One-third of all American adults are not getting enough sleep, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But why does it matter so much? Well, simply put: Inadequate sleep is bad for your health. It’s linked to chronic conditions and illnesses like diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and depression.
Hearing a song from your teen years can certainly trigger a flood of memories. Familiar oldies have even been shown to bring forth memories in people with profound dementia. This awareness is what led Rudolph Tanzi, PhD, director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, to
“What causes depression?” is a question many of us have asked. Responses are all over the map, but it’s fair to say that depression is a disease. Research supports this by demonstrating key differences in the brains of those who are depressed and those who are not.
The Effects of Brain
There may be a scientific reason why some people are night owls: delayed sleep phase syndrome. It’s a sleep disorder in which your body’s clock tells you to fall asleep a few hours later than most people hit the sack. The problem is that this delayed bedtime makes it difficult
If you become ill, usually you can pinpoint a reason. A stiff, swollen joint, for example, might be due to injury or to a chronic disease like arthritis, while an upset stomach might be due to food poisoning. The causes of depression are harder to pin down. And unfortunately, they
Being Sedentary Is Like a Disease
It’s well established that exercise is important for good health, but a study published in JAMA Network Open in October reported that there is no upper limit for benefits. After administering a treadmill test to 122,007 people and later recording their mortality rates over a
Moderate drinking (one or two glasses a day) shouldn’t affect your cognitive function and may even provide some mild benefits. But chronic alcohol abuse can lead to alcohol-induced dementia due to the combined toxic effects of alcohol and the nutritional deficiencies often associated with alcoholism. In fact, heavy drinking (more
Your age, race, gender, and genes. You can’t do anything about them, and if they increase your odds of hypertension, they already have you at a disadvantage.
You need a weapon to help you fight back and try to even out the odds.
Fortunately, your lifestyle is that weapon—perhaps the best one!
Although insomnia is a common problem—literally, thousands of people suffer from it—not everyone experiences the same type of insomnia.
The National Sleep Foundation identifies two primary categories of insomnia:
Short-term (acute) insomnia lasts a few nights and can be caused by worry, stress, grief, or another situation that affects us temporarily.
Long-term (chronic)
Although our conscious mind is closed to the outside world when we sleep, the rest of our body is not at rest. If you think of the body as a machine, sleep puts it in “idle” mode so that repairs can be made. Hundreds of biological processes continue: The heart
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