Cheating Ourselves of Sleep By JANE E. BRODY

Think you do just fine on five or six hours of shut-eye? Chances are, you are among the many millions who unwittingly shortchange themselves on sleep.

Research shows that most people require seven or eight hours of sleep to function optimally. Failing to get enough sleep night after night can compromise your health and may even shorten your life. From infancy to old age, the effects of inadequate sleep can profoundly affect memory, learning, creativity, productivity and emotional stability, as well as your physical health.

According to sleep specialists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, among others, a number of bodily systems are negatively affected by inadequate sleep: the heart, lungs and kidneys; appetite, metabolism and weight control; immune function and disease resistance; sensitivity to pain; reaction time; mood; and brain function.

Poor sleep is also a risk factor for depression and substance abuse, especially among people with post-traumatic stress disorder, according to Anne Germain, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh. People with PTSD tend to relive their trauma when they try to sleep, which keeps their brains in a heightened state of alertness.
Dr. Germain is studying what happens in the brains of sleeping veterans with PTSD in hopes of developing more effective treatments for them and for people with lesser degrees of stress that interfere with a good night’s sleep.

The elderly are especially vulnerable. Timothy H. Monk, who directs the Human Chronobiology Research Program at Western Psychiatric, heads a five-year federally funded study of circadian rhythms, sleep strength, stress reactivity, brain function and genetics among the elderly. “The circadian signal isn’t as strong as people get older,” he said.
He is finding that many are helped by standard behavioral treatments for insomnia, like maintaining a regular sleep schedule, avoiding late-in-day naps and caffeine, and reducing distractions from light, noise and pets.

It should come as no surprise that myriad bodily systems can be harmed by chronically shortened nights. “Sleep affects almost every tissue in our bodies,” said Dr. Michael J. Twery, a sleep specialist at the National Institutes of Health.

Several studies have linked insufficient sleep to weight gain. Not only do night owls with shortchanged sleep have more time to eat, drink and snack, but levels of the hormone leptin, which tells the brain enough food has been consumed, are lower in the sleep-deprived while levels of ghrelin, which stimulates appetite, are higher.
In addition, metabolism slows when one’s circadian rhythm and sleep are disrupted; if not counteracted by increased exercise or reduced caloric intake, this slowdown could add up to 10 extra pounds in a year.

The body’s ability to process glucose is also adversely affected, which may ultimately result in Type 2 diabetes. In one study, healthy young men prevented from sleeping more than four hours a night for six nights in a row ended up with insulin and blood sugar levels like those of people deemed prediabetic. The risks of cardiovascular diseases and stroke are higher in people who sleep less than six hours a night. Even a single night of inadequate sleep can cause daylong elevations in blood pressure in people with hypertension. Inadequate sleep is also associated with calcification of coronary arteries and raised levels of inflammatory factors linked to heart disease. (In terms of cardiovascular disease, sleeping too much may also be risky. Higher rates of heart disease have been found among women who sleep more than nine hours nightly.)

The risk of cancer may also be elevated in people who fail to get enough sleep. A Japanese study of nearly 24,000 women ages 40 to 79 found that those who slept less than six hours a night were more likely to develop breast cancer than women who slept longer. The increased risk may result from diminished secretion of the sleep hormone melatonin. Among participants in the Nurses Health Study, Eva S. Schernhammer of Harvard Medical School found a link between low melatonin levels and an increased risk of breast cancer.
A study of 1,240 people by researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland found an increased risk of potentially cancerous colorectal polyps in those who slept fewer than six hours nightly.

Children can also experience hormonal disruptions from inadequate sleep. Growth hormone is released during deep sleep; it not only stimulates growth in children, but also boosts muscle mass and repairs damaged cells and tissues in both children and adults.
Dr. Vatsal G. Thakkar, a psychiatrist affiliated with New York University, recently described evidence associating inadequate sleep with an erroneous diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children. In one study, 28 percent of children with sleep problems had symptoms of the disorder, but not the disorder.

During sleep, the body produces cytokines, cellular hormones that help fight infections. Thus, short sleepers may be more susceptible to everyday infections like colds and flu. In a study of 153 healthy men and women, Sheldon Cohen and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University found that those who slept less than seven hours a night were three times as likely to develop cold symptoms when exposed to a cold-causing virus than were people who slept eight or more hours.

Some of the most insidious effects of too little sleep involve mental processes like learning, memory, judgment and problem-solving. During sleep, new learning and memory pathways become encoded in the brain, and adequate sleep is necessary for those pathways to work optimally. People who are well rested are better able to learn a task and more likely to remember what they learned. The cognitive decline that so often accompanies aging may in part result from chronically poor sleep.
With insufficient sleep, thinking slows, it is harder to focus and pay attention, and people are more likely to make poor decisions and take undue risks. As you might guess, these effects can be disastrous when operating a motor vehicle or dangerous machine.
In driving tests, sleep-deprived people perform as if drunk, and no amount of caffeine or cold air can negate the ill effects.

At your next health checkup, tell your doctor how long and how well you sleep. Be honest: Sleep duration and quality can be as important to your health as your blood pressure and cholesterol level.

~http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/cheating-ourselves-of-sleep/?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.z_sma=HL_COO_20130617~

sticks and stones may break my bones, (but words can never hurt me... or, can they?)

Every morning I try to find time to scan through today’s morning paper. It makes me feel updated, to know what agenda the fourth estate set for the day.

Headlines, ingress and pictures give me a guideline to what will be the talk of the day.

For some time now, when I read the news, I have found myself not really paying attention to the news as such; I pay more attention to the language used.

I first noticed that more and more often the headlines are misleading… in the sense they are boosted to catch your eye, rather than tell what the story is actually about. Then I started picking up on the choice of words different journalists tend to prefer.

The thing about trifle details which are part of everyday doings, and that you see, read or hear on a regular basis and never pay any attention to, is that once you DO notice them; they overshadow the general main impression or experience.

Like… the ticking of an alarm clock. You don’t hear it, not really, as it steadily goes tic-tac while waiting for the right time to wake you up. But then, one night, you lay in bed trying to fall asleep, and there it is: “tic-tac-tic…” and your entire you gets so absorbed with the sound it makes you alert and all hope of getting some sleep is lost.

There is a good chance I am more than just a little weirde; but that resembles my attitude and relation to words.

I pay attention to words, I believe that words have the power to catalyze action. I think you can say just about anything, preventing you choose your words right. Even the worst insult can be presented so eloquently it is hard to be offended.

Subconsciously I think we all, to some degree, pick up on these nuances and react to the impact of the words we are exposed to. How you speak or write makes a difference.

When we were presented to news before, we used to discuss issues regarding the event or situation in question. Now we more and more often discuss not the event or situation itself, but social issues the journalist chose to indicate.

If the article add the phrase “ of foreign descent”, we are instantly led astray to not concern ourselves with what happened… we tend to be preoccupied with all the foreigners who have come to our country causing nothing but trouble: Regardless of why, who or how. We generalize and pull them all down.

Instead of mending our society by focusing and trying to fix what is wrong with the system, we are lured into brand marking people; blaming what is wrong on everyone else. It makes us say out loud that our society would be so much better if only we stuck to our own kind, even though we don’t actually think so.

It is sad we are not updated on news without language misguidance, which distracts us.

Maybe this is why we tend to engage less in our local community: we have learned there is such a thing as us and them: Children’s sports teams lack coaches. The Salvation Army lacks volunteers. The Red Cross miss volunteers…. The list is close to endless. Instead of getting involved, spending time healing what is wrong, but by doing that expose ourselves and perhaps prove ourselves vulnerable: we focus more and more on our own comfort, and feel smug about ourselves because, after all, WE are decent people. And while we do so, we criticize what a bad coach our daughter has to deal with, we don’t even think about what an effort he/she makes for our precious offspring.

Very seldom do we give thanks. Hardly ever do we care to tell what is right or well. We adopt the lingo from the medias where we hardly hear, see or read anything good (and if we do, it usually involves an infant or an animal… the two groups still pardoned from our negativity).

Far too often the weak, and yet exposed, groups of people in society are even further degraded… or we enhance the prejudices they already suffer from.

I am old enough to remember when a fight was won when the opponent lay on the ground. Today I have this feeling a fight is about getting your opponent to the ground so you can really hit and kick him properly. Words can do that as well.

I believe we all really want to understand, and we wish things were different… and to the better. To do that, we need to know the full story. We need to be allowed to make up our minds on issues, not on people or groups of people. We can’t make it a matter about whether we like or dislike individuals

We often experience the fourth estate, undeliberately, take side, choosing to tell the part of the story which serves their agenda or cause the best: making money by creating malcontent feelings. (Yes, being negative is a very strong drive in most of us. In example: negativity is such a strong emotion it takes 100 compliments to make up for 1 critisism.) When others are as bad as can be, we, the rest, are great! Sadly, that only inspires aggression and a dividing of people: us and them.

Looking at history that was never a good strategy to keep a society sound and healthy.