Month: October 2018

Can’t sleep? Perhaps you’re overtired | Life and style | The Guardian

Nerina Ramlakhan remembers when her daughter was a toddler, and how if she got too tired she would be unable to switch off. “There was a healthy level of tiredness,” she says. “But if she went beyond that, she would be running on a kind of false energy. And then she wouldn’t be able to switch off when she went to bed.”

Overtiredness is recognised the world over in young children – but it is seemingly more and more common in adults. Dr Ramlakhan should know: she is a sleep psychologist and is increasingly seeing people who remind her of her little girl when she was younger.

There’s certainly an irony that in our sophisticated, hi-tech, busy world we appear to be reverting to behaviour that we recognise and know how to treat in kids, but are somehow failing to deal with as adults. Overtiredness, sleep experts agree, is down to our always-on existence. In the past, says Ramlakhan, the author of The Little Book of Sleep, our days had naturally built-in downtime that gave us short snatches of rest. Today, that has disappeared for many of us. “We have become restless as a society – and that places more demands on us when we get into bed at night,” she says. “We have lost the rituals and practices that gave us little respites during the day. In the past, you would go to the supermarket and, while you were waiting in the queue, you’d daydream, be a bit bored, look around. Now, any window like that will be filled by looking at your phone, answering some emails, sorting out your Amazon account.”

Can’t sleep? Perhaps you’re overtired | Life and style | The Guardian

How your sense of humor affects relationship quality

It should come as no surprise that we tend to look for a sense of humor in our romantic partners. The trouble is, we all find different things funny—or not funny. New research in the Journal of Research in Personality quantifies exactly how our particular blend of humor affects our relationships. The bottom line? You’ll do better if you can take a joke.

The study looked at three different approaches to humor: gelotophobia (entirely unrelated to a deep-seated fear of gelato; instead, this is the fear of being laughed at), gelotophilia (the joy of being laughed at), and katagelasticism (the joy of laughing at others). People can have mixtures of these qualities in varying degrees, but some people mostly enjoy being laughed at, mostly enjoy laughing at others, or mostly hate being laughed at.

How your sense of humor affects relationship quality

Finally, a cure for insomnia? | News | The Guardian

There is, it turns out, a London clinic that has achieved remarkable results. Founded in 2009 by Hugh Selsick, a South African psychiatrist, the Insomnia Clinic in Bloomsbury has revolutionised treatment for sleeplessness in the UK. As Britain’s only dedicated insomnia facility, more than 1,000 patients have passed through the clinic at a rate that has quickened to, in 2018, 120 new casesa month. According to the clinic’s figures, 80% of patients report major improvements, while almost half claim to have been fully cured. This success has earned the clinic an enviable reputation and a waiting list to match; patients can wait two years for a consultation.

At the root of Selsick’s approach is a revolutionary assertion that has led to a new approach to treatment, quite unlike the old wives’ tales with which, in the absence of a coherent medical solution, every insomniac will be familiar. Where, for decades, insomnia has been treated as a symptom of another issue (if indeed it has been treated at all) Selsick contends that insomnia is not merely a symptom, but a disorder in its own right. This remains an unorthodox view. Yet, for Selsick’s patients, the approach does more than fix a category error: it provides a life-changing validation, a route out of helplessness, a way of getting to sleep.

Finally, a cure for insomnia? | News | The Guardian

Sex on the Sidelines: How the N.F.L. Made a Game of Exploiting Cheerleaders | Vanity Fair

They call each other “girls,” even though they are grown women now, some of them grandmothers in their 60s. Few look it: most are lithe and fit from a lifetime of exercise. Early this morning they convened for a variety of fitness classes, including a “twerkout workout,” a “hot heels dance class,” and “cheer Zumba,” followed by a panel on the “Good, Bad, & Ugly” of cosmetics procedures. Now they are buzzing around a banquet hall set up in a club-seating deck on the upper level of Nissan Stadium in Nashville, home of the Tennessee Titans. There are nearly 500 former N.F.L. cheerleaders—Washington Redskinettes, Seattle Sea Gals, Chicago Honey Bears, Buffalo Jills, and the queen supremes, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. (“When they walk in, you can just tell,” says one alumna.) They have gathered for the biennial National Football Cheerleaders Alumni Reunion, and the room is crackling with the bubbly brand of energy that many of the girls call “sparkle,” which also serves as an implicit dress code. There are sparkles on dresses, sparkles on earrings, sparkles on stilettos. “It’s awesome to get re-united with my cheer sisters, as we like to say,” gushes Jennifer Hathaway, a former Atlanta Falconette whose eyes are dusted with sparkly shadow.

The ex-cheerleaders have been drawn here by their shared past—a collective nostalgia for their days on the sidelines, their moment in the spotlight. But despite their giddiness at being re-united, they know there is no escaping the present. Over the past year, the N.F.L. has faced a rash of lawsuits and ugly allegations over its treatment of cheerleaders. Five former members of the Washington Redskins squad say the team flew them to Costa Rica in 2013, stripped them of their passports, and required them to pose topless before wealthy fans. In March, former cheerleader Bailey Davis sued the New Orleans Saints for firing her over an Instagram photo she posted of herself in a lacy bodysuit. And in June, six former cheerleaders filed a federal sex-discrimination suit against the Houston Texans, alleging they were paid less than the state’s minimum wage and relentlessly body-shamed by the squad coach, who called them “jelly bellies” and “crack whores.” “I had no idea that once I became a Houston Texan cheerleader, all of my dreams would slowly be shattered,” one of the plaintiffs, Morgan Wiederhold, said at a news conference.

Sex on the Sidelines: How the N.F.L. Made a Game of Exploiting Cheerleaders | Vanity Fair

Children Who Get Less Screen Time Think Better, Study Finds

Keeping your kid’s mind sharp might involve making sure they don’t spend all day on their smartphone or other screen devices, suggests yet more research published this week.

Canadian researchers looked at the first bits of data from a 10-year-long U.S. project meant to study how children’s brains develop over time, called the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study (or more cleverly, the ABCD study).

As part of the project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers across the U.S. interviewed children and their parents about their lifestyle habits. That included how much time they spent exercising, sleeping, and watching screens on an average day. The children also took questionnaires, provided spit samples, and completed puzzles that measured their cognitive functions.

Children Who Get Less Screen Time Think Better, Study Finds