Napping: the expert's guide | Life and style | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/27/napping-guide-health-wellbeing

For years, napping has been derided as a sign of laziness. We are "caught" napping or "found asleep at the switch". But lately it has garnered new respect, thanks to scientific evidence that midday dozing benefits both mental acuity and overall health. A slew of recent studies have shown that naps boost alertness, creativity, mood, and productivity in the later hours of the day.

Next time you're having trouble getting to sleep, try out one of these herbals remedies -- way gentler than the chemical alternatives, but for many people, still effective.

tricks to get out of bed..

Geekdad from Wired.com

As if I needed another reason to get 14 hours of sleep every night.

In the sleep-deprived, gruesome images produced 60 per cent more activity in the amygdala - a primitive, emotionally reactive part of the brain - than in well-rested people. // Evidence is growing that sleep - and dreaming, REM sleep, in particular - helps the brain to process memories. Disrupt this mechanism, and you could end up with psychological problems such as PTSD.

新社会人の人とかが「仕事中眠くて・・・」とか「生活習慣が急に変わってつらい」とかよく言っています。 いちいち伝えるのが大変なので、前回に引き続き、まとめ系のエントリです。

This is integer overflow ...

Some nights... when I can't sleep, I surf XKCD: http://bit.ly/13PL8W [from http://twitter.com/sherrymain/statuses/1563028607]

RT @diannagraf: RT @drtiki Want to get ahead? Sleep in http://bit.ly/Op41P @JonathanStrahan don't get up before me in Tas, that's just wrong [from http://twitter.com/meika/statuses/1665793930]

"Smug early birds take note: Night owls actually have more mental stamina than those who awaken at the crack of dawn, according to new research."

RT @jontybrook: Finally! Science confirms that late sleepers are more productive: http://ping.fm/KqtBS (via @tferriss) <- YAY! [from http://twitter.com/danphilpott/statuses/1715473753]

This is an interesting article, but it leaves way too many gaps. Does it measure productivity by hours awake?

Have You Ever Been So Tired?

tips from someone in the mattress business

Simply stop eating during the 12-16 hour period before you want to be awake. Once you start eating again, your internal clock will be reset as though it is the start of a new day.  Your body will consider the time you break your fast as your new "morning." For example, if you want to start waking up at 2:00 am, you should start fasting between 10:00 am or 2:00 pm the previous day, and don't break your fast until you wake up at 2:00 am. Make sure you eat a nice healthy meal to jumpstart your system. Another example: If you are travelling from Los Angeles to Tokyo, figure out when breakfast is served in Tokyo, and don't eat for the 12-16 hours before Tokyo's breakfast time.

ေန႔နဲ႔ည မွားေနရင္ ဒီလိုလုပ္ပါ။ ဒါေပမဲ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ့္အတြက္ေတာ့ မွားေသးတယ္ :P

事をした時に、それが新しい一日のスタートとして体内時計がリセットされ、睡眠の周期をスムーズに変えることができます。 例えば、2:00 amに起床予定

次の起床予定時刻までの12～16時間は食べるのをやめること。

Hah thats a good one very interesting.

nice interesting infographics that serves as illustrations to a blog post about the difficulty of sleeping at night (children involved? yes!)

The illustrations and graphs are priceless (and hilarious)!

Fantastic comic about how hard getting a good nights sleep is.

By fasting for 16 hours before your breakfast in a new time zone or on a new sleep/wake schedule, or perhaps after some really rough sleep nights, one can "override" the body's other sleep clocks that have a really aggravating way of demanding obedience.

16h? Too long.

studies your wrist movements to wake you at the optimal time for non-grogginess

Data at work

잠 잘 깨워주는 기계! 신기하군

Tired of feeling tired? Get the WakeMate, the cell phone accessory wristband that lets you sleep less and feel better! See how it works:

Posted by precision

Funny as fuck quotes.

"I can't control the kittens. Too many whiskers! Too many whiskers!"

Man talks in his sleep, wife blogs it.

ill beds...some shit is weird though, can't fuck with the constraining shit

poodle ramp!

These groundbreaking modern (and postmodern) beds and be designs seem to work to free themselves from convention, predictability and even gravity.

"A recent study by Walker and his colleagues examined how rest - specifically, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep - influences our ability to read emotions in other people's faces." does sleep promote brain acuity? can lack of sleep explain social deviations? are autistic people counted into this study?

"Adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life." Research suggests that sleep-deprived people are more-sensitive to negative emotions such as anger and fear. "With little mental energy to spare, you're emotionally more attuned to things that are likely to be the most threatening in the immediate moment. Inversely, when you're well rested, you may be more sensitive to positive emotions, which could benefit long-term survival." So if you're not sleeping, and you're feeling a little on-edge, there's your reason why...

the sound of rain, 30 min loop

Sateen ääntä.

Play your favorite music simultaneously with high quality loop

add gentle rain to your environment

After our daughter Poesy was born, we were inundated with parenting advice and books -- big, thick, 900-page bricks that purported to tell us everything we needed to know to raise a newborn into a productive member of society. Of course, we had neither the attention nor the time to devote to following any of this advice.

Twelve Hours' Sleep by Twelve Weeks Old: A Step-by-Step Plan for Baby Sleep Success, a very short book that does exactly what it says on the cover: it's a simple prescription for teaching your baby to sleep through the whole night by 12 weeks. It takes about an hour to read and does not involve doing anything horrible to your kid like letting her cry all night. Basic method: for the first 8 weeks, keep track of when the kid feeds and sleeps. At 8 weeks, use this to come up with a sleep and feed schedule that more or less fits the rhythm she's falling into. Gently encourage her to stick to it (e.g., if she's hungry before mealtime, see if you can distract her for a few minutes [the first day], then a few minutes more [the next].)

interest

Hvis du har lyst til at finde ud af hvornår folk på Twitter sover: http://www.sleepingtime.org. Godnat.

SleepingTime.org - Find the Sleeping Schedule of anyone !: Find the #sleep schedule of anyone with http://www.slee... http://bit.ly/bqS1jS

Programming is like sleeping! Send to people who don't understand why you need to be in the zone to program. Absolutely love it.

Simply The Me

how a programmer works

pecial sermon to get to sleep. Some people do it quick, some do it very slow. Some even have trouble getting to sleep when they need to, so they take pills or make themselves

Great explanation of how programmers work. Very good read for managers.

Daniel Tenner has spent a lot of time thinking about (and taking) naps. What follows is his experience learning to master 20 minute power naps even though he normally takes 30 minutes to fall asleep.

Sleep may be a way to sweep out the brain and get it ready for a new day of building connections between neurons, according to two new studies of fruit flies. The studies support the controversial theory that sleep weakens or entirely dissolves some synapses, the connections between brain cells. “We assume that if this is happening, it is a major function, if not the most important function, of sleep” [Science News], says Chiara Cirelli, a coauthor of the first study, published in Science.

睡眠のクオリティを高める10の方法

これは実践済み。効果的。「午後にものすごい睡魔がおそってくる人、まずコーヒーを飲んで、それから15分のパワーナップをしましょう。脳がリブートされて、再び動き出しますよ。」

Estrategias para curarse el insomnio

Gotta catch that car...gotta catch that car!

We tend to apply ergonomics as it relates to our waking activities. But utilizing the right sleep posture is just as important as having the right PC posture, especially if you want to enjoy a pain-free morning and day.

In research published recently in Neuron, Marcos Frank, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, postdoctoral researcher Sara Aton, PhD, and colleagues describe for the first time how cellular changes in the sleeping brain promote the formation of memories.

The key cellular player is the molecule N-methyl D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR), which acts like a combination listening post & gate-keeper. It both receives extracellular signals in the form of glutamate & regulates the flow of calcium ions into cells. Once the brain is triggered to reorganize its neural networks in wakefulness (by visual deprivation, eg), intra- & intercellular communication pathways engage, setting a series of enzymes into action w/in the reorganizing neurons during sleep. To start the process, NMDAR is primed to open its ion channel after the neuron has been excited. The ion channel then opens when glutamate binds to the receptor, allowing calcium into the cell. In turn, calcium, an intracellular signaling molecule, turns other downstream enzymes on and off. Some neural connections are strengthened as a result of this process, & the result is a reorganized visual cortex. &, this only happens during sleep.

If you ever argued with your mother when she told you to get some sleep after studying for an exam instead of pulling an all-nighter, you owe her an apology, because it turns out she's right. And now, scientists are beginning to understand why.

In research published recently in Neuron, Marcos Frank, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, postdoctoral researcher Sara Aton, PhD, and colleagues describe for the first time how cellular changes in the sleeping brain promote the formation of memories. ... "We find that the biochemical changes are simply not happening in the neurons of animals that are awake," Frank says. "And when the animal goes to sleep it's like you’ve thrown a switch, and all of a sudden, everything is turned on that's necessary for making synaptic changes that form the basis of memory formation. It's very striking." The team used an experimental model of cortical plasticity – the rearrangement of neural connections in response to life experiences. "That's fundamentally what we think the machinery of memory is, the actual making and breaking of connections between neurons,” Frank explains

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers. They tested whether "incubating" a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM. [Excerpt, click on the link to read the rest of this article.]

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers. They tested whether "incubating" a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM. Volunteers who had entered REM or rapid eye movement sleep - when most dreams occur - were then better able to solve a new problem with lateral thinking.

We propose that REM sleep is important for assimilating new information into past experience to create a richer network of associations for future use. They tested whether "incubating" a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep called REM sleep.

The study at the University of California San Diego showed that the volunteers who entered REM during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%.

"We found that, for creative problems you've already been working on, the passage of time is enough to find solutions. "However for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity."

Get back to the normal sleep cycle and rest.

I regularly can't fall asleep.   I often can't fall asleep even when I feel tired.   Once asleep, I generally sleep through the night just fine.   It's nearly impossible for me to wake up early in the morning.   Pulling an all-nighter is surprisingly easy for me.   I generally direct my lifestyle to avoid morning commitments. I have delayed sleep phase syndrome, a common form of insomnia.  Sound familiar anyone?  Or as Wikipedia describes it:   Attempting to force oneself onto daytime society's schedule with DSPS has been compared to constantly living with 6 hours of jet lag; the disorder has, in fact, been referred to as "social jet lag".[7] Often, sufferers manage only a few hours sleep a night during the working week, then compensate by sleeping until the afternoon on weekends. Sleeping in on weekends, and/or taking long naps during the day, may give people with the disorder relief from daytime sleepiness but may also perpetuate the late sleep phase.

... But the flight was over ten hours. The right thing to think is: oh, 10 hours of sleep, that'll do me good. But do not look at your watch and think about the flight time left. Just close your eyes, put on the blindfold, shut out the noise and relax. Of course, relaxing is hard, but I find that something simple like alternate nostril breathing works wonders to calm me down. The yogi probably won't tell you but the beer also helps. PS It's important to know how to unblock your ears because blocked ears can be painful. Here's a good description.

RT @biomatushiq: pity for us, evening owls :) Morning people rule the world http://bit.ly/9Ov9Er [from http://twitter.com/matushiq/statuses/18620682631]

사진이..ㅎ RT @bookedit: "아침형 인간이 세계를 지배하는 이유"를 밝힌 연구 결과가 나왔네요. 현재의 사회환경에서 저녁형 인간보다 좀더 주도적으로 상황을 이끌어갈 수 있기 때문이라네요. http://bit.ly/dh5Mw8