during the dream phase of sleep, also known as REM sleep, our stress chemistry shuts down and the brain processes emotional experiences and takes the edge off difficult memories.
Dream sleep takes sting out of painful memories

Dr. Stasha Gominak Discusses Sleep and Vitamin D Pt. 1 (by ETMC1)

Great video on vitamin D by a neurologist talking about the effects of D and Cpap on her patients, together with relevant research. The idea is low vitamin D can cause lots of neurological problems - in addition to global problems throughout the body.

It’s 1 hour + runtime.

Notes:

I love the idea that vitamin D is not just a bone building hormone, but a global hormone telling the body to repair itself - and fix any number of things that can go wrong in the body. I love the idea that it can repair the brain.

“We are organized to use our body when awake and repair it during sleep.”

It’s also interesting that if the vitamin D levels get too high, a number of low vitamin D symptoms re-emerge.

It’s interesting the idea that people should test their vitamin D levels to optimize their dosage.

The right test is D25OH and the right level is 60-80 ng/ml.

How Does Exercise Improve Sleep

Exercise improves sleep efficiency shortening the amount of time you need to sleep.

via http://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-reduce-the-amount-of-sleep-I-need-every-night/answer/Mattias-Petter-Johansson#ans722575

researchers believe that very young children take naps because so-called sleep pressure builds rapidly in their brains — that is, the need for sleep accumulates so quickly during waking hours that a nap becomes a biological necessity. It is not just a question of how much total sleep that children need in 24 hours. Possibly because of the intense synaptic activity that goes on in their highly active, highly connected brains, young children are less able to tolerate long periods of time awake.
A Child’s Nap Is More Complicated Than It Looks - NYTimes.com

How long does it take to work off long-term sleep debt?

 it can take several weeks to fully work off a sleep debt; there were some studies done on this by Wehr at NIMH in the 90s. I think this is their main paper:

http://ajpregu.physiology.org/content/265/4/R846.abstract

They found that if they took otherwise healthy people and put them in an environment where they could sleep up to 14 hours per day, they slept well over their baseline amount (as if working off a sleep debt) for as long as 3 weeks. The first few days they would sleep 10-11 hours a night, then after a couple of weeks it would be 9 hours - only after 3-4 weeks did it subside to the final equilibrium of ~8.5 hours a night, at which point the subjects reported that they felt terrific.


There are more recent, similar studies done at Stanford on athletes that show that in a similar environment, sprint times continued to decrease as much as two months into the study.

Do "night owls" wake up slower than "early birds"?

It really depends on what you mean by “night owl”. There is a condition that is called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, which is a disorder that changes a person’s general sleep, peak period of alertness, and so on.

I assume this is what you’re talking about when you say “night owl”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome


In contrast, there is an “early bird” similar, called Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_sleep_phase_syndrome


From the article

People with the disorder who try to live on a normal schedule cannot fall asleep at a “reasonable” hour and have extreme difficulty waking because their biological clocks are not in phase with that schedule.


This quote basically says that yes, quite certainly, when one with DSPS (that is, an extreme “night owl”), will have difficulty waking up in a morning, and wake up slower than an “early bird”, but only if they are being forced (by work or otherwise) to live on a schedule that their body doesn’t naturally want to do.

Imagine if a ‘regular’ person had to wake up every morning at 3am for their job. They would hit the snooze button just as much as one with DSPS does when they wake up at 8am.

If, however, they are allowed to follow their own schedules, e.g. sleeping from 4 a.m. to noon, they sleep soundly, awaken spontaneously, and do not experience excessive daytime sleepiness.


* italics not originally in text, and used to accentuate a point.

I will attest to the fact that, as someone with DSPS, when it’s time for me to wake, I will awaken instantly, and be ready for the day. I’m generally not sleepy for very long. That being said, it may be around 10:30 - 11:30, but when one sleeps at 2:30am - 3:30am that’s a full 8 hours of sleep.

So, I would have to say, in full confidence to the question “Do night owls wake up slower than early birds?”

Yesno.

Yes when they must wake up earlier than their normal waking time.
No if they awaken on their own accord.

Why Hammocks Make Sleep Easier, Deeper

The scientists weren’t too surprised to find that people fell asleep faster when the bed rocked. But they were surprised at the big difference that rocking made in brain activity. Rocking increased the length of N2 sleep, a form of non-REM sleep that takes up about half of a good night’s rest. It also increased slow oscillations and “sleep spindles.” Sleep spindles are brief bursts of brain activity, which look like sudden up-and-down scribbles on an electroencephalogram.

“We were basically trying to find a scientific demonstration of this notion of rocking to sleep,”

The fact that the brain waves changed so much …was “totally unexpected.”

Sleep spindles are associated with tranquil sleep in noisy environments and may be a sign that the brain is trying to calm sleepers stuck in them. Spindles also have been linked with the ability to remember new information. And that is associated with the brain’s ability to rewire itself, known as brain plasticity.

Haha, it would be ridiculously fun to install an indoor hammock.

People ate an average of nearly 300 calories more when they were sleep-deprived compared to when they were well rested, research presented at an American Heart Association revealed. And the calories overwhelmingly came from junk foods like ice cream and fast food.

In one study, researchers found that people who received only four hours of sleep a night for two nights experienced:

18 percent reduction in leptin
28 percent increase in ghrelin

Effects of Insufficient Sleep

It’s interesting to see some degree of quantification here.

If you wake up with a bad taste in your mouth, it could be because you ate a meal too close to your bedtime and so there was not sufficient time for proper digestion.

via this article via meghcandy

Will Sleeping on Your Side Reduce Snoring?

Snoring occurs when your throat muscles relax during sleep, your tongue falls backward toward your throat and the walls of your throat vibrate, leading to the familiar sounds of a snore. It’s a common notion, then, that most people only snore when they sleep on their back, as this is what allows your tongue to collapse into the back of your throat and obstruct breathing.

In fact, sleeping on your back can lead to snoring in some people — the New York Times reported one study found that 54 percent of snorers were “positional snorers,” which means they only snored while sleeping on their backs. So switching to your side while sleeping is a simple trick to try if snoring is interfering with your, or your partner’s, sleep — but it likely won’t work for everyone.

Causes of snoring:

  • Aging, which leads to increased relaxation of the throat muscles
  • Obesity (particular having a lot of fatty tissue around the neck)
  • Anatomical abnormalities of the nose and throat (enlarged tonsils or adenoids, nasal polyps, or deviated nasal septum)
  • Functional abnormalities (such as inflammation of the nose or throat due to allergies)
  • Drinking alcohol before bed, as alcohol is a potent muscle relaxant, or taking muscle relaxants in the evening

The Average American is sleep deprived - and their performance is impaired

This is a great study where subjects’ sleep was restricted to 3,5,7, or 9 hours. P.V.T. is a measure of how much your performance is impaired by lack of sleep.

in the seven-hour group, their response time on the P.V.T. slowed and continued to do so for three days, before stabilizing at lower levels than when they started. Americans average 6.9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. Which means that, whether we like it or not, we are not thinking as clearly as we could be.

some people who need eight hours will immediately feel the wallop of one four-hour night, while other eight-hour sleepers can handle several four-hour nights before their performance deteriorates. (But deteriorate it will.) There is a small portion of the population — he estimates it at around 5 percent or even less — who, for what researchers think may be genetic reasons, can maintain their performance with five or fewer hours of sleep. (There is also a small percentage who require 9 or 10 hours.)