Get To Sleep In 60 Seconds

                                                                        

                                                                       

A deep-breathing trick can make insomniacs drop off to sleep in less than one minute, according to a health expert.

The method involves holding the breath in stages then exhaling with a loud whooshing noise. This “4-7-8” method has been pioneered by US sleep expert Dr Andrew Weil, who claims the technique works by calming the mind and relaxing the body.

Breath control

More than 1.5 million Australians suffer from poor sleep, with stress, mobile devices and taking work home often blamed for the lack of quality rest. Consistently poor sleep puts you at risk of medical conditions such as obesity, heart disease and diabetes, and it can also shorten your life expectancy.

But Weil, the founder of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, says a simple alteration to your normal breathing could be the answer. 

“This comes from yoga breathing techniques where you keep the tip of the tongue behind the upper front teeth,” he says. “You breathe in through your nose quietly and blow air out forcefully through your mouth, making a whoosh sound. 

It takes about 30 seconds, so there’s no excuse for not doing it, and it produces a pleasant altered state of consciousness. You may not get that the first time you do it but it’s one of the benefits of practising.”

The trick is to breathe in quietly through the nose for four seconds, then hold for seven seconds and exhale completely for a count of eight. The steps are then repeated between two and four times.

Weil says it’s effective because it allows the lungs to become fully charged with air, allowing more oxygen into the body, which promotes a state of calm. 

“You have to do this two times a day religiously. It will become a wonderful way to help you fall asleep,” he says. “You can do it more often throughout the day if you wish.
“It’s utterly simple, takes almost no time, requires no equipment and can be done anywhere. After about four to six weeks, you’ll see wonderful changes in your body.”

The benefits

Weil says this technique can be used to deal with cravings and control anger. He also claims it can combat the “fight or flight” response in the body, lowering stress levels.

The method is based on an ancient Indian practice called pranayama, which roughly translates to “regulation of breath”, and is used widely in yoga and Pilates.

Research has shown that breathing exercises such as pranayama can have instant effects by changing blood pressure. But more importantly, they can be used as a method to train the body’s reaction to stressful situations and dampen the production of harmful stress hormones. Rapid breathing makes the body think it’s stressed, but deep breaths stimulate the opposing parasympathetic reaction, which calms you down.

In 1975, Harvard University researcher Herbert Benson discovered that short periods of deep-breathing meditation triggered a “relaxation response”.

 Following decades of research, he claimed in 2010 that it could lead to genetic changes that counter the effects of stress. “It does away with the whole mind-body separation,” Benson says in his book, The Relaxation Response. “You can use the mind to change the body, and the genes we’re changing [are] the very genes acting in an opposite fashion when people are under stress.”

Whether or not such techniques help you fall asleep in 60 seconds, there’s no doubt being mindful of your breath helps you relax.

Sleep needs throughout life

Newborns

• 0-3 months
• Recommended: 14-17 hours
• Not recommended: Less than 11; more than 19

Infants

• 4-11 months
• Recommended: 12-15 hours
• Not recommended: Less than 10; more than 18

Toddlers

• 1-2 years
• Recommended: 11-14 hours
• Not recommended:Less than 9; more than 16

Preschoolers

• 3-5 years
• Recommended: 10-13 hours
• Not recommended: Less than 8; more than 14

School-age kids

• 6-13 years
• Recommended: 9-11 hours
• Not recommended: Less than 7; more than 12

Teenagers

• 14-17 years
• Recommended: 8-10 hours
• Not recommended: Less than 7; more than 11

Young adults

• 18-25 years
• Recommended: 7-9 hours
• Not recommended: Less than 6; more than 11

Adults

• 26-64 years
• Recommended: 7-9 hours
• Not recommended: Less than 6; more than 10

Older adults

• 65+ years
• Recommended: 7-8 hours
• Not recommended: Less than 5; more than 9

What happens to a sleep-deprived body?

A long-term lack of sleep has been linked to a greater risk of obesity, heart disease, stroke and diabetes. So what’s behind this association? The University of Chicago in the US has conducted various studies into human sleep deprivation and observed that even after a few days of reduced sleep, the following physical changes can occur:

• Higher blood pressure (a factor in stroke and heart disease)
• Higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol (which impacts heart health and body weight)
• Lower levels of antibodies (which fight viruses and infection)
• Increased insulin resistance (a precursor to type 2 diabetes)
• Higher levels of the hormone ghrelin (which triggers hunger)

With many thanks to Body and Soul

Picture credit: Razimo's Deviant Art

Many thanks to Jo for mentioning this to me.




 

Tommy Caldwell And Kevin Jorgeson On The Edge Of History By Climbing El Capitan - Now Achieved!

                                                                   

                                                                    

El Capitan is located in Yosemite National Park. It is an incredible monolith and the entire park is a fantastic experience. I saw mountain climbers attempt El Capitan when I was there. They looked like ants! That gives you a bit of an idea of its size and the effort involved in such a challenge.

FOR Sir Edmund Hillary, comradeship was “the greatest of all feats” and the force that drove him upwards. George Mallory provided another glimpse into the adventurer’s mindset: “Because it’s there,” he quipped when asked why he was tackling Everest.

Now, the world is captivated by two more men hellbent on achieving something never done before — and this time the healing of a broken heart is a big part of the motivation. Tommy Caldwell, 36, has lived on El Capitan, a 900m-tall granite monolith in California, for 19 days. He and Kevin Jorgeson, 30, are inching their way up the Dawn Wall, considered the toughest free-climb ever attempted. They will reach the summit this week, possibly even today, hoisting themselves into the annals of climbing history.

 

According to Caldwell’s wife, Becca, it was the breakup of his first marriage, to the elite rock climber Beth Rodden, that first drew him to the challenge.

“The Dawn Wall started out as an escape from a deep pain Tommy felt from the sadness of splitting up,” Mrs Caldwell said on her blog. When he first studied the route, “he deemed the wall impossible to free-climb,” she said. But then he met Becca. “He came back to it and with the excitement of a budding relationship between us decided that the Dawn Wall just might be possible. Our relationship began with this route, and the Dawn Wall has weaved its way through our lives together over the past six years.”

El Capitan, a 900m-tall granite monolith in California.

                                                               

 

Last week Caldwell, 36, completed the final sections of the route that he considered “extremely hard”. He had tears in his eyes as he made it to a spot known as Wino Tower — so-called because another climber, Warren Harding, weathered a storm there in 1970 and when park officials tried to rescue him he rebuffed them, offering them some wine instead. Caldwell could have pressed on alone, but he appears to share Sir Edmund’s respect for comradeship. Instead, he waited to support his partner, Jorgeson, who had struggled with a difficult section for a week.

Caldwell’s faith in his colleague was well placed: late on Monday, Jorgeson made it to Wino Tower, and the two are now at the same stage. The remaining 1,000 feet, while still challenging, is technically easier. “This journey isn’t over yet, but we can start to see what it might look like standing on top of this route. And it’s beautiful,” Mrs Caldwell said.

by Rhys Blakely

                                                                        
Above: Film clip of Yosemite National Park.
                                                              
With thanks to The Australian

Yosemite climbers reach peak of El Capitan granite rock face

                                                              

THE two climbers scaling a sheer slab of granite in California’s Yosemite National Park without climbing aids have reached the top of the 914-metre (3000 ft) peak after more than two weeks of effort. 

 Shortly before 10.30am AEDT, 30-year-old Kevin Jorgeson and 36-year-old Tommy Caldwell reached the summit of El Capitan on Wednesday, said spokeswoman Jess Clayton.

 

“I feel like the most proud person in the world right now,” said Caldwell’s 39-year-old sister, Sandy Van Nieuwenhuyzen shortly before the men reached the peak. She said she can’t wait to hug her younger brother. “I’m just going to hug. Just hug. No words necessary,” she said.

The two men began their climb on December 27 and have been free-climbing, a technique that shuns climbing aids other than harnesses and ropes to prevent falls.

The world has been watching the pair’s gruelling journey up the peak’s Dawn Wall route. But Clayton says they men won’t give media interviews at the top, instead waiting until Thursday to discuss their ascent.

Throughout the climb, both men have had their fingers sliced by the needle sharp handholds on the granite wall and have needed to take rest days to wait for their skin to heal. They used tape and even superglue to help with the process. Caldwell has set an alarm to wake him every four hours to apply a special lotion to his throbbing hands.
The men also took physical punishment when their grip would slip, pitching them into long, swinging falls that left them bouncing off the rock face. The tumbles, which they called “taking a whipper,” ended in startling jolts from their safety ropes.

Eric Jorgeson, Kevin Jorgeson’s father, told KGO-TV his son has always been a climber and watching him fulfil a long-time dream makes him proud.

“He climbed everything he could think of. It made us nervous early on as parents, but we got used to it,” the father said.

The two started climbing El Capitan (there are more than 100 routes to the top) when Kevin Jorgeson turned 15, and it has been a birthday tradition ever since.

From The Australian -  January 15th

Yosemite National Park In HD

                                                                     

                                                       

Why Do We Dream?

                                                               

                                                                                                                                          

We all have them. Some are good others not so much.But it seems it is hard to ascertain why we have them and what they mean.

by Charles W. Bryant
The human brain is a mysterious little ball of gray matter. After all these years, researchers are still baffled by many aspects of how and why it operates like it does. Scientists have been performing sleep and dream studies for decades now, and we still aren't 100 percent sure about the function of sleep, or exactly how and why we dream. We do know that our dream cycle is typically most abundant and best remembered during the REM stage of sleep.

 It's also pretty commonly accepted among the scientific community that we all dream, though the frequency in which dreams are remembered varies from person to person.

The question of whether dreams actually have a physiological, biological or psychological function has yet to be answered. But that hasn't stopped scientists from researching and speculating. 

There are several theories as to why we dream. One is that dreams work hand in hand with sleep to help the brain sort through everything it collects during the waking hours. Your brain is met with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of inputs each day. Some are minor sensory details like the color of a passing car, while others are far more complex, like the big presentation you're putting together for your job. 

During sleep, the brain works to plow through all of this information to decide what to hang on to and what to forget. Some researchers feel like dreams play a role in this process.

It's not just a stab in the dark though -- there is some research to back up the ideas that dreams are tied to how we form memories. Studies indicate that as we're learning new things in our waking hours, dreams increase while we sleep. Participants in a dream study who were taking a language course showed more dream activity than those who were not. In light of such studies, the idea that we use our dreams to sort through and convert short-term memories into long-term memories has gained some momentum in recent years.

Another theory is that dreams typically reflect our emotions. During the day, our brains are working hard to make connections to achieve certain functions. When posed with a tough math problem, your brain is incredibly focused on that one thing. And the brain doesn't only serve mental functions. If you're building a bench, your brain is focused on making the right connections to allow your hands to work in concert with a saw and some wood to make an exact cut. The same goes for simple tasks like hitting a nail with a hammer. 

Have you ever lost focus and smashed your finger because your mind was elsewhere?

Some have proposed that at night everything slows down. We aren't required to focus on anything during sleep, so our brains make very loose connections. It's during sleep that the emotions of the day battle it out in our dream cycle. If something is weighing heavily on your mind during the day, chances are you might dream about it either specifically, or through obvious imagery. 

For instance, if you're worried about losing your job to company downsizing, you may dream you're a shrunken person living in a world of giants, or you're wandering aimlessly through a great desert abyss.

There's also a theory, definitely the least intriguing of the bunch, that dreams don't really serve any function at all, that they're just a pointless byproduct of the brain firing while we slumber. 

We know that the rear portion of our brain gets pretty active during REM sleep, when most dreaming occurs. Some think that it's just the brain winding down for the night and that dreams are random and meaningless firings of the brain that we don't have when we're awake. 

The truth is, as long as the brain remains such a mystery, we probably won't be able to pinpoint with absolute certainty exactly why we dream.

With thanks to How Stuff Works

Picture Credit: Huffington Post and more “Recurring Dreams:Your Dreams Are Trying to Tell You Something. Lots more information there.

See also

A day in the life of dreams

SWEET dreams are made of leaves. Who am I to dis a tree? That is at least one conclusion of a study into how sounds influence sleep, which found that those who listened to a recording of the rustling of a breeze through trees were likelier to have pleasant dreams. 

The same was true when they listened to a relaxing beachscape. Conversely, those whose unconscious mind heard a jarring cityscape reported more bizarre and disjointed dreams.

The results came after 500,000 people downloaded an iPhone app called Dream:ON that is primed to play different music for the final phase of sleep. Placed under the pillow, it uses motion sensors to play the music while users are dreaming.

They are asked to write down their dreams when they wake up, and have produced more than a million such reports.

One thousand of the most coherent were selected and compared with placebo reports where no music was played.

Richard Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire, who conducted the study, said: “One of our most regular dreams is having an imaginary affair with George Clooney.”

He cited an indisputably happy dream. “The two of them first met when George asked if she would like to go for a walk with his imaginary giraffe.”

From the Australian