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Do men and women deal with sleep deprivation differently?
A small but provocative new study, presented at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies today, tells us that when women don’t sleep well, it trickles over into the marriage and causes tension between spouses. When men don’t sleep, the relationship carries on as normal.
The researchers tracked couples for 10 days, recording their sleep at night using an “actigraph” to measure how long it took the participants to fall asleep, how long they slept in total during the night, and how often they woke up.
During the day, the couples were asked how often they had both positive and negative interactions with each other.
The results suggested sleepy wives as the culprit for marital strife: Continue reading »
How mom and dad can get more sleep
If you follow my writing, you know that I’m mildly obsessed with the subject of sleep. Baby and kid sleep, sleep biology, dreams — these topics are endlessly fascinating to me. But I’m also a parent, and I know that in practical terms, sleep is tricky and unpredictable.
As I wrote recently, sleep deprivation has real costs to parents. Even when we think we’re awake (albeit drowsy) we may not be functioning with a whole brain. And the worst part is that as parents, we think sleep deprivation is just a way of life .
It’s not true — we need sleep (maybe even more so, since our kids require so much energy). So here is an expanded break list of tips for sleep deprived parents. Make a few of these tweaks in your house for better nighttime rest: Continue reading »
If you could have one superpower, what would it be?
OK, now that you’ve indulged your dreams of flying, turning invisible or having your own personal Tardis, check out this seemingly magic power: short sleep.
Short sleep is the ability to genuinely thrive on 4-6 hours a night of sleep. Short sleepers don’t just get by on less than seven hours a night like every parent I know; they genuinely don’t need any more sleep.
It’s a real-life superpower that one to three percent of the population is blessed with, giving them an extra couple of hours every day to do what they want with. Short sleepers go to bed after midnight and wake up with the early birds, fresh as daisies and ready to start the day all over again.
Often blamed for contributing to nighttime insomnia, the Internet can also help parents struggling with sleep problems. Staring at a screen late at night may not help you get to sleep, but a new program promises to get your little ones sleeping soundly.
The program, currently available through Johnson&Johnson’s website, was created by a team of researchers at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. You give it data on your family’s bedtime routines and sleep problems, and it gives back customized advice to help everyone under your roof get a good night’s sleep. Most of the families involved in a clinical trial of the program reported improvements, and many planned to continue using it.
What magic tricks does the Custom Sleep Profile have to offer?
Two ways that technology disrupts sleep
A study by the National Sleep Foundation says that 95 percent of us engaged with some form of technology in the hour before bedtime.
Almost all of us watch TV, text, go online, or play video games when we should be winding down for sleep.
People age 46-64 were the most likely to watch TV every night, and about one third of people age 13-29 play video games before bed. One in 10 kids reports being woken up by texts throughout the night.
60 percent of us are on our laptops before bed.
The obvious way that sleep and gadgets are at odds: technology has an addicting quality — we can’t help ourselves but watch one more episode of Jon Stewart or jump from site to site in search of the perfect end table or an answer to the Skuut vs. training wheels dilemma.
But that’s not the only problem. Here’s the biological explanation for why technology cuts into sleep: Continue reading »
How do you get a baby to sleep?
Earlier this week, I reviewed an awesome new book, Spousonomics. Turns out they have a blog, too! And on it, Jenny posts about using economic theory to make a tough parenting choice: sleep training her 4-month-old daughter.
She uses a technique called a “commitment device” to follow through on what every parent knows is a tough task: letting her baby cry it out so everyone can get a full night’s sleep. Jenny’s commitment device is simple and infallable. She’s leaving.
For a night (or, if this is really going to work, probably a few nights), she’s going to pack her bags and have a slumber party at a friend’s place. Her husband can handle the rough night (or couple of rough nights, I’m guessing) with a crying baby, and then Jenny can come home to a house full of peaceful sleepers.
Seriously, when was the last time you got a good night’s sleep? Before you had kids, right? Now you’re probably a caffeine whore like the rest of us, taking your drug whenever and however you can.
Well, thanks to us, retailers are finding ever more ways to get caffeine into our systems (coffee is so yesterday!), from oatmeal to lollipops. You might argue that there’s no such thing as an “unnecessarily caffeinated” item. But you haven’t seen this list yet:
1. Caffeinated Inhaler Continue reading »
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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