Wenatex Blog :: Healthy Sleep for a Better Life

With Australia now listed as the world’s fattest nation, it is time to do an audit on ourselves and work out how we can reduce our waistlines and improve the quality of our lives.

One interesting piece of research states that sleeping for 7 – 8 hours each night can in fact help you achieve your weight loss goals quicker, with other pleasant benefits too!

A full article on the subject please read the following article Dream Diet

Forget hitting the gym this afternoon – it will be heads on pillows from now on! Now that would be a dream diet – if only that was all that was involved!

Information provided in this blog is to be used for educational purposes only. It should NOT be used as a substitute for seeking professional diagnosis or treatment of any disorder.

If you are anything like me you would have been shocked to hear the latest news that Australians are now THE fattest country amongst the world’s major economies, bulging past the Americans by 1%. More than one quarter of our population are now deemed to be obese, this is 4 million Australians! Add to this a further 5.4 million who are overweight. Therefore 62% of our population are now overweight or obese! This is one scary statistic!

There are so many contributing factors to our bulging bellies. We can blame it on cheaper prices of fast foods, the rising costs of healthy foods and gym memberships, our fast paced society leaving us with no time for exercise, or poor quality sleep. Whatever excuse you may use, the bottom line is that we are to blame and it is time that we get serious about our health and the huge impact this is having on our society as a whole.

What steps will you be taking to either reduce your waistline or ensure you don’t add to our ever growing overweight/obese population?

Information provided in this blog is to be used for educational purposes only. It should NOT be used as a substitute for seeking professional diagnosis or treatment of any disorder.

Kitty B Yancey from USA Today reported that the “pillow menu” is the “latest thing” offered by some hotels in the United States. These hotels are promoting healthy sleep with a view to reducing snoring in their guests.

The general manager of Kimpton[1] Hotels’ 70 Park Avenue Hotel in New York had the idea to create a pillow menu after he found an anti-snore pillow in a store.

Now others are expanding on the idea, for example, the Crowne Plaza Hotels & Resorts[2] in North America offer a “Sleep Advantage” program, developed by sleep experts. Guests get a free kit with earplugs and eye mask, calming lavender mist, a CD that lulls them to dreamland — even a clip to hold drapes closed, shutting out light. They also offer “quiet zone” floors.

… and the trend is starting to catch on in Australia with some of the larger hotel chains jumping on the bandwagon and offering healthy sleep options.

I would be interested to hear about your experiences with any hotel chains in Australia offering this service. Did it add to your experience? Did you get a better night’s sleep?

You don’t have to go to an expensive hotel chain to experience a good night’s sleep, you can achieve a healthy sleep environment at home. To learn more, I strongly recommend you to attend to one of Wenatex’s free healthy sleep seminars.

Please click to fill out this form to register.

Until tomorrow, be wise and have fun!

More than half of the elderly population complain about experiencing sleep problems. Most do not seek a solution but those who do tend to use sleeping tablets, which have many side effects.

A study that is soon to be published in the scientific publication Sleep[1] reports the results of an amazing study performed at the UCLA[2] on 112 healthy adults ranging in age from 59 to 86, where the effects of Tai Chi exercises against health education classes that included advice on stress management, diet and sleep habits, were tested. The group that practiced Tai Chi showed not only a better quality of sleep and remission of clinical problems related with sleep disturbances, but also reduced drowsiness and increased capacity to concentrate. This short-term study is extremely important, not only because of its positive results, but also for the overall positive health improvements that can be achieved by a long term practice of Tai Chi.

I would be very interested to know if anyone has experienced a reduction in health problems by practicing Tai Chi or Qi Gong. Send me your comments.

Be wise and have fun

Juan

1 http://www.journalsleep.org/
2 http://www.ucla.edu/

How is it you can learn the tango in the evening and be able to remember it the next morning? When did your brain create this memory? Was it during the lesson? Shortly after it? During the night?

The when and how of memory creation in human brains has been the subject of scientific debate for centuries. Today, the question of how the brain stores or discards memories still remains largely unexplained. However, Nobel Prize winner Bert Sakmann from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg  and his colleagues demonstrated that those fresh impressions, the tango steps for example, are first stored as short-term memories in an area of the brain called the hippocampus. They are then said to move within hours or a few days - usually during deep sleep - into the cerebral cortex where they enter long-term memory.

This explains why people who have experienced sleep disturbances during the night who perform tasks requiring memory, do not perform as well as those who enjoyed a healthy and continuous sleep.

Can anyone share some personal experience in relation to memory creation?

Be wise and have fun

References:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1991/
http://wbp.mpimf-heidelberg.mpg.de/
http://www.physorg.com/news84535821.html

IMPORTANT NOTE:

This article is for information only. For health advice specific to you, please consult your Health Professional.