Many of us struggle to get a good night’s sleep (I sure do), but even if you sleep like a baby, you may find yourself sleeping worse than usual over the next week — and you can blame the full moon for that.
It’s expected to appear on May 5, and studies suggest it could really affect sleep.
One, published a few years ago by Argentinian researchers, found that people fall asleep later and get about 45 minutes less sleep than usual in the week leading up to a full moon, possibly because exposure to the extra light of the full moon can affect sleep. disrupts. sleep. To counter that, you may want to wear an eye mask.
I’m particularly obsessed with sleep at the moment as I’ve just returned from Australia where I was taking part in a new study at Flinders University in Adelaide.
The idea of the study is to take 30 people with serious sleep problems — such as chronic insomnia or parasomnia, where patients sleepwalk or sleep talk — who haven’t responded to other treatments and see if they can be cured with a combination of new technology and established science-backed techniques, such as sleep restriction therapy (more on that later).
Many of us struggle to get a good night’s sleep (me sure), but even if you sleep like a baby, you may find yourself sleeping worse than usual over the next week – and you can blame the full moon for that
The technology they used involves pills you take that measure your body temperature for 24 hours.
This should rise during the day and fall at night, with a minimum around 3am. If that doesn’t happen, it suggests there’s something wrong with your biological clock that needs to be adjusted.
Because I suffer from chronic insomnia, I wanted to participate in this study. About one in three Britons suffer from insomnia, meaning we have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep long enough to feel refreshed the next morning.
If it persists, it can affect almost every organ in your body – and even affect the way you speak.
Researchers at Paris Sciences and Letters University recently trained an artificial intelligence system to detect when someone is sleep-deprived simply based on the way they sound.
That’s because sleep deprivation increases the inflammation of your nose and throat, which changes the tone of your voice so you can sound hoarse or “rough.”
Being tired also slows down your speed of thinking, changing the rhythm of your speech.
Poor sleep also affects the effectiveness of your immune system. A study in Current Biology found that people who sleep less than six hours a night after a vaccine produce far fewer antibodies (an important part of your immune system) than those who sleep seven hours or more; something to keep in mind if you get a covid booster anytime soon.
Unfortunately, some bad sleep habits can make things worse. For example, drinking alcohol before bed may help you fall asleep, but the sleep you get is likely to be of poor quality.
Another strategy is to sleep late on Sunday. But that could mean you have trouble falling asleep that night, which makes getting up on Monday morning very difficult.
Research has also shown that sleeping in on weekends leads to a shift in your internal body clock (it’s called social jet lag), which means not only disrupted sleep, but also overeating, weight gain, and an increased risk of type 2 diabetes.
So it’s best to ditch the lies, make sure your bedroom is cool and dark – and opt for a diet higher in protein and fiber, as there’s some evidence that this can help improve sleep quality.
But once you’re in the throes of chronic insomnia, what can you do? I mentioned earlier that as part of the Flinders University study, I tried an approach called sleep restriction therapy.
For six weeks I have reduced the time I spend in bed from eight hours to more than six hours. The idea is that you get so tired that when you go to bed, you fall asleep quickly and stay asleep.
You’re trying to retrain your brain to associate lying in bed with sleeping – not with being awake, worrying. It’s been tough, but it seems to be working.
I started going to bed at 11 p.m. and getting up at 5 a.m., but as the weeks went by, I slowly increased the time I spent in bed by about 15 minutes a week.
I now go to bed at 11 p.m. and get up at 6 a.m., which is seven hours a night in bed, with no naps or sleeping in. I still lie awake at night, but usually it’s only briefly, and surprisingly, I feel much less sleepy during the day. The study is ongoing, but I’ll let you know more when the results are published.
Switch salt to lower blood pressure
A third of UK adults have high blood pressure (hypertension), which puts them at increased risk of heart attack or stroke – but it is massively underdiagnosed because the symptoms are rare. That is why it is called a silent killer.
Two good friends of mine died of undiagnosed hypertension, so I’d encourage you to buy a blood pressure monitor (you can get a decent one for around £20) and do something about it if the numbers go up.
Beyond the obvious, like eating less junk food (which tends to be high in salt that raises blood pressure) and quitting smoking, there’s growing evidence that getting more potassium in your diet can make a big difference.
A third of UK adults have high blood pressure (hypertension), which puts them at increased risk of heart attack or stroke – but it is massively underdiagnosed because the symptoms are rare. That is why it is called a silent killer
A recent study in Nature Medicine found that people with high blood pressure who swapped their usual salt (made from sodium chloride) for a salt substitute (containing 30 percent potassium chloride) saw a significant drop in blood pressure and a 14 percent reduction in heart attacks and strokes.
Potassium salt substitutes cost a little more than salt, but taste the same. You can also increase your potassium levels by eating more salmon, lentils, spinach, yogurt, milk and bananas.
Dark chocolate can also help — it’s high in potassium and contains chemicals called flavonoids that lower blood pressure by dilating blood vessels.
New skills can help aging brains
Last year I traveled to California to learn about a study that encouraged older people to learn many new skills at once to see what impact it had on their brains.
The results, recently published in the journal Aging And Mental Health, were remarkable. At the end of the experiment, the 27 volunteers aged 60 to 80 had tripled their scores in some cognitive tests, and their average scores had risen to levels comparable to those of college students decades younger.
Volunteers learned three new skills over three months, such as Spanish, computer skills and painting.
Volunteers learned three new skills over three months, such as Spanish, computer skills and painting
They had cognitive tests at the start and at three months, six months and a year after that. One 74-year-old contestant, Jim Ryan, learned Spanish and became an avid painter – and he enjoyed the learning regimen so much that he took additional classes, including history and poetry.
So what’s going on? Researcher Dr. Rachel Wu believes the challenge of intense learning increased the volunteers’ confidence in their mental abilities, leading them to think faster and perform better. She also said that learning new skills can increase brain mass and brain connections.
Time, I think, to grab the paintbrush and book an online language course.