by Amrit Bandyopadhyay, Awarables

The night has always been the time associated with the terrors of the dark. We celebrated that in costume last week for Halloween. However, uneasiness, stress, and even fear of going to bed is a reality and life for many people. These include the 30M+ Americans who suffer from insomnia, their broken sleep often waking them up at 3am and taking their minds to the darkest places; places of anxiety, stress, fearful thoughts about loved ones, health, work, life, on and on.

Some of the ways fears and sleep intersect can be:

1. Fearful stressful negative thoughts while lying in bed trying to fall asleep or fall back to sleep. …

by Amrit Bandyopadhyay, Awarables

Why are we talking about New Year’s resolutions in February? Because most of you picked something other than sleep, and how’s that going? Huh?

Mean questions aside, most people’s resolutions have something to do with improving. Sleep is literally when you improve, both your body, and your mind. Body, during deep (slow-wave) sleep. Mind, during both deep and REM sleep.

Was your New Year’s resolution the most popular choice of a diet, or losing weight?

Sleep deprivation is known to make you feel hungrier, increases appetite, reduces metabolism, and invites increased portion sizes (due to increase/decrease in ghrelin/leptin hormones), makes you crave and choose foods high in calories, carbs, and fat (increased stress hormone cortisol upregulates food reward centers, coupled with poor decision making due to a dulled out frontal lobe), and makes you store calories as fat in all the wrong places (lack of processing, and responsiveness to, insulin). …

by Amrit Bandyopadhyay, Awarables

Sleep is married to love and sex. That’s why we call it sleeping with someone. True story!

On this holy day of relationships, let’s take a close look at the relationship between love, sex and sleep.

The bed is only for sleep and sex. This is one of the points of emphasis in Stimulus Control within Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBTi). Doing anything else in bed is confusing to the brain and alters its perception of, and relationship with, the bed. So, no TV, no cell phones, no working in bed. If you’re in bed, there are only two things you should be doing: sleeping or sexing. …

by Amrit Bandyopadhyay, Awarables

Today is a good day to think about your New Year’s resolutions. Your hangover is probably gone. The shock of being back at work is hopefully easing out. Instead of having a laundry list of resolutions, maybe it is better to resolve to give priority, every chance you get, to one or two new things. If you are looking for a candidate, Sleep is hard to beat. Even the Department of Defense has Sleep in its performance triad for the armed forces, along with activity and nutrition. “I’ll sleep when I die” is very 1990s.

Here are 7 reasons why sleeping well may be a better new year priority than the much more popular going to the gym…

“No, those little ghouls on the road are not scary. They won’t hurt me!”

When you’re wide awake at 6pm on Halloween, it’s easy to rationally address your thoughts. Awake in bed, the monsters are bigger, scarier, and converging in larger numbers. If the image of a child dressed up as a monster popped into your head while you are struggling to fall back to sleep, the odds of you freaking-the-chuck out would considerably increase. This is probably because even though you feel awake, your brain is not completely on, you’re lying in the fetal, and all your defenses are down. …

by Amrit Bandyopadhyay, Awarables

Prince is gone. Pharma-geddon is coming.

The good is we know where we are headed. The bad, we have all been complicit in this systemic problem. For our busy doctors, it’s an easy way to get us out the door, fast. For patients, it’s easier to pop a pill than put in any effort that the doctor may recommend. Pharmaceutical companies are encouraged by the success of the pill-a-day remedy, and seem to pour more dollars into insta-remedies rather than cures. …

by Amrit Bandyopadhyay, Awarables

When I was looking for an image to add to this post it was interesting that most of the images returned for “insomnia” had a clock, and the clock struck somewhere between 3 and 4 am. That is exactly what most of our interviewees complained of as their biggest pain with respect to their sleep quality. I call this group “mid-night’s children!” Many of them manage to get to sleep, but wake up after 3–4 hours at around 3:00 or 4:00 and never really get back to sleep. “I’m the best and am going to rule the world!” is usually NOT the thought that races through your mind at this time. You are not you when you stumble awake at 3 am. Instead, the person awake is in some sort of confused state. …

by Amrit Bandyopadhyay, Awarables

Am I an Insomniac? Am I the only one staring at the ceiling every night? Even people on the west coast have gone to sleep by now. I won’t be able to get any work done tomorrow …

These are some of the thoughts that may race through someone’s mind when they are lying in bed awake for hours. None of us really talk about sleep properly. Our comments usually sound like “I haven’t slept at all!” “I sleep like a baby” “I don’t really need any sleep” or “I want to sleep forever!” …