Tag: sleep
Skimping On Sleep May Activate The ‘Munchies’

Skimping On Sleep May Activate The ‘Munchies’

By Kathryn Doyle

(Reuters Health) – Getting too little sleep may activate the same chemical pathways in the brain that are involved in heightened attraction to and enjoyment of junk food associated with marijuana use – also known as “the munchies” – according to a small U.S. study.

Researchers found that a night of restricted sleep was followed by extended peaks, later in the day, in natural signaling chemicals that regulate hunger and pleasure. They think that may be one reason sleep deprivation is linked to weight gain.

“Our current study adds to that growing literature and suggests that along with changes in leptin and ghrelin, alterations in endocannabinoids – all changing in the direction to favor food intake – may be mechanisms by which sleep restriction promotes overeating,” said lead author Erin Hanlon, a research associate in endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at the University of Chicago.

“And, on a larger scale, evidence from both laboratory and epidemiologic studies have consistently associated insufficient sleep or short sleep with increased risk of obesity,” Hanlon said.

The researchers studied 14 healthy young adults ranging in age from 18 to 30 years who got four nights of sufficient sleep, about eight and a half hours, then four nights of sleep restricted to 4.5 hours. The two sleep tests took place in a sleep lab and were separated by a month.

During waking hours, participants were housed in a private room and kept basically sedentary. They had three identical meals at 9 a.m., 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.

In each test, calorie intake was controlled for the first three days and on the fourth day participants were allowed to eat as much or as little as they liked from a buffet tailored to individual preferences. Meanwhile, researchers monitored participants’ calorie intake and analyzed blood samples.

Participants also answered questions about their hunger, appetite, energy level and mood during the 24-hour period of blood sampling, 25 minutes before each meal and one hour and 35 minutes afterward.

When sleep deprived, participants had higher levels of endocannabinoid 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG), a chemical signal that makes foods, particularly junk foods, pleasurable. This blood chemical is usually low overnight and rises steadily during the day, peaking in the afternoon.

But in the sleep-deprived phase, 2-AG remained elevated late in the evening and participants reported higher hunger scores, according to the results in the journal Sleep.

“These are the first results showing that sleep restriction influences the endocannabinoid system in humans,” said Frank Scheer of the Medical Chronobiology Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who wrote a commentary alongside the new study. “This opens up a new insight into systems involved in energy balance and food reward,” he told Reuters Health by email.

“Previous studies had shown that experimental sleep loss causes an increase in ‘hunger hormone’ ghrelin and a decrease in ‘satiety hormone’ leptin,” Scheer said. “The increase in the peak in endocannabinoids following sleep restriction provides an additional mechanism that could help explain an increase in hunger.”

Adults should aim for seven to nine hours of sleep per night, he said.

“With decreasing amounts of sleep, the metabolic effects appear to become progressively stronger,” Scheer said.

Photo: A shop worker rests in the shade along the beach in Recife June 10, 2014. In a project called ‘On The Sidelines’ Reuters photographers share pictures showing their own quirky and creative view of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Sandman Not Doing The Job? Use Behavioral Tips To Sleep Easy

Sandman Not Doing The Job? Use Behavioral Tips To Sleep Easy

Mayo Clinic News Network (TNS)

“Many of my patients face sleep difficulties,” says Dr. Filza Hussain, Mayo Clinic Health System behavioral health expert. “It’s either difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep or both. This leads to feeling tired in the morning, having difficulties with daytime sleepiness, attention and concentration problems and irritability. Most of my patients have tried over-the-counter sleep aids or even prescription medications but remain dissatisfied and sleepless.”

Sleep aids certainly can help in the short term, but developing good sleep practices is often key. Sleep hygiene is a term used to describe good sleep habits. Dr. Hussain says the fundamentals of practicing good sleep hygiene are:

  • Set a routine. Establish a regular rhythm by going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time each day. Yes, even on weekends. Don’t take naps during the day. Avoid caffeine, nicotine and alcohol, and exercise at least four to six hours before bed. These behaviors can affect the quality of your sleep.
  • Listen to your body. Your body will tell you when it’s tired because your eyelids will feel heavy. Go to bed only when you’re tired rather than spending hours in bed waiting for sleep to come.
  • If you find yourself awake in bed, don’t toss and turn for hours. There’s no point in counting thousands of sheep. Don’t watch the clock _ this will only provoke more anxiety and wake you up more. Get up and do something boring, such as reading the phone book. Video games or other computer/television screens or bright lamps will wake your brain up, so try using dim lights.
  • Make your bedroom your sanctuary. Make sure your bedroom is quiet, cool (with blankets to keep you warm) and uncluttered. Using lavender aroma therapy can help. Some people find white noise soothing. Make sure your bed is just for sleep and related activities. Don’t eat, watch TV or work on your laptop in bed.

If sleep problems still exist despite following the above tips, keep a sleep diary for a week to show your doctor so he or she can help better address the issue. A template for such a diary can be found online. Or, you can simply document what time you went to bed, what time you woke up, how many times you woke up in the middle of the night and what the factors were for awakening.

(Mayo Clinic News Network is your source for health news, advances in research and wellness tips.)
(c)2015 Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: You can improve your sleep by setting a routine and making your bedroom a comfortable, sleep-focused environment. (Photo courtesy Fotolia/TNS)

Beating Jet Lag: A Sleep Expert Weighs In

Beating Jet Lag: A Sleep Expert Weighs In

By Josh Noel, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

When he got to Yorkshire, England, on a recent trip, Robert Rosenberg began one of his standard routines: He laced up his sneakers and took an afternoon jog.

Rosenberg was, in reality, doing more than getting fresh air and exercise; he was adjusting his body to the local time zone, which was eight hours ahead of his home in Arizona. Rosenberg, a doctor of sleep medicine who runs the Sleep Disorders Center of Prescott Valley, in Prescott, Ariz., was beating jet lag with exercise and exposure to the afternoon sunlight. Both are elemental to overcoming jet lag, he said.

“I know it helped me get acclimated, getting exercise and getting out there in the light, rather than sitting in a hotel room,” Rosenberg said.

Although a few lucky travelers might be immune to jet lag, most of us have suffered through that wobbly sensation of being half a world from home in a deep, disorienting exhaustion. It often is impossible to avoid because of the chasm between our circadian rhythms — the biological process that juggles consciousness and sleep — and a new surrounding where sunrise and sunset don’t mesh with what our body expects.

The challenge is particularly acute when traveling across at least three time zones, Rosenberg said; it takes about a day to adjust for every time zone crossed heading east and half the time when traveling west.

The problem for a person on a regular day/night schedule, Rosenberg said, is that the brain’s pineal gland is accustomed to producing the melatonin we need to sleep about nine or ten p.m. — but, when whisked across the Atlantic Ocean, that’s suddenly four or five a.m. in, say, Prague. Worse, we continue to get that melatonin well into Prague’s daytime. The fallout can be quite unpleasant: insomnia, fatigue, an inability to concentrate and even constipation and indigestion.

“It takes brain several days or more to change its inherent cycle and phase in with a new night and day in the new destination,” Rosenberg said. “Trying to budge the circadian clock can be hard to do.”

But it can be done. Here are Rosenberg’s suggestions:

  • Prepare: For three nights before traveling east, go to sleep an hour earlier than usual and wake up an hour earlier. When traveling west, sleep an hour later and rise and hour later.
  • Light exposure: When freshly landed somewhere to the east, don’t expose yourself to light until the afternoon. Why? “The brain is still back home; if you’re in Paris and you get up at eight a.m. and expose yourself to bright light, it is still nighttime to your brain. You want to do everything you can to help your brain adjust to the new time, so expose yourself to sunlight at four p.m., when it’s 8 a.m. back home. Just wear sunglasses until then, and then take them off. It’s about easing yourself in.”
  • Supplement: Rosenberg suggests taking 0.5 milligrams of melatonin for the first two or three nights in your destination. “It’s very safe, and it’s a great way to get through jet lag,” he said. A sleeping pill, he said, should always be a last resort. “I try to use natural methods first,” he said.
  • Don’t give in (too much): If you have to nap on the day you arrive in a far-off place, keep it to no more than two hours.
  • Scheduling: Try to arrive in your destination in the afternoon, which will allow you to go to sleep at a “normal” bedtime.
  • Go early: Business trip? Go a couple days early to adjust. “You don’t want that meeting to be on the first day you’re there,” Rosenberg said.
  • Eat smart: When you get to your destination, eat foods high in tryptophan — dairy, red meat, fish, and peanuts — which help stimulate melatonin.
  • Sleep on the plane: Obvious, but several hours of sleep en route can make a huge difference toward getting on a regular sleep schedule.
  • Exercise: It helps you fall asleep more easily.
  • The little things: Small advantages hel. Turn off electronics 90 minutes before bedtime (melatonin production is suppressed by the bright light from a mobile phone or tablet); don’t drink too much alcohol (which interferes with sleep in a variety of ways) or caffeine after about noon.

Photo: Brian Felix via Flickr

Kill Your Snooze Button Before It Kills You

Kill Your Snooze Button Before It Kills You

Keeping up to date with health studies can be a hellish experience, especially when every third report informs you that some everyday habit or seemingly innocuous simple pleasure can kill you (sitting down, anyone?). Well, if you’re easily unnerved by this sort of thing, stop reading now. It turns out that oversleeping is bad for you. Who knew?

It has been well established for years now that not getting enough sleep correlates to higher risks of obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes. But a recent study indicates that, among older adults, getting more than the requisite eight hours is linked with an increased likelihood of having a stroke.

The findings come from a decade-long study conducted by researchers at Cambridge University, published in an article that recently appeared in the journal Neurology. The study concludes that if adults older than 65 get more than their nightly quota, they run a higher risk of stroke.

Study participants were drawn from the middle- and older-age adult population of Norfolk, UK, and screened for pre-existing health problems. The participants in the study were between 42 and 81 years old. The sleep patterns of these 9,692 people were measured in two-year batches, from 1998-2000 and 2002-2004. Researchers then tracked the incidence of strokes among the test subjects until mid-2009.

When older adults fell outside the six- to eight-hour sweet spot, that’s when problems began to arise. Those who reported sleeping for more than eight hours a day were 46 percent more likely to have a stroke; those who slept less than six hours were 18 percent more likely to have one. Of the 9,692 sample set, there were 346 strokes.

However, it remains unclear whether sleeping too long is the cause of the cardiovascular problems that lead to stroke, or whether it’s a symptom of the underlying issues.

The National Sleep Foundation, an organization of researchers and clinicians that promotes healthy sleep habits through advocacy and education, recently updated its guidelines for the recommended amounts of sleep. While both younger and middle-aged adults are encouraged to get seven to nine hours per day, adults older than 65 are encouraged to cut that off at eight hours.

The Cambridge study into the correlation between oversleeping and strokes joins a body of other research indicating that a horror house of health issues can arise from oversleeping, including obesity, headaches, depression, back pain, and heart disease.

At least until the next batch of research comes out, perhaps the best course of action is to kill your snooze button before it kills you.

Photo: Jonathan Bliss via Flickr