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Some foods can kill you, and it turns out that a good night’s sleep can do it too–IF you use sleeping pills. According to a recent study, patients taking prescription sleep aids on a regular basis were nearly five times as likely as non-users to die over a period of two and a half years, and even people who took fewer than 20 pills a year were at risk. They were also more likely to develop cancer. Americans filled 60 million prescriptions for sleeping pills last year, up from 47 million in 2006.
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We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night–but it could be good for you. It turns out that the often recommended straight eight hours of sleep may actually be unnatural. Numerous literary and scientific writings from the past refer to a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk (before we had electric lights), followed by a waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep when darkness finally fell.
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As strange as that may sound, sleep researchers have discovered that our sleep patterns are related to the way the Earth’s axis shifts. As the Earth travels around the sun on its annual course, one hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, getting more than its fair share of light and warmth, while the other is titled away and thus has winter weather. It’s the reason why going off daylight saving time may have given you insomnia.
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More than 40% of Americans say they don’t get enough sleep, and the culprit could be watching TV in bed. A new study by the National Sleep Foundation found that 95% of people polled had used some sort of electronic device less than an hour before bed the previous night. Exposure to electrical light between dusk and bedtime strongly suppresses melatonin levels, and light -emitting TVs, smart phones, computers and video-game players can do just that, making it difficult to sleep.
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