Neuroscience
From 'The Archives', first published in the Digest 2/2/2004
For the 33 percent of Americans who suffer from insomnia, a good night's sleep is no more than a dream. Part of the their problem could be that they overestimate how long it takes them to get to sleep, thus sustaining a self-perpetuating cycle of sleep-related anxiety.
Nicole Yang and Alison Harvey (Oxford University) recruited 40 students with primary insomnia from two Oxford universities. All the participants said that for at least a month they had suffered difficulty sleeping as frequently as three nights per week.
The participants were kitted out with a watch-like gadget - an actigraph - that provided an objective measure of sleep, based on how much they tossed and turned in the night. For three nights they wore the gadget and kept a sleep diary. Afterwards, half of the participants were shown, based on the actigraph's measurements, how they had overestimated in their diary how long it took them to get to sleep. The procedure was then repeated for a further three nights.
For the second three-night session, the participants who had seen the discrepancy between their own and the actigraph's measure of how long they took to drift off, now estimated this period more accurately and reported significantly less sleep-related anxiety than did the other participants.
"The findings support the proposal that distorted perception of sleep functions to maintain insomnia by fuelling anxiety and preoccupation with sleep" the authors claimed. And use of an actigraph "provides a non-intrusive, easy to administer method" of correcting these distortions.
__________________________________
Tang, N.K.Y. & Harvey, A.G. (2004). Correcting distorted perception of sleep in insomnia: a novel behavioural experiment? Behaviour Research and Therapy, 42, 27-39.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Not such a bad night's sleep
From 'The Archives', first published in the Digest 2/2/2004For the 33 percent of Americans who suffer from insomnia, a good night's sleep is no more than a dream. Part of the their problem could be that they overestimate how long it takes them to get to sleep, thus sustaining a self-perpetuating cycle of sleep-related anxiety.
Nicole Yang and Alison Harvey (Oxford University) recruited 40 students with primary insomnia from two Oxford universities. All the participants said that for at least a month they had suffered difficulty sleeping as frequently as three nights per week.
The participants were kitted out with a watch-like gadget - an actigraph - that provided an objective measure of sleep, based on how much they tossed and turned in the night. For three nights they wore the gadget and kept a sleep diary. Afterwards, half of the participants were shown, based on the actigraph's measurements, how they had overestimated in their diary how long it took them to get to sleep. The procedure was then repeated for a further three nights.
For the second three-night session, the participants who had seen the discrepancy between their own and the actigraph's measure of how long they took to drift off, now estimated this period more accurately and reported significantly less sleep-related anxiety than did the other participants.
"The findings support the proposal that distorted perception of sleep functions to maintain insomnia by fuelling anxiety and preoccupation with sleep" the authors claimed. And use of an actigraph "provides a non-intrusive, easy to administer method" of correcting these distortions.
__________________________________
Tang, N.K.Y. & Harvey, A.G. (2004). Correcting distorted perception of sleep in insomnia: a novel behavioural experiment? Behaviour Research and Therapy, 42, 27-39.
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- "placebo Sleep" Can Boost Your Mental Performance
Believing that you've had a good night's sleep can influence your mental performance, regardless of how much sleep you actually had. That's according to a new paper, by Christina Draganich and Kristi Erdal, who tricked students into thinking...
- Students: It's Time To Ditch The Pre-exam All-nighter
Lack of sleep impairs the human brain's ability to store new information in memory, researchers have found. Past research has already shown that sleep is vital for consolidating recently-learned material but now Matthew Walker and colleagues have...
- 21st Century Treatments For Insomnia
Are you having trouble sleeping? But you're not feeling that 19th century retro hipster insomniac vibe? Try some of these behavioral remedies recommended by the finest scientific and medical journals of today. What a Difference a Day Makes Is Intensive...
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From the FDA: For Immediate Release: Nov. 23, 2011 FDA approves first insomnia drug for middle-of-the-night waking followed by difficulty returning to sleep [snippet] The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved Intermezzo (zolpidem tartrate sublingual...
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["... Now" is a short post of cog sci topics in the news] Last week, the New York Times had several articles on sleep. You can see the list at Bora Zivkovic's A Blog Around the Clock blog: Sleeping with the New York Times. David Corcoran of the New...