Lazy Man and Health » Sleep http://www.lazymanandhealth.com Get Healthy with Me, One Post at a Time Mon, 19 Dec 2011 18:57:32 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 What If We Didn’t Need to Sleep? http://www.lazymanandhealth.com/what-if-we-didnt-need-to-sleep/ http://www.lazymanandhealth.com/what-if-we-didnt-need-to-sleep/#comments Fri, 04 Jan 2008 23:12:06 +0000 Lazy Man http://www.lazymanandhealth.com/sleep/what-if-we-didnt-need-to-sleep/ Everyone wants to add a little more time to their day. What if you could add another eight hours every now and again? Wouldn’t that change your life? Of course it would.

It may sound like I’m dreaming. There’s no possible way we could function without proper sleep, right? It wasn’t too long ago that I suggested getting the right amount of sleep before. So what has changed?

Nothing has changed yet, but it may be in the future. According to this Wired article on sleep deprivation, a spray of a hormone called orexin A can get you up and running just like you got sleep. In tests, monkeys were deprived of sleep for 30 to 36 hours and given either orexin A or a placebo. The monkeys getting the orexin A performed just as well on cognitive test as the alert monkeys. The ones receiving the placebo didn’t do well at all on the tests. PET scans of the monkeys brains with the orexin A looked similar to monkeys who weren’t sleep deprived.

This is exciting news for those with sleep disorders. For the rest of us, our enthusiasm should be tempered. The body uses sleep to repair and ready itself for a new day. Without that time, there will likely be side effects. The bad news is that no one will likely get to try it for years. It could take more than a decade to get approved by the FDA.

]]> http://www.lazymanandhealth.com/what-if-we-didnt-need-to-sleep/feed/ 2 Sleep and The Three Bears http://www.lazymanandhealth.com/sleep-and-the-three-bears/ http://www.lazymanandhealth.com/sleep-and-the-three-bears/#comments Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:21:05 +0000 Lazy Man http://www.lazymanandhealth.com/sleep/sleep-and-the-three-bears/ Everyone knows the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Goldilocks stumbles upon the home of the three bears and riffles through their things (what are teaching our children anyway?!?!) sampling them all. The Papa Bear’s stuff is too hot or too hard while the Mama Bear’s stuff is just as unsatisfactory to Goldilocks in the opposite direction. The baby’s porridge, chair, and bed are “just right.”

What does this have to do with sleep? According to a study by University of Warwick’s Warwick Medical School, too much or too little sleep can be deadly. Most people already knew about the problems of too little sleep. It has been linked to increased risk of diabetes and obesity, among other things.

What isn’t obvious is that too much sleep can be a problem. How much of a problem can it be? There’s the rub in this research. It seems that the scientists don’t know. Francesco Cappuccio, an author of the study says:

“But in contrast to the short sleep-mortality association, it appears that no potential mechanisms by which long sleep could be associated with increased mortality have yet been investigated. Some candidate causes for this include depression, low socioeconomic status and cancer-related fatigue.”

This sounds to me that sleeping too much is not the cause, but just a symptom of an underlying circumstance. This is why you need to read the whole article instead of the headline of, “Too much sleep as dangerous as too little”.

]]> http://www.lazymanandhealth.com/sleep-and-the-three-bears/feed/ 4 An Hour of Sleep vs. An Hour of Gym? http://www.lazymanandhealth.com/an-hour-of-sleep-vs-an-hour-of-gym/ http://www.lazymanandhealth.com/an-hour-of-sleep-vs-an-hour-of-gym/#comments Wed, 18 Jul 2007 16:28:28 +0000 Lazy Man http://www.lazymanandhealth.com/sleep/an-hour-of-sleep-vs-an-hour-of-gym/ I had an interesting comment on my post about stepping up my fitness plan. Guinness416 suggested, “Get up an hour or so earlier and work out then.” I’ve done morning workouts in the past, but have sense focused a more time into my blogs such as this one and Lazy Man and Money. I’m working on some additional side business and they take time as well.

This brings us to Guiness416 suggestion. Is an hour of sleep worth an hour at the gym? There have been numerous studies about the benefits of both. I think the answer depends a bit on how much sleep you are getting and how much time in the gym you are spending. If you spend 3 hours in the gym, the value of an extra hour of sleep is huge. If you only sleep 5-6 hours a night, giving that up for an hour at the gym may not be a smart idea. I typically get 6.5-7 hours a night. I could probably do less in the short term, but I don’t think it’s a smart long term plan. I’m always hesitant to do short-term fixes.

I think I have found a solution for myself. My condo complex has a small gym with just the minimum necessary to get a good work out in. I can walk to it in about 3 minutes. From there I can do a circuit training targeting the lower half of my body for one exercise and then my upper half for another. I believe this could approximate a full workout in as little as 20 minutes. Round trip, we might be talking about a half hour out of my day. I think I can create this time by doing a little less of the extra promotion that I do for Lazy Man and Money. I think I could work to minimize the impact of that lost half hour. Best yet, I can do it without losing more of my precious sleep.

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