Gladia

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Sleep is so important. We need it to live. And when we can't sleep, we're desperate for help. But lately, our fascination with sleep feels as if it's taken on an urgency. Do a quick internet search for sleep and you'll find a slew of articles about how to make your sleep perfect. New gadgets, fancy alarm clocks, stay away from blue light. There are lots of services, products, and advice columns that tell us we're sleeping wrong. Not enough, not quality sleep, wrong position. Even worse, you might find scary messaging claiming that if you're not sleeping right, your life is gonna be shorter. You're gonna get all kinds of diseases. One of the biggest worries we have about our sleep is that we're not getting enough and that anything less than seven hours a night means that we're doomed to bad health. Everything from high blood pressure to Alzheimer's disease. But there are two flaws with this kind of messaging. The first flaw is that it's not completely accurate. Seven to eight hours of sleep, while recommended for adults, is just an average. And while messages have to be simplified for health communication to the public, sometimes important nuances get lost. So yes, it's true that not getting enough sleep in the long term is associated with health problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and depression, but fixating solely on seven to eight hours ignores the fact that there's a range of sleep that people need. The duration of a good night's sleep can be different for different people. Some adults need eight, but some are just fine on six. The second flaw with this kind of doomsday messaging is that it can be counterproductive, especially for people who do have trouble sleeping. For instance, in 2019, it was estimated that 21% of adults in the US were wearing sleep tracking devices. and that number is probably growing. And I get it. It's fascinating to see how much sleep you've gotten each night and to know what part of your night was spent in deep sleep or dreaming. But having all of that sleep data is causing some people to become obsessed with it. So much so that it's leading to a condition some call orthosomnia. a preoccupation with the constant need to achieve perfect sleep. And this condition, ironically, is causing more sleep problems. Now orthosomnia might be an extreme example, but the anxiety of not getting enough sleep is keeping some of us up at night. So here's what some experts are saying. Stop fixating on the number, because that can lead to unrealistic expectations of sleep. According to Dr. Colleen Carney... a psychologist and the head of the Ryerson University Sleep Lab. The basic questions you should ask yourself are, do I feel reasonably well rested during the day? Do I generally sleep through the night without disturbances? Or if I wake, do I fall back asleep easily? Can I stay awake through the day without involuntarily falling asleep? If your answers are yes to all three, you probably don't need to worry about your sleep. And if you're struggling with your sleep, instead of buying expensive blue light filters or fancy sleep trackers, try talking with your doctor to make sure there aren't any medical conditions that need to be explored first. Then try evidence-based recommendations like a sleep therapy. laid out by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. What's really cool is that there's a highly effective therapy called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia, or CBTI. It doesn't have any medications involved, and it has a really low failure rate.

Speaker 0 | 00:00.558

Most of us have procrastinated at some point in our lives. But about one in every five of us are compulsive about it. They put off tasks and chores nearly every chance they get. They're called chronic procrastinators. And it turns out, this behavior does a lot more damage than you might think. We get it. Doing work is hard. But when you choose to watch TV over doing laundry or washing dishes, you've just launched an all-out battle in your brain. On one side, you have your prefrontal cortex. That's the part of your brain that sets long-term goals and regulates self-control. It's telling you that those dishes aren't going to clean themselves. And on the other side is the limbic system. It deals with pleasure, arousal, and reward. And it's telling you that washing dishes is lame, dude. You'd have a better time doing something else. So procrastination essentially puts your brain in its happy place. It feels good. That's why you do it. But of course, just because it feels good doesn't mean it's necessarily good for you. For example, several studies have found that undergraduate college students who procrastinated had a lower GPA in the latter half of the semester compared to non-procrastinators. They were also more likely to get sick based on their healthcare visits. Moreover, other studies have found that procrastinators report higher levels of guilt and anxiety when they choose to procrastinate in the first place. And if you keep it up, researchers have found that chronic procrastination is linked to low self-confidence, low energy, and depression. Overall, your quality of life will probably be worse than if you had just listened to that good old prefrontal cortex. And you may think that you just have a different workflow or you perform better under pressure. But sorry to say, there are no studies to support any benefits of chronic procrastination. Bottom line, it's unhealthy. But not all hope is lost. In fact, researchers have conducted dozens of scientific studies in search for ways to help procrastinators. What they've found time and time again is how you think about tasks can make a huge difference in how likely you are to procrastinate on them. Tasks like saving for retirement, for example, can be so abstract. There's no immediate deadline, so you can always start tomorrow. And this is the mentality that can lead you to procrastinate. Instead, make your tasks more concrete in your mind. For example, a study in 2011 discovered that people given an illustration of how they might look at retirement age were more likely to say they would save money for retirement than people without an illustration. The image was something tangible and therefore painted a more concrete picture of their inevitable future. So whatever the task, do your health a favor and do the work right now. You might even enjoy that TV show even more once you get to it.