Posts Tagged ‘Sleep’
Sleep and Resilience Can Form a Virtuous Cycle for Teens
Resilience, or being able to bounce back from adverse events, is a useful skill to have – if we didn’t already know that, 2020 has certainly driven the point home! Psychologists know that resilient people tend to share certain traits, such as finding meaning in events and trusting their ability to navigate challenging situations. And…
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Optimists Sleep Better at Night
Do you ever wake up in the night and worry about what the future might hold? Well, if you’re an optimist, maybe not. A new study published in the Journal of Sleep Research indicates that viewing the world through rose-colored glasses may go hand-in-hand with a lower risk for chronic insomnia. If that’s the case,…
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Night-Owl Teens Might Be Angrier
Psychologists that research people’s “chronotypes,” or their propensities to go to bed at different times, have found that early and late risers tend to differ in a variety of ways. In many cases, the findings haven’t exactly been good news for night owls. Studies have suggested that night owls are more likely to have emotional…
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Lockdown Might Be Changing People’s Sleep Patterns
If you feel like social distancing is keeping you awake at night, you could be right. A new survey of 1,310 adults in Italy during the country’s total lockdown points to a range of effects that lockdown might have for sleep habits. At the end of March, participants in the study took an online survey…
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Five Hours of Sleep a Night Biases People Toward Negative Interpretations
We all know that nothing good comes from cutting sleep out of your life. First, there are the cognitive effects. Sleep deprivation influences people’s performance in ways similar to alcohol consumption, which is what makes drowsy driving similarly dangerous to drunk driving. Then there’s the simple feeling of tiredness, having to get through the day…
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Is Exercise and a Nap the Magic Combination for Memory?
Working out and lying around snoozing might seem like activities that are opposites, but sleep and exercise have at least one thing in common: they can potentially boost memory. The cognitive benefits of naps have led some people to suggest that high schools should have nap time, while exercise carries a variety of benefits for…
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Switching Off Your Phone Half an Hour Before Bed Might Improve Sleep, Memory
I’m not going to bother telling you not to use your phone before bed. Partly because you’ve probably heard that advice before, and partly because it would be hypocritical of me to do so! But I am going to highlight the results of a study that shows what might happen to people who do and…
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Is Getting Up Too Early Worse Than Going to Bed Too Late?
To some extent, we have all conducted our own one-person real-life experiments with sleep deprivation. One thing I’ve noticed in my own such experiments is that if I’m going to have my sleep cut short, I’d rather do it by going to bed late than by waking up early. One especially late night by itself…
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Depression Might Be Part of the Reason Psychopaths Go to Bed Later
When the sun sets, all kinds of creatures come out of the woodwork. Owls, bats and … psychopaths? Some previous research suggests that the darker side of human nature really does have an affinity for the darker hours. For example, a 2013 study found that people who prefer to go to sleep and get up…
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Bedtime Cues Matter for Teens
How do you know when it’s time to go to bed? Recently, researchers in Australia and Finland looked at how teenagers answer that question, and whether the way they answer it has implications for sleep quality. In a survey of 1,374 adolescents, the researchers considered several different ways these teens might decide when it’s time…
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