You know that thing we all take for granted? Oh yeah, sleep! Check out how your body reacts when running empty on sleep.

“STRIKE A POSE!”

Very productive meeting this morning via Skype. Although we are one person down, spirits are still high and we are getting it done! Lots of exciting research discussed, looking forward to showing it to our clients next week!

Did you know, some American companies are changing their personnel rules to allow a daily nap! 

Naps are a great way to catch up on sleep if you are sleep deprived. Check out the following article to learn how best to nap during your day. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/els-van-der-helm/3-rules-for-the-perfect-n_b_9947508.html

Fun fact of the week - diaries from the pre-electric-light-globe Victorian era show adults slept nine to 10 hours a night with periods of rest changing with the seasons in line with sunrise and sunsets.

Your bedroom environment can drastically impact your sleep. Are you browsing your phone or tablet before sleep? Are you entering a brightly lit up bathroom to brush your teeth before bed? Research suggests exposure to Fluorescent bulbs and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) before bed can suppresses the production of melatonin. This is especially the case for blue light wavelengths produced from electronics and overhead lights, which suppress sleep more than any other type of light at night because the body is more sensitive to this type of light. 

Light is detected by the retina, which sends signals to the hypothalamus. When it starts getting dark outside, the hypothalamus signals to the body to start creating sleep hormones, like melatonin, and to drop the human's body temperature to prepare for sleep, according to the National Sleep Foundation. In the morning, when light is sensed, the body is told to warm up and to produce hormones, like cortisol, that wake the body up. 

Take our advice and refrain from using electronics up to an hour before bed. Don’t interrupt your sleep pattern. The body's biological clock works in rhythms that are set by the amount of light and dark the body is exposed to. This is called the circadian rhythm. Circadian rhythms control the timing of many physiological processes. They determine sleeping and feeding patterns, as well as brain activity, hormone production and cell regeneration.

Have you ever wondered how it came to this day, where everyone is tracking this and that part of their health, with this shiny device or that nice app? No? Okay, we are informing you anyways about some research and why scientists also see the reason behind tracking your sleep.

All can be tracked back to the Romans. Yes! Romans, though they did not have a fitness tracking device, connected via bluetooth to their smartphone, they tried their best to track things related to their health. In the case of the Romans it was mostly to map health and power of their soldiers (Rooksby, Rost, Morrison& Chalmers, 2014), but anyways, they also tracked their health. So health tracking is not something new, coming from the blogging society to promote buying expensive shiny things.

Related to the purpose of tracking the Romans had, we have a lot of research concerning sleep tracking, to optimize the lifes of people working crooked schedules. If you are working regularly during times where your body would prefer to sleep, based on the biological rhythm humans adapted during the thousands of years of evolution, then you will experience more drownsiness and sleepiness as a consequence (Caldwell, 2012). This happens even if you sleep “enough”, after for example a night shift, a late night working to finish a paper before a deadline, or a night you partyed through. These effects are especially bad if you work with heavy machines, huge responsabilities or if you could generally have an impact on other people and their lifes. You could think about a machine worker in a factory who could risk his co-workers health by being inattentive, a pilot who might dose off, and this has happened more often than you might imagine, or a doctor, who might be so badly sleep deprived that he performs as if he was heavily drunk (Caldwell, 2012). This could somewhat be countered by sleep tracking. In several studies sleep tracking, and the raised awareness on sleep deficits, led to a change in either company policies or sleep prioritizing of the individual (Caldwell, 2012). Caldwell (2012) proposed a model as with truckers, whose driving hours are tracked, for pilots. They suggested activgraphs to record times of “sleep” or inactivity to validate that the pilots sleep enough in their time off to start their duty afterwards.

But what about the rest of us humans, not working at night, but though willing to live healthier? Yes, everybody should hop on the train of sleep tracking. There is a wealth of different devices or apps you could chose from. With all the trendy devices it became a normal thing to quantify areas of your life by tracking them (Rooksby et al., 2014). We are tracking our diets, calories, fat intake, steps, heart rate, stress levels, sleep and more with apps. Our data is presented to us in different ways, concerning what we want to gain from it. Colourful graphs show you how you diet is composed of fats, carbohydrates and proteins if you want to improve your eating behavior. You can get piecharts on the time you spend at night in restless sleep, awake or resting. Everything is summed up and you can improve yourself with just a little work. You can even set short or long term goals and challenge your friends to be more healthy then you are.

Several years ago you had to consult a list of specialists to gain all these informations. You had to consult a general practitioner, a dietarian, a sleep scientist and so on. Today we have the opportunity to track it ourselves in our home environment, and there is even evidence of the available tracking devices to be moderately to good concerning reliability of their measures compared to the polysomnography (deZambotti, Claudatos, Inkelis, Colrain& Baker, 2015; Goetz, 2010). And as we already made clear in our previous posts, all the factors of your life influence sleep, and sleep influences all the other aspects of your life in turn.

So as a lesson to be learnt: Sleep tracking is a very important aspect you should consider in pursuing a healthy lifestyle, especially as it is so easy to do today.

If you are interested in some background knowledge consult our sources:

Caldwell, J. A. (2012). Crew schedules, sleep deprivation, and aviation performance. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21(2), 85-89.

de Zambotti, M., Claudatos, S., Inkelis, S., Colrain, I. M., & Baker, F. C. (2015). Evaluation of a consumer fitness-tracking device to assess sleep in adults. Chronobiology international, 32(7), 1024-1028.

Rooksby, J., Rost, M., Morrison, A., & Chalmers, M. C. (2014, April). Personal tracking as lived informatics. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 1163-1172). ACM.