How well do YOU sleep?

"Nearly three in 10 workers have become very sleepy, or even fallen asleep, at work in the past month, according to a first-ever study on sleep and the workplace"

Stephanie Armour, USA Today

Sleep apnea is a common disorder: as common as adult diabetes according to the American Sleep Association. They also report that

Risk factors include being male, overweight, and over the age of forty, but sleep apnea can strike anyone at any age, even children.

and that:

Untreated, sleep apnea can cause high blood pressure and other cardiovascular disease, memory problems, weight gain, impotency, and headaches. Moreover, untreated sleep apnea may be responsible for job impairment and motor vehicle crashes.

It can result in excessive snoring with lapses in breathing, and extreme tiredness that may even lead to falling asleep while driving. However, many people snore but do not have sleep apnea. (read more about sleep apnea here and here).

Fortunately, there is treatment available for anyone who suffers from sleep apnea.

Lack of sleep catches up with today’s workforce

By Stephanie Armour, USA TODAY

U.S. workers are silently suffering from a dramatic lack of sleep, costing companies billions of dollars in lost productivity, says a study out Monday.

Nearly three in 10 workers have become very sleepy, or even fallen asleep, at work in the past month, according to a first-ever study on sleep and the workplace by the non-profit National Sleep Foundation. The late-2007 survey was based on a random sample of 1,000 workers.

"It’s a very expensive issue for employers, and it can be fatal, too," says Nilesh Dave, medical director of the Sleep and Breathing Disorders Center at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. "The 24/7 global economy means work is now around the clock."

About 70 million Americans have a problem sleeping, according to the NSF.

Some employers, such as Union Pacific (UNP) railroad, are so concerned that they’re now allowing workers to nap on the job. Employees also say it’s a significant issue, causing them to drive drowsy or even fall asleep at their desks.

Ursula Forhan, 53, of Chicago, used to fall asleep at her desk. She was treated for sleep apnea and says she has no problems today.

"I would take a nap on the floor of my office, and my boss was so tolerant he would step over me," says Forhan, a paralegal in Chicago. She used to drive for work and had to roll down the windows to stay awake.

Among the survey’s findings:

•Dangers on the road. Thirty-six percent of respondents say they have nodded off or fallen asleep while driving, including 26% who say they drive drowsy during the workday.

•Work performance. Twelve percent of respondents have arrived late to work in the past month because of sleepiness. Other problems cited: impatience with others, difficulty concentrating on job tasks and lower productivity.

•Work hours. Employees with more than one job report the highest rate of dissatisfaction with sleep: 43% say they get a good night’s sleep only a few nights per month or less. Part-time workers report the highest rate of sleep satisfaction.

Several factors are driving the trend toward sleepier employees. Employees are putting in longer hours, in part due to increased pressure from employers to ramp up productivity. The study found that one-fourth of respondents have a workday that lasts between eight and nine hours, and another fourth say they work up to 10 hours a day.

Technology, which is supposed to enhance productivity, has also required employees to be available. "You’re not disconnecting except when you hit the pillow," says Mark Rosekind, a consultant who worked on the survey.

(read this article here)

Related posts:

How to Wake Up and Have an Awesome Night’s Sleep

Napping: How To Do It… and Feel Good About It

30 Ways To Destroy A Hangover – The Ultimate Guide

How to Maintain and Increase Brain Activity Over the Long Haul

Discovering Peace … through White Noise?

Here’s a fantastic talk given by biogerontologist, Aubrey de Grey, on the causes of aging and how we can start extending our lives by making some fundamental changes in the way we live!

Check out this compelling video here!

The Beautiful Brain of Albert Einstein

What made Albert Einstein’s brain so different from the rest of us? Are there physical differences between the a genius’s brain and the incredible analytical ability of his mind?

“How can such remarkable thoughts come from such an unremarkable brain?”

Albert Eintein may have been born with a natural ability to think and reason better, but there are some great methods to keeping your mind healthier and sharper.

Check out our related posts on mental health here:

Napping: How to Do It… and Feel Good About It
The Practical Health Results of Meditation

Meditation + Laughter? Who’d Have Thought?!

Check out this awesome video of John Cleese of Monty Python fame delving into an unusual (but enlightening) World of Laughter and Yoga combined!

A Must Watch! I guarantee, this will brighten your day!

In a related vein, check out one of our previous articles on what the practical benefits of meditation are:

Click Here To Find Out More!

Here’s why napping is good

… and 7 tips so even YOU can be a good "napper."

It’s a favorite past time of babies and teenagers, and even some of our elderly friends. It reduces stress, improves memory, makes you more alert, and helps you keep your brain at max performance over the long haul, among many other things.

So why do so many people resist napping or feel guilty for taking one?

Sleep is one of the most critical elements of maintaining a low stress, productive, and high quality life. Here’s how to work a nap into your daily schedule to give you a nice BOOST for the latter portion of the day.

1. Make your napping environment YOURS. People sleep much better when they are in familiar surroundings. For example, if you have a couch in your office, put a nice covering from home over it. This will make it easier to associate your couch (or "napping space") with the comforts and relaxing nature of your home. Going out to your car to nap would be another possible method.

2. Choose a proper time to nap. Early afternoon is probably your best bet as most people start feeling sluggish around this time. An added benefit is it is still early enough to not affect your night sleeping. We recommend actually planning it into your schedule.

3. Keep it short. Nap for too long and you will never recover. Keep it to around 25 minutes or less; long enough to recharge your brain and give you a break, but short enough to avoid grogginess.

4. Try The Coffee Bomb. If you are really struggling some day and need a major boost, you might try this: Right before napping, drink a cup of coffee. The 20 – 30 minute nap will give the caffeine time to start kicking in, meaning you’ll be Ready To Rock when you wake up. Many people believe coffee and naps don’t mix, but you might find it works quite well. Of course, developing a reliance on caffeine is against our mantra, but in a pinch this could help you out.

5. Feel good about it! How many times have you thought to yourself, "Ugh, if I could just take a short nap right now…" So give yourself that pleasure and enjoy it. We all hate those sluggish afternoons we occasionally experience, so let’s kick that from our mind! Your increased awareness and energy levels will be envied by everyone around you.

6. Free your mind. Face it, if you can’t calm your thoughts and give yourself a few work/stress-free minutes, you’ll never enjoy your nap time. This might take a bit of practice, but get in the habit of releasing your thoughts and your daily nap will become a daily moment of grace.

7. Get a good night’s sleep. One of the most critical principles of napping properly is having a solid night’s sleep beforehand. Don’t rely on your nap to make up for your late nights. Sleeping well and for an adequate length is necessary to fully recharge your body – a nap will never do this.

Napping is something many of us often yearn for, and deserve. Work it into your schedule, help yourself feel comfortable and relaxed,  and you will enjoy refreshed afternoons and a higher quality life.

Use this technique to begin ditching your bad habits.

…and start building GOOD ones (yes, it’s possible).

Do you smoke, but wish you didn’t? Does it seem impossible, no matter how hard you try, to keep your desk or office lean and clean? Or do you wish you read for 30 minutes a day to learn new gardening techniques?

Habits, good or bad, are a major part of our life. Think about it, how many actions or activities do you repeat day in and day out? If you can’t think of any, observe yourself today and note which tasks you do daily without a second thought.

The beauty and the curse of habits is they’re so thoughtless. But wait! There is usually something that inspires each habit occurring; a meal inspires a cigarette, getting home from work inspires 2 hours in front of the TV, or a meeting means you need a Coke.

Introduce yourself to The Trigger. The Trigger is the specific event, feeling, or activity – the meal, arrival home, or meeting – that triggers a desire in you – the cigarette, TV, or coke. The first key to breaking a bad habit is understanding what triggers it. Once you know that, you may be able to remove your bad habit by removing the trigger. Only smoke cigarettes when you’ve had a few too many beers? Limit your intoxication by only bringing cash when you socialize and limiting the quantity you bring. No money = no more beers. But don’t forget the taxi!

Some triggers can’t be removed from daily life. Fact of life. And these bad habits generally bring some sort of pleasure, albeit usually a short-term pleasure. So, your next step is figuring out how you’re going to fill the void left by this habit-removal. Now we’re starting to understand…

… The Substitute. The Substitute is what replaces your habit in bringing you pleasure. Want to quit taking that Coke to the meeting? Take a smoothie or fruit juice instead. Always need a coffee in the morning? Try replacing it with tea. Although you must be extremely careful with this, you could try a multi-step substitute replacement using progressively better (or less bad) substitutes. This method highlights the fact that, regardless of the 1-step or multi-step, you…

… need A Game Plan. Your Game Plan is your schedule for habit-removal. Set up checkpoints, 30, 90, and 365 day checkpoints seem good (you didn’t think you could get by with no record keeping, did you?). Use these check-points to assess how successful you’ve been. If at Day 30 you’re kicking that poor habit, feel good! Give yourself a reward. If you haven’t improved much, assess why it is. Did you properly identify The Trigger? Or maybe you don’t have…

… High Stakes. Having High Stakes means you get a meaningful reward or a punishment for success or failure. For example, let’s say your goal is to work out 4 times per week (here’s how to do it). Before starting, give a trustworthy friend $50 to hold onto. If you succeed to you get to use that for a professional massage. If not, they get to keep it (be clear about this and make sure they agree to it). The Stakes are high and in this case could get expensive, so you…

… might as well Maintain Focus. Keep it to one new habit per 30 days. Here’s why. One per month means that in one year, you could stop (start) these bad (good) habits:

• Smoking
• Drinking 4 Diet Cokes per day
• Maintain a lean and clean inbox
• Work out 4 times per week
• Read 30 minutes per day
• Stop watching TV completely
• Stop picking your nails
• Keep the litter box clean for your feline friend by cleaning it daily
• Meditate daily
• Eat breakfast every day
• Keep your kitchen clean by scrubbing it down each month
• Stop eating those brownies after every dinner

Not a bad list, eh? I’d call that a pretty good year.

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Four Tips to Keep Your Brain Active and Alert.

Use this list to keep your brain healthy and energized during those marathon work periods.

If you are like most people on this planet, I’d bet you sometimes find yourself feeling like no matter what you do, you can’t get ahead in your work. And when deadlines, overbearing bosses, or family obligations loom over your head, sometimes you are forced to work for extremely long, unhealthy periods of time. However, it is fairly well known that long periods of work and sleep deprivation can alter your mental awareness. Here’s a list of things to do to keep your mind energized and your brain activity high.

1. Meditate – Meditating regularly will recharge your brain and help you refocus your thoughts. It also has great health benefits. When you work without a break for extremely long periods of time, you will begin to find yourself “unable to think about this or that.” If you find yourself thinking this statement, it is a big clue that you need a break. Meditation can help you re-energize your brain.

2. Exercise – The health of your body and mind are interconnected. The status of one will definitely affect the other, so be sure to make exercise a habit and enjoyable. You’ll find that as your physical health increases, so does your mental health. Here’s what a NY Times had this to say about it:

One form of training, however, has been shown to maintain and improve brain health — physical exercise. In humans, exercise improves what scientists call “executive function,” the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that’s appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory, the type used to remember a house number while walking from the car to a party.

3. Get Started – Think about it. How many times does the anticipation of your workload actually prevent you from getting started? Your brain experiences a flurry of activity as you prepare for the tasks ahead, and this sometimes causes you to forget to start! Having a plan is important, but don’t get lost in planning. Or sulking because of upcoming work. Just do it. Here’s a few specific tips for overcoming procrastination.

4. Get A Few Hobbies – Hobbies bring joy to your life and keep your brain active. Why find more than 1 hobby? If your brain focuses on performing only a few different activities, it’ll never develop the wide processing power required for true cognitive development. Having a venue for creativity is just pleasant in general, too. That same NY Times article offered this:

That is, practice can certainly make people better at sudoku puzzles or help them remember lists more accurately. The improvement can even last for years. Similarly, people tend to retain skills and knowledge they learned thoroughly when they were younger. Unless the activities span a broad spectrum of abilities, though, there seems to be no benefit to general mental fitness.

Summary

Start with these 4 tips and you’ll be well on your way to a healthier, more active brain that is more capable of lasting through those long work sessions. If you would like even more tips, here are some more ideas for increasing brain activity.

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A new study sheds some light on how your mind combats negative events like death.

A study to be printed in the November issue of Psychological Science says that when faced with negative events (like your own death) the mind automatically triggers happy feelings. This is done as a sort of defense mechanism to keep us from falling into a depression due to the setbacks we encounter in our daily lives.

In the study, students were broken into 2 groups, one asked to contemplate their own death and the other to imagine dental pain. Afterwards, they were put through explicit emotion tests as well as implicit emotional tests. The study found:

There was no difference in scores between the groups on the explicit tests of emotion and affect. But in the implicit tests of nonconscious emotion — the wordplay — researchers found that the students who were preoccupied with death tended to generate significantly more positive-emotion words and word matches than the dental-pain group.

What does this mean? Our mind may just have an immune system that aids us in our psychological battles of facing rejection, aging, and the like. So, as we go through our days and inevitably face our challenges, remember – our mind is trying to help us! Use this fact as your first step towards building a strong positive outlook and getting the most from life. On that note, you should also check out the American Monk – some great (and free) lessons for developing your mind.

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Make Exercise Habitual

…and enjoy exercising while you’re at it.

If you ask a habitual exerciser what their biggest road block is, by far the most common answer is "getting started." Getting into the habit, working it into your schedule, and keeping it that way are all much easier said than done.

Zen Habits has a great list of things to help make exercise a habit. His list is 31 items long, but there are a couple we think you should focus on:

• Find a partner. Having a partner to go to classes with, motivate you on the days you’re dragging, and struggle through the pain with will make it much easier to maintain your exercise habits. Definitely find a reliable partner, not someone who’ll suggest to get ice cream instead, and you won’t be sorry you did.
• Do an activity you enjoy. If you don’t like lifting weights, then don’t do it. Play basketball or join a cycling class instead. If you enjoy the activity, you’ll look forward to exercising and won’t look for reasons not to go. It took me a long time to realize this, but switching to an activity I actually liked made working out a bright spot in my day.
• Set a goal and record your progress. It will only take a minute or two a day, but set a measurable goal and write down your daily or weekly progress. This will motivate you as you get closer and can see the changes in your strength, fitness, or weight. Make sure the goal is measurable, like "I want to lose 5 pounds this month" or "I want to work up to 15 pull ups in one set," not "I want to get fitter" which could mean anything.

Making sure your exercise routine incorporates those 3 things will help motivate you, make exercise a permanent part of your schedule, and give you goals to feel good about achieving. A healthy body and healthy mind go hand in hand, so make sure to exercise both.

References

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Why Meditation can result in improved health…

…and how you can use meditation to become healthier.

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A common road block people have with meditation is thinking that having a demanding job, a family, and a busy life means they don’t fit the bill for meditation. This misconception prevents many people from realizing the great health benefits that can result from meditation, like a stronger immune system (less doctor’s bills), less stress (a happier life), and greater detachment from big and small irritations (enjoying the grocery store, instead of dreading it).

There’s an article over at PickTheBrain.com that explains some of the practical benefits, that a normal, everyday person can derive from meditation. Read this page on some of the benefits and ask if you shouldn’t give meditation a try.

If it sounds like something you might try, head over to The American Monk to get some free lessons. This is great because it is free and gives common people (like you and me) a chance to explore meditation. Share your experiences in the comments. Who knows? But I think we could all use the great health results that meditation seems to give.

PickTheBrain.com::Physical and Mental Benefits of Daily Meditation