The five sleep positions you should NEVER ignore and what they reveal about your personality
How do you sleep in bed? Like a T-Rex with arms bent in front of you? Or a mountain climber, with one knee almost touching your chest?
According to Liz Tenuto, also known as the Workout Witch, the position you adopt can tell a great deal about you – and the way you deal with stress.
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The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Doctor explains why you feel worse when you hit snooze and go back to sleep for an hour
If you've woken up way too early for no good reason, going back to bed for that extra hour of sleep may not be as beneficial as you'd hoped. Instead, you're better off just staying awake, because slipping back into sleep will leave you feeling groggy and agitated since you've disturbed your 90-minute sleep cycle. 'If you were to sleep till you woke up naturally, often, you'd be fine because you'd be in the natural cycle. But then, when you fall asleep and then your alarm wakes you up … you have a good chance of ending up awakening in a deeper sleep phase when you weren't meant to wake up,' Dr. Greg Mahr, a psychiatrist at Henry Ford Health, told The Independent. 'You feel really groggy because you haven't gone through the natural rhythm.' Changes in the brain are 'fairly clear,' he said, looking at recordings of brain activity. When you interrupt those deeper stages of sleep, it can take a while to recover, whereas, being woken up in other lighter stages of sleep does not yield the same results. This is true even if you technically get enough sleep. 'It's typically not listening to our body cycles and trying to override them because of our schedules and alarm clocks,' Mahr noted. Alarm clocks can play a major role in sleep health. Recent research has found that more than 50 percent of 3 million sleep sessions studied ended in a 'snooze.' People spent an average of 11 minutes between snooze alarms before waking and heavy snoozers averaged 20 minutes a day, according to Dr. Rebecca Robbins, a sleep scientist at Brigham and Women's Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. 'Unfortunately, the snooze alarm disrupts some of the most important stages of sleep. The hours just before waking are rich in rapid eye movement sleep. Hitting the snooze alarm will interrupt these critical stages of sleep and typically only offer you light sleep in between snooze alarms,' she explained. How many alarms you set can also be a red flag, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine Dr. Rachel Salas. 'If you're a 10-alarm person, that is a huge red flag. If you have to hit the snooze button and you're not waking up, that's a red flag that something may be going on while you're sleeping that you're not aware of,' she explained. 'You might have an undiagnosed, untreated sleep disorder.' People might not be able to control their variable work schedules or environmental conditions. But, can they hack the system? Can you sneak a little extra sleep in without feeling the effects? Salas says you can. 'Taking a nap before 3 p.m. for less than an hour – ideally, 20 or 30 minutes – that's one way to pay back and not affect the other process that's important for sleep that runs with the circadian rhythm. It's called the homeostatic drive,' she said. Otherwise, you can get yourself in a vicious cycle of bad sleep. But there's one way to ensure you're waking up as fresh as can be. 'The best approach for optimizing your sleep and next day performance is to set your alarm for the latest possible time, then commit to getting out of bed when your first alarm goes off,' Robbins said.
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Keeping yourself alive could become way more expensive with Trump tariffs
Americans would likely pay more for necessary everyday prescription drugs, such as insulin, painkillers, chemotherapy, or antibiotics, if President Donald Trump were to enact tariffs on pharmaceuticals, experts warn. In an effort to incentivize drug manufacturers to bring production back to the United States, Trump has proposed tariffing pharmaceuticals made overseas – which account for an overwhelming majority of everyday medicine used in the U.S. 'We're going to be doing that,' Trump said of pharmaceutical tariffs in April. 'That's going to be like we have on cars. You know we have a 25 percent tariff on cars, we have a 25 percent tariff on steel and aluminum, and that's what the [pharmaceutical] category fits right now.' 'The higher the tariff, the faster they come,' Trump said. But experts say that's not necessarily true and there would be tangible consequences to such action, from higher brand-name drug prices to generic drug shortages. 'If tariffs were applied to prescription drugs, one of the most immediate consequences could be price increases — on prices that we already pay way in excess of other countries,' Dr. Mariana Socal, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said. Branded drugs would become more expensive The U.S. imports a majority of its branded prescription drugs – or medications that are patented with a brand name such as Viagra, Wegovy, or Zoloft – from high-income countries. Dr. Jeromie Ballreich, an associated research professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said much of the manufacturing comes from Ireland, Germany, and Switzerland because they have favorable tax policies for companies. As a result, adding a tariff would only make it more expensive for pharmacies and insurance companies to keep them in supply. 'We would expect pharma to pass the costs onto the insurers and we would expect insurers to pass the cost onto the individual patients,' Ballreich said. 'So, if there is a 50 percent tariff on your insulin product because it's coming from Ireland, patients in Mississippi who get insulin – they will either be faced with a higher cost when they go up to the pharmacy to fill their insulin or they're going to face a higher indirect cost because the premiums of the insurance plan are going to go up,' he said. Ballreich said a tariff on countries that produce high quantities of branded drugs would put 'pressure' on public insurers like Medicare or Medicaid and private insurers. However, branded drugs only account for roughly 10 to 15 percent of prescriptions. A majority of Americans, up to 90 percent, use generic drugs, often manufactured in India and China, because they're cheaper. Making branded drugs less accessible through tariffs would only increase reliance on generic drugs, which could exacerbate shortages that already impact millions of Americans. '[Shortages] can have very significant implications in day-to-day clinical practice,' Socal said. 'For example, if you are administering chemotherapy for an oncology patient, that may have significant consequences even for the prognosis of that case moving forward.' In 2024, the U.S. experienced a shortage of more than 300 drugs – 70 percent of which were generic prescriptions. Socal said that when patients are not able to access a more affordable version of their prescription, it means they may put their health at risk by skipping a dosage, taking a lower dosage, or not filling their prescription at all. Otherwise, they're forced to turn to the more expensive branded version. 'Those more expensive drugs are not always the best,' Socal said. 'Very frequently, and we saw this with chemotherapy shortages, the available drugs are second-line drugs.' The president has indicated that any negative impact from tariffs may be temporary and worth it to bring manufacturing and jobs back. 'We're doing it because we want to make our own drugs,' Trump said. But Ballreich and Socal are more skeptical. 'Tariffs are a very blunt instrument to incentivize domestic U.S. manufacturing of the branded drugs we use,' Ballreich said. Given pharmaceutical companies have moved outside of the U.S. for tax purposes, Ballreich says tax policy may be a better way to incentivize them, especially since many of those drugs are more difficult to manufacture. 'It's not just a very simple chemical plant; these tend to be very complex,' he said. Socal suggested a better strategy would be to understand where drugs are being manufactured and which ones would make more sense to bring to the U.S. — since even those manufactured locally often rely on certain imported ingredients and materials. 'Having tariffs on pharmaceutical products coming from abroad can actually also hurt our domestic manufacturers,' he says. While the president has not officially implemented any tariff policy on pharmaceuticals yet, he said, in April, that the plan would take effect in the 'not too distant future.'
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
RFK Jr claims one of his new vaccine panel members works at GW University. The school says he doesn't
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is facing questions after apparently misrepresenting the academic career of one of the eight people he appointed to a crucial vaccines panel. After firing the entire 17-member line-up of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on June 10, Kennedy named eight replacements the following day. The secretary announced his new panelists in a post on X, along with brief biographies for each. One of their number was Dr Michael Ross, whom Kennedy described as 'a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at George Washington University and Virginia Commonwealth University, with a career spanning clinical medicine, research, and public health policy.' However, NBC's Washington affiliate has since approached both of those universities and been informed by George Washington that Dr. Ross has not taught there for eight years and by Virginia Commonwealth that he has not worked there in four. The network quotes another biography of the same man from the website of the private equity fund Havencrest, which makes the same claim, stating: 'A Professor of Pediatrics at George Washington University and a Professor of OB-GYN at Virginia Commonwealth University, Dr Ross serves on the boards of multiple private healthcare companies.' The Independent has approached the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for clarification on the situation. Several of Kennedy's other appointees to ACIP have also raised eyebrows due to their track record of vaccine skepticism, controversial past statements on the Covid-19 pandemic, or lack of experience. Noel Brewer, one of the former members of the panel dismissed by Kennedy, told MSNBC recently: 'It was a bit shocking. None of us had any idea that something like this would happen. 'One of the implications of this is a bit of chaos in healthcare. It's unclear what insurance will cover and it's unclear who providers should look to when they're trying to understand what's the best practice for delivering HPV vaccine and other life-saving vaccines.' Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, told NBC that the recent change of guard at ACIP was 'disturbing.' 'I think if you go around the table, there's a lack of expertise and experience and institutional memory,' he said. 'And what do you do now? Where do you go for information? Where do you go for advice? And I guess the answer, for right now, is go to your doctor and hope that he or she can figure it out.' For all of the upheaval at the HHS on Kennedy's watch – which has seen huge DOGE cuts, the CDC stop recommending the Covid vaccine for healthy children and pregnant women and the secretary himself declare war on ultra-processed foods – a new poll by NBC has found that an extremely narrow majority of the American public, 51 percent, are in favor of his performance in the job. That said, 48 percent of respondents to the survey expressed disapproval, leaving just 1 percent undecided. Asked about the secretary's 'Make America Healthy Again' agenda, a report on which was accused of being compiled using AI, roughly one-third of people questioned said they believed junk food was the prime cause of the country's declining health, while another third blamed individuals' broader lifestyle choices. Twelve percent blamed socioeconomic status, 10 percent cited unaffordable health insurance premiums, and six percent attributed the issue to environmental toxins.
