Sleep Awareness Project

(It was freezing in my apartment)

Well when starting this project, I really didn’t have a great idea of what I wanted to do, but after writing a few things down I decided that something I like when I feel stressed out or just really wound up is candles and that lead to my idea of Aromatherapy. And I thought well everyone might not use candles as much as I do so the next thing I thought about was soap, everyone uses soap and who doesn’t like to smell fresh during a nice hot bath or shower?

So I decided to make soap for my project. I made 3 different colors and made scents including peppermint and lavender. I packaged my soap using plastic wrap and tissue paper and gift bags. I was going to include fun tips about sleep but I was worried that it might come off too gimmicky so instead I made a brochure that included various tips and facts about sleep, things like healthy sleep tips, how to create a bedtime routine, and reasons to not use your phone at night.

Some snags I hit during my project was actually printing out all those brochures, I mean we all know AirBear can be brutal at times but I NEVER experienced the problems I faced during my project, things I didn’t even know could happen while printing happened, but I finally got all my copies made and I was happy with the results. Something I thought would have been more of a challenge was cost, but I probably spent no more than $50-$60 for all my supplies. The toughest part of my project was finding a venue, at first I was going to hand them out at my hometowns annual bazaar but unfortunately it was postponed and turned into the holiday bazaar which conflicted with the due date, so the race to find another venue was on. I called every place I could think of in Dallas and Waco but they all said they needed more notice of course, so frustrated and feeling defeated I sat there thinking WHAT AM I GOING TO DO? Then it hit me this is an outreach project so that is exactly what I’m going to do, I went all around Waco passing out soaps to anyone who would stop and listen.

Something I would change about this project would probably be having a backup venue to my back up venue. But I enjoyed the process and the experience.

I Didn't Get Much Sleep Trying to Read all These Case Studies

Wow, there are so many interesting stories of people who are unfortunately afflicted by some form of sleep disorder. All of them ranging from kind of funny to pretty dangerous. But all very interesting and unique. What I learned from this slightly dense collection of case studies is that there are many types of disorders that are characterized and diagnosed very carefully or you could easily misdiagnose someone.

I have also learned that there are so many ways to treat and monitor these disorders. While I was reading it got me thinking back to Drs. Matlock and Springer’s visit and how they were talking about how much medicine has changed in only 20 short years. Things like PSG and Actigraphy have become so common place to us. As well as medications like benzos and SSRI’S, our society today gives out drugs like they were candy, I mean not to devalue the importance and usefulness of these drugs but it is true. The fast acting holy grail in pill form, the world has become totally desensitized to some prescription drugs.

I Liked that each case study was broken down into different informational sections that let the reader know exactly what to do when faced with a certain sleep disorder.

My favorite case out of these was Case #4 the Arousal Disorder, I mean the guy shattered a window in his sleep! That is crazy! The interesting part about this study to me was the fact that they said that it is usually more common in childhood but this guy was 20, which raised the question in my head to “well is it stress related?” which the article claimed it to be something psychopathologic about it despite myths. Another thing I liked about this case was that not only did they introduce the drugs that could help alleviate symptoms of arousal but they recommended psychotherapy which I think is a great alternative to the traditional prescription.

Can You Feel It in Your Legs or Is It Just in Your Head?

Restless leg syndrome is one of the most common but unrecognized disease out there, so of course with people not fully aware of what the disease entails it is easy for someone to just WebMD their symptoms and easily decide themselves that they have the disease.

The result of such self-diagnosis plus a number of other factors leads to the pushing of pharmaceutical drugs and the big problem of over diagnosing by doctors. The way they do this is by making people think they have a couple of the 4 main symptoms that RLS requires and then tell them that your doctor probably missed it so you should basically make him give you the diagnosis in order for them to prescribe them the drug and overall make the pharmaceutical company that much richer.

The worst part is that most pharmaceutical related media outlets don’t even mention the drug as a way to distance themselves from the disease. It is really just a way to cover up the over diagnosing. I mean can’t they see that this isn’t helping anyone, it makes the people who are actually healthy think there is something wrong with them and possibly cause them to have adverse side effects from the drug itself.

In order to do better we must make sure we understand clearly what the drug really is and research thoroughly the symptoms to make sure we are really at risk as well as quantify the side effects and be able to weigh the benefits of said drug on those who actually need it. Pushing drugs on to people for no other reason than to make money off of them is one of the worst things that drug companies could do, how are we supposed to trust them as well as discern if the drug is even helpful, like if a person who claims to have RLS but in actuality does not then says they are having whatever side effect from the drug how is a physician truly going to determine whether it’s from the disease or the drug?

I commented on Brett’s Blog

Medicine Munchies

We all feel the need to have a late night snack from time to time, maybe during a long night of studying or just a midnight snack to help us fall back to sleep. But I doubt that any of us would enjoy a drug fueled pantry raid, I mean what’s the point of eating if you can’t enjoy it? Well unfortunately things like this really happened, it is called Nocturnal Sleep-Related Eating Disorder and it causes people to basically “sleep eat”

A man was prescribed a drug named Zolpidem because he suffered from insomnia, they mention him being an obese man which is probably a contributing factor not only to NSRED but to insomnia as well. Well the man took the drug for a short period of time to help with his problem, and one night his wife goes looking for him and he’s miles away at his shop eating, and when they woke him up he didn’t remember anything he had done.

Isn’t that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard? Like we all know how the commercials hastily list off all the life-threatening side effects of drugs on tv but I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard anything about night eating, and they weren’t just eating normal food, people are eating a “fist full of salt” and buttered cigarettes” I might rather take a chance on one of the side effects the tv commercial told me over eating a cigarette. But luckily he stopped taking the drug and he didn’t have any more episodes.

Although the drug is the main reason for the NSRED and if on it there is not much you can really do about it, the underlying factors that cause insomnia and thus the need for the drug can be changed. Maintaining a healthy weight and seeking attention for things like stress and depression can potentially offset the risks for insomnia and help maintain your circadian rhythm.

Or if none of that helps, maybe they should try sleep walking to a McDonalds, their ice cream machine is sure to be broken which means no munchies for them.

Don't Sleep and Drive!

 Do you ever find yourself pretty drowsy headed home after a long week of classes? I know I do, some people blast the A/C of let down the windows but I like to turn my radio up and sing as loud as I can. It helps me sort of perk up and makes the drive go a lot faster. But unfortunately those little tricks might not work for everyone. According to the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research drowsiness is likely to be a cause of 36 percent of all fatal car accidents, and unfortunately some people cannot control their drowsiness as easily because some people suffer from sleep apnea.

In Dr. Teran-Santos’s study over sleep apnea and car accidents they put together 2 different groups, one group being the control and they set out to find a correlation between sleep apnea and a possible elevated risk of car accidents. so they gathered 254 subjects and randomly split them into the two groups. The participants filled put questionnaires a general one and one for signs of sleep apnea. Then the participants underwent PSG to determine whether they had sleep apnea or not.

Overall the experimenters did find a rather significant correlation between sleep apnea and car accidents. Those who had sleep apnea were far more likely to have an accident. This probability was also increased if the driver had under the influence of alcohol the day of the accident.

What I thought was interesting was that they found the ESS did not accurately represent their findings, which I guess is odd but to me I think the result they got from the scale wasn’t too surprising in that it is a subjective way of finding out how sleepy someone feels and there have been cases where people are known to over and well as underestimate how they feel.

You always hear about sleep apnea affecting someone’s sleep but this is my first time hearing about it affecting performance in the day time. This is great information for people who do suffer from sleep apnea and it could potentially save someone’s life in the long run

Speed Racer ain't Got Nothing on This!

Can we really recall things that we learned prior to going to bed in our sleep? I mean I can definitely say I’ve had some nights were I’m like half sleep I guess and I am either literally going through all the material I learned in my head or for some reason my mind goes to this weird place and it turns into some stress dream and I’ve failed out of college. But there is definitely truth to this to experience recall.

In the article by Wamsley the experimenters are focusing on “Recant experience recall”, in order to test recall, they use an interactive video games called Alpine Racer to explore what happens in memory traces while participants sleep. Doing this asks the question how specific features of the memory reactivation can change, and how recall can affect performance. In prior studies they have noticed that this form of memory recall is most commonly seen in NREM sleep almost immediately after sleep onset so the experimenters decided to collect mentation samples from the NREM sleep.

There were 16 college age males that took place in the study who played Alpine Racer for 3 consecutive days, then later for a single day. The experimenters also brought in another group for a 3^rd experiment who played three sessions of Alpine Racer and were monitored using PSG and Nightcap recording.

Concluding the experiment, they found that recent experiences are recalled in the brain while we sleep and can have a strong influence in our sleep onset mentation but found that over a period of time post-training the amount of Alpine related content decreased. And that our dreams and thoughts after learning or practicing new information becomes completely dominant of what we recently learned.

This is super neat that we somehow continue to process and in a way practice new information while we sleep, I wish all learning happened when we slept I would have like zero sleep debt. 









I commented on Matt's blog

PTSD

People everywhere are suffering from PTSD, and it isn’t only people who have served in the military. Men, women, and children all over the world suffer from some form of PTSD whether they have been in the military, have been sexually assaulted, or have been a part of some other form of traumatic event. One person’s PTSD isn’t any less real or painful than someone else’s, and the article by Dr. Lavie introduces objective and subjective findings for the immediate and long term effects as well as two different forms of treatment that can help ease patients into a better, healthier form of sleep.

They found in the subjective effects that people suffered from sleep disturbances almost immediately after the trauma, also fear and anxiety plague the patients. Something pretty interesting they found too was the fact that women were had a 50% higher chance to suffer from these effects. In their findings for long term effects patients suffered from a variety of sleep problems such as difficulty falling asleep, frequent awakenings, and most commonly trauma-related anxiety dreams. It was noted that some people continue to go through this for over 40 years, like I couldn’t imagine the pain and stress they feel on a daily basis.

On the objective side patient’s sleeping habits were observed and they found that the patients did have awakenings but there weren’t any signs of insomnia which is obviously something clearly different from the subjective effects. For the long term patients seemed to have a longer sleep latency, less time sleeping, and other various sleep problems.

To combat these findings, the article gave examples of two types of treatment behavioral and pharmacologic, the most practiced of behavioral being progressive muscle relaxation for those who are very anxious near bedtime. They even limited the amount of time spent in the bed to help make the bed a more peaceful environment for them. For pharmacologic treatment many things are claimed to be effective but there isn’t significant proof, but benzodiazepine hypnotics have been proven to help with sleepiness.

This work is pretty freaking amazing. I knew that people who suffered from PTSD often had night terrors and flash backs and stuff like that, but I never knew that this disorder took this big of a toll on these people. I can barely handle the day to day stress of just a normal day sometimes I cannot imagine the psychological toll this takes. 

Can Sleep Deprivation Be a Good Thing?

Have you ever had a bad day where you feel like you just want to crawl into bed and cry your eyes out? It’s okay everyone does from time to time, sometimes we even cry some much until we literally can’t cry anymore. Don’t you feel so much better afterwards though, to the point where you just fall asleep at the drop of a dime? I get it I do sleep after a really rough day can be so therapeutic, but what if it’s not? Well therapeutic to some at least.

In the case study by Roy-Byrne the experimenters have come across the claim that people with panic disorders actually benefit from being sleep deprived over a night. So they set out to test the effects of sleep deprivation among patients that suffer from panic disorders and then compare them with patients who are depressed and have been observed in the unit on a prior occasion. They planned on monitoring their data using EEG due to known abnormalities that are caused by the panic disorder combined with lack of sleep.

Patients with panic disorder went one night without sleep and performed an EEG the next day, their mood and behavior were scored every other hour by a nurse, the patients also self-rated themselves based on mood and cognition.

The results show that the depressed patients showed improvement with depression but not so much with anxiety, the patients who suffered from panic disorders didn’t show any significant difference, and the depression patients benefited more overall than the patients with panic disorders.

I honestly for one do not like this study, like honestly even if this information is sound and the logic behind it is credible it is not a healthy way to fix depression or panic disorders. Going without sleep can cause a huge deficit in your mental and physical performance in the long run. I’m not sure if it works that fast but wouldn’t the improvement the patients be seeing come from the rally effect, a symptom of sleep deprivation?

I don’t think the public can benefit from this article, I mean it is interesting and different to say the least but fixing a crippling disorder by doing further harm to your body isn’t really benefiting anyone. I mean I guess you can say by knowing to not, not sleeping is what you can take away from the article.

I commented on Bisma's blog

Melatonin & Breast Cancer

Breast Cancer claims so many lives each and every year, mothers, daughters, and sisters from their families. But Researchers and Doctors are steadily hard at work to figure out the factors that contribute to cancer as well as ways to avoid it. Needless to say one of the obvious ways to counter cancer is sleep, SURPRISE! I know I didn’t see it coming either.

This was demonstrated in the case study by M. Kakizaki attempting to assess the relationship between the duration of sleep and the risk of getting breast cancer. They questioned 23,995 women in the age range of 40-79 years old from northeastern Japan and then separated them by their sleep habits into 4 different sleep groups, those who slept <6 hours, <7 hours, <8 hours, and >9 hours a day.

They found that the patients who sleep 6 hours or less had a greater risk of getting cancer as well as used contraception and be premenopausal. On the other end, patients who were known to sleep 9 hours or more were older, with a low caloric intake, educational level, and other diseases. While those who slept 7 hours showed an inverse relationship between sleep and breast cancer.

Overall there was less of a risk of getting breast cancer with those patients who slept a little longer. The experimenters suggest that Melatonin contributes to this decrease, that being that those with less melatonin being secreted the greater the risk becomes promoting a gonadotropin-releasing hormone.

Okay I have a question; it might be a rather naïve question but it popped into my head. I thought GRH as stated above was only or rather mainly used when presenting the sex of the prenatal fetus, so do we always use this hormone and for what?

I have also come to realize that sleep is honestly SUPER important I mean it can even help decrease the risk of cancer. I mean I’m sure all of us were knew very well that sleep is a very valuable thing before we took this class but going over all these different aspects of our lives that sleep affects is mind-blowing and also kind of scary when you think of it. Like think back to all those ties where you thought “Nah, I’m okay I got this, an all-nighter is fineee” and even still while in the class some nights I’m like it’s worth it to stay up those extra few hours for the sake of my grade. But seriously sleep is crazy important.

Practice (and sleep) Makes Perfect

You know those dreams, or more like this weird half sleep half-awake trance thing that you have the night before a test where you’re going over the information over and over again in your head? Do you really think it helps? I mean we all can’t monitor ourselves like some kind of sleepwalking case study patient, luckily we have YouTube.

In the article by Mazza, experimenters wanted to thoroughly investigate whether sleep really does aid in the efficiency of learning retention and proving that memory is enhanced by practice and sleep. During the procedure the 40 participants were asked to learn 16 words that were translated from Swahili to French using repeated retrieval-restudy practice. They were also broken up into 2 groups, a wake group and a sleep group, and later they formed a control group of 20 participants. The participants were then reassessed a week and 6 months later. In the wake group the participants initial fist session was at 9:00am and the stayed awake until 9:00pm the same day, as for the sleep group their first session was 9:00pm then they slept and took their next session at 9:00am the next day. Them a week and 6 months later all the groups performed a midday recall test without corrective feedback.

 

They found that sleep is a very beneficial effect on learning and relearning for long term retention. More specifically the unrecallable items were acquired faster during relearning in the sleep group independently of initial retention, and both speed and recall ended up being positively correlated with the time spent sleep. Demonstrating that memories not clearly accessible at the beginning of relearning had been transformed during sleep.

Before this study I didn’t really think about how sleep really affected the way we learned, like I knew about memory consolidation and how it is good to sleep in order to retain things we have learned but not to the extent of speed and accuracy of memory recall, and I wish I would have known sooner because I probably would have gotten a lot more sleep these last 20 years, just add it to my current sleep debt I guess.

This article is great for the general public of all ages whether you’re learning your very words, studying for a test, or just trying to keep your mind sharp.

Quitting is Only a Sniff Away

In the Arzi article the experimenters wanted to determine whether conditioning between cigarette odor and unpleasant odors during sleep and whether or not it would reduce cigarette-smoking behavior compared with similar conditioning during wakefulness.  So they brought in 76 participants in who wanted to quit smoking, after all the qualifying procedures were done they ended up with a total of 66 participants.

The experiments were conducted in a designated olfactory sleep laboratory that was coated in stainless steel to prevent ambient odor and was subserved by high efficiency particulate air and carbon filtration to further assure an odor free environment. During the experiment the participants were exposed to three different odors, a cigarette smoke smell, ammonium sulfide dissolved in water, and a rotting fish smell; it was determined that these smells did not did not waken participants. These smells were taken in by the participants through a nasal mask that they wore, the participants were given a steady air flor of 6L per minute.

In conclusion, hey found that nasal airflow is sensitive to sleep stage a while implicit olfactory aversive conditioning between the cigarette smell and other unpleasant odors does overall reduce smoking behavior profoundly, the reduction in smoking behavior was greater and lasted longer while the participant was in stage 2 sleep as compared to REM sleep. They also found that the explicit olfactory aversive condition during wakefulness did not alter smoking behavior but the presentation of aversive odors alone reduced smoking behavior but only by half.

I thought this article was super interesting I have never heard about using olfactory learning as a way to curb unpleasant habits let alone using sleep to achieve this. I believe that the effects of the conditioning were greater in stage 2 sleep due to the participants being in slow wave sleep thus a deeper sleep than in REM sleep.

This is a great article for anyone who is trying to quit smoking for good, I wonder what other things you could try to condition in our sleep?

Frontal Lobe

Since being in this class I have come to learn that sleep can affect so many things within our lives, our mood, our behavior, how we think and act, and even our weight. But I am still in awe of the mighty power of sleep and how easy it is to take it for granted but unfortunately it is not so easy to recover from it, and that can have terrible consequences to various parts of our brain and its overall function. How long do you think you would have to sleep in order to fix your sleep debt?

In the article Frontal Lobe, it explains how total sleep deprivation has many terrible effects on your frontal lobe including: reduced response inhibition, decision making, thought process, and speech. It also affects our alertness and relative metabolic rates. SO the experimenters set out to test whether relative cerebral glucose metabolism in the frontal lobe would be decreased as a result of total sleep deprivation. They tested their hypothesis using 32 subjects giving all of them IV’s filled with 5 mCi of FDG and simultaneously taking a performance test.

In their “After Sleep Deprivation” results they found that there was significant decline in metabolism cortical association regions (frontal lobe, temporal and occipital cortex, and subcortical system) as well as an increase in metabolism in cortical regions. Also in the “After Sleep Deprivation” there was significant relative increases in metabolism in cortical regions and also relative decreases in metabolism in subcortical areas.

I thought this article was interesting and different than any other article we’ve done so far in that it focuses more of how sleep deprivation directly affects the brain and the specific areas that it has a direct impact on.

It’s important for the public to know how sleep deprivation works and what it really does to the body, it practically sucks the life out of us and messes with all of our faculties. I know when I am dog tired I feel like I am slowly losing my mind, I can’t focus or concentrate on what I need to do, and it’s like there is a bunch of noise going on in my head and I can’t formulate a proper thought or sentence. It is important for people to know that you need sleep more so than just for the sake of not being cranky, building up all the sleep debt can seriously hurt you in the long run.

Are You Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired?

Don’t you hate that time of year when it seems like the entire campus is sick? So do I! I mean you’re just sitting in class minding your own business trying to get your education and BAM, you are bombarded with coughs and sneezes from every direction while you try all you can to protect yourself. You down a couple of vitamin C gummies (yes gummies I prefer them to the tablets) or maybe some Airborne, but sooner or later you are betrayed by your body and you wonder “Why me?”. Well let’s see, you thought you did everything you could do right, you have your gummies, your Airborne, even your recently acquired stockpile of OJ but you still ended up sick. Well as Dr. Scullin would point out, “How much sleep did you get?”

In the article Common Cold they set out to see if measured sleep behavior could be predictors in participant susceptibility to the common cold. Data was collected over a span of 4 years and included 164 participants with ages ranging from 18-55. The participants went through various medical screenings as well as interviews and questionnaires to assess emotion, they also wore and Actigraphy watch to monitor sleep behavior. The participants were given nasal drops which contained the virus (rhinovirus) and then quarantined for 5 days (participants were compensated $1,000), each day they had to do a nasal lavage, and a nasal mucociliary clearance function to test for infection. The experimenters also measured sleep behavior by total sleep time and fragmentation index.

The experimenters concluded that a threshold effect of <6 hours of sleep resulted in a higher risk of obtaining the cold, demonstrating that a shorter duration of sleep does in fact result in increased rates of cold development. They also found that the various covariates they screened for previously as well as fragmentation did not significantly contribute to risk rates.

Personally the very first thing I thought when reading the intro was “I hope these people were paid handsomely for willingly being infected with a virus” like come on I hate being sick so I am glad they got something out of this. I also thought it was interesting that there might be a correlation between longer duration of sleep (>9 hours) and disease, I think I would like to know more about that. This study definitely reinforces that no matter how well you try to take care of your body if you aren't getting the proper amount of sleep your efforts are ultimately futile.

The public would definitely benefit from this article because we all get super busy during certain times of the year and we forget to take care of ourselves and having this information can just be a reminder that during the times where you know you’re the busiest or it’s a time where you’re more likely to get sick you can stop and ask yourself “Am I getting enough sleep?”

Teacher Ratings

I am pretty sure that all of us some time or other have had the slow nod going on during class throughout our long years in school. Sometimes we even brag about how little sleep we get, but contrary to belief even though you feel like you are getting things done it probably isn’t as good as it could be and you’re probably not in the best of moods either. We all need sleep and maybe a little coffee for our peers’ sake.

In the Article Teacher Ratings, the study sought out to test their hypothesis that by sleep restricting students it would lead to inattentiveness, difficulty with work, and increased sleepiness. The participants completed a 3-week home-based protocol that were separated into two groups, the optimized group and the restricted group, where the optimized group had a TIB limit of no fewer than 10 hours per night and the restricted group had an 8 hours TIB (1^st and 2^nd grade aged children) and 6.5 hours (3^rd grade and above) per night. The groups were monitored by Actigraphy watches and daily bedtime and rise-time journals. The teachers were asked to assess and rate the children based on their performance during class.

The results concluded that by restricting the children’s sleep did increase their rating of difficulty in class based on the teachers answers to the various questionnaires.

I found it interesting that although they are a lot of very neat information on ADHD the experimenters clearly stated they didn’t want any students with ADHD to participate in the study but I honestly think that the study would be more interesting if the included those kids and compared them to the healthy children.

I think this will help the general public much like the previous article Bedtime Routine would. It would help inform parents and teachers of signs for children who are not getting enough sleep, and help create a more stable bedtime routine in order to maximize their performance in class.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

In the article False Confessions, they talk about how sleep deprivation is a key component to people falsely accusing themselves in crimes they didn’t commit, this happens in 15-25% of cases. This leads to a lot of innocent people been convicted and either spending a lot of time incarcerated or put to death for crimes they didn’t commit.

The study consisted of 88 students from Michigan State University who completed 3 laboratory sessions. In the first session they gave their basic information and they were given the instructions on how to go about the procedure, specifically the importance of not pressing the Escape Key on the keyboard. The button was located on the top left corner making it pretty hard to press. During the second session (7 days later) where the participants rated their sleepiness and were shown the warning again then half of the participants slept for 8 hours in the lab and others stayed awake. Then they completed another set of procedures and questionnaires. This took place a 3^rd day, after all the testing was complete the participants were asked to sign a statement which accused them of pressing the escape key some signed the form the first time but some took until the second time to sign the statement.

The experimenters found that sleep-deprived participants reported increased sleepiness and an increase in positive and negative effects than the rested participants, meaning that the sleep-deprived participants were more likely to sign the statement then the rested participants.

This study is can greatly affect the general public specifically law enforcement. If they decided to change the way they interrogate suspects in a different setting as well as during a different time of day and not for as many hours, then they would probably less people that would admit to crimes and less people losing years of the lives in jail.

Sleep Education

A lot of us are well versed in many different subjects from poetic writing to organic chemistry (poetry in its own right), but how many of us can say we truly know what it means to be sleep literate at this age, let alone as kids and teenagers. But learning is only half the battle.

In the article Sleep Education they set out to seek out the effects of a large-scale multilevel and multimodal sleep education program that would be based out of primary and secondary schools that were located in Hong Kong to try and help educate adolescents and improve their sleep habits. The Asian students were known for having worse sleeping habits than those of us in America and those in Europe. Can you imagine that there are actually people that get less sleep than we do? BLEW MY MIND!

With a participant size of over 7000 students the experimenters broke them up into a control and an intervention group, from there they set up two 40-minute workshops dedicated to teaching the students about the importance of sleep, how it affects you, contributing factors, and practical skills to help improve your sleep. During the intervention the students were asked to keep a sleep journal, they were also given various questionnaires to subjectively assess their quality of sleep.

In the end the majority of student’s sleep habits did improve throughout the intervention but only 32% of students reported that the program would actually motivate them to change their sleep habits. Which reminded me of the sleep journal we had to do for class and it made me realize that the students who didn’t think they would really change their sleeping habits had a good point. While recording my sleep for my journal it was always in the back of my mind I felt that I had to go to bed earlier to make sure I had a decent night’s sleep, but after I quickly returned to my old ways of staying up a little longer than I probably should. Which begs the question what can we do to really get motivated to change our ways and not only create new habits but make them stick as well?

I thought this article was important because it brings insight to the sleep habits of those across the world and how sleep habits are affecting adolescents at a very young age. I think this is very valuable information for the parents of adolescents everywhere so that they could maybe make changes to when and how their children fall asleep.

Don't Fall Asleep! Young-old Adults vs.Young Adults

At our age we all think we are Invincible and that we only need 4-5 hours of sleep and we can still perform at optimum levels. But according to the article Tolerate Sleep Deprivation we might not be as strong willed as we think, maybe, like most things we get better at it with age.

In the article experimenters sought to test and compare sleepiness, vigilance, and overall performance in young-old adults and young adults during a sleep deprivation period or vigil of 26 hours. To test their hypothesis of whether or not the ability to cope with less sleep is due to age they used 37 healthy participants, the participants started off with 3 baseline days with the usual 8-hour sleep time followed by a 10-hour awake period, this was their designated beginning Constant Routine. The rest of the routine consisted of the participants having to stay awake for 26 hours while being monitored by an EEG and an electrooculogram (EOG) to monitor episodes of dosing off and performance/attentional failures defined by slow-rolling eye movements (SEM). To measure performance, the participants went through a Reaction Time test. Then experimenters then recorded each participant sleep efficiency, sleep depth, and sleep continuity and compared them between the two groups.

In the end they found that even though the older participants had a lower sleep efficiency compared to the younger participants the older group had an overall more significant sense of alertness and reaction time (performance) than the younger group did.

This is probably one of my favorite articles we’ve done so far because I would have never guessed that the older you get you’re more likely to be more alert with longer periods without sleep. The article even helped explain the VLPO to me a little bit better and how it functions and relates to how we fall asleep. But I actually can’t be that surprised because when I think about it I can see it in my grandparents, my grandmother who is pretty spritely for anyone’s age really can stay up until like 11pm or 12am and sleep for like 4 or 5 hours and get up and start cleaning and I’m just like wake me up when the sun’s up. But my grandfather is not in too bad of shape but has some health complications and you are sure to find him in his chair with his blanket asleep at any time of the day.

This article is great for older people because maybe they don’t know why they can’t stay awake during the day and this could help them seek the attention necessary. It is also important for those our age as well, it serves as a lesson that contrary to popular belief we need as much sleep as possible in order to perform well in our day to day, also it gives insight for the future that staying healthy well into your older years can have some sleep benefits.

eReaders vs. Paperback

 In the article about eReaders the experimenters wanted to study the effects of light exposure on sleep, doing so they studied twelve healthy subject 6 men and 6 women who while in private rooms and were given either a paper book or an eReader to read for 4 hours before bedtime with dim lighting for five straight evenings with a break in between with the two conditions traded off at random. During they study the experimenters took hourly blood tests using through an indwelling forearm IV catheter and then frozen; the samples taken were used to measure the melatonin levels to check how sleepy the participant was. The experimenters also tested for sleep latency, total sleep time, sleep efficiency, and duration of sleep stages (via EEG). The subjects also gave a subjective measure of their sleepiness using the 9 point Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS). In the results they found that suppressed melatonin levels during the eReader portion and participants would comment on not feeling sleepy in the evening but were said to be sleepier in the morning, there was also less rapid eye movement recorded. But not differences were noticed in the other factors that were assessed.

I didn’t really understand why they let the participants hold the book but not the eReader, I just wonder what was significant about not letting them move it. I thought it was interesting how the eReader affected latency and REM sleep but not any other factors I would assume efficiency of sleep would be somehow related to latency and how you feel when you wake up.

This applies to pretty much any and everyone these days. Reading on your phone and on tablets is the trend right now, even for younger children. The effects of light exposure that close to bedtime can hinder performance, and be detrimental to our health. Personally I have a bad problem of leaving my TV on or watching Netflix on my computer before I go to bed and normally I would say it helps me fall asleep but lately I have definitely noticed that it makes it so much harder to fall asleep.

Football

The purpose of the study titled Football was to test if West Coast (WC) professional football teams had an advantage over East Coast (EC) teams in performance in games played after 8pm due to circadian factors given the time zone. To do this they to data spanning over 40 years that included over 100 teams and examining games played in all days of the week including home and away games for a total of 106 games and a control group of 293 daytime games. Using two data sets game times and scores were verified and crossed referenced using multiple sources for confirmation to see if the WC teams had beat the point spread or not. They figured this out by using the formula:

                               

                                Score of WC team – Score of EC team + Point spread = x

If x was positive, it meant that the WC team beat the point spread and if it was negative they did not. The results concluded that there was a strong advantage for WC teams over EC teams even accounting for the point spread. But the data also showed that even though WC teams had an advantage over evening games the same was not said for daytime games, for games played during the day the EC teams had the advantage.

I found it interesting that they used data spanning over 40 years and ten referenced and crossed checked it all, it proved to be a very thorough and well thought out study for the information that they had. With that being said there was also a lot of things that they couldn’t test for and had to make assumptions about which could have potentially skewed their data away from their results.

I think this study applies to the general public in that no matter if you are a collegiate athlete or just going to and from class and studying for class or working a 9-5 or a day/night shift type job your body’s sleep and our circadian physiology plays a bit part in how we perform on a day to day basis.

REM Sleep and Dreams

In Dement’s article The relation of eye movements During Sleep to Dream Activity the participants in the study or “Ss” included seven adult males and two adult females with five of them studied thoroughly and the other four used as confirmation of the former. The “Ss” had electrodes placed on various parts of their head and face and were then sent off to bed with the electrodes plugged in using a single cord allowing them full range of motion while they slept. The experimenters or “E” would wake the “Ss” up during certain duration of the periods where the participant was either in REM sleep or NREM sleep, they were first asked if they had been dreaming and then asked to describe in detail what their dream was about if possible. The experimenters did this over the course of 43 nights I believe. They found that “Ss” could more accurately recall their dreams when awakened during REM periods than NREM periods. It was then concluded that it is possible to objectively measure dreams by recording REM’s during sleep.

What I found interesting about this study was that in addition to finding the accuracy of dream recall after waking the “Ss” up the experimenters would then also ask the participants if they could predict how long they had been dreaming given a duration of either 5 or 15 minutes. And the cool thing about that was that the majority of the time the participants guessed correctly.

Something that I didn’t really care for in this study methods and results aside, was that they mentioned that they placed a bell next to the bed of the participants and that was how they would wake up the patients… it was “sufficiently loud to ensure immediate awakening in all levels of sleep”. For me that would be a big N O, I don’t think I could have been a part of this study I would not like to have to be woken up from my sleep and then asked questions???? No thank you!

I don’t think I fully understand what the intent for the general public would be but from what I can gather I think the purpose is mainly just bringing awareness to the benefits of good quality deep REM sleep, it may also correlate to memory consolidation as well and how REM sleep helps with that.

Emotion

The article Emotion covers an experiment that sets out not only to test if sleep helps decrease amygdala and behavioral reactivity of prior emotional experiences but also prove that there is a correlating action that decreases adrenergic levels during REM sleep. They tested their hypothesis using 34 healthy adults ranging from 18-30 years old and separated them into 2 groups a sleep group and a wake day group. The two groups each took two repeat fMRI where they viewed 150 pictures then rated their emotional intensity (1-5). After the experiment was complete they found that there was a decrease in amygdala reactivity in the sleep group but an increase in reactivity in the wake group throughout the day. These findings were also observed with the subjective reactivity associated with REM sleep with a decrease in adrenergic levels in the sleep group and an increase in the wake group.

What I liked about this study was that the experimenters seemed to be more focused on the details and the validity of the entire experiment. Adding the circadian control test and using multiple test sessions in order to make sure that the experiment will have the best chance of ending without any of the data having to be thrown out because of “technical difficulties”. I also thought it was interesting that they also found that sleep helps with memory consolidation as well. I always hear that if you study then sleep on it that you will retain more of what you studied, I never really considered that to be a good option but after reading this article I might give it a try.

This experiment is important to the general public because it proves that if you are feeling down or mad about anything all you need is a goodnight’s sleep and it can cause you to become more relaxed and not feel as strongly about the situation and reduce your blood glucose levels during your sleep helping to increase your quality of sleep throughout the night.

Pre-Industrial

What I found very interesting about this article was that after all the research they did the results still concluded that even with society being so industrialized our sleep patterns haven’t been too greatly affected where they would be deemed not normal. I think that is just crazy, I mean the majority of the hunter-gatherers don’t take naps, they wake up early (some even before sunrise I mean what is that?), and they don’t even have a word for insomnia. Granted they technically still get just as much sleep on average compared to a person who gets adequate amounts of sleep while living in an industrialized society, which may be a factor as to why the results were the way they were.

It was cool to see how temperature and light plays a role in our sleep as well. I will admit that I have heard before that it is harder for you to go to sleep with lights on or while on your phone or let’s say binge watching your favorite show on Netflix right before bed… you know just some examples, not that any of us smart college students would ever do that. But honestly, I find that for me I have to have my laptop or TV on at the lowest volume, it is so hard for me to sleep in complete darkness. But as far as temperature goes I am right with them. The article stated that the hunter-gatherers would likely fall asleep around the time when the temperature dropped at night, I am the same way at home we set the temperature at 72 degrees at night and I still keep my ceiling fan on high to prevent waking up in the middle of the night in a sweat. I prefer to be colder at nights it makes it a lot easier to fall asleep.

I think this article really puts our way of life in perspective. Society is always telling us that the advancement in technology is so great for our future, that it makes things so much better and so much easier for us, and in many ways it is. But after reading this article although the results were way less extreme than I thought they were going to be it still begs the question, is all this technology the best for us? I mean we can already see a growing dependence on it now within the different generations and how it is handicapping us mentally, this article really points out that it might not be in the general public’s best interest health wise either. 

Exercise

In the Exercise article what I liked about the article kind of goes along with what we were talking about in class as far as zoning in on what the experimenters want when it comes to participants as well as focusing on those who have problems with their sleeping habits as compared to those who get adequate amounts of sleep every night. Also another thing that I found interesting is that the experimenters choose to focus on those who are older (55+ years old) rather than college aged participants whose day to day is more stressful on average than a person in their upper 50’s (to a point). I like this because these participants have a clear pattern of some sort of sleep disorder that would be clearly impacted by a change in amount of physical activity performed making this experiment pretty straight forward, theoretically.

What I didn’t really like is that basically in the middle or close to the end of the experiment they were thinking they needed to throw out “17 participant nights” because of technical difficulties like a weak battery which is definitely something that should have been checked prior to the start of the experiment, well given that the participants were instructed to charge them which isn’t clearly stated in the Methods section. But luckily they only had to eliminate one of the participants’ score.

This article, I feel, is relatable to the general public in the sense that we all know someone in the age range of the participants and will one day become this age whether we like it or not and that is the time where physical activity is a must in order to remain healthy physically and in order to gain the best amount of sleep possible so that we are working with all our faculties. I definitely understand what these people go through because almost every night I find myself waking up around the same time once or twice in the middle of the night, tossing and turning, I just seem to easily fall out of my deep sleep. And on the occasion where I work out I do find it easier to fall asleep probably because I’m so tired I can’t bear to move. But we all need exercise in our daily lives to keep us fit in every aspect.

Effects of Caffeine

I choose the Caffeine Effects… article as my secondary article and I found the study pretty interesting because I never really realized that caffeine could have such adverse effects on sleep even when taken as far as 6 hours prior to bedtime. As an occasional coffee drinker and a self-proclaimed “chocoholic” this article really opened my eyes to some of the reasons why I probably haven’t been getting a full night of rest. I notice that I am constantly waking up between 3 and 4 am almost every night and after reading this article I can understand what might be part of the problem.

Some things I found strange is that they let the participants consume caffeine, other than the pill that was given, throughout the day. It kind of made me wonder like wouldn’t the extra amount of caffeine skew the data? The article even stated that that caffeine has a “high variability in the elimination half-life” I would just assume that it would be difficult to tell if the data collected was solely based from the caffeine pill or have the trace amount of excess caffeine included from earlier that day. Something else I am not too sure on is what “latency” of sleep is, my guess is that it is the length at which you are able to stay asleep but I am not sure. Another thing would be the “Latin Square Design”, this method of testing was also used in the primary article I had to read, Tennis, where they briefly explained what the set up was but I am still not 100% clear on the concept.

The article affects the public in a major way, an easy example and probably a personal one would be us as college students. Some of us could never fathom making it through the day let alone to our first class without a couple cups of coffee or a few shots of espresso throughout the day. And this cycle of caffeine intake lasts all day when projects and homework start to pile up and we must work long nights and we definitely lose countless hours of sleep because of it. This article also affects your everyday working man (or woman) when deadlines need to be met, papers need to be graded, or you just need that extra boost to help you have enough energy after work to play with your children. Caffeine is in our everyday lives and is something that most can’t live without, the article is a good read for everyone, it definitely gives you something to think about and maybe even consider changing some habits.