Latest news with #MatthewWalker
The Age
15-05-2025
- Health
- The Age
‘You will be stunned': A sleep expert's pre-bedtime tips
He calls himself a 'humble servant of this thing called slumber', but that would be selling British neuroscience professor Matthew Walker short. The author of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Walker is the expert of choice on one of life's great mysteries (and necessities). Why do we sleep? Twenty years ago, the crass answer was, 'We sleep to cure sleepiness', which is the fatuous equivalent of saying, 'I eat to cure hunger.' Now we ask, 'Is there any major physiological system of your body or any operation of your mind that isn't wonderfully enhanced by sleep when we get it, or demonstrably impaired when we don't get enough?' And the answer seems to be no. I love a good nap. So did Thomas Edison, right? Edison understood the creative brilliance of sleep and used it ruthlessly as a tool. He was also a habitual napper who would wake up and then write down all of the ideas he was getting. He called it 'the genius gap': [the short phase] between lucid, waking consciousness and the depths of non-conscious, deep sleep. It's probably one of the reasons why no one's ever said you really should stay awake on a problem. Barack Obama says he can survive on five hours of sleep. Nikola Tesla was said to exist on three. Is there any optimal amount? It's seven to nine hours. Chronically sleeping less than seven hours is associated with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, immune and inflammation issues, cancer, hormonal issues and, of course, Alzheimer's disease and dementia. There is a very small subset of the population that we now call 'natural short sleepers', but statistically you're more likely to be struck by lightning. You note that adolescents naturally fall asleep later, meaning school starts far too early? Teenagers have been lumbered with this incessant chronic sleep debt, and if you look at models throughout the world where school start times are delayed, attendance rates increase and truancy rates decrease, while academic grades increase and psychiatric referrals decrease. I don't mean to trivialise things – getting children to school is not easy, and parents have to get to work – but if you look at the data, when sleep is abundant, minds flourish, and when it is not, they don't. What purpose do dreams serve? Dreaming is almost like a form of informational alchemy. During dreaming, we start to collide all the recent things that we've learnt with the back catalogue of information that we've already got, and as a consequence we wake up with a revised mind: a wide web of associations that is capable of divining solutions to previously impenetrable problems. It's also a form of overnight therapy. With the special chemical cocktail that happens during dream sleep, it's almost like a nocturnal soothing balm, taking the sharp edges off those painful, difficult experiences. Dreaming strips the bitter emotional rind from the informational orange. What's the most common cause of insomnia? Sometimes I consider insomnia as the revenge of things we haven't worked through during the day: the stuff causing anxiety and stress. You have to get your mind off itself. How? First, meditation. Next, with what's called a body scan, relaxing as you focus on each part of your body from head to toe. If you don't like the sound of that, try box breathing: inhale for five seconds, hold it for five seconds, and then exhale for eight seconds. Another thing that you can do is take yourself on a mental walk down the street in 4K hyper-vivid detail. Do not count sheep. Loading What are your top tips for good sleep? Try to stay away from too much caffeine in the afternoon and limit your alcohol use, because it will fragment your sleep. Your bedroom temperature should be cool: about 17 to 18 degrees. As for unconventional tips, set an alarm for one hour before you expect to go to bed, then shut down all the lights in your house. You will be stunned by how sleepy and soporific that will make you feel. In that same hour before bed, try to limit the use of devices – not because of the blue light but because they hit the mute button on your sleepiness and cause what's called 'sleep procrastination'. Also, go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. I know it sounds desperately pedestrian, remarkably vanilla and deeply boring, but if you want to sleep, regularity is your first best step. Do we undervalue sleep? We are still in the mentality of competitive under-sleeping, and whoever the PR agent for sleep has been, we probably should have fired them long ago because there's a terrible stigma about getting sufficient sleep, which is strange. No one looks at an infant sleeping during the day and says, 'What a lazy baby', but we do that to adults. Don't think of sleep as a cost to today; sleep is an investment in tomorrow.
Sydney Morning Herald
15-05-2025
- Health
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘You will be stunned': A sleep expert's pre-bedtime tips
He calls himself a 'humble servant of this thing called slumber', but that would be selling British neuroscience professor Matthew Walker short. The author of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Walker is the expert of choice on one of life's great mysteries (and necessities). Why do we sleep? Twenty years ago, the crass answer was, 'We sleep to cure sleepiness', which is the fatuous equivalent of saying, 'I eat to cure hunger.' Now we ask, 'Is there any major physiological system of your body or any operation of your mind that isn't wonderfully enhanced by sleep when we get it, or demonstrably impaired when we don't get enough?' And the answer seems to be no. I love a good nap. So did Thomas Edison, right? Edison understood the creative brilliance of sleep and used it ruthlessly as a tool. He was also a habitual napper who would wake up and then write down all of the ideas he was getting. He called it 'the genius gap': [the short phase] between lucid, waking consciousness and the depths of non-conscious, deep sleep. It's probably one of the reasons why no one's ever said you really should stay awake on a problem. Barack Obama says he can survive on five hours of sleep. Nikola Tesla was said to exist on three. Is there any optimal amount? It's seven to nine hours. Chronically sleeping less than seven hours is associated with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, immune and inflammation issues, cancer, hormonal issues and, of course, Alzheimer's disease and dementia. There is a very small subset of the population that we now call 'natural short sleepers', but statistically you're more likely to be struck by lightning. You note that adolescents naturally fall asleep later, meaning school starts far too early? Teenagers have been lumbered with this incessant chronic sleep debt, and if you look at models throughout the world where school start times are delayed, attendance rates increase and truancy rates decrease, while academic grades increase and psychiatric referrals decrease. I don't mean to trivialise things – getting children to school is not easy, and parents have to get to work – but if you look at the data, when sleep is abundant, minds flourish, and when it is not, they don't. What purpose do dreams serve? Dreaming is almost like a form of informational alchemy. During dreaming, we start to collide all the recent things that we've learnt with the back catalogue of information that we've already got, and as a consequence we wake up with a revised mind: a wide web of associations that is capable of divining solutions to previously impenetrable problems. It's also a form of overnight therapy. With the special chemical cocktail that happens during dream sleep, it's almost like a nocturnal soothing balm, taking the sharp edges off those painful, difficult experiences. Dreaming strips the bitter emotional rind from the informational orange. What's the most common cause of insomnia? Sometimes I consider insomnia as the revenge of things we haven't worked through during the day: the stuff causing anxiety and stress. You have to get your mind off itself. How? First, meditation. Next, with what's called a body scan, relaxing as you focus on each part of your body from head to toe. If you don't like the sound of that, try box breathing: inhale for five seconds, hold it for five seconds, and then exhale for eight seconds. Another thing that you can do is take yourself on a mental walk down the street in 4K hyper-vivid detail. Do not count sheep. Loading What are your top tips for good sleep? Try to stay away from too much caffeine in the afternoon and limit your alcohol use, because it will fragment your sleep. Your bedroom temperature should be cool: about 17 to 18 degrees. As for unconventional tips, set an alarm for one hour before you expect to go to bed, then shut down all the lights in your house. You will be stunned by how sleepy and soporific that will make you feel. In that same hour before bed, try to limit the use of devices – not because of the blue light but because they hit the mute button on your sleepiness and cause what's called 'sleep procrastination'. Also, go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time. I know it sounds desperately pedestrian, remarkably vanilla and deeply boring, but if you want to sleep, regularity is your first best step. Do we undervalue sleep? We are still in the mentality of competitive under-sleeping, and whoever the PR agent for sleep has been, we probably should have fired them long ago because there's a terrible stigma about getting sufficient sleep, which is strange. No one looks at an infant sleeping during the day and says, 'What a lazy baby', but we do that to adults. Don't think of sleep as a cost to today; sleep is an investment in tomorrow.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
There's a Critical Thing We Can All Do to Keep Alzheimer's Symptoms at Bay
Deep sleep could be key to forestalling slow declines in brain health that may one day lead to Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia. In their 2023 study of 62 older, cognitively healthy adults, researchers from the University of California (UC) Berkeley, Stanford University, and UC Irvine in the US found individuals with brain changes associated with Alzheimer's performed better on memory function tests as they got more deep sleep. This was irrespective of education and physical activity, two factors along with social connection known to contribute to cognitive resilience in older age. Those with similar Alzheimer's-linked changes who failed to get as much deep sleep didn't fare quite as well on the same tests. By comparison, sleep made little difference to those individuals with few deposits. Taken together, the results, which were published in May 2023, imply having a generous amount of solid shut-eye could help support the decline in memory that sets in as dementia begins to take hold. "Think of deep sleep almost like a life raft that keeps memory afloat, rather than memory getting dragged down by the weight of Alzheimer's disease pathology," said University of California (UC) Berkeley neuroscientist Matthew Walker. "This is especially exciting because we can do something about it. There are ways we can improve sleep, even in older adults." The study echoes previous research which has found a build-up of amyloid-beta proteins in the brains of people with disrupted sleep. But poor sleep is both a risk factor for and a symptom of Alzheimer's disease, making it tricky to tease apart cause and effect. Likewise, clumpy amyloid-beta proteins might only be a sign of Alzheimer's disease, not its root cause. Even so, levels of amyloid-beta proteins are commonly used as a marker of Alzheimer's disease, as research suggests they – and another protein called tau – can start clogging up brain cells decades before symptoms of the disease arise. Past research from Walker's group found significant levels of amyloid-beta aggregating in the brains of older adults can disrupt deep sleep – also known as non-rapid eye movement slow wave sleep – and impair memory function. But some folk appear to stave off the decline that comes with Alzheimer's disease, even when levels of amyloid-beta proteins are relatively high. To find out why, Walker and colleagues monitored participants' brain waves as they slept, and then asked them to complete a memory test the next day. Among those whose brain scans revealed similarly high levels of beta-amyloid deposits, getting a good night's sleep seemed to make a critical difference in cognitive function. This effect was only seen when the researchers looked specifically at non-rapid eye movement slow wave sleep, and not at other sleep wave frequencies or sleep stages. Longer-term studies in older adults are needed to test whether increasing deep sleep over a number of years can actually help preserve a person's cognitive function in that time, even as levels of amyloid-beta increase. This research adds to scores of studies suggesting that sleep could be a modifiable risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, one that could potentially forestall molecular changes by giving the brain time to clean up waste products that accumulate during the day. It also points to sleep quality being important. "With a certain level of brain pathology, you're not destined for cognitive symptoms or memory issues," UC Berkeley neuroscientist and lead author Zsófia Zavecz said of the study findings in 2023. Although people may display molecular changes indicating a progression toward Alzheimer's disease, Zavecz says their findings suggest lifestyle factors can help buffer against those effects. "One of those factors is sleep and, specifically, deep sleep," she said. The study, though small, also hints at why getting good sleep naturally might be a better option than taking sleeping pills to get some shut-eye. Other research shows users of sleeping pills appear to have lower levels of amyloid proteins in their cerebrospinal fluid, which washes the brain clean at night. But these medications come with side effects; they may also lull people into shallow bouts of sleep rather than deep sleep phases. Instead, to set yourself up for a good night's sleep, Zavecz suggests cutting out coffee late in the day, doing some exercise, avoiding screen time, and taking a hot shower before bed. While you snooze, rest assured scientists are working hard to figure out the knotty problems of Alzheimer's disease, which affects millions of people worldwide. The study has been published in BMC Medicine. A version of this article was first published in May 2023. Traces of a Nutrient in Brazil Nuts Could Fight Cancer, But Dosage Is Crucial Tardigrade Protein Could Soon Make Cancer Patients More Radiation Proof X-Rays of Viking-Age Skulls Reveal a Shocking Level of Disease
BBC News
19-02-2025
- BBC News
Oldham: Police rule out 'foul play' over baby's death in Chadderton
Police investigating the death of a baby have said a post-mortem examination had found "nothing to suggest foul play".The baby girl was found dead at a house in Chadderton, Oldham, on 9 had been called to Nelson Way shortly before 13:00 GMT over a concern for the welfare of a child, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) force said an investigation into how the baby died was still ongoing. A 41-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman who were earlier arrested on suspicion of child neglect have since been bailed pending inquiries, it said the baby girl was pronounced dead at the scene "despite the best efforts of paramedics".Det Supt Matthew Walker said: "Getting answers for this baby and her loved ones is paramount and that is at the heart of everything we do."He urged anyone with information about the baby's death to come forward. Listen to the best of BBC Radio Manchester on Sounds and follow BBC Manchester on Facebook, X, and Instagram and watch BBC North West Tonight on BBC iPlayer.
Yahoo
16-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
AI beds and sleep labs: Some luxury hotels are charging more than $1,000 a night for good sleep
Some luxury hotels are offering amenities that promise a restful slumber. Equinox Hotel plans to launch in-house doctor-led studies in a coming sleep lab. Park Hyatt New York's Sleep Suites have AI-equipped beds for about $1,200 per night. Forget "I'll sleep when I'm dead." These days, it's all about sleeping on vacation — with the help of AI beds, hotel science labs, and even crystals. Travelers are increasingly seeking a good night's rest, so much so that one in four book slumber-enhancing treatments, while 70% of luxury guests reserve hotels with sleep amenities, Hilton said in a 2025 trends report. The idea may seem counterintuitive — why travel to a new destination just to snooze in? The answer: We're all a bit shut-eye-deprived. In 2024, McKinsey called sleep the "second-highest health and wellness priority," giving rise to biohacks like the "sleepy girl mocktail" and smart rings that track nightly hibernation patterns. For some, the quest for superior slumber commands no vacation days, even on vacation. So, to capitalize on the trend, luxury hotels are increasingly selling the promise of better rest. On New York City's Billionaires' Row, Park Hyatt New York is taking a "Jetsons"-like approach by using sleep-tech company Bryte's AI-enhanced king mattresses. By scanning the bedside QR code, guests in the hotel's Sleep Suites can adjust the bed's firmness, fall asleep to meditative pulses synced to soothing sounds, or use the pulses to awaken gently. The cushions also shift support throughout the night according to how the user sleeps, mitigating pain, according to Bryte. You could buy one for $4,400 — or pay about $1,200 for a night in the Sleep Suite. It's a $300 surcharge compared to Park Hyatt New York's standard rooms. The high-tech accommodations saw an 89% occupancy rate in 2024, a 10% increase from the year prior, a spokesperson for the hotel told Business Insider. The mattresses are also available in the property's newest apartment-like three-bedroom suite, which costs $50,000 a night. For those who prefer a clinical approach, the nearby Equinox Hotel is working with sleep scientist Matthew Walker to establish on-site "sleep lab" studies where guests can participate. The luxury hotel's slumber-focused amenities already include supplement mini-bars with sleep aids, split duvets, p.m. soaps, and a "dark, quiet, cool" setting that blacks out the room and drops the temperature to 66 degrees. Expect these to be further optimized. Chris Norton, the CEO of Equinox Hotels, told BI that it's also working with tech companies to further fine-tune guests' REM cycles, be it through lights, temperatures, and sounds. "It was less about sleep tourism than making sure we made the quality of sleep a major ingredient in the quality of your hotel stay," Norton said. "The ultimate goal is to make sure when you hear our brand name, you say, 'best sleep ever.'" In Arizona, the growing focus on superior respite has led luxury wellness resort Castle Hot Springs to launch a "soak and slumber" package. The $2,470-per-night program — for two people and a minimum of four nights — provides the hibernation-hungry with perks like a session with a wellness curator, spa credit, and sleep provisions such as CBD body butter and nighttime tea. Kevin Maguire, the property's general manager, told BI that the add-on has booked "fairly well," often by people who've recently undergone a major life change such as a graduation, medical recovery, or divorce. "I don't want to say they're looking for the cure, but they want to have the information," Maguire said. Individuals who want more insight can also attend sleep retreats, a trend Hilton is now capitalizing on. In 2024, Waldorf Astoria Grand Wailea inaugurated Hilton's first sleep retreat — think lectures, spa treatments, and Oura ring analyses — led by sleep scientist Rebecca Robbins. That same year, the luxury Hawaii resort also launched $1,210-per-night wellness rooms with amenities like Therabody meditation goggles, white noise machines, and deliberately placed crystals to "protect the space and release negative energy," the hotel says. A spokesperson for Hilton said its next three-night, $600-per-person roost retreat will meet at Conrad Orlando in March — the same month Hilton plans to integrate meditation and sleep app Calm's programs into its guest room TVs. "The primary reason the majority of people are traveling is to rest and recharge," Amanda Al-Masri, Hilton's vice president of wellness, told BI in late 2024. "Ultimately, we see ourselves as a sleep company." Read the original article on Business Insider
