Tag Archives: sleep

Restless legs?

When you try to relax in the evening or sleep at night, do you ever have unpleasant, restless feelings in your legs that can be relieved by walking or movement? If the answer is yes, you may have Willis-Ekbom disease, more often known as restless legs syndrome. It is a common nervous disorder where people have an uncontrollable urge to move certain parts of the body, particularly their legs. The cause is unknown.

Apart from getting up and walking around, what can you do about it? Simple steps such as sleeping in a quiet, comfortable and cool environment, and going to bed and getting up at a regular hour may help. Avoid drinking coffee before you go to bed. During an attack you may benefit from walking and stretching, or bathing in hot and cold water.

If these simple measures are ineffective you could ask your pharmacist to recommend a mineral supplement (magnesium, potassium and calcium. If this does not work, the next stop is your GP.

People are under-sleeping by an average of almost an hour every night – losing an entire night’s sleep over the course of a week, warns The Royal Society for Public Health.

An RSPH poll shows that people feel getting enough sleep is the second most important activity for optimising their health, ahead of eating five fruit and vegetables a day, undertaking enough physical activity, and sticking to alcohol guidelines. The poll of 2,000 adults also reveals:

• average sleep time is 6.8 hours, below the average 7.7 hours people feel they need
• more than half (54%) have felt stressed as a result of poor sleep.

Experts are now calling for the introduction of national sleep guidance time – ‘a slumber number’ – to help inform people about the critical importance of sleep to wellbeing.

The RSPH says we need to wake up to the benefits of sleep. There is a wealth of evidence that lack of sleep is damaging to your health and is associated with a range of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart attack and depression.

Not getting enough sleep could increase your risk of catching a cold, according to new research that reinforces the importance of getting a proper night’s sleep.

Research published in the journal Sleep says that people who only get six hours or less sleep each night are four times more likely to catch a cold after exposure to the virus than people that get seven or more hours sleep a night.

A short period of sleep was more important than any other factor in predicting the likelihood of catching a cold. It didn’t matter how old people were, their stress levels, their race, income or whether they smoked or not.

With the winter ‘cold and flu’ season approaching, you have been warned. Forget the late night movie and go to bed!

Surprisingly for such a common problem there is no standard treatment for primary snoring or snoring associated with a mild obstructive sleep apnoea (a sleep disorder in which the person stops breathing for at least 10 seconds each hour during sleep, caused by relaxation of the throat muscles – the soft tissue in the back of the throat collapses and closes, resulting in blocked airways).

But there might be hope yet for those sleepless bed partners. A Brazilian study has found that mouth and tongue exercises can significantly reduce the frequency of snoring by 36% and the total power of snoring by 59%. The exercises include:

• Pushing the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth and sliding the tongue backward

• Sucking the tongue upward against the roof of the mouth, and pressing the entire tongue against the roof of the mouth

• Forcing the back of the tongue against the floor of the mouth while keeping the tip of the tongue in contact with the bottom, front teeth

• And elevating the back of the roof of the mouth and uvula while saying the vowel “A”.

Got to be worth a try, surely?

http://www.chestnet.org/News/Press-Releases/2015/05/Snoring-keeping-you-up-at-night

Staying up late surfing the internet or playing on the X-Box is not going to improve your child’s performance at school. You know it, and although your kids might dispute it, a recent study of teenagers in Sweden shows it to be true.

Around 40,000 children were asked questions about how many subjects they had failed during the school year, whether their sleep was disturbed, and how long they spent asleep each night.
Analysis of the results shows adolescents who reported sleep disturbances were more likely to fail at least one subject during the school year. Also, children who reported that they didn’t sleep for many hours each night – either during the week or at the weekend – were more likely to fail at least one subject at school, when compared with children who slept at least seven to eight hours every night.