire said the study also showed the importance of sleep for children.

“We know that parents have a huge influence on the sleep patterns of five-year-olds. So really, it’s incumbent on parents to make sure their kids are getting enough sleep,” said Wickwire, a board-certified sleep specialist. —Reuters

Evening workouts don’t disturb sleep

NEW YORK - Couch potatoes looking for a reason to forgo working out in the evening may no longer be able to use difficulty sleeping afterward as an excuse, according to a recent study.

Researchers found that people who exercised in the evening reported sleeping just as well as those who weren't active in the hours before bed. People who worked out in the morning reported getting the best sleep, on average.

"Sleep recommendations suggest avoiding exercise prior to bed," said Matthew Buman, lead author of the study from Arizona State University in Phoenix. "We found evidence to the contrary suggesting that individuals need not avoid exercise at night."

He and his colleagues analyzed responses collected from 1,000 adults participating in the 2013 National Sleep Foundation Sleep in America Poll. The telephone- and web-based questionnaire asked participants how well they felt they slept, how long they slept each night, how much time it took them to fall asleep, and whether they felt refreshed after waking up in the morning.

The poll also asked participants about their exercise habits, such as whether they worked out regularly and, if so, whether they were active in the morning, afternoon or evening. Evening was considered to be within four hours of going to sleep.

Based on the types of physical activity participants performed regularly, like tai chi, running or yard work, workouts were categorized by intensity as light, moderate or vigorous.

People who exercised vigorously in the morning were 88 percent more likely to report good sleep quality than non-exercisers and 44 percent less likely to say they woke up feeling unrefreshed.

Moderate-intensity morning exercisers were 53 percent more likely to say they slept well overall, compared to people who didn't exercise.

There was no difference in any of the sleep measures between moderate or vigorous evening exercisers and non-exercisers, according to findings published in the journal Sleep Medicine.

Experts said the study's poll-based methods may not necessarily be the most accurate gauge of sleep quality, however.

"As strange as it may seem, self-reported sleep—whether good or bad—is not a very reliable indicator of what's actually happening by objective measures with a person's sleep," Dr. Matt Bianchi said. He directs the sleep laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and was not involved in the new study.

"For example, only half of people with sleep apnea will feel sleepy or non-refreshed about their sleep—and sleep apnea is a fairly dramatic kind of sleep problem. I take with a grain of salt any ‘survey'-based studies such as this one," Bianchi said.

Although the National Sleep Foundation's sleep hygiene recommendations don't preclude pre-bedtime workouts, they do advise sticking to relaxing exercises, such as yoga, in the evening hours.

Researchers said the online or printed resources to which some doctors direct patients advise against evening workouts.

"Generally, physicians do have patients get a sleep hygiene resource, and often not exercising close to bedtime will be on there," said Dr. James Mojica, director of the Spaulding Sleep Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mojica, who is also a sleep specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, was not involved in the study.

Representatives from the National Sleep Foundation were not available for comment.

It's important to remember that sleep is different for each person; what helps one person's slumber may lead to insomnia in someone else, researchers said.

"Sleep hygiene recommendations are just that—things that might work in general. They are not written in stone," Bianchi told Reuters Health. He recommends people who are having trouble sleeping be "thoughtful and introspective about finding patterns in their own lives."

"Each patient may find by trial and error the best combination of things to do or to avoid," he said. —Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com

Poor sleep linked to widespread pain

Regularly feeling tired and worn out after a night's sleep was the strongest predictor of also developing widespread pain in a new study of UK adults over the age of 50.

"In older adults widespread pain, that is pain that affects multiple sites in the body, is common and is associated with morbidity and disability including poor mental health and reduced physical functioning," said Ross Wilkie, the study's senior author.

Wilkie is a researcher with the Arthritis Research UK Primary Care Center of Keele University in Staffordshire.

"In this study, reporting musculoskeletal pain was common with just under half of participants reporting some pain and one quarter reporting widespread pain," Wilkie told Reuters Health in an email.

"Non-restorative sleep was the strongest predictor of new onset widespread pain," he said, and "sleep is a modifiable target," so improving it might improve the outcomes of these people, he said.

"In addition to sleep, osteoarthritis, cognitive impairment, anxiety and physical health independently predicted the onset of widespread pain and are important treatment targets," he added.

Widespread pain is the main feature of fibromyalgia, a condition affecting 15 percent of women and 10 percent of men over the age of 50, according to Wilkie and his colleagues, who published their report in the journal Arthritis and Rheumatology.

But the factors that influence who develops widespread pain with age are poorly understood, they write. To investigate, the researchers analyzed data on 4,326 adults from North Staffordshire, England.

All were over age 50 and free of widespread pain at the start of the study, although 2,764 had some localized pain.

Participants were surveyed about their pain, their physical and emotional health and lifestyle factors at the beginning of the study. Then they took the same survey again three years later.

At the follow-up, 19 percent reported new widespread pain, with women more likely to have experienced the onset of widespread pain than men.

When the researchers looked for factors linked to developing widespread pain during the time between surveys, they found that having reported some pain on the original survey, as well as having anxiety, physical health or cognitive problems and osteoarthritis were all predictors.

But regularly having poor, "non-restorative" sleep showed the strongest link, making a person almost twice as likely to experience the onset of widespread pain compared to people without sleep problems.

The study cannot prove that unrestful sleep is either a cause or effect of widespread pain, but more research is needed to understand the relationship, Wilkie and his colleagues write. That may also offer targets for reducing pain.

At present, current management and treatment of musculoskeletal pain in older adults is less than optimal, Wilkie said.

"Clinical approaches that target multiple sites of osteoarthritis may be useful," he said. "However, the clinical approach to managing widespread pain in older adults may need to move beyond focusing on treatment of osteoarthritis and consider combined interventions."

Treatment options to improve sleep are limited, Wilkie added, and existing pharmacological sleep aids can be problematic in older adults.

"Psychological and other non-pharmacological treatments may be beneficial," Wilkie said, but there's a need for both drug and non-drug treatments to be more thoroughly tested in clinical trials.

"It's interesting because they looked at people who were pain-free and they followed them over time" to see who developed widespread pain, Dr. Babak Mokhlesi said, "I think that's what gives (the study) so much strength."

Mokhlesi is director of the Sleep Disorders Center as well as the Sleep Medicine Fellowship training program at the University of Chicago. He was not involved in the UK study.

"Typically what happens is that you don't know what came first - does bad sleep cause pain or is the pain causing bad sleep - you don't know what's causing what," Mokhlesi told Reuters Health.

Retired and elderly people frequently come to his office and ask why they can't sleep more than eight hours, he said.

Among the things he tells them is to avoid "reducing time in bed" by going to sleep late or getting up early "so that you can get enough hours of sleep," he said.

On the other hand, spending a lot of time in bed with lights, televisions and other electronic devices on is also not conducive to rest, he said.

"Engaging in behavior like that can actually promote insomnia, so I always tell people, ‘you don't want to spend excessive amounts of time in bed or go to bed when you're not sleepy because that creates a vicious cycle for insomnia'," he said.

"The other thing that we always tell people is that as a society as we've been gaining weight and we're an aging society, that also brings about increased risk for other sleep disorders like sleep breathing disorders like sleep apnea, restless legs, and insomnia," Mokhlesi said.

He added that those are things that people typically don't pay attention to and they don't even discuss it with their physicians.

"There might be a lot of opportunity there for physicians to help their patients to improve their sleep," he said.—Reuters

Too little sleep linked to heart disease risk

NEW YORK - In a large US study, people who tended to get less than six hours of sleep nightly were more likely to have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and to be obese.

The research is the first to look at differences in risk between racial and ethnic groups, and also finds the strongest effect among Black and Hispanic Americans.

"This is important, since racial minorities are generally at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity," Michael A. Grandner said. "And if they also tend to have more sleep difficulties, that could be making things worse."

Grandner led the study at the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Using nationwide survey data from 2008, researchers divided results from more than 5,000 respondents representing the US population into three groups. Very short sleepers got less than five hours per night, short sleepers got between five and six hours and long sleepers got more than nine hours.

Very short and short sleep were both linked to poor health, Grandner's team reports in the journal Sleep Medicine.

Very short sleepers were twice as likely to have high blood pressure and high cholesterol, compared to people who slept around seven to eight hours. Very short sleepers were also 75 percent more likely to have diabetes and 50 percent more likely to be obese.

Short sleepers were about 20 percent more likely than normal sleepers to report high blood pressure and obesity.

Blacks were most likely to report sleeping less than five hours and very short sleep was most strongly linked to obesity among Blacks.

Short sleep was strongly linked to high blood pressure among Blacks, Whites and non-Mexican Hispanics, while people of Asian descent had the strongest link between short sleep and high cholesterol.

Long sleepers did not appear to experience any negative health effects once researchers adjusted for other factors.

There is no consensus on what the ideal minimum amount of sleep should be for good health, Kristen L. Knutson said.

Knutson studies sleep and heart health in different populations at the University of Chicago Department of Medicine. She was not involved in the new study.

There's no set number for sleep, in part "because there is likely to be some variability in how much sleep different people need," Knutson said. "Still, the majority of large studies have found that people who say they sleep between seven and eight hours are the healthiest."

Recommendations vary by age, with younger people generally needing more sleep than older people.

"Like most aspects of health, too little is bad for you and too much is also likely bad for you," Grandner said.

"It is hard to say that short sleep is worse than long—it's just that we currently have a better idea of why short sleep is detrimental to health," he said.

Quantity of sleep isn't the only important factor though, Grandner said. Insomnia, sleep apnea and waking frequently during the night may be related to heart disease, diabetes and obesity, he said.

"These data do suggest that short sleep, whatever the cause, is associated with important negative health outcomes," Knutson said.

Sleep and health are likely linked in a two-way relationship, Grandner said. Less sleep may negatively impact health, and certain health conditions like obesity might make sleep more difficult.

"Lack of sleep limits your body's ability to keep itself healthy, increasing risk for disease, which puts stress on the body, making sleep harder," he said. "It is likely a cycle like this." — Reuters

source: gmanetwork.com