Wenatex Blog | Healthy Sleep for a Better Life

Here is the proof - Wenatex has always argued that turning off the bedside lamp will help you get a better sleep. Now science has taken this thinking a step further and a new study links leaving the light on with depression.

I read an article this morning that discussed a recent study which exposed hamsters to artificial light and found that after four weeks, they were disinterested in things that they previously enjoyed, when compared with a control group.

However, the positive that came out of the study is that these effects can be reversed by simply turning the light off!

To read the article from New York Daily News which inspired this blog entry, go to http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/dim-lighting-sleep-linked-depression-article-1.1122322

To learn more about how to get a healthy night’s sleep, you should consider attending a free Wenatex ‘Healthy Sleep for a Better Life’ seminar. They are held all over Australia. To register your interest, go to http://www.wenatex.com.au/seminars_registration.asp

Do you wake in the middle of the night? In an article I read recently, new research has highlighted that what you might be experiencing is a throwback to your ancestors prior to the introduction of artificial light.

In olden times, people slept in two four hour blocks, then rested and relaxed for a period in between. This may have “played an important part in the human capacity to regulate stress naturally”, says Sleep psychologist Gregg Jacobs. He also suggested that in today’s modern world, we don’t get much time to rest and relax and he believes that “it’s not a coincidence that the number of people who report anxiety, stress, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse has gone up.”

So next time you are wake up in the middle of the night, don’t stress, take the time to just rest and relax. Lie back and think of your ancestors, you will get back to sleep in no time.

If you would like to read the full article that was the inspiration for this blog entry, it appeared on BBC News Online, go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783

Please let me know your thoughts and experiences.

If you would like to learn more about how to get a healthy night’s sleep, Wenatex conducts free seminars all over Australia on the subject. You can register your interest in attending a free seminar near you at http://www.wenatex.com.au/seminars_registration.asp

An article I read recently appeared in Brisbane’s Courier Mail. It discussed new research conducted by the Jackson Hole Centre for Preventive Medicine in the USA which found that adults taking between 18 and 132 sleeping tablet doses per year were 4.6 times more likely to die early. What a scary statistic! They even ruled out the factor that people taking the pills may have other health problems, by matching with a control group of patients of similar ages, gender, lifestyle and health. The test group still had a higher mortality rate. The results of this research provide a clear picture for those who experience poor sleep. Our advice - minimise your use of sleeping tablets and address the underlying problem affecting your sleep.

You can read the article at http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/breaking-news/sleeping-tablets-linked-to-early-death-us-study-finds/story-e6freonf-1226284428246

If you have problems sleeping and you want to learn more about getting a healthy night’s sleep, you should consider attending a Wenatex “Healthy Sleep for a Better Life” seminar. They are free to attend and are conducted in venues all around Australia. To register your interest, fill in the form at http://www.wenatex.com.au/seminars_registration.asp

An article in the Wall Street Journal caught my eye this morning. It discussed how scientists from the University of Pennsylvania are researching biomarkers, which are characteristics or substances in the body, to measure sleepiness.

Initially, when reading the article, I was excited about the possibilities of this research, for example, looking at sleepiness as a measure for the potential risk of diseases such as diabetes. Measuring people’s levels of sleepiness has the potential to improve overall health.

However, I can see a more negative potential for this research. It is one thing to measure how “sleepy” a person is but it is another to measure the ability of someone to cope with it. Dr Dinges raises the debate when he states “The ability to pinpoint who handles sleep loss poorly brings up ethical issues. For example, for positions that involve a lot of travel or long hours, what companies want to screen candidates for their natural ability to weather sleep loss?” Take an example, say you are applying for a job. Sleeping six hours per night is normal for you. As part of the interview process, you are required to go through a test which measures how “sleepy” you are, and based on the results of the test, you fail to get the job. In the example, the test failed to measure how well you cope with your level of sleepiness.

On the flipside, some companies appear to be using this technology in a positive way. The company in Melbourne that was raised in the article has developed special eyeglasses that can give truckdrivers a “sleepiness” score in real time.

I think in the end that Dr Shaw, also from the University of Pennsylvania, has the final say. He believes that there is no one single biomarker that can measure sleepiness. He states in the article that “we are going to need a panel of markers, each of which is going to be imprecise on its own.”

We can only wait and see further outcomes from this research.

You can read the article at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204369404577206952841644944.html?mod=googlenews_wsj. Please let me know what you think.

If you are one of those people who doesn’t need to measure, you know you are not getting enough sleep, Wenatex holds free seminars all over Australia educating people on how to get a better night’s sleep. If you are interested, you can register your interest at http://www.wenatex.com.au/seminars_registration.asp.

While researching sleep subjects this morning, I came across this article on the 11 alive website and was gobsmacked! People sending text messages while asleep… what is the world coming to?

We pay the price for staying connected with the world. The mobile phone has meant that we can receive emails and notifications at any time of night or day and now it is affecting our sleep. Sleep specialist Dr Cunningham has the last say in this article when he states, “(With smart phones), it becomes more difficult to separate our waking from our sleeping lives.”

Wenatex has always taught that for a number of reasons, all electronic devices (including mobile phones) should be kept out of the bedroom. This article provides yet another reason.

If you would like to read the article, go to http://www.11alive.com/news/article/225193/40/Expert-claims-sleep-texting-as-new-phenomenon-

Please let us know what you think.

If you would like to find out more about how to get a healthy night’s sleep, Wenatex conducts free seminars all over Australia on the subject. To register your interest, go to the Wenatex website at http://www.wenatex.com.au/seminars_registration.asp

Every now and then, Catalyst on ABC TV features an excellent story on a sleep related subject. One of the most important stories featured on Catalyst looked at what happens to us when the “body clock”, also referred to as “circadian rhythms” is “out of sync”. Circadian rhythms make up your internal timekeeper linking your body to time, for example, daily, weekly, monthly etc.

If you are interested in seeing the video, go to the ABC Catalyst Story Archive at http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/2351893.htm

Let us know what you think.

If you would like to find out more about the body clock or more about healthy sleep in general, Wenatex conducts free seminars all over Australia. If you are interested in finding out about a seminar close to you, you can register your interest at http://www.wenatex.com.au/seminars_registration.asp.

Children’s bedrooms are representative of who they are and how they live.

This morning I discovered a fascinating article which is a snippet from a book documentary from Kenyan-born, English-raised, Venice-based photographer James Mollison called Where Children Sleep.

The article that I found came from The Atlantic. As the writer of this article suggested, it is “a remarkable series capturing the diversity of and, often, disparity between children’s lives around the world through portraits of their bedrooms”.

Read the article here.

I just found this article absolutely fascinating and I hope you do too! Please let me know your thoughts.

If you would like to learn about how to get a healthy night’s sleep, come along to a Wenatex free healthy sleep seminar. They are conducted all over Australia. To register your interest, please fill in your details at Wenatex Seminar Registration Page.

A colleague recently alerted me to a fascinating article which highlights a recent discovery by scientists who found electrodes that can “record neuron activity in the part of the brain that controls memory” which means that they may be able to tap into the thoughts and dreams of people who are not able to communicate in any other way.

This is a fantastic discovery and one that we should watch for future updates.

Read the article at http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/us-scientists-hope-to-record-peoples-dreams/story-e6frfku0-1225944886499 and let me know your thoughts.

One of the staff in our New Zealand office sent me the link to an interesting article today http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/world/7181065/lack-of-sleep-linked-to-early-death-study/. The article stated that researchers “aggregated decade-long studies from around the world involving more than 1.3 million people and found “unequivocal evidence of the direct link” between lack of sleep and premature death.”

Unequivocal evidence is hard to refute, don’t you think?

The study proves that, for optimum health, adults must get six to eight hours of sleep per night.

If you cannot achieve that, there are strategies out there to assist you improve the quantity (and the quality for that matter) of your sleep. Spend time to find out what they are and you will see a difference. Wenatex conducts free seminars on the subject of healthy sleep all over Australia and New Zealand. Go to http://www.wenatex.com.au/seminars_registration.asp to register your interest.

At Wenatex, we have been banging on for a long time about fatigue being a contributing factor in accidents.

Here is yet another case in point:  In an article I read today about the Shen Neng 1, the Magistrates Court found that the reason for the oil spill is that “the crew neglected to change course” which wasn’t helped by the fact that “the first mate had only slept for a little over two-and-a-half hours in the previous day-and-a-half”.

Another case that comes to mind is the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska some years ago. It was shown that fatigue was a factor as it was reported that “the staff were not given their mandatory 6 hours off duty prior to the start of their 12-hour shift” during which time the incident occurred. 

I guess we will just have to keep banging on… 

If you would like to read the article I referred to about the Shen Neng 1 findings, it can be found at http://www.news.com.au/national/fatigue-a-factor-in-sheng-neng-1-incident-australian-transport-safety-bureau/story-e6frfkvr-1225854018414.