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Drifting
Anyone who has spent any time with a teen (or is young enough to remember being one themselves!) knows they struggle to get to bed- making them even harder to rouse in the morning.
Their body clocks are running up to two hours later than ours, and other hormone changes in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis increase sensitivity to light at night, linked to stress and other abnormal behavioural outcomes – Turn off that night light! Light-at-night as a stressor for adolescents. The high-octane appeal of social media and video gaming compounds the ‘social jetlag’ spiral – Social jetlag and sleep habits in children and adolescents: Associations with autonomy (bedtime setting and electronics curfew) and electronic media use before sleep. One large-scale longitudinal study found a clear link between persistent jet lag (more than one hour difference between weekday and weekend bed and wake times) and daytime sleepiness, risk of depression and lower quality of life – Longitudinal course and outcome of social jetlag in adolescents: A 1-year follow-up study of the adolescent sleep health epidemiological cohorts.
They may hate you for setting a bedtime and imposing an electronic curfew, but a growing number of studies suggest that these routines are key to them getting the sleep they need so they can enjoy being awake during the day – Time for Bed: Parent-Set Bedtimes Associated with Improved Sleep and Daytime Functioning in Adolescents.
Teens and adults at least have the pressure of school and work to keep us on track.
But what happens when we retire or lose a loved one? I’ve watched friends and family members start to drift when those powerful social pressures disappear.
Here too, maintaining a routine is key – Contribution of Routine to Sleep Quality in Community Elderly.
This report of the National Sleep Foundations’ Sleep, Health and Aging conference sums it up, with over half of the factors influencing sleep linked to routines – Sleep health and aging: Recommendations for promoting healthy sleep among older adults: A National Sleep Foundation report. The other half are linked to the environment, with light, temperature and humidity.
So, paradoxically, even when it’s not a ‘school night’ (or when there’s no obvious reason to get up) the best treat for your body and brain could be to get to bed on time.
Off-colour
Seeing someone who looks under the weather activates your immune response, and even shifts your personal boundaries (or ‘peripersonal space’) as this fascinating article explains, referencing new research published in Nature last week – Human brain may anticipate looming contagion, Neural anticipation of virtual infection triggers an immune response.
Accurately judging skin tone is important for other situations, too – as a growing number of applications use facial recognition algorithms, from online banking and building access systems to ‘choose your perfect eyewear’ platforms – Automatic Skin Tone Extraction for Visagism Applications, and ‘blur background’ functions – Colors Matter: AI-Driven Exploration of Human Feature Colors.
LED’s are engineered to generate a bundle of wavelengths that are either absorbed or reflected by surfaces in space – including your skin. Your brain interprets that blend of reflected wavelengths as a colour. So paradoxically, something that looks red doesn’t, in fact. absorb the red part of the spectrum.
Your brain can only ‘see’ wavelengths or colours of light that are generated by the LED. Daylight (CIE D65) is the ‘gold standard’ benchmark for the balance of wavelengths or spectral power distribution to produce the most ‘natural’ appearance of colours – or colour rendering.
The issue is highly technical and much-debated (a couple of papers here – Recent Advances in Preparing Transparent Phosphor Ceramics for High-Index Color Rendering and High-Power Lighting, A New Way to Understand the Color Rendition Performance of Multi-Primary LED Lighting Systems: Color Rendition Variability).
But, bottom line, investing in lights with higher colour fidelity make it easier to spot those subtle shifts in skin tone that will help your immune system to keep you safe – Dermoscopy and skin imaging light sources: a comparison and review of spectral power distribution and color consistency.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery – social contagion and cats
Today is National Cat Day in the USA – although every day is cat day so far as my mum – and millions of other cat-lovers around the world are concerned.
We tend to believe that people ‘like us’ are more competent and likeable, which may be why social mimicry – copying another person’s posture or facial expression seems to improve cohesion and even reduce interpersonal conflicts – The effect of non-verbal mimicry on evaluations in interactions with cognitively (dis)similar individuals.
Your cat may not be able to copy your body language, but they do show they’re on the same wavelength through a mechanism known as ‘contagion’. For example, their pupil size, a signal of arousal or pleasure tends to adapt to yours – Humans’ pupillary contagion extends to cats and dogs, they even match your bink rate – Mutual synchronization of eyeblinks between dogs/cats and humans.
Of course it’s a two-way street – when our feline friends yawn, over half of us will feel an irresistible urge to do the same, suggesting that this copying behaviour crosses boundaries of species – Interspecific Contagious Yawning in Humans.
Romahome
I’m enjoying the first nights under the stars in our beloved campervan, Wanda.
She’s a venerable old lady – no screens or LED lights. Maybe that’s why I always sleep so well out there. That first cup of tea in the early morning mist is one of my favourite things in the whole wide world.
The benefits of sleeping outside are clear.
Just two nights in a tent is enough to shift your clock up to 2.5 hours earlier and get you back on track – Circadian Entrainment to the Natural Light-Dark Cycle across Seasons and the Weekend.
This two-week camping study with ten-year-old children found that going to bed at sunset and rising with the sun brought their clocks forward by an average of two hours. This was especially significant for those who had delayed sleep habits in normal life, linked to increased risk of mental and physical health issues and poorer academic outcomes – Circadian phase advances in children during camping life according to the natural light-dark cycle, Sleep Disorders in Early Childhood and the Development of Mental Health Problems in Adolescents: A Systematic Review of Longitudinal and Prospective Studies.
I’m not sure if you get the same benefits in those modern motorhomes with cool blue LEDs and TV screens. I’d love to see a study on that.
As far as I’m concerned, Wanda is sleep therapy on wheels.