To be beautiful, sleep.

Swedish researchers have established scientifically what you already know: there is a close relationship between your sleep and your physical appearance.

In a study published in the British Medical Journal on 15 December 2010, John Axelsson and his team from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm arrived at the conclusion that people who lack sleep seem more unhealthy, and are less attractive physically than those who sleep well and enough.(1)

"Sleep is the natural beauty care for the body," said j. Axelsson. It is probably more effective than no treatment you can buy. (2)
 The study was conducted by showing people selected random photos of people after a night of eight hours of sleep, and after 31 hours of standby, and then asking them to note their State of health, their physical beauty, and their level of fatigue on a scale of 1 to 100.

Other recent research came to the conclusion that lack of sleep may increase the risk of Alzheimer's disease (3) depression (4) and (5) overweight. But, in fact, it appears that the risk of getting the disease, or almost, increases when it sleeps too little, as the immune system is strongly weakened.
 
Lack of sleep causes the same effects as the aging

Lack of sleep has the same effects as the aging on the physics and the brain.

If you look in the ice a day after day, or after a restless night, your face resembles what it will be... in ten years while you have slept well.

In the same way, it is much more difficult to remember the place where has been its key when they slept less than five hours. It is more likely to bumping, tripping on objects, missing a market of butter on the words, or even to repeat something that one has just said.

As your grandmother, you sometimes tend to not know if you've already told this (excellent) story to this person.

This obviously calls for better sleep. Yes, but how? If you are part of the 40% of the population that has difficulty falling asleep and/or staying asleep, you know that the solution is not obvious. However, should you have each night between six and eight hours of good sleep.(6)

Not sleeping pills!

If you have insomnia, it may be tempting to seek an immediate solution by taking drugs. But in the long term, the sleeping pills were likely to worsen your sleep problems.

In addition, what are you looking for sleeping better? You feel better, the next day, less tired, more alert intellectually. A have better morale.

However, it is none of these effects will be achieved by chemical pills: all cause the exactly opposite effect, i.e. a risk more intattention, sleeper, brief, general sense of fatigue. These products you overwhelm, but you are not. He even was established that sleep caused by sleeping pills is generally very agitated, crossed from nightmares, and interspersed frequent Awakenings.

11 Tips for better sleep

In cutting the advice given by the various guides to better sleep, I spotted 11 advice found in the speech of most specialists:

1 - Sleep in black total, or as full as possible. When light strikes your eyelids, she interrupted the production of serotonin and melatonin (sleep hormone), disrupting the circadian rhythm of the pineal gland (which manages your biological clock). If you get up at night to go to the bathroom, try to not turn on the light. If this is too risky, put a pilot light in your bathroom.

2 - No television just before you go to bed. Better still, not television in your room. Better still, not television in your home! The television too excites the brain. It also disrupts the pineal gland, for the same reasons as above. Above all, television and the Internet make you very easily go to bed an hour or two later that you would have.

3 - Wear socks to bed. Being the less well irrigated parts of the body, the feet are often the first part to cool. However, as soon as you have too cold, your body starts to move to warm up. There is a risk of waking, and decreases the quality of your sleep. A study has shown that having warm feet increases the quality of sleep.

4 - Sleep in a cool, not warmer than 18 ° C atmosphere. Many houses are too heated, especially on the floor in the bedroom. However, below of 15 ° C, you will no doubt hampered by cold, within porter a night cap.

5 - Walk your alarm clock and other electrical appliances in your bed. Their noise and the led flashing can you interfere. And look at the figures on your alarm clock (2 pm, 3 pm, 4 pm...) can only add to your anxiety.

6 - Reserve your bed for sleeping. If you are accustomed to watching television or working in bed, this can increase your difficulties to relax and you fall asleep. So avoid these activities in your bed.

7 - Consider House to share. Recent studies (7) (and the experience of many generations!) indicate that, for many people, sharing his bed with someone can heavily disrupt sleep, especially if the other person has a restless sleep, rises at night, or ronfle. Dr Neil Stanley, specialist in sleep at the University of Surrey (England), strongly advises House to share. He recalled that used to sleep together in the same room is settled since the industrial revolution, when populations are installed in the cities where the space was expensive. At the Roman time, the conjugal bed was not used for sleeping, but to … you guessed the end.

8 - Make regular physical exercise. A study of the Stanford Medical School found that, after a 16 week of moderate physical exercise program, the subjects studied improved sleep maintenance is based on average 15 minutes earlier and slept 45 minutes more. However, do not exercise just before going to sleep because it would keep you awake.

9 - Don't eat sugar just before going to bed. Not only it can cause nervousness, but this can also cause hypoglycemia within a few hours, that you wake up. On the other hand, you can take food although protein a few hours sleep. This will help you to produce melatonin (sleep hormone).

10 - Lie you always at the same time.

11. Finally, to go beyond the simple common sense advice and propose a new solution which seems to be really effective if all points above do not help you sleep better, consider a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). A study conducted by the University of Bergen, Norway, concluded that the TCC are more effective than pills. In six weeks of treatment, the sleepless people who followed this therapy increased 81.4% to 90.1% effective sleep time. They had more deep sleep phases, and are waking less often than the two other control groups (which one received a sleeping pill zopiclone, and the other a placebo).(8)

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Sources:

(1) Axelsson J.A., Sundelin, t., Ingré M., et al. "Beauty sleep: experimental study on perceived health and attractiveness of sleep deprived people", British Medical Journal, December 15, 2010.

(2) Interviewed by ABC News, Bradley Blackburn, December 15, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/beauty-sleep-deprivation-science-beauty-rest/story?id=12402190 & page = 1 (accessed December 20, 2010)

(3) According to Dr. David M. Holtzman, president of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, and Dr. Nikolaos Scarmeas, Associate Professor of Neurology, Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain, Columbia University Medical Center, New York City, Science Magazine, September 24, 2009.

(4) Walker M., "The human emotional brain without sleep - a prefrontal amygdala disconnect", Current Biology, 17 (20) pp. R877 - R878, October 22, 2007.

(5) Studies of Stanford University and the University of Chicago, cited by Ali Mohamadi, ABC News, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=305906 & page = 1 (accessed December 20, 2010).

(6) Charumathi Sabanayagam, MD, PhD; Anoop Shankar, MD, PhD, "Sleep Duration and Cardiovascular Disease: Results from the National Health Interview Survey", Sleep, Volume 33, issue 08. http://www.journalsleep.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=27857

(7) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8245578.stm

(8) Journal of the American Medical Association June 28, 2006, Vol. 295, no.. 24: 2851-2858