Every year more and more people begin to realize how important the role in a person's life is. In the meantime, scientists continue to learn new details about the mechanisms of sleep and the need for a good night's rest for physical and mental health, productivity, cognitive abilities and human longevity. Information about sleep, obtained by specialists in recent years, allows us to realize the importance of this process in our lives. Estet-portal.com presents to your attention seven recent discoveries related to sleep and its impact on our lives.
Useful sleep information for everyone
- Smartphones interfere with sleep
Most smartphone owners are not separated from their gadgets until sleep. If you are one of these people, the sleep information from a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences applies to you. The use of electronic devices that emit light before going to bed interferes with sleep, suppresses the production of the sleep hormone melatonin, disrupts the circadian rhythm, as a result of which you feel more sleepy the next day.
- Sleep is essential for emotional intelligence
If you miss "sessions" sleep, you don't just feel worse in the morning, you also become less sensitive to the needs of those around you. This conclusion was made by the authors of a study published in the July issue of The Journal of Neuroscience. According to the authors, sleep deprivation prevents people from accurately recognizing other people's emotions, an ability that is one of the key components of emotional intelligence. Lack of sleep is a particularly big problem for doctors, medical staff, parents – people for whom the recognition of emotional signals is especially important.
- Meditation – harmless sleeping pills
Meditation is known to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression, so it's no wonder it's also good at helping you fall asleep and make you sleep healthier. Psychologists from the University of Northern California presented the following information on sleep and meditation in 2015: Six weeks of mindfulness meditation improves sleep quality in adults who find it difficult to fall asleep and get enough sleep.
- The human circadian clock has a reset button
In 2015, neuroscientists at Vanderbilt University discovered a possible way to control the circadian clock, which is responsible for the 24-hour sleep-wake cycle. By activating a specific group of genetically altered light-sensitive neurons in the brain with a beam of light, scientists have been able to manipulate the neurons, altering a person's internal circadian rhythms.
- Sleep helps us access memory
It has long been known that during sleep the brain is busy consolidating and storing memories. However, a study conducted at the University of Exeter (England) showed that sleep helps not only to store memories better, but also to retrieve them more efficiently from the "cells" in which they are stored. In other words, sleep doubles our chances of remembering stuff we couldn't remember before.
- The sleep patterns of our ancestors were not much different from ours
Information about the sleep of our ancestors, presented by University of California researcher Jerome Siegel, suggests that electricity and smartphones did not affect our sleep patterns as much. The researcher found that people living in Tanzania and Namibia, who do not have the opportunity to enjoy the benefits of civilization, sleep about 7-8.5 hours a night, just like us.
However, Siegel also found that people living in traditional cultures are unaware of the existence of insomnia and sleep disturbances, unlike modern humans.
- Good sleep = strong memory
The more scientists study sleep, the more evidence they find for the need for sleep for memory. A study conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, showed that poor sleep leads to memory impairment and accelerates the development of Alzheimer's disease. Why? Because in this case, there is an accumulation of beta-amyloid protein, which triggers Alzheimer's disease.
Thus, the information about sleep obtained by specialists in recent years allows us to once again see how important this process is for the health of the brain and the whole human body. However, many more discoveries await us in this area, since the dream is fraught with many more mysteries to be solved.
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