DR MICHAEL MOSELY: How to prevent next week’s full moon from ruining your sleep

Many of us struggle to get a good night’s sleep (I sure do), but even if you’re sleeping like a baby, you may be sleeping worse than usual over the next week—and you can blame the full moon for that.

It’s out on May 5, and studies suggest it can really affect sleep.

One published a few years ago by Argentinian researchers found that in the week before a full moon, people fall asleep later and sleep about 45 minutes less than usual, possibly because exposure to the full moon’s extra light can interfere with sleep . disturb sleep. To counter this, you may want to wear an eye mask.

I’m particularly obsessed with sleep at the moment, having just returned from Australia where I took part in a new study at Flinders University in Adelaide.

The idea of ​​the study is to take 30 people with severe sleep problems – such as chronic insomnia or parasomnia where patients sleepwalk or talk in their sleep – who have not responded to other treatments, and see if they are cured with a combination. of new technologies and established science-based techniques, such as B. sleep restriction therapy (more on that later).

When it pays to work less

As part of a pilot project last year, 61 UK companies offered their employees the opportunity to reduce their weekly working hours from five to four days without a pay cut – and a recent report found that more than 90 per cent of them took up the scheme have because of the results positive.

Employees were just as productive, thanks in large part to less burnout and absenteeism. This may be because spending less time at work promotes healthy habits.

Recently, researchers from the University of South Australia found that people who worked four days a week were 13 percent more physically active each day and slept 21 minutes more each night than if they worked five days a week.

The five-day work week, introduced by Henry Ford in the early 1900s, seems as outdated as a Ford Model T.

The technology they used involves pills you take that measure your body temperature for 24 hours.

It should rise during the day and fall at night, with a minimum around 3am. If this is not the case, it indicates that something is wrong with your biological clock and needs to be adjusted.

Because I suffer from chronic insomnia, I wanted to participate in this study. Around one in three Britons suffer from insomnia, which means we struggle to fall asleep or stay asleep long enough to feel refreshed the next morning.

If it persists, it can affect almost every organ in your body—and even the way you speak.

Researchers at the Paris Sciences and Letters University recently trained an artificial intelligence system to recognize when someone is sleep deprived simply by the way they sound.

This is because sleep deprivation increases the inflammation in your nose and throat, which changes the tone of your voice so you can sound hoarse or “hoarse”.

Fatigue also slows down your thinking speed and changes the rhythm of your speech.

Poor sleep also affects the performance of your immune system. A study in Current Biology found that people who sleep less than six hours a night after being vaccinated produce far fewer antibodies (an important part of your immune system) than those who sleep seven hours or more; Something to keep in mind if you are about to receive a Covid booster.

Unfortunately, some bad sleeping habits can make things worse. For example, drinking alcohol before bed may help you fall asleep, but the sleep you get is likely to be of poor quality.

Another strategy is to sleep in late on Sunday. But it can mean that you have trouble falling asleep that night, which makes getting up on Monday morning very difficult.

Research has also shown that sleeping late on the weekend shifts your body clock (this is known as social jet lag), which not only means trouble sleeping, but also overeating, weight gain and an increased risk of type 2 diabetes.

So it’s best to cut the lies, make sure your bedroom is cool and dark – and opt for a diet rich in protein and fibre, as there’s evidence it can help improve sleep quality.

But what can you do once you suffer from chronic insomnia? I mentioned earlier that I tried an approach called sleep restriction therapy as part of the Flinders University study.

In the past six weeks, I have reduced the time I spend in bed from eight hours to more than six hours. The idea is that you get so tired that when you go to sleep you fall asleep quickly and stay asleep.

You are trying to retrain your brain to associate lying in bed with sleep – not with being awake and worrying. It was difficult, but it seems to be working.

I started going to bed at 11pm and getting up at 5am, but over the weeks I slowly increased the time I spent in bed by about 15 minutes a week.

I now go to bed at 11pm and get up at 6am, which is seven hours a night in bed with no naps or lies. I still lie awake at night, but mostly only briefly, and surprisingly, I feel much less sleepy during the day. The study is still ongoing, but I’ll let you know more when the results are out.

Change salt to lower blood pressure

A third of adults in the UK have high blood pressure (hypertension), which puts them at greater risk of heart attack or stroke – but it is largely underdiagnosed as symptoms are rare. That is why it is called the silent killer.

Two good friends of mine have died from undiagnosed high blood pressure so I would encourage you to buy a blood pressure monitor (you can get a decent one for around £20) and do something about it if the numbers go up.

Beyond the obvious, like eating less junk food (which tends to be high in salt, which raises blood pressure) and quitting smoking, there’s growing evidence that more potassium in your diet can make a big difference.

A third of adults in the UK have high blood pressure (hypertension), which puts them at greater risk of heart attack or stroke – but it is largely underdiagnosed as symptoms are rare. That is why it is called the silent killer

A recent study in Nature Medicine found that people with high blood pressure who swapped their regular salt (made of sodium chloride) for a salt substitute (made with 30 percent potassium chloride) experienced a significant drop in blood pressure and a 14 percent reduction in heart attacks and strokes.

Potassium salt substitutes cost a little more than salt, but taste the same. You can also increase your potassium levels by eating more salmon, lentils, spinach, yogurt, milk and bananas.

Dark chocolate can also help – it’s high in potassium and contains chemicals called flavonoids, which lower blood pressure by dilating blood vessels.

New skills can help aging brains

Last year I traveled to California to learn about a study that encouraged older people to learn many new skills at once to see what impact it had on their brains.

The results, recently published in the journal Aging And Mental Health, were remarkable. By the end of the experiment, the 27 volunteers, ages 60 to 80, had tripled their scores on some cognitive tests, and their average scores had risen to levels comparable to college students decades younger.

The volunteers learned three new skills in three months, such as Spanish, computer skills and painting.

The volunteers learned three new skills in three months, such as Spanish, computer skills and painting

They had cognitive tests at baseline and at three months, six months and a year later. A 74-year-old participant, Jim Ryan, learned Spanish and became an avid painter—and he enjoyed the learning program so much that he took additional classes, including history and poetry.

So what’s going on? The researcher dr. Rachel Wu believes that the challenge of intensive study boosted the volunteers’ confidence in their mental abilities, prompting them to think faster and perform better. She also said that learning new skills can increase brain mass and brain connections.

Time, I think, to pick up the paintbrush and book an online language course.