Can’t Fall Asleep? You’re Not Alone

April 28, 2019 By Debra Pearlstein Leave a Comment

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast. – William Shakespeare

Eat healthily, sleep well, breathe deeply, move harmoniously.
― Jean-Pierre Barral

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a night owl. My Dad was a night owl. My Mom was an early bird. She caught the worms and we, well, we just were not morning people.

You know those people who can fall asleep at the drop of a hat, in the car, on a plane, as soon as their head hits the pillow, I’ve never been one of them.

I’ve had jobs over the years that fit my sleep patterns well: late-night catering, bartending, freelance writing. In college, I wrote my best papers at 3 am. I brought up my wacky sleep patterns last week when I went to see my doctor and she said, “Yes, you are a writer.” Sure, indeed. In my case, the muse is fickle. She loves quiet and loves to dance when everyone else is sleeping.

This is all well and good, but, you see, I am not a vampire, and the world operates on a different schedule. Meetings, interviews, job assignments, meals, family, friends – they all require me to follow their lead.

So, I have struggled with my bouts of insomnia. The earlier I have to get up, the harder it is to fall asleep.

I have tried many different options. Some work better than others. I’ve tried no caffeine or spicy foods in the evening, meditation, herbal teas, essential oils, listening to the sound of the ocean on tape. While the real ocean works well, the tape never really did it for me.

Some ideas that I’ve been implementing are designing my ideal bedroom for sleep. This includes dimming the lights about an hour before bed to help shift both body and mind into sleep mode, creating a peaceful environment with calming colors and an uncluttered space, keeping the temperature cool, getting the right mattress, pillows and sheets, and incorporating soothing scents like lavender. What I’m loving most right now is my Yorkville weighted blanket.

I did a lot of research and shopped for a long time before I found the perfect one. I do feel it’s an individual decision as to which blanket strikes your fancy, however, I definitely recommend them to help with relaxation and sleep. The blanket feels like a hug or a very gentle massage and incorporates deep touch pressure stimulation. For my fibromyalgia, it’s a dream whether I’m using the blanket at night or anytime I’m feeling overall pain.

Something else I’m working on is not having the tv or the computer on too close to bedtime. That’s a challenge for me, but, it truly helps as the bright light from the computer is not sleep-inducing, but rather the opposite. My morning yoga and walking instead of driving when possible is helpful as is a warm bath before bed, especially when I add epsom salts and essential oils like lavender, orange, frankincense, bergamot or jasmine. Believe it or not, a bowl of oatmeal helps me sleep as does a glass of tart cherry juice.

Most of all, I try not to stress about not sleeping, because that’s the surest way to not fall asleep. I don’t try to sleep anymore, I just allow my body to relax and do some breathing techniques.

I’ve found that a good night’s sleep keeps me healthier, from having less fibromyalgia pain to being more effective at work. Waking up refreshed helps me face the day with a bright outlook and much more resilience, whatever the day may hold.

Bon Rêves Mes Amis!

Why Is Sleep So Important for Healthy Skin?

April 10, 2018 By Debra Pearlstein Leave a Comment

Quality sleep and skin health go hand in hand while lack of sleep puts a strain on our body. Not getting enough sleep accelerates aging, impairs water balance, changes facial expressions, enhances weight gain, and ruins our skin’s natural beauty. Moreover, stress caused by sleep deprivation triggers elevated levels of cortisol, the so-called stress hormone, which furthers inflammation in the body. The inflammatory response is not good for skin health. Here is how sleep deprivation can damage our skin:

Poor Sleep Worsens Skin Conditions

Not enough sleep activates an increased inflammatory response in the body, which irritates existing skin conditions and sets off added skin sensitivity, intensified reactions for allergic contact dermatitis, increased acne breakouts, and aggravated irritant dermatitis. Immune-related skin conditions, such as eczema or psoriasis, also worsen just because the body, invaded by inflammation, loses its ability to regulate the immune system. Skin begins to itch increasingly exacerbating the symptoms of immune-related skin conditions. Increased itching affects the quality of sleep, and thus we enter a never-ending circle.

Less Sleep Means Poor Water Balance

Our body needs enough sleep to rebalance hydration, a process that allows the skin to recover its moisture while the excess water gets processed for removal. Poor water balance translates into puffy eyes, under-eye dark circles, dry skin, and more visible wrinkles. The puffiness under our eyes says we are not getting enough shut-eye. Water tends to accumulate under eyes, and with the skin so thin there it becomes quite visible. There are ways to reduce swelling during sleep, and you can find some ideas here.

Poor Sleep Undermines Skin’s Natural Beauty

An increased level of stress hormones boosts the number of inflammatory cells in the body. Collagen, a protein essential to our skin’s health and beauty, breakdowns faster in these conditions. Our skin willlose its bounciness, radiance, and translucency and will start looking dull, pale, and even lifeless. On theother hand, collagen replenishes during sleep, and that means less visible wrinkles and a plumperlooking skin. Blood flow to the skin improves when we sleep, which offers our skin that healthy-looking glow and gives us those rosy cheeks.

Enough Deep Sleep Slows Down the Aging Process

A good night’s sleep is like a fountain of youth for our skin. If we want to look younger for many years, we need to understand the importance of deeper phases of sleep in controlling the aging process. When we get enough deep during the night, our bodies experience a rise in growth hormones production. Growth hormones are essential for repairing cell damage. Cell breakdown, which occurs during the day, is no longer accumulated inside the cell but is reversed overnight in the presence of growth hormones. This way, damaged cells get repaired, and signs of aging become less noticeable. This process can happen when we get enough deep sleep.

Our body longs for quality snooze time because it helps to repair itself and recover from daily stress. Within this context, getting enough quality sleep is essential to our looks. Enough shut-eye means 7 to 9 quality hours each night and less than 6 hours of sleep will likely affect our appearance and, therefore, our skin health.

The Sleep Zzz Pillow is a game-changer for your kids!

March 6, 2018 By Debra Pearlstein Leave a Comment

If you have kids, then you know how difficult it can be to get them to sleep and to stay asleep.

Introducing the Sleep Zzz Pillow from the makers of the Twin Z Pillow as Seen on ABC’s show Shark Tank! The Sleep Zzz Pillow is a kids sleep pillow (ages 3 and up) that surrounds your child with the snuggly softness and security of their very own body pillow sized perfectly for them! This pillow helps kids fall asleep faster and most importantly STAY asleep providing a more restful nights sleep for your child and you! Everyone wins! Check them out on FaceBook!! and their website.

$5 OFF Coupon – Sleep Zzz Pillow Special!

Save $5 off your Sleep Zzz Pillow purchase and enjoy a more restful nights sleep for the whole family! Use Code: SLEEPY http://sleepzzzpillow.com
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Disclosure: This is a partnered post with Sleep Zzz Pillow and US Family Guide

Tried-And-True Tips to Help Your Children Sleep at Night

February 22, 2017 By Debra Pearlstein Leave a Comment

If you are a parent, chances are that you are well aware of the struggle of getting your little ones into bed on time. Unlike us grownups who would actually kill for some more sleep, kids hate going to bed. To them, it’s the end of all things fun, like ruining the newly wallpapered bedroom with pen scribbles, playing catch with your grandmother’s antique flower vase or dipping your Smartphone in the flush because “daddy, it gets thirsty too”. Be it 2 year olds or 10 year olds, getting them to sleep on time is an uphill battle.

Newborns and toddlers need around 16 to 20 hours of sleep per day. Children require an average of 9-12 hours of sleep per day. Children who do not get the required amount of sleep tend to be more problematic than those who do. Their emotions get out of control; they get easily irritable, irrational and hyper. They may also suffer from behavioral problems, focus issues or weight problems. As a parent, it is very important that you make sure your child gets the amount of sleep his/her body requires. The more important sleep is for the development of infants, toddlers and school going kids, the more unappreciated it is by them.

Learning what your child is feeling at bedtime and how you can resolve it is the key to getting them in bed and snoozing. Every parent has to struggle with opposition from their kids at bedtime. Let’s start by breaking down every parent’s struggle into phases.

Phase 1: Pooper and Tooters (0-1 Years)

This is the most difficult phase for a parent as the baby keeps waking up every few hours. Infants need to sleep 4 to 5 hours since they have small stomachs and cannot hold food in for very long. Once they get it out, they get hungry again! This can be quite disturbing for the parents too during the night since that is the time we fill up on our sleep. Here are a few tips you can use to get your crying poop machine back to sleep.

⦁ Get your spouse to take turns with you to feed the baby during the night. The baby will get up after every few hours, so one of should be ready to feed him/her. Once fed, chances are that the baby will go back to sleep.
⦁ Babies cannot differentiate between day and night. And after being fed, they are ready for some playtime. If the baby wakes up during the night and does not go back to sleep after being fed, try not to engage playfully with him/her. Keep the lights turned off and be as quiet and subdued as you can.
⦁ If your baby refuses to sleep, check the obvious details like are the baby’s clothes comfortable? Does he/she need a diaper change? Is the environment around the baby sleep inducing? Just like adults, babies also need a sleep inducing environment to sleep.
⦁ Make sure the baby is not over stimulated before bedtime. Playing peek-a-boo and piggyback rides are not a good idea before the baby’s bedtime.

Phase 2: Monsters and Bedtime Stories (1-6 Years)

This is the stage where you have to focus on setting a consistent bedtime routine for your growing child. At this age, a child needs to sleep around 11 – 12 hours per day.

⦁ Start by incorporating bedtime activities before putting your child to sleep. Set a routine of having the child brush their teeth and change into their jammies. Grab a book and cuddle up with them in bed and read them a story.
⦁ Keep the lights low and have them follow the bedtime routine at least an hour or thirty minutes before they get in bed.
⦁ Don’t let your child watch TV or go anywhere near digital screens or anything that gets them excited before bedtime.
⦁ The most important thing is to stay consistent with the bedtime routine even if your child does not sleep on time. This will enable their body to automatically detect bed time and start inducing sleep when the brain associates the bedtime routine with sleep.
⦁ If your child is wetting the bed or suffering from fear, be supportive and take action. For example, if the child complains of a monster in their room, you can help calm them down by spraying the room with ‘monster killer spray’.

Phase 3: Homework and Video Games! (7-12 years)

At this stage, your child has already gotten used to sleep. Kids this age require an average of 9 hours of sleep. The difficult part now is staying consistent with the bedtime routine. A proper sleep routine is very important for the child because the child needs to focus in school and that is not possible if he/she is sleep deprived.

⦁ Stick to the child’s bedtime routine and focus on bedtime hygiene as well. Kids this age have a tendency to nag when it’s sleep time (“Ten more minutes please mommyyy?”). Don’t fall for it and make them go to bed on time.
⦁ Do not allow activities that can cause the kids to be hyper before bedtime. These include video games, TV, iPads, phones etc. The bedroom environment has to be calm, dark and sleep inducing.
⦁ Do not allow the kids to stay up past their bedtime even on the weekends since it disturbs the body’s biological clock.

Despite the years of sleepless nights annoyed parents spend being woken up in the dead of the night by their children, they are always sad to see them go away to college or move out when they grow older. Hopefully these tips will help you and your children get some sleep and some amazing memories to look back upon down the lane.

About the Author
Eugene Gabriel is a passionate blogger. He has always been fascinated by sleep and how it relates to health and wellness. Read his post on How Sleep Changes with Age. You can follow him on twitter @eugenegabrielj.

Get Healthy in 2017! Best Mobile Apps to Improve Your Sleep

December 27, 2016 By Debra Pearlstein Leave a Comment

Best Mobile Applications to Improve your Sleep

As 2016 draws closer to its end, the fact that there’s an app for everything nowadays rings truer than ever. However, as a quick glance through the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store will confirm, the focus is definitely on quantity rather than quality. There IS an app for everything now. There is an app that allows you to zip and unzip a zipper and that’s about all it does. There are even apps that (falsely) claim to charge your phone using solar power or help cure baldness with “special” frequencies.

Amazing, isn’t it?

Amidst all the noise, genuinely useful apps exist that can help you sleep. Today, we are going to go ahead and curate a list of apps that help you get to sleep faster and sleep better. From apps that play a variety of relaxing, atmospheric sounds to lull you to sleep, to apps that are smart enough to actively track your sleep patterns and maintain a log for you. From apps that use binaural beats to help you snooze, to apps that wake you up gradually over time instead of abruptly.

Let’s get started!

Best entry-level app

If you only have trouble sleeping sometimes but at other times you snooze just fine. Here is our top contender for someone who wants a no frills app to help him or her sleep.

Relax Melodies

This is a neat little app that gives you the option to drown out noise and distractions in your surroundings and helps you relax and focus on sleeping. It has a lot of high quality ambient sounds and binaural frequency audio to help you gently nod off to slumber. The best part is that you can create your own sounds by mixing up to 12 of the high quality sounds together. Play around with it a bit to see what suits you best. It also lets you save and store your mixes and has a neat timer feature that turns it off after the preset time period.

You can find it on Android or iOS.

For the mildly curious

If you want to have a veritable sleep assistant by your side, you can try out Sleep Cycle.

Sleep Cycle

Sleep cycle is one of the best sleeping assistant apps out there. It is an excellent all rounder sleeping aid app, that does quite a few things right. For starters, it uses your phones accelerometer readings during the night, to learn how you sleep and records data that you can view later on. One of the best features is its ability to gently wake you up within a window of time rather than waking you up abruptly by blaring an alarm. You see, we sleep in phases of high activity and low activity. We get our best sleep in the periods that we have low activity. Since the app monitors your sleep activity, it knows when your body’s activity during sleep is high and it starts to gently wake you up within that window. So, if you give it a time frame to wake you up between 6 to 6:30 a.m., what it’s going to do is pick the best time in that window to wake you up. You being gently awoken during a high activity period is bound to leave you feeling relaxed instead of shocking you awake.

Another feature is its ability to maintain detailed sleep logs every night of how long you have slept and how good the quality of your sleep was. It can also track your sleep over time and if you give it a log of your activities before sleeping, like having coffee, can compare what affects your sleep quality and how. Add to that 15 high quality alarm tones (you can use your own too) and it translates into a great value app that you just have to try out.

You can find Sleep Cycle on iOS and on Android.

Pulling out all the stops!

This should be your go-to app if you take your sleep really, really seriously (as you should). This is the mother of all sleep assist apps.

Sleep Genius

The sleep genius app was made after years of research by experts on neuroscience, sound and, of course, sleep! They claim to have helped NASA with helping astronauts sleep during the research. Hey, if it is good enough for NASA, it has to be good enough for you, right? The app is chock full of all the functionality that you might want at your fingertips and then some.

The app has sleep programs that you can follow that trains your brain towards a regular, healthy sleeping pattern. The base version of the app comes with one sleep pattern. You can unlock 3 more plus other additional features through in app purchases. Apart from the very helpful directed sleep programs. The app does almost everything that any other sleep assist app can. It tracks your body’s sleep and movements through the night to detect the sleep stage and depending upon the stage you are in wakes you up gently by playing specific soothing sounds. It tracks sleep statistics like duration, quality, efficiency and many, many others through an easy to access dashboard. The stats are recorded per night and over time as well.

They claim that their Neuro-sensory algorithm with help prepare your brain for sleep, guide it through every sleep stage and wake you up gently with a smart alarm.

You can find Sleep Genius on iOS and on Android.

Now if only it could make you breakfast in bed as well, that would be a dream come true.

About the Author:

Eugene Gabriel is a passionate blogger. He has always been fascinated by sleep and how it relates to health and wellness. Read his post on Ways to get Better Sleep. You can follow him on twitter @eugenegabrielj.

Having Trouble Falling Asleep?

June 15, 2014 By Debra Pearlstein 16 Comments

This is a Type-A Parent paid post to discuss sleep issues, and to share a new insomnia resource from the National Sleep Foundation.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a night owl. My Dad was a night owl. My Mom was an early bird. She caught the worms and we, well, we just were not morning people.

You know those people who can fall asleep at the drop of a hat, in the car, on a plane, as soon as their head hits the pillow, I’ve never been one of them.

I’ve had jobs over the years that fit my sleep patterns well, late-night catering, freelance writing, and now, blogging. In college, I wrote my best papers at 3 am. I brought up my wacky sleep patterns last week when I went to see my doctor and she said, “Yes, you are a writer.” Sure, indeed. In my case, the muse is fickle. She loves quiet and loves to dance when everyone else is sleeping.

So, I have struggled with my bouts of insomnia. The earlier I have to get up, the harder it is to fall asleep.

I have tried many different options. Some work better than others. I’ve tried no caffeine or spicy foods in the evening, meditation, yoga, essential oils, listening to the sound of the ocean on tape. While the real ocean works well, the tape never really did it for me.

I recently came across the National Sleep Foundation. This is a great resource that helps with understanding sleep issues and discovering healthy solutions. It contains a wealth of information on the subject of sleep.

Some ideas that I’ve been implementing which I found on this site are designing my ideal bedroom for sleep. This includes dimming the lights about an hour before bed to help shift both body and mind into sleep mode, creating a peaceful environment with calming colors and an uncluttered space, keeping the temperature cool, getting the right mattress, pillows and sheets, and incorporating soothing scents like lavender.

Something I’m working on is not having the tv or the computer on too close to bedtime. That’s a challenge for me, but, it truly helps as the bright light from the computer is not sleep-inducing, but rather the opposite. Daily exercise is helpful as is a warm bath before bed, especially when I add relaxing salts and essential oils like lavender, orange, lemon balm, bergamot or jasmine.

Be sure to check out a new resource from the National Sleep Foundation at sleepfoundation.org/insomnia – a good place to start if you think you have insomnia or aren’t sleeping. The National Sleep Foundation is your trusted resource for everything sleep – understanding how sleep works & why it’s important, learning healthy habits, creating a relaxing bedroom & bedtime routine, & finding solutions to your sleep issues.