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Our articles have been researched extensively and can provide some alternative solutions to improve your quality of life
Canada Day is the day we all think about how far we’ve come!
Congratulations to you, Canada 🇨🇦
And a very happy Canada Day 🇨🇦 to you and your family!
We often wear our sleeplessness as a badge of pride – a measure of our impossibly hectic schedules. Thomas Edison, Margaret Thatcher, Martha Stewart and Donald Trump have all famously claimed to get by on just four or five hours’ sleep a night – much less than the seven-to-nine hours recommended to most adults. Many of us are following suit: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one third of US adults fail to get enough sleep on a regular basis.
The consequences – including impaired memory and decision making, and increased risk of infection and obesity – are well known, but easy to ignore. When our immediate demands exceed the hours in the day, sleep is still our top sacrifice.
But what if we were able to simply optimise the sleep experience so that we enjoyed most of the benefits of deep sleep, in less time?
This possibility may be closer than it sounds, thanks to new ‘sleep optimisation’ techniques. Various experiments across the world have shown that it is possible to boost the efficiency of the brain’s night-time activity – speeding up the descent into deep sleep and enhancing our rest once we get there.
It sounds almost too good to be true. Is it?
On a regular night, the brain cycles through many different stages of sleep, each with a characteristic pattern of ‘brain waves’, in which neurons in different regions of the brain fire together, in synchrony, at a particular rhythm. (It’s a bit like a crowd chanting or beating a drum in unison).
During the rapid eye movement (REM) phases that rhythm is fairly fast – during which time we are most likely to dream. But at certain points our eyes cease to move, our dreams fade and the rhythm of the brain waves drops to less than one ‘beat’ a second – at which point we enter our deepest, most unresponsive state of unconsciousness called ‘slow-wave sleep’.
It is this stage that has been of particular interest to scientists investigating the possibility of sleep optimisation.
Research since the 1980s has shown that slow-wave sleep is essential for the brain’s maintenance. It allows the necessary brain regions to pass our memories from short-term to long-term storage – so that we don’t forget what we have learnt. “The slow waves facilitate the transmission of information,” says Jan Born, director of the Department of Medical Psychology and Behavioural Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen, Germany.
The slow waves may also trigger the flow of blood and cerebrospinal fluid through the brain, flushing out potentially harmful debris that could cause neural damage. They also lead to dips in the stress hormone cortisol and help to rejuvenate the immune system so that it is readier to fight incoming infections.
Such results led scientists including Born to wonder whether we might therefore be able to enhance the benefits of sleep and improve our daytime functioning by boosting the production of those slow waves.
One of the most promising techniques to do so works a bit like a metronome counting the brain into the correct rhythms. Experimental participants wear a headset that records their brain activity and notes when they have started to make those slow waves. The device then plays short pulses of gentle sound, beginning in sync with the brain’s natural slow waves, at regular intervals over the night. The sounds are quiet enough to avoid waking the participant, but loud enough to be registered, unconsciously, by the brain.
Born has led much of the experimental work, finding that this gentle auditory stimulation is just enough to reinforce the right brain rhythms, deepening the slow-wave sleep compared with people receiving sham stimulation. Participants wearing the headset performed better on memory tests, showing increased recall for material they had learnt the day before. It also altered their hormonal balance – reducing their cortisol levels – and led to an improved immune response.
In the trials to date, participants haven’t yet reported unwanted responses to the technique. “We can’t really be sure, but so far there are no obvious side effects,” says Born.
Most of the studies attempting to boost slow-wave sleep have been conducted on small groups of young, healthy participants, so to be certain of the benefits of boosting slow-wave sleep, we would need to see larger trials on more diverse groups. But based on the existing evidence, the technology has already made its way into a handful of consumer devices, mostly in the form of headbands to be worn overnight.
The French start-up Dreem, for instance, has produced a headband (available for around €400 or £330) that also uses auditory stimulation to boost slow-wave sleep using a similar set-up to the scientific experiments – effects have been confirmed in a peer-reviewed trial. The Dreem device also connects to an app that analyses your sleep patternsand offers practical advice and exercises to help you get a better night’s rest. These include things such as meditation and breathing exercises that might ensure you get to sleep quicker and with fewer awakenings during the night. The aim is to improve overall sleep quality across the night for anyone who feels that they could do with a deeper rest.
Philips’s SmartSleep Deep Sleep Headband, in contrast, is very explicitly aimed at making up for some of the ill-effects of sleep deprivation – for people “who, for whatever reason, are simply not giving themselves an adequate sleep opportunity”, says David White, Philips’ chief scientific officer.
The device was first launched in 2018, and like Dreem’s product, it is a headband that senses the brain’s electrical activity and periodically plays short bursts of sound to stimulate the slow oscillations that are characteristic of deep sleep. It relies on smart software that carefully adapts the volume of its sound over time to ensure that it delivers the optimum level of stimulation for the specific user. (The device is currently only available in the US for $399.)
White agrees that the device cannot fully replace a full night’s sleep, but he says that it is notoriously hard to convince sleep-deprived people to make the necessary lifestyle changes. By amplifying the benefits of the sleep they do manage to get, this device should at least help them to function better in daily life. Along these lines, Philips’s own experiments have reportedly confirmed that the SmartSleep boosts slow-wave sleep in sleep-deprived people, and that it mitigates some of the immediate effects like poorer memory consolidation.
Future research may suggest many more innovative ways to optimise our sleep. Aurore Perrault at Concordia University in Montréal has recently tested a gently rocking bed that swayed back and forth every four seconds.
She says that the technique was inspired by a colleague’s new-born baby being rocked to sleep, leading the team to wonder whether adults may also benefit from gentle movement. Sure enough, they found that the participants were quicker to enter slow-wave sleep, and spent more time in that crucial sleep cycle, as the brain waves synchronised with the external movement. As you might hope, they also reported feeling more relaxed at the end of the night, and this was again accompanied by the expected knock-on benefits for their memory and learning. “That was the cherry on the top,” says Perrault.
If such a bed were brought to market it could serve a similar purpose to the sound-stimulating headbands. Perrault is particularly interested whether it might help older people. The amount of time we spend in short-wave sleep seems to decline as we age, potentially contributing to some age-related memory problems – and she hopes that gently swaying beds may be one way to counteract that.
Although the field is still in its infancy, these studies show that there is a lot of promise in the general concept of sleep optimisation to increase the power of our slumbers (however much or little we get).
Perrault and Born are both optimistic about the potential of the commercial products using pulses of sound to stimulate those regenerative slow waves. Perrault emphasises that we still need larger studies to ensure their effectiveness outside the carefully controlled conditions of the lab – but she welcomes that this research could now benefit a wider population.
“It’s great that they’re trying, more and more, to use external stimulation because we know that it impacts sleep,” says Perrault.
In the future, it will be interesting to see whether sleep optimisation could also bring benefits in the long term. We know that chronic sleep loss can increase the risk of conditions like diabetes and even Alzheimer’s disease – but it’s by no means clear that these new techniques will help reduce those risks.
For now the only guaranteed way of reaping all the benefits of sleep – both long and short-term – is to make sure you get enough of it. Whether or not you decide to give these devices a try, you should attempt to schedule more early nights, and avoid too much alcohol, caffeine and screen time before bed – factors that are all known to damage the quality of our sleep.
Our brains cannot function without a recharge – and anyone hoping to live a happy, healthy, productive life needs to wake up to that fact.
Sleep is a normal and indeed essential part of our lives. But if you think about it, it is such an odd thing to do.
At the end of each day we become unconscious and paralysed. Sleep made our ancestors vulnerable to attack from wild animals. So the potential risks of this process, which is universal among mammals and many other groups, must offer some sort of evolutionary advantage.
Research in this area was slow to take off. But recently there has been a series of intriguing results that are giving researchers a new insight into why we sleep and what happens when we do it.
Scientists simply don’t know for sure. In broad terms researchers believe it is to enable our bodies and especially our brains to recover. Recently researchers have been able to find out some of the detailed processes involved.
During the day brain cells build connections with other parts of the brain as a result of new experiences. During sleep it seems that important connections are strengthened and unimportant ones are pruned. Experiments with sleep-deprived rats have shown that this process of strengthening and pruning happens mostly while they sleep.
And sleep is also an opportunity for the brain to be cleared of waste.
A group led by Prof Maiken Nedergaard at the University of Rochester Medical Centre in New York discovered a network of microscopic fluid-filled channels in rats that clears waste chemicals from the brain. Prof Nedergaard told us when her research was first published in 2013 that this process occurs mostly when the brain is shut off.
“You can think of it like having a house party. You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, but you can’t really do both at the same time.”
It seems that a lack of sleep alters the way in which the genes in the body’s cells behave.
Researchers at Surrey University in Guildford have found that genes involved in inflammation seem to increase their activity. Dr Malcolm von Schantz, who is involved with the Surrey research, believes that the genes are responding to lack of sleep as if the body is under stress.
He speculates that in the distant past in times of stress our ancestors’ bodies would prepare themselves for injury by activating these inflammation genes which would cushion the effects of attacks by wild animals or human enemies.
“It puts the body on alert for a wound but no wound happens,” he told Sleep Advice.
“This could easily help explain the links between sleep deprivation and negative health outcomes such as heart disease and stroke.”
In modern times though preparing for an injury that never happens has no beneficial effect – in fact the consequent activation of the immune system might increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.
The expression “half asleep” might be an accurate description of what is going on in the brain when you are feeling slow-witted.
Research suggests that parts of the human brain may well be asleep when it is sleep-deprived. Studies on whales and dolphins show that when asleep they continue to use half of their brain to swim and come up to the surface for air.
A study on human patients showed that something similar goes on in our brains. As they became more sleep-deprived, parts of their brain became inactive while they were still awake.
What’s more the local sleep areas move around the brain. So although when we go to bed we think one moment we are awake and then there is an abrupt change to sleep – it may well be more of a continuous process.
That’s a question that psychiatrists, notably Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, have tried to answer but with limited success. More recently a team at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto in Japan has begun trying to answer some of these questions by building the beginnings of a dream-reading machine.
They asked volunteers to doze off in an MRI scanner and recorded their brain patterns. The volunteers were then woken up and asked to tell researchers what they were dreaming about.
The team then listed 20 separate categories of dream content from these accounts such as dwelling, street, male, female, building or computer screen. The researchers then compared the accounts with the pattern of activity in the area of the brain responsible for processing visual information – and to their amazement they found that there was a correlation. So much so that they could predict which of the 20 different categories they had listed the patient had dreamt of with 80% accuracy.
The device is a very rough tool but it may well be a first step to something that can see in more detail what happens in our dreams and so help researchers learn more about why we dream.
Several studies show that the light bulb has led people shifting their day and getting less sleep. On average we go to bed and wake up two hours later than a generation ago.
The US Centres for Disease Control reported in 2008 that around a third of working adults in the US get less than six hours sleep a night, which is 10 times more than it was 50 years ago. In a later study it was also reported that nearly half of all the country’s shift workers were getting less than six hours sleep.
And a study led by Prof Charles Czeisler of Harvard Medical School found that those who read electronic books before they went to bed took longer to get to sleep, had reduced levels of melatonin (the hormone that regulates the body’s internal body clock) and were less alert in the morning.
At the time of publication he said: “In the past 50 years, there has been a decline in average sleep duration and quality.
“Since more people are choosing electronic devices for reading, communication and entertainment, particularly children and adolescents who already experience significant sleep loss, epidemiological research evaluating the long-term consequences of these devices on health and safety is urgently needed.”
– One in eight of us keep our mobile phones switched on in our bedroom at night, increasing the risk our sleep will be disturbed.
– Foods such as bacon, cheese, nuts and red wine, can also keep us awake at night.
Many studies report that there is evidence that sleep loss is associated with obesity, diabetes, depression and lower life expectancy – while others, such as Prof James Horne, a sleep researcher at Loughborough University believes that such talk amounts to “scaremongering”.
“Despite being ‘statistically significant’, the actual changes are probably too small to be of real clinical interest,” he told Sleep Advice. “Most healthy adults sleep fewer than that notional ‘eight hours’ and the same went for our grandparents.
“Our average sleep has fallen by less than 10 minutes over the last 50 years. Any obesity and its health consequences attributable to short sleep are only seen in those few people sleeping around five hours, where weight gain is small – around 1.5kg per year – which is more easily rectified by a better diet and 15 minutes of daily brisk walking, rather than by an hour or so of extra daily sleep.”
A team from the universities of Surrey and Sao Paulo in Brazil have spent the past 10 years tracking the health of the inhabitants of Bapendi, a small town in Brazil where modern day lifestyles haven’t yet taken hold.
Many of the inhabitants of this town get up and go to bed early. The investigators hope to find out soon whether the old adage “early to bed and early to rise” really does make us, if not “wealthy and wise”, at least “healthy and wise”.
We might feel drowsy as we start to fall asleep, but our brain is still active, and noises or discomfort can disturb us.
As we drift into light sleep, an area of the brain called the hypothalamus starts to block the flow of information from our senses to the rest of the brain. But it will still let through noises, which need to be able to wake us up.
After about half an hour of light sleep, most of us enter a type of deep sleep called slow-wave sleep. Our brains become less responsive and it becomes much harder to be woken up. But some things will always get through – such as our names being called out loudly.
Missing out on parts of our usual sleep cycle reduces the quality and quantity of sleep.
We all have a built-in body clock which tells us when we are tired. It helps synchronise thousands of cells in our body to a 24-hour cycle called the circadian rhythm.
The main synchroniser for our body clock is light. Our eyes react to light and dark, even when our eyelids are closed.
Daylight prompts our brains to reduce the production of the sleep hormone melatonin. This makes us feel more alert.
If we get less sleep during the night, because of going to bed late or waking up early, we’re unlikely to get as much deep sleep as we need.
Our core body temperature should drop by half a degree when we are asleep. So as sleep approaches, our body clock makes blood vessels in our hands, face and feet open up, in order to lose heat. But if we get too cold, we get restless and find it hard to sleep. Or if our bedrooms or duvets are too warm, our bodies can’t lose heat, which can also cause restlessness.
We can have trouble sleeping after we consume food and drink that act as stimulants.
Drinks high in caffeine make it harder to fall asleep and can interfere with our deep sleep. Caffeine can stay in our system for many hours, so our sleep quality can be affected by the caffeinated drinks we consume earlier in the day.
In the course of a night we usually have six to seven cycles of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, during which our brains process the information we’ve absorbed during the day. This leaves us feeling refreshed. But a night of drinking means we’ll typically have only one to two cycles and wake up feeling tired.
Foods containing a chemical called tyramine, such as bacon, cheese, nuts and red wine, can keep us awake at night. This is because tyramine triggers the release of noradrenaline, a brain stimulant.
Stress is the enemy of sleep. In bed, our mind is left free to wander and anxiety concerning sleep will only make it worse.
It’s difficult to keep track of time when you’re lying down in the dark waiting for sleep. People often nod off and wake up again but it feel as if they’re getting no sleep at all. This delivers fragmented sleep with much less time spent in the important deep sleep stages.
Sleep experts recommend that people with this problem get up and do an activity which distracts the mind from worry – such as a puzzle – before trying to sleep again.
Do you like to have a weekend lie-in or a nightcap before going to bed? These habits could actually be harming your sleep.
If you have trouble falling asleep night after night, or if you always feel tired the next day, snore, or stop breathing during sleep you might have a sleep disorder. It is advisable to seek more advice from your doctor. Most sleep disorders can be treated effectively.
Sleep apnea is a common disorder that causes your breathing to stop or get very shallow. Breathing pauses can last from a few seconds to minutes. They may occur 30 times or more an hour.
Sleep apnea is the most common type of sleep disorder. It causes your airway to collapse or become blocked during sleep. Normal breathing starts again with a snort or choking sound. People with sleep apnea often snore loudly. However, not everyone who snores has sleep apnea.
You are more at risk for sleep apnea if you are overweight, male, or have a family history or small airways. Children with enlarged tonsils may also have it.
Doctors diagnose sleep apnea based on medical and family histories, a physical exam, and sleep study results.
A person may not be aware that his/her sleep is interrupted throughout the night due to snoring or obstructions. This is because he/she may not be fully conscious during these occurrences. However if a person feels drowsiness during the day, he/she should consult a doctor about getting a sleep study. People with sleep apnea are at higher risk for car crashes, work-related accidents, and other medical problems. If you have it, it is important to get treatment. Lifestyle changes, mouthpieces and surgery may help treat sleep apnea in many people if their diagnosis is mild. But if the diagnosis is moderate to severe, CPAP is the gold standard of treatment for optimal results.
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DeVilbiss Healthcare manufactures a range of IntelliPAP devices to treat Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) and Sleep Disordered Breathing (SDB).
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PulseDose Breath Pattern | x | x |
During deep sleep, the brain may be tidying up the detritus that accumulates during a hard day of thinking, a recent study suggests.
Researchers have found that during slow-wave sleep in particular – the type of slumber sandwiched between periods of dreaming – a sort of cleaning fluid pulses into the brain, taking out the trash as it recedes, according to a report published in Science.
Using high-speed brain imaging, the researchers were able to map out a series of events that occur as the brain enters deep sleep and brain waves start to slow and synchronize.
They found that the blood flow to the brain diminishes, allowing for an influx of clear, colourless cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). That fluid surges in and sloshes around, washing away the day’s detritus of proteins and other waste substances that might harm the brain if they aren’t cleared out.
“We haven’t ever seen CSF waves on this scale in the awake brain, suggesting that sleep involves a unique pattern of fluid flow in the brain,” said Laura Lewis, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University and the study’s senior author.
“Previous studies in animals from other labs have shown that during sleep, proteins such as beta-amyloid (one of two hallmark proteins implicated in Alzheimer’s disease) are cleared more rapidly from the brain,” Lewis said. “Based on these studies; we wondered why this might occur and we wanted to ask whether CSF changes during sleep because CSF is thought to be important for waste removal.”
Lewis and her colleagues suspect that poor sleep in patients with neurological disorders might impact the tidying up process, leaving waste materials to accumulate, eventually leading to degeneration.
“We’re running new studies to test how these CSF waves may change in healthy aging and in neurological disorders,” she said. “We’re also going to test whether this would be associated with less waste removal from the brain during sleep in these patients.”
The new research shows how the rhythmic flow of fluid during deep sleep could be the way the brain washes away waste, Danish researchers write in a commentary that accompanied the new study.
Understanding that process might shed a light on how disturbed sleep could be linked to certain neurologic disorders, write Soren Grubb, an assistant professor in the department of neuroscience at the University of Copenhagen, and Martin Lauritzen, a professor of clinical neurophysiology at Rigshospitalet.
“Disturbances of (slow wave sleep) commonly accompany aging, major depressive disorders and dementia,” they note.
“It will be interesting to assess whether the CSF dynamics linked to SWS can be used as a biomarker for disease states and whether strategies to restore SWS can rescue brain function in neurodegeneration.”
Although a great way to disinfect CPAP masks and water chambers, the Lumin is not limited to disinfecting only CPAP items. Any non-living item which can fit inside the Lumin tray can be disinfected. This includes common items such as dentures, toothbrushes, hearing aids, small children toys and many more!
Remote | Hearing Aid | Pacifiers |
Tooth Brush | Pens | Dentures |
Phone | Swim goggles | Eyeglasses |
CPAP Mask | CPAP Tubing | Toys |
You can use the Lumin UVC to disinfect any required item that safely fits into the drawer!