How to Sleep Right, Tonight

By: Liesa Goins

If you are sleeping with stress—and waking up at all the wrong times—here’s how to put yourself on snooze control

Finding yourself wide awake after a few hours of sleep, or waking often during the night is called “parasomnia” or “sleep maintenance insomnia,” and it’s much more common than people think. A 2005 National Sleep Foundation poll found that 75 percent of adults frequently have symptoms of a sleep problem, including waking during the night.

Just as the victims in slasher flicks make fatal errors (why are you running up the stairs?), we are often our own worst enemies when it comes to a solid night of sleep. “People think that because they’re able to fall asleep they’ll stay asleep, even if they’ve had too much caffeine,” says Rubin Naiman, Ph.D., a sleep and dream specialist at Andrew Weil’s Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona.

But for most of us, the culprit’s not that ill-conceived espresso at 5 p.m. “The root of most sleep problems is stress,” says Jeffrey Thompson, director of the Center for Neuroacoustic Research and creator of an audio sleeping aid called the Delta Sleep System.

We’re overloaded, over-stimulated, and overwhelming our bodies’ ability to relax. “Our nervous system is built for a sprint, but we’re living in a stress marathon,” he says. “If you go to bed worried you’re probably going to wake up in the middle of the night,” Dr. Naiman adds. And when that happens, as you probably know, the next day is pretty much shot.

Last night, 10 million men fought for breath and lost their struggle for a good night’s sleep. Today, their jobs, maybe even their lives, are in jeopardy.

A new generation of sleep scientists are overturning the conventional wisdom about parasomnia. (Counting sheep? Out.) They say: You can do it. With a few simple changes in your routine, a little visualization, a couple of surprisingly counter-intuitive moves and perhaps an attitude adjustment, a peaceful night of slumber can be yours. Here’s their best advice:

Throw out your definition of a good night’s sleep

Just as three square meals a day has given way to all-day grazing and smaller portions, “what’s good for you” has changed here, too.

“Thinking it’s necessary to stay asleep for 8 hours straight may be unrealistic,” says David Neubauer, M.D., associate director of the Johns Hopkins Sleep Disorders Center and author of Understanding Sleeplessness: Perspectives on Insomnia. “Just as we experience a dip in alertness mid-afternoon, the inverse is a dip in sleepiness in the middle of the night. There’s strong evidence that there’s a kind of awakening that’s totally normal.”

History supports this take, Dr. Naiman says. “Before the industrial revolution, people had their first sleep for 3 to 4 hours, awoke for an hour or two, then slept for another 3 or 4 hours.”

Even waking every 60 to 90 minutes can be part of a healthy sleep pattern. The deeper stages of sleep, or REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, occur about every 90 minutes and get longer as the night goes on, so your brain might become more alert between those cycles.

Since we’re conditioned to think that waking during the night is a problem, when it happens, we panic. That reaction causes our brains to awaken even further, Dr. Neubauer explains.

If you find yourself awake in pre-dawn hours, Dr. Naiman advises first assessing your physical state. Do you have an ache, a cramp, or need to go to the bathroom? If so, take care of it.

If you don’t have a physical complaint, then chances are you are experiencing a normal stage of the sleep cycle. Knowing this “helps replace worries that you’ll be useless without 8 solid hours of sleep with more neutral thoughts,” suggests Sat Bir Khalsa, Ph.D., instructor in medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School. “The useful thought is: ‘I can handle the disruption and still feel rested.’”

Get bed-ready

After an action-packed day (or one equally packed with worry), our brains need some time to catch up, to make order of things, and to slow their frenetic firing before we’re ready to sleep. Pure bodily exhaustion can probably get you at least that first hour of dozing, but then worries will rise to the surface and cause you to stir. How can you get your mind to chill?

“We need to learn to apply the brakes before the car is in the garage,” Dr. Naiman says. “Clearing your head is key to a good night of sleep.” Simply taking 15 minutes to sit quietly, meditate, pray, or do rhythmic breathing can allow your mind to slow down enough to sleep through the night.

Establishing any ritual that you do before bed—anything but checking your e-mail!—will do more than relax you right then and there. The repetition also conditions your brain and body for sleep, Thompson explains.

While you’re transitioning to Z-mode the same way night after night, you’re also creating a Pavlovian response to your ritual. So simply sitting in the spot where you do your breathing or turning on the shower water signals your mind that it will be sleeping soon, Thompson says.

Another way to condition yourself sleepward is by playing off the body’s internal clock. Dr. Naiman suggests simulating dusk about an hour before you plan to go to bed and dimming the lights significantly. This triggers natural circadian rhythms that help us prepare for sleep.

Make the breath-brain connection

Dr. Khalsa recently supervised a small Harvard study using specific breathing techniques to treat insomnia, and all subjects reported an improvement in the quality and quantity of sleep. “There is evidence that long, slow abdominal breathing will reduce anxiety and arousal,” Dr. Khalsa explains.

Dr. Naiman recommends one breathing exercise (similar to those Dr. Khalsa used) called the 4-7-8 breath exercise. With your tongue resting on the roof of your mouth, just behind your upper teeth, exhale completely. Close your mouth and inhale through your nose for four counts. Hold your breath for seven counts. Then, exhale while mentally counting to eight. Repeat the cycle three more times. Both are important for restful sleep.

Take a pose to the doze

“There’s a feedback loop between the muscles and the brain,” Dr. Naiman explains. “When you stretch and release tension, the brain relaxes too.” The deepest meditative state is known as “sleepless sleep.”

To get to a sleepful state, Dr. Khalsa finds the yoga Bridge pose especially useful. Lie on your back with knees bent at a 90-degree angle and your heels parallel, close to your butt. Lift your hips and arch up onto your shoulders. Lace your palms together underneath your body and press your arms into the floor or mat. Hold the posture while taking 10 to 15 long, slow breaths.

When you wake up anyway

Despite all your best efforts, here you are, awake at an hour even a fisherman would call ungodly. What do you do now? First, here’s a big don’t: “If you open your eyes and see the clock, that’s it for many stressed people,” Dr. Walsleben says. “Seeing the time can trigger them to become fully awake.” Keep your eyes closed, roll over, or move the clock so the display isn’t visible.

If you’re still far from dreamland try a mantra. Silently repeat any word that’s soothing or pleasant to you, or simply think “inhale” as you inhale “exhale” as you release your breath. Thinking the words over and over focuses and relaxes you, but requires less energy and attention than counting sheep, which can actually be too engaging to work the way it’s supposed to.

“Get out, get out!”

After 15 minutes of lying awake in bed, you need a change of venue. “When someone can’t sleep, the bedroom can become a torture chamber,” Dr. Khalsa says. “Staying there is counter-productive.” And you risk associating the bed with your trouble sleeping, which will exacerbate the problem in nights to come.

Go to go to another room. You don’t want to become too alert, so make sure you have a nightlight in your hallway and won’t need to turn on brighter lights. Occupy yourself with something calming like knitting, listening to chill music on your iPod, or even performing your pre-sleep ritual again. Only when you feel drowsy, Dr. Khalsa says, should you go back to bed. In a very short while, you should be the picture of blissful sleep.

Getting your nap on

It’s not just for toddlers. Napping makes great sense for adults, whether or not it puts you in touch with your inner child. When adults napped between 2 and 4 p.m., one recent study showed, they performed better on tests and had no problems falling asleep at night.

NASA found that military pilots and astronauts who took a 40-minute nap improved alertness by 100 percent and performance by 34 percent, and recent Harvard University research also revealed that college students who napped between tasks performed better than those who stayed awake.

How does napping work its brain magic? “It may protect brain circuits from overuse until those neurons can consolidate what’s been learned about a procedure,” says Robert Stickgold, Ph.D., coauthor of the Harvard study.

Unless you know the correct way to conduct a daytime doze, however, you could snooze and lose. “Napping can steal the drive for nighttime sleep, so you need to be cautious,” says David Neubauer, M.D., associate director of the Johns Hopkins Sleep Disorders Center. “The key is to nap early and short.”

By early he means daylight hours, at least five hours before you plan on going to sleep that night (between 2 and 4 p.m. is prime). Any later and your circadian rhythms will kick in, possibly making you feel disoriented upon waking and likely preventing you from conking out come your regular bedtime. As for short, keep your naps to less than an hour; 20 to 30 minutes is enough for most people to get the benefits.

To help stick to this nap-plan, stay out of the sack—likely not a problem at the office—since you associate your bed with long periods of rest. Find a quiet couch or carpeted floor where you can lie down. Even shutting your eyes in your office chair for 20 minutes will relax and refresh you. (That’s if you can stifle your phone; if not, find an unused conference room.)

Home or work, you’ll find that—just like in kindergarten—after a nice restorative nap, you’ll play much better with others.

How to Stay on a Diet

Will this be the year you lose weight for good, or will you end up a diet dropout? Most dieters start out with great intentions for diet success — hitting the gym every day and cutting calories to a minimum. But before long, when the results are not fast enough, and maintaining the routine gets tough, they throw in the towel.

Typically, people last about six months on a diet — even less if the plan is really strict, says Catherine Champagne, PhD, RD, a researcher with Louisiana State University’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center.

“When diet plans differ immensely from previous eating patterns, restrict favorite foods or entire food groups, dieting usually lasts for a much shorter time,” she says.

Reasons for Diet Failure

According to the experts, these are the four leading causes of diet dropout:

1. Choosing the Wrong Diet

Choosing a restrictive diet that doesn’t fit your lifestyle is a major reason for giving up on weight loss efforts, says Holly Wyatt, MD, Colorado University’s program director for obesity research and education. When the diet is too difficult in the first place, sustaining it long term will be almost impossible. Factor in boredom, and all it takes is one misstep to cause a dieter to give up.

“There is no one perfect diet that is the best,” says Wyatt. “Instead, look for a sound diet plan that you can live with, day in and day out.” It should also allow you to enjoy small portions of your favorite foods.

Diet Success Tip: Diets that work are diets that last. Don’t think of your eating plan as a “diet” you can go on and off of. Choose a healthy plan that fits your lifestyle — one that you can see following for the rest of your life.

Successful losers understand that whether they’re trying to lose weight or maintain the lost weight, theirs is a lifestyle of constant vigilance.

“Losing weight and maintaining it is among the most difficult things people can do because it has no end,” says Gary Foster, PhD, director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple University in Philadelphia. “To succeed is to make the vigilance part of a regular lifestyle.”

2. Unrealistic Expectations

Failing to lose weight quickly enough is the Achilles heel of most dieters, says Champagne. Weight loss may take longer than anticipated, or your diet may need adjustments along the way.

“Most dieters want to lose large amounts of weight and aren’t happy unless they lose 30%-40%” of their body weight, says Wyatt.

When you set the bar unrealistically high, she says, it can feel like you failed when you don’t meet your goals. And when you think of yourself as a failure, this can trigger a return to old eating habits.

Diet Success Tip: You might not fit into those skinny jeans, but keep in mind that losing even a little weight goes a long way toward improving your health. Research has shown that losing 10% of your body weight (for example, going from 200 to 180 pounds) can have big payoffs for your health.

“Medically, 10% weight loss can lower blood pressure, cholesterol [and] triglyceride levels, improve glucose sensitivity and sleep apnea,” says Wyatt.

In addition, it can help you feel better about yourself.

3. Dieting Without Exercise

Some people just don’t like to exercise, or have physical limitations that prevent them from doing it. But if you don’t want to be a diet drop-out, you need to find some form of physical activity you can do most days of the week.

“If there is one behavior that predicts weight loss success, it is being physically active on a regular basis,” says Foster.

Further, physical activity brings many health and psychological benefits aside from weight loss.

Diet Success Tip: Exercise does not have to happen in a gym - try gardening, dancing, walking, bike riding, or playing tennis, whatever you enjoy. Start slowly and gradually increase your intensity. Check with your doctor if you have physical limitations. Working out in the pool, for example, cushions joints and adds the extra benefit of water resistance. One of the simplest and easiest ways to exercise is to trap on a pedometer and count your steps throughout the day, aiming for 10,000 each day.

4. Not Changing Your Environment

Willpower alone won’t cut it. To be a successful loser, you need to create a diet-friendly environment at home, work, and socially.

“It is hard to continually push away from the wings at happy hour, candy on your desk, or a house full of temptations. If you want to succeed, you need to make changes in your environment so you are not constantly dealing with or resisting temptations,” says Wyatt.

When you can’t eat the same things as your friends, or your family doesn’t support your weight-loss efforts, this makes dieting more difficult, says Champagne.

Diet Success Tip: Seek support from your family, friends, and co-workers. And, Wyatt suggests, remove temptations wherever you can. Stock your kitchen with nutritious foods so you have ingredients on hand for healthy meals and snacks. Take nutritious snacks and meals with you when you’re on the go so you’ll be prepared when hunger strikes. Remove the candy dish from your desk, skip happy hour with your friends — do whatever it takes to set yourself up for success, even if it means hanging around with different friends.

OPPORTUNITIES KNOCK … OR DO THEY?

When we think of “opportunities”, we often think of chance occasions that cross our path, or are presented to us. We don’t think of opportunities as something we have to actively go in search for… because opportunity knocks on our door - not vice versa. Right?

Wrong.

Let’s not discount those very real opportunities that do fall in our lap from time to time, because this does happen and we notice it when we are alert. Sometimes we don’t notice and the opportunity slips right by, with us none the wiser.

There is another type of opportunity, the shy type. The type that you have to go in search for, BUT because you are actively seeking it and being very alert, they are easily found. The thing about these shy opportunities is that many people don’t go looking for them, believing that all opportunities will come knocking on their door.

One example of the shy opportunity is happening this very week.  Today is the first day of school in our community.  Many of us have had wonderful summers that have focused on family and fun times for us and our children.  Too many have gotten away from our “normal” routines that guide us through the rest of the year.  We have gotten away from our exercise programs, let the summer barbeque become a frequent part of our nutrition,  and made the transition, albeit unwittingly, to move away from things that we “should” be doing.  We tell ourselves “when the summer is over…..when the kids go back to school”  we will get back on our regular routine.  That time is not only now, it is TODAY.

Use today as an opportunity to take a personal inventory of all the things that we have put off or placed on hold that we know are essential to care for the one thing that is most important…..your health.   Next to each item write the action step or steps that are needed to get that item back into your reality.  Once this is done, indicate the “by when” date.  Without a factor of time, even the most well meant goals fade into wishes that go unfulfilled.   If needed, have a trusted person in your life assist you by being your accountability coach to ensure you stay on track.  That person, can be your spouse, a friend, a co-worker, your personal trainer, or health care professional.

Opportunities for change come across our way every day.  Don’t let this opportunity pass.  Take the action you need to take to get yourself back on track………TODAY

Washington, Dc — Obesity is a growing and costly problem for the United States, as two recent reports show. An estimated $147 billion a year in medical spending is used to treat obesity-related diseases in America, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study released last month found.

Between 1998 and 2006, researchers said that U.S. obesity rates climbed 37 percent, which translated to an 89 percent increase in health costs for obesity-related diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis. For the study, scientists from RTI International, the CDC and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality analyzed data on medical costs during those years.

The CDC released 24 new recommendations on healthy eating and exercise and encouraged communities and schools to join its efforts in combating obesity.

Another report, “F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America 2009,” released in July found that adult obesity rates increased in 23 states during the past year and did not decrease in any states.

For the fifth year in a row, Mississippi had the highest rate of adult obesity at 32.5 percent, followed by Alabama (31.2 percent), West Virginia (31.1 percent) and Tennessee (30.2 percent).

Colorado had the lowest adult obesity rate (18.9 percent).

Eight of the 10 states with the highest percentage of obese adults were in the South, per the report, which was released by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Also, the percentage of obese or overweight children (aged 10 to 17) was at or above 30 percent in 30 states. Mississippi had the highest rate of obese and overweight children at 44.4 percent.

The Importance of Flexibility

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(ATLANTA) - Americans spend more than a 10th of their out-of-pocket health care dollars on alternative medicine, according to the first national estimate of such spending in more than a decade.

Obese children are at risk for early onset of diabetes, fatty liver and musculoskeletal problems.

Researchers calculated the body mass index from a sample of 8,550 Hispanic, black, white, Asian and Native American 4-year-olds. The children were born in 2001, and in 2005, their height and weight were measured — 18.4 percent of them were obese.

“Significant differences in the prevalence of obesity between racial/ethnic groups were evident at 4 years of age,” the researchers wrote in the April issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Using body mass index, they found that 31.2 percent of American Indian/Native Alaskans, 22 percent of Hispanics, 20.8 percent of blacks, 15.9 percent of whites and 12.8 percent of Asians were obese.

“It’s surprising that there are large differences by racial/ethnic group by that age,” said Sarah Anderson, an assistant professor of epidemiology at The Ohio State University and lead study author.

Anderson and co-author Robert Whitaker’s analysis showed that children were becoming obese even before encountering soda and candy vending machines in schools.

“These results really do point to the need for us to focus attention on early childhood and the need for research to understand how these differences can emerge so early,” Anderson said. “To do that, we may need to understand the different family and cultural factors that are at play in these children’s lives.”

The cause for the early health disparities is hard to pinpoint, childhood obesity experts said.

“It’s always possible there are biological factors within ethnic groups,” said Dr. Tom Robinson, director of the Center for Healthy Weight at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “We know most of the changes that have occurred in body fat tend to occur from being in an environment that promotes very easy access to high-caloric foods and limited opportunities for physical activities.”

Michael Rich, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, called the disparities between ethnic groups disturbing.

“The expectations, lifestyle, behaviors are different on a cultural and socioeconomic basis,” he said. “Kids who live in the inner city, whose neighborhoods are perceived as dangerous, stay at home more, sit more, eat more snacks, because that’s all they can get at the local bodega. There are no supermarkets to get produce. That’s what mom is eating, so that’s what kid is eating. What we’re dealing with here is whole life issues.”

Previous research has shown that older children are becoming less active and spending more time in front of a computer or TV.

“That is displacing physical activity,” said Dr. Sarah Barlow, director of the Obesity Center at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. “You can imagine strollers, less outdoor play — all those kinds of things that have shifted how much activity younger kids are getting. At the same time, portion sizes are increasing for everybody.”

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, adults fare no better. Approximately 45 percent of blacks, 36.8 percent of Mexican Americans and 30 percent of whites are obese.

“It’s a very bad sign if we see obesity at a young age,” Robinson said. “When we see children obese at age 4, we’re likely to see complications — high blood pressure, abnormal lipids — which can lead to heart disease and stroke, diabetes in children.”

Diseases commonly seen in 40- or 50-year-olds are presenting in 6- and 7-year-olds. Obese children are developing type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease and musculoskeletal problems, which occur because their bodies can’t carry that much weight, doctors said. Calculate your child’s body mass index.

“The heavier you are as a child, the likelier that extra weight will follow you through life,” Robinson said. “That’s why we see adolescents who need weight-loss surgery, because they have life-threatening complications from obesity.”

If you have an obese child…

The first step is for the parents to acknowledge that the child is overweight, instead of making excuses or comparing him or her to heavier children. Many of the parents of obese children are overweight themselves, which makes that acknowledgment difficult, said Rich, who is also director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

“While it’s important to focus on it and take it seriously, it’s also important not to give up or feel hopeless,” he said. “Then you won’t try. You want to look at it for what it is and not be defeated by it.”

When you’re trying to help your child achieve a healthy weight, remove the stigma attached to obesity.

“It should always be about health, not about losing weight,” Rich said. “You’re trying to build the positive.”

He recommended the 5-2-1-0 plan. Eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables, cut screen time down to two hours or less, exercise at least one hour, and have zero soda and sugary drinks.

Such changes, which are not seismic shifts to lifestyles, can help the child get into a health weight.

“It’s easier to start that way, rather than try to change habits when they’re 8 or 12 or 16,” said Barlow, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

While it’s possible for some kids to outgrow the excess weight, she warned parents not to count on that. “We’ve seen over time that the environment doesn’t promote that,” she said.