Well-Rested Woman: 60 Soothing Suggestions for Getting a Good Night's Sleep - Softcover

Kinosian, Janet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573248134 ISBN 13: 9781573248136

Verlag: Conari Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Written by former insomniac and longtime journalist Janet Kinosian, who cured herself by using these methods, The Well-Rested Woman offers sixty inventive ways to help any woman get a good night's sleep. Change your sleep by incorporating better habits into your daily life, such as:

• Attuning your circadian rhythms
• Uncovering your chronic sleep positions
• Writing a sleep biography
• Crying at night if you want to
• Making friends with your nightmares
• Using Feng Shui to bring on sleep

Filled with inspiring quotes and lists of sleep-promoting herbs and vitamins, The Well-Rested Woman is every woman's ultimate companion to a lifetime of rejuvenating, restful good nights.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Janet Kinosian is an award-winning journalist who has written for The Los Angeles Times, People, and Reader's Digest, among many other established magazines and newspapers. She has an M.A. in counseling psychology and lives and sleeps in Southern California.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

The Well-Rested Woman

60 Soothing Suggestions for Getting a Good Night's Sleep

By Janet Kinosian

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Copyright © 2002 Janet Kinosian
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57324-813-6

Contents

Preface
CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS SLEEP? ORDER AND DISORDER
CHAPTER 2 WOMEN AND SLEEP: SPECIAL ISSUES
CHAPTER 3 CREATING THE RIGHT ENVIRONMENT
CHAPTER 4 DE-STRESSING THE MIND
CHAPTER 5 FINE-TUNING THE BODY
CHAPTER 6 SOOTHING THE SOUL
CHAPTER 7 SLEEP HAZARDS
CHAPTER 8 IF YOU NEED MORE HELP
Acknowledgments & Thanks
Resources
About the Author

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS SLEEP?ORDER AND DISORDER

If sleep does not secure anabsolutely vital function, then it is thebiggest mistake the evolutionaryprocess ever made.

—Dr. Allan Rechtschaffen,University of Chicago

It's no secret that women today are in dire need of some restful nights. Modernlife seems to conspire in subtle and not so subtle ways to lop off precioushours of sleep from many women's lives. You may wonder, Am I getting enoughsleep? Probably not, if you work, run a household, go to school full time,supervise your family's lives, or simply make time just for yourself among theschedules you're juggling.

Even if you do think you're getting the amount of sleep you should, you maywonder why you feel so tired and un-refreshed much of the time. This is notsurprising. More than half of the women surveyed in a recent National SleepFoundation Women and Sleep Poll reported insomnia symptoms sometime during everymonth. Various studies and polls indicate that nearly 30 million American womenclaim they long every day for a good night's sleep.

And despite what we sometimes think, a good night's sleep isn't a rare andexotic experience that occurs on high mountain tops and then only for thoselucky enough to find it. Good sleep is an innate biological need—a need the bodymakes sure it fulfills, even with only a few healthy sleep habits.

In evolutionary terms, it was only minutes ago that science took notice of whathappens when someone closes their eyes. Before the 1950s—when medicine firststarted unraveling the sleeping brain's mysteries—sleep was seen as aphysiological, unmysterious, and natural daily happening, a true nonevent (itwas only in 1996 that the American Medical Association recognized sleep medicineas a secondary specialty). Until the early '90s, women were often excluded fromsleep studies because it was believed that their hormones would skew data. Sowomen don't have a strong scientific history of help with sleep difficulties:health-care providers, medical information, and general self-help books didn'taddress the problem.

Much of this is changing, thankfully, and sleep researchers are beginning tostudy female sleep patterns and how they change over the course of a woman'slife. Factors such as hormones, age, fertility, work, children, health, andlifestyle all affect your sleep, as do physical syndromes such as depression andpain, which affect women more than men. As the studies continue, you can lookforward to more solid information on what's going on inside your body as yousleep, and how best to take advantage of the hours you do sleep.

The good news: A woman's sleep structure is fundamentally the same as a man's,but women have some distinct advantages. First, we experience more slow-wave ordeep sleep, also called stage 3 and 4 sleep, throughout our lives. Slow-wavedeep sleep is the most restorative sleep level. In addition, our sleep systemsage more slowly than do men's: while the amount of male slow-wave sleepdiminishes after age twenty, female deep sleep has a slower decline, beginningafter age thirty.

So if you hold the evolutionary gene for more restorative, deep sleep, why thendo you not feel more deeply restored when you awake in the morning? If youguessed that modern lifestyle plays a role, that's a good guess. No longer is"Early to bed and early to rise" a guarantee of being well rested. To help findthat good rest, take a brief look at what sleep is and what physical purpose itserves, what sleep disorders are and how you can deal with them.

WHY DO WE SLEEP?

Sleep research specialists still don't know exactly why we sleep, and medicinehas not yet given us a central reason or function for it, though a variety ofintriguing theories about sleep exist. We sleep to restore, rest, and repairvital physiological functions; to help activate the immune system; to programinformation and memory. One theory holds that sleep evolved as a means to removeour distant ancestors from harm and keep them safe during the dark hours ofnight.

Just how many hours of sleep do you need? Many people believe the traditionaleight to be the most healthful number, yet most researchers claim this is myth.They believe you need only the number of sleep hours that make you feelconsistently refreshed in the morning and fully alert during the day: if thatnumber is five, then that's your physiological preference. You alone decide howmuch sleep your body needs. That nightly amount of needed sleep remainsamazingly constant over a lifetime.

Whatever the biological reasons for sleep, we spend approximately a third of ourlives in this state. For the average seventy-five-year-old, that means abouttwenty-three years of life spent sleeping.

THE STRUCTURE OF SLEEP

To understand sleep difficulties and disorders, it's important to understandsleep's two main stages: non-rapid eye movement sleep (NREM) and rapid eyemovement sleep (REM) sleep.

NREM SLEEP

Non-rapid eye movement sleep is a four-stage cycle:

Stage 1 is the drowsy, relaxed, intermediary stage between waking and sleep. Youare, in fact, half-awake, half-asleep, and your waking beta brain waves modulateto slower alpha and theta waves. Your body becomes more relaxed, but you're veryeasily awakened from this stage.

After several minutes in stage 1, you enter stage 2 sleep. Your brain wavestravel more slowly, intermittently mixing with what sleep researchers call"sleep spindles"; your breathing and heart rate stabilize, your muscles relax.Researchers use the first onset of a sleep spindle in an EEG(electroencephalogram) to mark the actual onset of sleep. It's still easy toawaken from this stage.

Stage 3 sleep produces slower theta waves and even slower delta waves. Yourbreathing slows, your heart rate slows more, and muscles become extremelyrelaxed. Most people reach this stage within 30 minutes after falling asleep. Inthis sleep stage the body releases growth hormone and regenerates, restores, andrepairs organs and tissues. If awakened, you'll feel quite groggy.

Slow delta waves dominate stage 4 sleep, the deepest sleep stage. This is thestage of sleep you must enter in order to feel rejuvenated and well rested. It'svery difficult to awaken someone from this stage of sleep; if you are awakened,you'll feel groggy, even disoriented. Stage 4 is reached about an hour afterfalling asleep, and it's by far the most important sleep stage.

REM Sleep

After the 90 minutes or so it takes to cycle through all four stages, you enterrapid eye movement sleep, a dream state that recurs every 70-90 minutes,lengthening throughout the night....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Conari Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1573248134
• ISBN 13: 9781573248136
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 268
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar