Sleep

[Tommy Tainant]

How do you sleep ?

My preferred position is on my back with 2 pillows in a "v" shape supporting my shoulders.

Of course I can sleep in other positions but if I am on my side I need either Mrs T or a pillow to hug.

Best quality sleep is on my back with my head and shoulders supported by my V pillows.

 

[Bleipriester]

Can you please remove that disgusting signature? I am eating! It also goes into the Browser cache!

 

[Tommy Tainant]

Can you please remove that disgusting signature? I am eating! It also goes into the Browser cache!

You are off topic.

 

[waltky]

Granny says she sleeps...

... with her eyes closed.

 

[waltky]

Earn as you snooze...

The company that pays its staff to sleep
Wed, 29 Jun 2016 - As businesses become ever more concerned about the impact of sleep deprivation, one company is now paying its staff to get a good night's shut-eye.

For staff at insurance group Aetna, it pays to get a good night's sleep. Specifically $300 (£225) a year. Such is the US firm's concern about the impact of sleep deprivation on employee performance, that it encourages its workers to sign up to a scheme that rewards them for getting at least seven hours of shut-eye per night. Aetna staff that participate can earn $25 for every 20 nights in which they sleep seven hours or more, up to a limit of $300 every 12 months. Introduced in 2009, about 12,000 of the firm's 25,000 employees participated last year, an increase from 10,000 in 2014.

Staff can either record their sleep automatically, using a wrist monitor that connects to Aetna's computers, or instead are trusted to manually record how long they have slept every night. Kay Mooney, Aetna's vice-president of employee benefits, says that the sleep scheme is "one of many different healthy behaviours we wanted staff to track". The firm's staff also receive extra funds if they do exercise. Ms Mooney adds that regarding the sleeping programme, Aetna likes to view itself as a "living laboratory, to see if this is something effective for other large employers as well".

But is she concerned that some workers may be pocketing the cash without actually getting all the sleep? "We're not worried, it's on the honour system, we trust our staff," she says. Aetna's commitment to ensuring that its workers get enough sleep comes as a number of studies warn that not sleeping long enough can significantly affect our ability to do our job. In the US alone, the average worker loses 11.3 working days or $2,280 (£1,700) of productivity per year due to sleep deprivation, according to a 2011 report by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. It calculates that this adds up to an annual loss of $63.2bn for the US economy.

Find out more about sleep:

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Is prob'ly why Uncle Ferd sleeps so much...

Sleep Shrinks Synapses, Preps For New Learning
February 02, 2017 - Sleep, is an enduring mystery, and scientists continue to study its forms and its functions, and some new research shows sleep helps make us smarter.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin - Madison have found sleep helps improve brain function by shrinking synapses, the junctions between nerve cells. VOA spoke with researcher Chiara Cirelli who said the research team started with the hypothesis that we sleep so that our brain can restore and recharge itself. She said the idea seems simple, elegant and logical, but testing it and discovering how it works has been incredibly difficult. Cirelli and Giulio Tononi of the Wisconsin Center for Sleep and Consciousness have been trying to prove the "Synaptic Homeostasis Hypothesis" since they published a first version of it in 2003.

3D images of synapses that shrink during sleep.​

Cirelli said they began by "literally, measuring the size of the synapses" in the brain. "There are 100 billion synapses in our brain," she says and we know that "that stronger synapses are also bigger." They knew that during sleep the brain "can sample all our synapses, and renormalize them in a smart way, comprehensive and balanced." So they decided to see if that renormalization has a physical component, that is, are they bigger after being awake all day, and smaller after a good night's sleep.

How to measure a synapse

Synapses are only about 20-40 nanometers wide, and the team looked for changes in these already tiny gaps between nerve cells. They had to wait until advances in electron microscopy made it possible to see these tiny changes. A university press release said it was "a massive undertaking, with many research specialists working for four years to photograph, reconstruct, and analyze two areas of cerebral cortex in the mouse brain. They were able to reconstruct 6,920 synapses and measure their size." Cirelli says it is an incredibly painstaking process because "all the actual measurements of the synapses (what we call the “segmentation”) has to be done manually." To make sure there was no bias, "the team deliberately did not know whether they were analyzing the brain cells of a well-rested mouse or one that had been awake."

The result proved the SHY hypothesis by finding a few hours of sleep led on average to an 18 percent decrease in the size of the synapses. "This shows," Cirelli says, "in unequivocal ultrastructural terms, the balance of synaptic size and strength is upset by wake and restored by sleep," "Sleep," the study concludes, "is the price we pay for brains that are plastic and able to keep learning new things." Cirelli says what "happens with sleep, is that salient and novel information is integrated within our body of knowledge, irrelevant details are forgotten, and new space is created for new memories to be formed the next day." She says our synapses shrink as our brain cleans house, and we wake up refreshed and ready to fill up those synapses with new information.

What can we do with this information

 

[waltky]

Too Little Sleep can aggravate metabolic syndrome...

Study: Too Little Sleep Doubles Mortality in Those With Heart, Diabetes Risks
May 26, 2017 - People with a common cluster of symptoms that puts them at increased risk of heart disease and diabetes are two times as likely to die as people without those risk factors if they get less than six hours of sleep per night.

That was the finding of a new study conducted by researchers at Pennsylvania State College of Medicine and reported in the Journal of the American Heart Association. So-called metabolic syndrome is marked by elevated blood sugar, high blood pressure and cholesterol, and excess fat around the waistline. A diagnosis of metabolic syndrome also includes a high body mass index (BMI), a measurement of a person's weight relative to his height. People with a high BMI and other symptoms of metabolic syndrome are at increased risk of developing heart disease and diabetes.

Study participants

In the study, a group of 1,344 adults agreed to spend one night in a sleep clinic. Almost 40 percent of the participants were found to have at least three of the risk factors of metabolic syndrome. When the participants were followed up an average of 16 years later, 22 percent of them had died. Compared with those without metabolic syndrome, investigators found those with a cluster of heart disease and diabetes risk factors were 2.1 times more likely to have died of stroke if they slept less than six hours during their night in the lab.

If they had slept more than six hours, those with metabolic syndrome were about 1½ times more likely to have suffered a fatal stroke than normal participants. Finally, those with metabolic syndrome who slept less than six hours were almost two times more likely to have died of any cause compared with those without the heart disease and diabetes risk factors. The study is the first to examine the impact of sleep duration on the risk of death in patients with metabolic syndrome.

More trials planned