Keep It Dark To Sleep Better

Many things can affect our quality of sleep, and the links between poor sleep and health are well established. A new study shows that just turning out the light when you go sleep is not enough and can increase your risk of both high blood pressure and diabetes.

This comes from a recent study in The Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM) which reveals that exposure to electrical light between dusk and bedtime strongly suppresses melatonin levels. Why is this important? Because your body relies on processes regulated by melatonin signaling, such as sleepiness, body temperature, blood pressure and glucose homeostasis.

Our bodies produce this hormone at night via the pineal gland in the brain and because today we are now routinely exposed to electrical lighting at night the study wanted to establish whether exposure to room light in the late evening may inhibit melatonin production.

The study was carried out by Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass and involved 116 healthy volunteers aged 18-30 years who were exposed to room light or dim light in the eight hours preceding bedtime for five consecutive days. What they found was that exposure to indoor light has a strong suppressive effect on melatonin production;
exposure to room light before bedtime shortened melatonin duration by about 90 minutes when compared to dim light exposure and exposure to room light during the usual hours of sleep suppressed melatonin by more than 50 percent.

Suppression of melatonin through light exposure has been hypothesized to increase relative risk for some types of cancer and melatonin receptor genes have been linked to type 2 diabetes. This is obviously an important factor for shift workers who are exposed to indoor light at night over the course of many years, but also for anyone who happily sits up in bed reading for an hour so before going to sleep.

Daylight and darkness are both good for our health, but the availability of constant artificial light may need to be monitored. If you can’t reduce the amount of artificial light you are exposed to you could at least in the few hours before bedtime make sure your lights are dimmer – not full and bright as that apparently really will make a difference – and certainly keep light in the bedroom as low as possible.

Oh really? Having enough sleep may reduce mistakes in memory!

We haven’t had one of these for a while but I always like to know that out there somewhere science never sleeps – especially if someone is paying them to research it.

Sleep is the subject here because Kimberley Fenn, a cognitive neuroscientist at Michigan State University, has studied on this and come to the conclusion that having enough sleep may reduce mistakes in memory.

No, really? If you don’t get enough sleep you are not going to be as sharp or able to remember things as well as if you got your full quota – don’t snicker, this lady got a lot of money to research this.

While previous research has shown that sleep improves memory, this study is the first to address errors in memory and although it isn’t known how sleep helps with this that hasn’t deterred Kimberley Fenn as she believes that further research is warranted, and plans to study different population groups, particularly the elderly, as she believes this could potentially improve their quality of life in some way.

Trust me, I do not make this up!