5 things we’ve discovered about sleep in the last 10 years
Sleep and all the mechanisms that regulate it are still partly a mystery to scientists, but today we can count on some certainties that can help us rest better and thus improve the quality of our lives.
Over the past 10 years, great strides have been made and many are the discoveries regarding rest which lead us towards more conscious and correct choices. What are these discoveries?
1. We sleep, our brains don’t
A research published in 2014 in the scientific magazine Current Biology confirmed it: when we sleep our brain works full-time in order to consolidate our memories and delete information considered “less important”.
2. “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise!”
Benjamin Franklin’s famous quotation found scientific proof after the publication in the scientific magazine Emotion in 2012: the results obtained have in fact proved that people who go to bed early in the evening and wake up early in the morning are more predisposed to positive attitudes and better health in general.
3. You can “reset” your body clock
In 2015, researchers at Vanderbilt University discovered that we can actually “reset” our body clock in order to properly adjust the sleep-wake cycle – a major discovery for the treatment of sleeping disorders such as insomnia.
4. Smartphones ruin our rest
This nearly sounds like an elementary truth but in 2013 it was a research carried out at the Mayo Clinic that demonstrated the damaging effects that latest generation devices have on our rest: the light emitted by smartphones is capable of altering the production of melatonin, the hormone that regulates our circadian rhythm.
5. Lack of sleep affects our judgment skills
A 2007 study has shown that lack of sleep can cause us to underestimate risks and overestimate the benefits of our decisions, thus giving us a distorted view of reality!
