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