![]() "At last comes an explanation: According to the new book Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, the sleep people get on sleeping pills like Ambien is not true sleep. Here’s a look at some good ways to reboot your sleep cycle." The good news for those who desperately crave sleep is that a variety of techniques and methods can help you achieve a blissful state of slumber without prescription medications. In an interview with New York Magazine, Walker explains that drugs like Ambien simply “switch off the top of your cortex, the top of your brain, and put you into a state of unconsciousness.” The drugs actually sedate you, he says, and “sedation is not sleep.” In his book, “Why We Sleep,” Matthew Walker, director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that the sleep people get from taking hypnotics doesn’t have the same restorative quality as natural sleep. "Dangers aside, Ambien and other hypnotics don’t necessarily provide you the kind of sleep your body actually needs. This removes heat from the body so that your core body temperature falls.Matthew Walker, a sleep expert, says sleep aids like Ambien are counter-productive. Taking a warm bath or shower before bed will bring blood to the surface of your skin. The core temperature of your body and brain need to drop by around two to three degrees for you to fall asleep and stay asleep through the night. The optimum room temperature for good sleep is about 67 degrees Fahrenheit.Dimming half of your lights in the last hour before bed sends your brain the signal that it’s time to start winding down.Even on cloudy days, the brightness outside is stronger than most light you’ll get indoors. Get as much exposure to light in the morning as possible.Sleep-deprived people can’t accurately discern emotions through facial expressions.While you sleep, immune cells find and eliminate virally infected cells or tumor cells in your body.An individual’s chronotype -his or her natural inclination toward a particular circadian rhythm-is dictated by genetic imprint. Being a morning person or a night owl isn’t a matter of personal choice.REM sleep helps take the sting out of emotional wounds so that you feel better about hurtful experiences the next day.This keeps you from hurting yourself by acting out your dreams. ![]() During REM sleep, your brain paralyzes your body.The brain also seems to be deleting information that might be unnecessarily taking up storage space. ![]() Walker describes this as the brain’s way of “hitting the save button.” Memories are moved from short-term storage areas of the brain to the cerebral cortex, where long-term memories are filed.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |