Sleep May “Lock In” Bad Memories, Emotions

Sleep May “Lock In” Bad Memories, Emotions, Study Finds - Although it might be your first impulse to go for a soothing lie down after suffering a trauma, new research shows that sleeping following an upsetting experience or event may cement the feelings, emotions or memories associated with the occurrence in your brain.

A study out of the University of Massachusetts Amherst was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, and more than 100 healthy adults were included in the research to explore the effects of sleep on processing of trauma. All were showed images- some described as “disturbing”- and then polled after a period of time to measure their responses to the images. Half of the subjects slept between the two viewings of images, the other half stayed awake.

Among the half that were able to nap, reaction to the images after their snooze was more marked than that among the half that did not sleep. Neuroscientist Rebecca Spencer at UMass co-authored the study, and of the findings, she said:

“Not only did sleep protect the memory, but it also protected the emotional reaction… It’s true that ‘sleeping on it’ is usually a good thing to do. It’s just when something truly traumatic or out of the ordinary happens that you might want to stay awake.”

Spencer referenced the benefit of processing a negative experience more thoroughly before heading to bed, saying:

“This study suggests the biological response we have after trauma might actually be a healthy. Perhaps letting people go through a period of insomnia before feeding them sleeping meds is actually beneficial… Just because we have a bad day doesn’t mean we should stay awake. We need to maintain some memories and emotional context to know what to avoid. We do learn something from them.”

Spencer indicated that there may be “parts of the brain being activated during sleep that allow us to process those emotions more than during day.” ( inquisitr.com )

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Don't sleep on it, you'll just feel worse! Shut-eye can preserve painful memories

Don't sleep on it, you'll just feel worse! Shut-eye can preserve painful memories - After a hard day, we are often advised to ‘get a good night’s sleep’.

But that is probably exactly what we don’t want to do, according to scientists, who have found sleep can preserve painful memories and make us feel worse.

In tests, researchers showed that people made to watch an upsetting or traumatic event felt less emotional if they stayed awake afterwards.

Sweet dreams? Researchers say that sleeping after watching something traumatic can make us feel worse

The neuroscientists said it makes evolutionary sense, as our ancestors would have survived by keeping vivid memories of life-threatening situations so they could avoid them in the future.

They asked 106 men and women to look at pictures on a computer screen. Some were negative – such as violence, wars and car accidents – and others neutral. They were asked to rate their emotional response to them between one and nine.

Twelve hours later, they were again shown pictures, some new and others they had already seen, and asked whether they had seen the picture before and to rate their response again.

Half the group saw the two batches in the evening and the following morning after a sleep. The others saw them for the first time in the morning and the second time in the evening of the same day without sleeping.

Those who had slept found the pictures just as upsetting if not more so than the first time – whereas those who stayed awake found them far less so, the University of Massachusetts researchers found.

It suggests people who sleep after a traumatic event will find memories or flashbacks of it more upsetting than those who have managed to stay awake.

The researchers say it could change everything scientists have assumed about sleep – as it was previously thought to ease our minds.

Co-author Dr Rebecca Spencer said: ‘What we’ve shown is that sleep not only protects our memory but also seems to preserve the emotional response we had during that event, and that’s never been shown before.

‘It’s interesting that it is common to be sleep-deprived after witnessing a traumatic scene, almost as if your brain doesn’t want to sleep on it – and that is probably a very healthy biological response.’

Dr Spencer said the findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, have implications for people with post-traumatic stress disorder or giving eyewitness testimony to an accident or crime.

The team will do more tests to work out how much sleep deprivation is needed – but say they assume it is proportional to the trauma experienced. ( dailymail.co.uk )

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Sleeping Late, Eating Late Leads to Gaining Weight

Sleeping Late, Eating Late Leads to Gaining Weight - A message to night owls: There's news that your bedtime -- and those late-night snacks -- may be preventing you from dropping those stubborn extra pounds. A recent study took on an important, and under-examined, aspect of the sleep-weight loss connection: how the timing of sleeping -- and of eating -- can affect weight. Researchers at Northwestern University examined the effects of sleep timing on diet and body-mass index (BMI), and found that late bedtimes and late mealtimes can lead to less healthful diets and to weight gain.

A group of 52 adults -- 25 women and 27 men -- spent seven days keeping food logs and having their sleep and waking activity measured by a wrist sensor. The researchers divided participants into two categories of sleepers:

• "Normal sleepers" reached the midpoint of their night's sleep before 5:30 a.m. These sleepers were asleep by shortly after midnight, and woke around 8 a.m. Among the study group, 56 percent were normal sleepers.
• "Late sleepers" reached the midpoint of their nightly sleep after 5:30 a.m. They went to sleep in the middle of the night, well after midnight, and woke in the mid-to-late morning. Among the study group, 44 percent were late sleepers.

Researchers tracked the eating habits of these two types of sleepers through the information provided to them from the participants' food logs. Not surprisingly, "normal sleepers" and "late sleepers" were on very different schedules, in terms of when they ate throughout the day:

• Normal sleepers ate breakfast by 9 a.m., lunch at 1 p.m. and dinner at 7 p.m., on average. These sleepers reported being finished with eating for the day by 8:30 p.m.
• Late sleepers reported eating their first meal of the day at about noon. They ate again in the middle of the afternoon, and did not eat dinner until after 8 p.m. Late sleepers did not finish their eating for the day until 10 p.m., on average.

What were the consequences for sleeping later and eating later? Researchers found that late sleepers suffered across the board, in terms of the quality and quantity of both their daily sleep and eating:

• Late sleepers slept less overall than normal sleepers -- an average of more than an hour less per night.
• Late sleepers consumed more calories at dinnertime than normal sleepers. They also consumed significantly more calories after 8 p.m.
• Late sleepers had poorer quality diets than normal sleepers -- they ate more fast food, drank more sugar-laden soda, and ate fewer vegetables.

These habits of late sleepers -- sleeping less, going to sleep later in the night, and eating more after 8 p.m. -- were all found to be associated with a higher body mass index. Among these habits, eating after 8 p.m. was the strongest predictor of a higher BMI. What does this mean? It's not just what you eat, but when you eat, that can affect your ability to lose weight. And your sleep habits can have a significant influence on the timing of your eating, as well as on how much you eat.

Previous studies using mice have shown results similar to these. Mice whose sleep-wake cycles were disrupted by exposure to light during their normal sleeping hours ate more and gained more weight than mice whose cycles remained intact. This new research has given us a strong start in examining this aspect of the sleep-weight relationship in humans. More investigation is needed, but these results do align with much of what we already know about sleep and weight:

• When deprived of sleep, the body undergoes a shift in hormones, generating more of the hormones that boost appetite, and less of the hormone that signals a feeling of fullness.
• Sleeping less than six hours per night (or more than eight hours per night) over an extended period of time makes weight gain more likely, according to a long-term study.
• Lack of sleep significantly reduces the body's ability to burn calories during waking hours.

This is not just an issue for adults. Kids -- teens especially -- are particularly prone to late and erratic bedtimes, midnight snacks, and a general lack of sufficient sleep, which can lead to weight gain. We know that adolescents require more sleep than adults, but they're too often making do with much less sleep than they need to function well, and with obesity an increasingly common health problem for children as well as adults, this new research provides yet another reason kids and teens need the structure of a sleep schedule -- one that includes curbing eating at a reasonably early hour. Weight problems that develop during childhood and adolescence can have long-term consequences that affect health for a lifetime. Let's give our kids a healthy start by helping them develop the skills they need to eat and sleep well.

Come to think of it, that's advice we can all take to heart. ( huffingtonpost.com )

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The science of sit-sleep

The science of sit-sleep - Prohibited from throwing down tarps and sleeping bags in Zuccotti Park, some Occupy Wall Street protesters have taken to wearing Snuggies and sleeping while sitting up. This weekend many Americans will sleep in their seats on flights home to visit their families. Can you get a good night’s sleep in a sitting position?

Yes. As long as you're able to get comfortable and recline slightly, you'll sleep as well sitting up as you would lying down. However, sleeping upright does present some concerns. First of all, sitting motionless with bent limbs for more than a couple of hours can lead to the development of deep vein thrombosis, a type of blood clotting in large veins which can be fatal if it travels to the lungs. For this reason, passengers should remember to stretch their legs or shift positions periodically, and should avoid strong sleeping pills that may immobilize them. One study found that travelers are three times more likely to develop DVT when taking flights of three hours or more. For the best slumber, sleep experts suggest sitting back at an angle of at least 40 degrees.

Protester in Zuccotti Park are finding alternate methods of sleeping. But can you get a good night's rest while sitting up?

While it's certainly possible to get a good night's rest while seated, the practice is very rare in human society. People tend to sleep lying down even in foraging and nomadic cultures that don't use any bedding materials to cushion the ground. There are exceptions: Among the Ache hunter gatherers in Paraguay, for example, new mothers sleep while sitting up with their infants in their laps. Some individuals who are morbidly obese or who suffer from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease may have to sleep sitting up in order to breathe properly.

Some other kinds of animals sleep on their feet. Horses have a locking mechanism in their legs called the “stay apparatus,” which allows them to sleep standing up without having their limbs buckle during the muscle paralysis that arrives with dream sleep. This allows a horse to flee from predators as soon as it awakes. Birds can sleep with one eye open, and flamingos are widely reported to be able to sleep on one leg. Dolphins and whales can sleep both at rest and while swimming, and bottlenose dolphins sleep by shutting down one half of their brain at a time. ( slate.com )

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Why girls have more nightmares

Why girls have more nightmares - Women have wilder dreams than men. In a recent study 19 per cent of men reported having had nightmares compared with 30 per cent of women.

And it could all be down to women's hormones because body temperature changes caused by their monthly cycle trigger more vivid, extravagant dreams, the study at the University of the West of England suggested.

Dreams and nightmares can be bewildering – you're likely to think: "Crikey, what does that mean?"

They spring partly from the limbic system, the primitive region of the brain which is responsible for powerful emotions.

During our sleep this region has an emotional clear-out, going over things from your daily life. This produces dreams and nightmares that "chatter" to us in their own language.

Below, we explore some common dream themes.

Five top dreams

1. FLYING, SOARING AND/OR SWOOPING

Secret meaning: You're going through a positive period of personal change.

Action you should take: Think what's going well and apply skills from that area to others that need improving.

2. BEING IN A SEXY EMBRACE WITH A CELEBRITY, COLLEAGUE OR PARTNER'S BEST FRIEND ETC.

Secret meaning: Classic wish fulfilment symbolism. Your sleeping mind has taken you to this exciting place you don't dare go to in real life.

Action you should take: Enjoy this, it's harmless — unless it's a recurring dream about someone when one of you is attached. In that case, keep flirting to a minimum.

3. COMING INTO/FINDING MONEY, JEWELS ETC.

Secret meaning: This could be wish fulfilment or symbolising something good that's happened to you — not necessarily to do with money.

Action you should take: Think about what gives you "emotional" wealth, such as doing well at work or in a relationship. Focus on this to give you confidence to face other hurdles.

4. DOING WELL AT SCHOOL – DESPITE BEING PAST SCHOOL AGE.

Secret meaning: There's someone you're eager to please — a boss, colleague or even a partner. Going back to school age symbolises a time when we had to please people such as teachers.

Action you should take: Explore why you might want to please someone. Are you trying to get on their good side? Maybe you're trying too hard?

5. HAVING AMAZING HAIR, GORGEOUS FIGURE OR BEAUTIFUL LOOKS ETC.

Secret meaning: Could be classic wish fulfilment, craving the perfect figure. Or it may be that you subconsciously know you have amazing qualities.

Action you should take: Use this as a springboard to give you a lift, focusing on your fab personality attributes rather than your physical ones.

Dream it's over ... good dreams can centre on wish fulfilment and bad ones on being overburdened

Five top nightmares

1. CHASED BY A STRANGER, MONSTER OR GHOSTLY SHAPE.

Secret meaning: You're overwhelmed with responsibilities.

Action you should take: Plan how to make things more manageable. Break big projects into smaller goals and start saying no when asked for favours.

2. YOUR TEETH FALLING OUT OR CRUMBLING.

Secret meaning: You have problems communicating somewhere in your life. You literally can't get your words out because your teeth are damaged.

Action you should take: For any big impending conversations, at work or home, plan what to say. Note points you must get across.

3. SUDDENLY FINDING YOURSELF NAKED IN FRONT OF OTHERS.

Secret meaning: A belief you've given away too much of yourself, maybe to a new partner, making you feel vulnerable.

Action you should take: Build your confidence to face something such as a public presentation. Practise in front of a friend. In future, be cautious with new people about revealing personal things before you trust them.

4. ABOUT TO DIE, OR FALLING OFF A CLIFF OR BUILDING.

Secret meaning: You feel your world's falling apart.

Action you should take: Let a friend know you are feeling stressed. Lean on them until you get your strength back.

5. DESPERATE TO GET SOMEWHERE BUT THINGS STAND IN YOUR WAY.

Secret meaning: Your life's chaotic and you find that you are often about to miss deadlines, always running late and rushing around.

Action you should take: Plan your time wisely. Give yourself an extra ten minutes to get to places. When given a deadline, put it in your diary the day before it's due. Get rid of some excess responsibilities that you can't manage right now. ( thesun.co.uk )

READ MORE - Why girls have more nightmares

TV Watching Is Bad for Babies' Brains

Babies who watch TV are more likely to have delayed cognitive development and language at 14 months, especially if they're watching programs intended for adults and older children. We probably knew that 24 and Grey's Anatomy don't really qualify as educational content, but it's surprising that TV-watching made a difference at such a tender age.

Babies who watched 60 minutes of TV daily had developmental scores one-third lower at 14 months than babies who weren't watching that much TV. Though their developmental scores were still in the normal range, the discrepancy may be due to the fact that when kids and parents are watching TV, they're missing out on talking, playing, and interactions that are essential to learning and development.

This new study, which appeared in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, followed 259 lower-income families in New York, most of whom spoke Spanish as their primary language at home. Other studies examining higher-income families have also come to the same conclusion: TV watching not only isn't educational, but it seems to stunt babies' development.

But what about "good" TV, like Sesame Street? The researchers didn't find any pluses or minuses when compared to non-educational programs designed for small children, like SpongeBob SquarePants. Earlier research by some of the same scientists, most of whom are at New York University School of Medicine-Bellevue Hospital Center, has found that parents whose children watch non-educational TV programs like Spongebob SquarePants spend less time reading to their children or teaching them.

At this point, parents reading this are probably saying D'oh! TV is so often a parent's good friend, keeping kids happily occupied so the grownups can cook dinner, answer the phone, or take a shower. But clearly that electronic babysitter is not an educational aid.

The bottom line: This latest study adds more fuel to a recommendation from the American Academy of Pediatrics that babies under age 2 watch no TV at all. If you've just got to watch Dexter, it's best to make sure the tots are fast asleep. ( usnews.com )

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Why Do Animals Sleep?

Why Do Animals Sleep? - That feeling when you wake up fully rested, crisp and fresh, is nirvana. Sleep is essential part of our daily lives. Stop sleeping and your body starts losing function, mental clarity evaporates, and you eventually die. Sleep seems to be essential for all animals, given that every animal studied has been found to sleep. Insects, fish, birds, and I all participate in this daily phenomenon. But why do we sleep? What purpose does it serve? The truth is, we don’t really know. We know loads about the neuronal pathways that define the various stages of sleep. We also know what happens when we are sleep-deprived (think of staying up all night for a final exam). But the true purpose of this curious state that we enter nightly remains mysterious.

Many researchers are working on solving this enigma through various clinical, experimental and observational studies on humans and animals. For years, researchers have recorded sleep in animals ranging from mice to elephants. But these animals have always been captive, caged or otherwise restrained. Our lab at the Max Planck Institute is the only group studying sleep in wild, unrestrained animals. There is enormous variation in the natural world, with some animals sleeping only two hours a day, while others require 20 hours. To properly understand this variation we have to study them in their natural habitat. It’s not that surprising that the behavior of captive animals is significantly different from that of their wild counterparts. Imagine if I studied sleep only in people on airplanes, and used that to infer that this is their “normal” sleeping pattern.

We are hardly the first people to suspect there are differences in the sleep patterns of wild and captive animals. We are just the first to have the technology to effectively study it in the wild. The key component to recording sleep is the electroencephalogram, or EEG. Typically an EEG is recorded with a computer, various wires and tiny voltage sensors that detect and record the minute electrical charges of brain waves. Strapping a Y2K-era laptop to a wild animal to record sleep is impractical. However, recent advances in miniaturized circuitry have yielded EEG loggers that are 1.5 grams. That’s about half the weight of a penny, and can be attached to an animal with minimal effect on its behavior. But even with these elegantly tiny loggers, there is one last hurdle to pass. We have to recatch our wild study animal and retrieve the logger with its onboard data module. Therefore, we have to be clever about which species we try to work with. My first animal of choice: the fierce three-toed sloth.

Ryan Tisdale A male sloth relaxing with me after a low-stress catch.

I began my scientific career as an undergraduate radio-tracking two- and three-toed sloths in Panama, so they were the natural animal to start with. It’s also amusing to casually mention to someone that I study sleep in sloths (the jokes are endless). As far as a research animal, sloths are a good choice. They are large and docile, can be caught by hand (no trapping or netting, as long as you can climb 100 feet into the canopy), and are certifiably the world’s slowest mammal. They were also assumed to sleep an inordinate amount of time, which is scientifically intriguing. Why have these animals decided to become so lethargic and lazy, spending all day in the treetops lounging, sleeping and relaxing?

Bryson Voirin Sloth or termite nest? This one is a sloth, which is obvious only by the presence of hair. I have identified plenty of “sloths” from the ground, only to climb up 80 feet to discover it was a stinging insect nest.

Armed with these advanced new micro loggers, I’ve been studying sleep in Panamanian sloths for the past three years. My first finding was that despite their being the world’s slowest mammal, the notion that they are “slow and therefore easy to catch” is false. Simply finding a sloth is an accomplishment. Sloths have an extremely cryptic lifestyle. Their evolutionary strategy is to never be seen or noticed. They typically masquerade in the canopy as a termite nest or clump of leaves, refusing to react to any movement or noise on the ground. The rain forest is full of stationary termite nests and clumps of leaves quietly minding their own business in the trees. They’re everywhere. The key to identifying one as a sloth is to painfully examine every single clump with binoculars and look for the presence of hair. Leaves and nests are traditionally absent of hair, so hairy nests are probably sloths. But even then, seeing one requires luck. It’s like looking for the one sloth that left its “A” game at home that day.

Ryan Tisdale Catching a sloth almost always requires me to climb up a tree. In this case, the tree was hollow and would wiggle like a rubber band in the wind. I was glad to be out of that tree as quickly as possible.

After tirelessly searching and finally locating the camouflaged little Zen master, physically catching it is the next feat. The sloths I find seem to always be at the top of the tallest tree, out on the thinnest of limbs. To climb up into the canopy, I shoot a line around a strong branch using an eight-foot slingshot that would make Dennis the Menace quite jealous. Then, after hauling up a climbing rope, I rig up my mechanical ascenders and inch my way skyward. Once I am at a similar altitude as the sloth, I swing, crawl and otherwise traverse my way through the canopy and grab hold of the sloth, and in a dramatic display of aerial acrobatics I rappel down the tree with the sloth and attach the sleep logger and radio collar. I release the sloth back at its home tree, where it is free to carry on being a sloth. Ten days later, using the radio collar’s signal to find the sloth, I repeat this aerial display again, this time to remove all the hardware from the sloth.

Sloth catching is not without its risks. I once ended up in the hospital after being bitten by a sloth (it actually happened very fast!). When hospital staffers were finally able to control their laughter, the only question the doctor had for me was whether I was sleeping when it bit me (this reignited the howls from the entire emergency room). I’ve fallen out of trees, broken bones, been stung by every insect imaginable, gotten seriously lost in the forest, and experienced numerous other mini-disasters that come with being a field scientist. More often, there are amazing experiences. Seeing harpy eagles, ocelots and stunning landscapes, and being up close and personal with wildlife is what I dreamed about as a kid. I wouldn’t trade the experiences or job for anything, both the good and bad.

The results I am getting from the sloth studies not only are new and exciting, but are also creating a new approach to the understanding of sleep in animals. Wild sloths sleep only 9.5 hours a day, while laboratory sloths sleep more than 16 hours. Why? We have also found that some sloths have selective diets that influence the strength of their brain waves and alter their sleep intensity. Are they intentionally altering their sleep patterns through their diet? Some sloth populations are early risers, yet others are up late at night. Could the risk of predation affect the hours they are awake? Working on sleep in wild animals on their home turf, we are just beginning to address a whole new world of questions.

For two months this dry season, I am leaving the sloths on the mainland behind and trying to record sleep in magnificent frigate birds on Isla Iguana. The colony out here is resident through the middle of May, so I have until then to complete the study. As is the case with “slothing,” the hardest part of the study is actually getting the animal. The colony here has around 5,000 birds, so finding them isn’t the issue. It’s catching and recatching them that poses the true challenge ( nytimes.com )

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