Lack of sleep

Interrupted sleep impacts mood more than lack of sleep, study finds.

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After a bad night’s sleep, you are unlikely to be in the best of moods. But according to a new study, your bad mood may be down to lack of quality sleep, rather than lack of quantity.
[A man woken by his alarm]
Researchers say interrupted sleep is more likely to lead to poor mood than lack of sleep.

Published in the journal Sleep, the study found that people whose sleep was frequently interrupted for 3 consecutive nights reported significantly worse mood than those who had less sleep due to later bedtimes.

Lead study author Patrick Finan, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD, and colleagues say their findings indicate sleep interruption is more detrimental to mood than lack of sleep, which may shed light on the association between depression andinsomnia.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults aged 18-64 should aim to get around 7-9 hours of sleep each night, while those aged 65 and older should get around 7-8 hours of sleep nightly. The Foundation say getting enough sleep can help boost the immune system, productivity and mood.

But increasingly, studies are showing that the quality of sleep is just as important as duration of sleep. “When your sleep is disrupted throughout the night, you don’t have the opportunity to progress through the sleep stages to get the amount of slow-wave sleep that is key to the feeling of restoration,” notes Finan.

Interrupted sleep led to 31% reduction in positive mood

Finan and colleagues demonstrated the effect of disrupted sleep on mood in their study of 62 healthy men and women who, over 3 consecutive nights in a clinical research suite, were randomized to one of three sleep conditions.

One group had uninterrupted sleep each night, one group had delayed bedtimes, while the remaining group was deliberately awakened eight times during sleep each night.

The sleep stages of each subject were monitored using polysomnography, which records brain waves, blood oxygen levels, breathing, heart rate and eye and leg movements during sleep.

At the end of each night, participants were asked to report how strongly they felt positive or negative emotions, such as anger or cheerfulness, which the researchers assessed to determine their mood.

While there were no differences in mood between groups after the first night, participants in the interrupted sleep group experienced a 31% reduction in positive mood after the second night, while those in the delayed sleep group experienced a 12% reduction in positive mood. These reductions persisted after the third night.

The team says there were no significant differences in negative mood between the delayed sleep group and interrupted sleep group on any of the 3 days, indicating that interrupted sleep has a more adverse impact on positive mood.

Poor slow-wave sleep may explain link between insomnia, depression

On assessing the polysomnography results over the 3 nights, the researchers found that the interrupted sleep group experienced shorter periods of slow-wave sleep, or deep sleep – the sleep stage that is deemed important for body repair and maintenance – than the delayed sleep group.

Fast facts about insomnia

  • Insomnia is when a person has trouble falling asleep, maintaining sleep or frequently awakens during sleep
  • Insomnia is only deemed a disorder when it causes significant distress or anxiety, or when it results in daytime impairment
  • It is estimated that around 1% of children and 7% of adolescents in the US have insomnia.

What is more, the team found that this lack of slow-wave sleep among the interrupted sleep group was significantly associated with the reduction in positive mood, and that disturbed sleep impacted certain aspects of positive mood, including friendliness and feelings of sympathy.

The team believes their findings help explain why many people with chronic insomnia – a sleep disorder that affects around 10% of the US population – experience depression; it may be down to insufficient amounts of slow-wave sleep.

“Many individuals with insomnia achieve sleep in fits and starts throughout the night, and they don’t have the experience of restorative sleep,” explains Finan. “You can imagine the hard time people with chronic sleep disorders have after repeatedly not reaching deep sleep.”

He notes, however, that further studies are warranted to gain a better understanding of the sleep stages experienced by people with insomnia.

Last month, Medical News Today reported on a study suggesting that adultsmay only need 6.5 hours sleep each night.

6 Diseases Your Lack Of Sleep Could Be Causing.

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You may not be too concerned about the fact you aren’t sleeping well, but below are six diseases that your lack of sleep could be causing. For the below reasons, it may be time to consider a better sleep routine.

6-diseases-your-lack-of-sleep-could-be-causing

Lots of things can interfere with your sleep, like a late night at work or various things to get done around the house before you head to bed. However, continually depriving yourself of the recommended time asleep (six to eight hours) can mean you become very sick down the line.

Endangering Your Heart and Bones Are Serious Matters

Lack of sleep can lead to serious ongoing conditions that can not be undone simply by going to bed earlier. Therefore, instead of subjecting yourself to these conditions that can lead to death, start sleeping more now. Consider the following as your incentive:

stroke- higher blood pressure and a higher level of the chemicals that lead to stroke in the blood stream are both linked to lack of sleep on a regular basis.

diabetes – eating poorly is a result of lack of sleep, since you tend to eat more at meals and also lean toward junk food more than you would with a proper amount of sleep to back you up at meal times. Therefore, the risk of suffering from diabetes is increased.

osteoporosis – This and other conditions related to the bones can result from continued lack of sleep. This is due to the fact that mineral density in the bones seems to decrease when you continue to not get an average of six to eight hours of sleep per night as an adult.

Other Conditions Are Inconvenient and Downright Scary

The following conditions are serious inconveniences when you are trying to get work done or simply enjoy life during the day. Others, like breast cancer, can mean death just when you thought you beat it and have your whole life left ahead of you:

memory loss – when you are not sleeping, your brain is not at its full ability. Eventually, you will have serious memory loss that can become permanent if you don’t start getting some more sleep and quickly.

breast cancer – breast cancer sufferers actually are prone to a recurrence of the disease when they do not get sufficient sleep. So avoid having to deal with cancer again, when it was bad enough the first time, by getting more sleep.

Incontinence – getting up in the middle of the night usually results in a trip to the bathroom, for a reason to move around if nothing else. However, over time that trip to the bathroom becomes necessary and in turn makes sure you do not get enough sleep. The cycle feeds itself and you have the issues with your bladder to deal with during waking hours as well.

As you may notice, skipping a couple hours of sleep has a lot more serious consequences than simply being tired the next day. Therefore, it may be wise to do what you can but make sleeping the proper amount a priority to avoid more serious issues in the future.

What Happens to Your Body When You Don’t Get Enough Sleep

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If you eat well and exercise regularly but don’t get at least seven hours of sleep every night, you may undermine all your other efforts.

Sleep disorders expert Harneet Walia, MD, says it’s important to focus on getting enough sleep, something many of us lack. “First and foremost, we need to make sleep a priority,” she says. “We always recommend a good diet and exercise to everyone. Along the same lines, we need to focus on sleep as well.”

What Happens to Your Body When You Don't Get Enough Sleep

How much sleep do you actually need?

Everyone feels better after a good night’s rest.  But now, thanks to a report from the National Sleep Foundation, you can aim for a targeted sleep number tailored to your age.

The foundation based its report on two years of research. Published in a recent issue of the foundation’s journal Sleep Health, the report updates previous sleep recommendations. It breaks them into nine age-specific categories with a range for each, which allows for individual differences:

  • Older adults, 65+ years: 7-8 hours
  • Adults, 26-64 years: 7-9 hours
  • Young adults, 18-25 years: 7-9 hours
  • Teenagers, 14-17 years: 8-10 hours
  • School-age children, 6-13 years: 9-11 hours
  • Preschool children, 3-5 years: 10-13 hours
  • Toddlers, 1-2 years: 11-14 hours
  • Infants, 4-11 months: 12-15 hours
  • Newborns, 0-3 months: 14-17 hours

Dr. Walia says there’s evidence that genetic, behavioral and environmental factors help determine how much sleep an individual needs for the best health and daily performance.

But a minimum of seven hours of sleep is a step in the right direction to improve your health, she says.

What happens when you don’t get enough sleep?

Your doctor urges you to get enough sleep for good reason, Dr. Walia says.  Shorting yourself on shut-eye has a negative impact on your health in many ways:

Short-term problems can include:

  • Lack of alertness: Even missing as little as 1.5 hours can have an impact, research shows.
  • Impaired memory: Lack of sleep can affect your ability to think and to remember and process information.
  • Relationship stress: It can make you feel moody, and you can become more likely to have conflicts with others.
  • Quality of life: You may become less likely to participate in normal daily activities or to exercise.
  • Greater likelihood for car accidents: Drowsy driving accounts for thousands of crashes, injuries and fatalities each year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

If you continue to operate without enough sleep, you may see more long-term and serious health problems. Some of the most serious potential problems associated with chronic sleep deprivation are high blood pressure, diabetes, heart attack, heart failure or stroke. Other potential problems include obesity, depression and lower sex drive.

Chronic sleep deprivation can even affect your appearance.  Over time, it can lead to premature wrinkling and dark circles under the eyes. Also, research links a lack of sleep to an increase of the stress hormone cortisol in the body. Cortisol can break down collagen, the protein that keeps skin smooth.

Make time for downtime

“In our society, nowadays, people aren’t getting enough sleep. They put sleep so far down on their priority list because there are so many other things to do – family, personal and work life,” Dr. Walia says. “These are challenges, but if people understand how important adequate sleep is, it makes a huge difference.”

Sleep duration, sleep-disordered breathing linked to childhood obesity at 15 years

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A child’s risk of becoming obese by age 15 years may be increased by sleep-related breathing problems and chronic lack of sleep, according to recent study findings published in The Journal of Pediatrics.

“In recent years, lack of sleep has become a well-recognized risk for childhood obesity,” Karen Bonuck, PhD, of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, N.Y., said in a press release. “Sleep-disordered breathing, or SDB, which includes snoring and sleep apnea, is also a risk factor for obesity but receives less attention. These two risk factors had not been tracked together in children over time to determine their potential for independently influencing weight gain. Our study aimed to fill in that gap.”

Karen Bonuck

Karen Bonuck

Bonuck and colleagues evaluated 1,899 children from birth to age 6.75 years to determine the effects of sleep duration and SDB on childhood BMI.

Participants were divided into five SDB clusters including: no symptoms (asymptomatic; 45%); peak at 6 months (symptoms peak at 6 months, then abate; 18.5%), peak at 18 months (symptoms peak at 18 months, then abate; 10.5%), worst case (symptoms rise at 18 months, peak at 30 to 40 months and remain high; 7%) and late symptom (modest symptoms appear at 42 months and remain high; 19%). Associations were examined for each SDB cluster and sleep duration at age 18 months, 2.5 years, 5.75 years and 6.75 years.

Compared with the asymptomatic group, the worst case group were twice as likely to become obese by age 7, 10 and 15 years. Snoring, sleep apnea and mouth-breathing were the most common SDB symptoms among the worst case group.

Participants in the late symptom group demonstrated an 80% increased risk for obesity at age 7 years and a 60% increased risk at age 15 years.

There was a significant association with obesity at age 15 years and short sleep duration at age 4.75 and 5.75 years. There was a 55% to 65% increased risk for obesity at age 15 years with short sleep duration at 5.75 years. Obesity at age 15 years was less likely among participants with the longest sleep duration at age 2.5 years (OR=0.5; 95% CI, 0.26-0.97).

“We know that the road to obesity often begins early in life,” Bonuck said. “Our research strengthens the case that insufficient sleep and SDB — especially when present early in childhood — increase the risk for becoming obese later in childhood. If impaired sleep in childhood is conclusively shown to cause future obesity, it may be vital for parents and physicians to identify sleep problems early, so that corrective action can be taken and obesity prevented. With childhood obesity hovering at 17% in the United States, we’re hopeful that efforts to address both of these risk factors could have a tremendous public health impact.”

The Impact Of Sleep Loss: Can It Affect The Size Of Your Brain?

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Lacking sleep can have quite an influence over your health; studies have shown that sleep deprivation can lead to poor memory skills, decreased quality of life, and impaired performance and alertness in accomplishing tasks. Not to mention a higher chance of developing high blood pressure, stress, attention deficit disorder, depression, and even obesity.

Now, researchers are beginning to examine the impact sleep deprivation might have on brain size. In a new study out of the University of Oxford, scientists examined 147 adults who were aged 20 to 84. They analyzed the link between lack of sleep and brain volume, finding that on average sleeping difficulties were associated with the “rapid decline in brain volume.” All of the participants underwent two MRI brain scans — about 3.5 years apart — and completed questionnaires about how they slept: whether they had a difficult time falling asleep, staying asleep, or sleeping a solid amount of hours every night. About 35 percent of the participants were shown to have poor sleep quality, according to the authors.

sleep deprivation

But the researchers still aren’t sure whether they can determine from this study that people with low sleep quality will indeed experience a decline in brain volume. Though there is a link, there is no telling if it’s a causation or just a correlation. What they did find, however, was that rapid decline in brain volume was more strongly apparent in people over the age of 60.

“It is not yet known whether poor sleep quality is a cause or consequence of changes in brain structure,” study author Claire E. Sexton of the University of Oxford said in the press release. “There are effective treatments for sleep problems, so future research needs to test whether improving people’s quality of sleep could slow the rate of brain volume loss. If that is the case, improving people’s sleep habits could be an important way to improve brain health.”

This is just another study that suggests how important sleep is for the brain. Sleep is something of the “brain’s housekeeper,” due to its ability to “cleanse” the brain and repair it. A recent study out of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicinefound that chronic sleep deprivation could be quite serious in that it causes your brain to lose neurons.

“In general, we’ve always assumed full recovery of cognition following short- and long-term sleep loss,” Dr. Sigrid Veasey, an author of the UPenn study and associate professor of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, said in a press release. “But some of the research in humans has shown that attention span and several other aspects of cognition may not normalize even with three days of recovery sleep, raising the question of lasting injury in the brain. We wanted to figure out exactly whether chronic sleep loss injures neurons, whether the injury is reversible, and which neurons are involved… This is the first report that sleep loss can actually result in a loss of neurons.”

So give sleep a chance to be your “brain’s housekeeper,” because it is likely far more important to your brain — and overall health — than you think.

CDC calls insufficient sleep a public health epidemic.

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The CDC has it right in declaring lack of sleep a public health epidemic.

Lack of sleep has been linked to a number of public issues such as industrial disasters, medical and occupational errors, and motor vehicle accidents.

In addition to these well-known consequences, however, new studies have shown that people who receive insufficient sleep are at increased risk for chronic disease such as diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and even cancer.

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Research backs the call for better sleep with shocking statistics

Two recent studies have shown that unhealthy sleep behaviors and self-reported sleep difficulties are becoming more prevalent across the country, and insufficient sleep is becoming of increasing concern.

According to the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System Survey, 35% of the nearly 75,000 adults who responded received less than seven hours per night. A number of other health problems were also reported, including 38% of respondents reporting that they fell asleep unintentionally during the day at least once during the preceding month.

An alarming 4.7 percent nodded off while driving. This is especially concerning when you consider that drowsy driving accounts for at least 1550 fatalities and 40,000 traffic accident injuries each year.

According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Sleep Disorders Questionnaire, adults between the ages of 40-59 are most likely to get less than eight hours of sleep at 40.3 percent, with the ages of 20-39 not far behind at 37 percent.

Furthermore, those adults who did report getting less than seven hours of sleep per night also experienced more difficulties with performing daily tasks.

How much sleep is necessary?

According to the National Institutes of Health, school-age children need a minimum of 10 hours of sleep per day, while teenagers need around nine hours. Adults need at least seven hours. Unfortunately, the National Health Interview Survey finds that nearly 30 percent of adults get less than six hours of sleep per night on average. Only 31 percent of high school students receive eight hours of sleep on an average school night.

There are a number of ways for both adults and children to improve their sleep habits, known as sleep hygiene. First, try to go to bed at the same time each day. Likewise, set an alarm to ensure you rise at the same time every morning. Avoiding caffeine and alcohol before bed can both make falling asleep easier and improve the quality of your sleep, as will avoiding nicotine. While a small bedtime snack is okay, it’s best to avoid eating a large meal.

For many with busy minds, sleep hygiene falls short

Indeed, practicing good sleep hygiene does NOT mean that your busy head calms down when you hop into bed. If you really want to sleep like a baby, then you’ve got to find a way to turn off all the inner commotion.

What causes the mental commotion that you can’t just turn off? Fascinating research as reported in the March 2010 issue of Scientific American Magazine suggests that the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) is the culprit. Scientific American positioned the DMN as the brain’s dark energy.

The DMN is responsible for self-referential thoughts (autopilot thinking). When the DMN is overactive, your mind churns and spins, generating thoughts that keep you tense and awake.

Most people have never heard of the DMN, much less how to turn it off. You can, in fact, turn off your DMN, clear your head and relax. This has been proven via fMRI scans. It’s relatively easy to do and it leads to natural sleep when you are tired.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/046202_sleep_deficiency_brain_health_busy_minds.html#ixzz38y2OrvVM