health - Academy Sleep Wellness

Why Lack of Sleep Is Costing Us Billions of Dollars

Academy Sleep Wellness — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 17:38:59 +0000

Everyone wishes they could get more done in a day, but there are extenuating circumstances, personal weaknesses, and sometimes, random factors that get in the way of us achieving our highest levels of productivity. You might experience a bit of extra stress, give in to a few extra distractions and deal with a finnicky internet connection on any given day, but there’s one factor that rises above the others in terms of its collective role in sabotaging our productivity — and it’s costing us a cumulative $411 billion in productivity losses.

SLEEP DEPRIVATION IS HURTING OUR ECONOMY

RAND Europe, a non-profit organization, realized what most of us know intrinsically—bad sleep habits have a negative impact on work performance — but researchers wanted to quantify the effects. They found that a person who, on average, sleeps less than 6 hours a night has a 13 percent higher risk of mortality than a counterpart sleeping 7 to 9 hours a night.

On top of that, they found that the United States was the global leader in economic losses from bad sleep habits, losing approximately 2.92 percent of its total GDP due to sleep deprivation. That’s a whopping $411 billion of lost productivity, or approximately 1.2 million working days per year.

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Sleep Trackers: More of a data nightmare than a data dream?

Academy Sleep Wellness — Tue, 16 May 2017 17:13:24 +0000

I like my Android phone just fine… but I don’t want to marry it and have its babies.

Nor do I want to sleep with it perched on my mattress. Many people do, though: Sleep as Android, the most downloaded sleep tracking app in the Google Play store, had been downloaded nearly 250,000 times as of May 16.

The app functions the same way as many other popular sleep trackers, be they smartphone apps or wearable personal devices (there are more than 500 options from more than 15 brands now available). The apps track a sleeper’s movements with an accelerometer, listen in on whether they’re snoring, and chirps at them to make them roll over if they are. It also tracks how much sleepers toss and turn, and how much time they’re lightly or deeply sleeping. Unlike other sleep trackers, this one promises to track even REM, which is the phase that’s the most difficult to detect.

But here’s what a researcher at Brown University wanted to know: is the data being collected by these devices and apps worth anything?

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Stressed-Out High Schoolers Advised To Try A Nap Pod

Academy Sleep Wellness — Mon, 15 May 2017 13:36:59 +0000

When 18-year-old Hannah Vanderkooy feels extremely tired or anxious, she heads to a spacelike capsule for a nap — during school. Like many teens struggling to get good grades and maybe even a college scholarship, Vanderkooy doesn’t get enough sleep.

And she’s not alone. Various studies indicate that chronically sleepy and stressed-out teenagers might be the new normal among U.S. adolescents who are competing for grades, colleges and, eventually, jobs.

Studies have shown teenagers actually need between nine and 10 hours of sleep a night. But the vast majority (69 percent) aren’t getting it.

Enter “napping pods.” They’re essentially egg-shaped lounge chairs that recline, with a circular lid that can be pulled over the chest to shield against light.

“It just sort of envelops you in a really nice darkness, with soft lighting behind you,” says Vanderkooy, a frequent user of the pods. She says she typically gets only four to five hours of sleep a night.

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Sleep Disturbances an Important Health Concern that Should Be Addressed in Primary Care

Academy Sleep Wellness — Mon, 15 May 2017 12:00:10 +0000

If left untreated, sleep disturbances are known to have various long-term health consequences. Severe insomnia, one of the more common sleep disturbances, increases the risk for heart disease, hypertension, myocardial infarction, congestive heart failure and diabetes. For this reason, it is essential that primary care physicians monitor and treats sleep disturbances in their patients.

However, although sleep disturbances are often linked to various other diseases, they are not merely components of a larger condition, according to Larry Culpepper, MD, MPH professor in the department of family medicine at Boston University and a member of the Education Committee for the National Sleep Foundation.

“In the clinical setting, a misconception that’s still fairly frequent is that insomnia is just an almost to-be-expected part of medical and psychiatric conditions,” Culpepper told Healio Family Medicine. “That’s actually not the case. That was the major point that’s imbedded in the change from older diagnostic criteria and the new DSM-5 criteria for insomnia. In the past, we used to diagnose insomnia as either primary or secondary. Now, we’re recognizing that this is not helpful to patients. Insomnia is simply insomnia, and it stands on its own.”

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