Researchers had over 11,000 participants wear a light sensor during sleep for one week, and recorded how much light the subjects were exposed to overnight. Then they did two things:
They performed a cardiac MRI on each person 3 years later
They also followed the participants for a full decade, recording how many suffered cardiovascular events such as heart attacks, strokes, atrial fibrillation, congestive heart failure, and cardiac related death.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but one of my favorite health podcasts is called “Zoe.” Zoe is a British-American company that offers a service of personalized testing: they mail you a kit so you can submit a blood specimen and a stool specimen, as well as wear a continuous glucose monitor for a few weeks. Then they analyze all of this data and come up with personalized nutrition recommendations for you that are supposed to best sync with your own biology. I have no idea whether this works well or not, but the podcast that they use to market their product often features great conversations with legitimate scientific experts.
At any rate, I enjoyed their latest episode, which covers a subject near and dear to my heart: how to sleep better. Included in the episode are some of the topics I hammer home a lot (such as having a steady wakeup time, getting morning sunlight, and developing good beliefs around sleep), as well as some new tips and tricks that I was not previously familiar with. If you’d like to give the full episode a go, you can listen to it here:
This coming Monday, I will be giving a brief talk at the Marion Council on Aging entitled “How To Become a Better Sleeper,” which will piggyback off of my prior series of posts on the topic. The talk should be about half an hour long, with some time for Q&A afterwards. If you are in the area, please feel free to drop in.
V0027010 Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov. Photograph after a photograph taken
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
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Ivan Petrovitch Pavlov. Photograph after a photograph taken in 1934.
Published: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The man pictured above is Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936) and if you are wondering why the photo of a long deceased Russian scientist is adorning this post, read on. I’ll come back to it by the end – I promise.
In my last two posts (click here and here if you haven’t read them yet), I discussed some tips for developing the correct mindset towards sleep and to lessen the anxiety about sleep that is usually at the root of insomnia. If you suffer from chronic poor sleep, it’s really worth re-reading these posts and internalizing them before going further. With that said, today I’m going to change directions and start talking about steps you can take to actually start sleeping better.
