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Oxytocin is sometimes referred to as the love hormone or the cuddle hormone because it promotes bonding between people when they’re engaged in intimate activities like hugging, touching, and, of course, having sex.
Oxytocin is normally produced in the hypothalamus and stored in the pituitary gland.
And a little fun fact about the word endorphins:
It’s derived from the words endogenous (produced from within) and morphine, from Morpheus, the god of sleep in Greek mythology.
Prolactin is a hormone that’s linked to sexual satisfaction, and it’s also heavily related to sleep.
This should be a big note to the significant others out there: If you want a healthy, happy woman, then you have to do what you can to ensure that she gets great sleep at night.
Lack of sleep leads to lowered libido and poor sexual health in both sexes. Testosterone is a huge player in this, and data provided by the journal Brain Research found that sleep deprivation intrinsically leads to reduced testosterone in men. Low testosterone can give way to a whole host of issues such as increased storage of body fat, depression, and even erectile dysfunction.
“Sleep deprivation can increase your risk of erectile dysfunction.” This is because testosterone levels plummet when you don’t get enough sleep. And to exacerbate the situation even more, you might not even care too much because low testosterone leads to low sexual desire.
your skin actually has receptors that can pick up light?
Studies show that exposure to room light during usual hours of sleep suppresses melatonin levels by more than 50 percent.
Melatonin has been proven to: •Improve immune system function •Normalize blood pressure •Reduce the proliferation of cancer cells and tumor growth (including leukemia) •Enhance DNA protection and free radical scavenging •Decrease risk of osteoporosis •Decrease risk of plaques in the brain (like those seen with Alzheimer’s disease) •Alleviate migraines and other pain •Improve thyroid function •Improve insulin sensitivity and weight reduction
Get yourself some of the now popular “blackout” curtains that are available from most retailers.
According to the Kelvin scale, blue light is at the farthest end of the spectrum, meaning it occurs at higher temperatures, while red occurs at lower, cooler temperatures. This is the opposite of the cultural associations attributed to colors in which red is “hot” and blue is “
Harvard researchers recommend using dim red lights at night. According to their data, “Red light has the least power to shift circadian rhythm and suppress melatonin.
Himalayan salt lamps feature a soft pinkish-orange tint. Some research indicates that salt lamps can produce a small amount of the health-giving negative ions that we talked about in Chapter
The research shows that you can stay younger, longer if you have more lean muscle on your body.
people who exercised at 7:00 a.m. slept longer and had a deeper sleep cycle than the other two groups. In fact, the morning exercisers had up to 75 percent more time in the reparative “deep sleep” stage at night.
One of the big issues with working out late in the evening is that it significantly raises your core body temperature, and it can take upwards of 4 to 6 hours for your temperature to come down again.
The most accurate biological markers we have that can tell us how long we’re going to live are something called telomeres. Telomeres are like the little plastic end caps on the tips of your shoestrings that keep them from fraying. But instead of it being your shoestrings, telomeres are the end caps on your chromosomes that keep them from breaking down and fraying.
sleep deprivation is one of the single biggest triggers for accelerated loss of your telomere length.
What this means is that those days in our teens and early twenties when we decided to forgo the sleep our bodies need, we could definitely “get by” easier, but we’re unknowingly accelerating our aging so much that we won’t even know what hit us when it all suddenly stops.
Suddenly you don’t have the energy you once did; suddenly you get sick more often; suddenly you start to experience more aches and pains; suddenly it’s incredibly difficult to get rid of unwanted weight. I’m not talking about people in their seventies and eighties—I’m talking about millions of people experiencing this in their late twenties! We’re inadver...
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This is the reason it’s essential that this information about sleeping smarter is shared readily with our kids—especially high school and college students—so that they can be armed with the knowledge that’s going to support them in...
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Running for long distances can radically increase muscle loss through a process called gluconeogenesis.
Muscle is your body’s fat-burning machinery, and if you lose it by running too much, you will depress your metabolism and find that if you don’t keep running day after day, you’ll start getting fat very quickly.
To get the best hormonal response, you need to lift heavy weights.
A polysomnogram is a sleep test that records your brain waves, the oxygen level in your blood, heart rate, and breathing, as well as eye and leg movements
It’s not surprising that world-class athletes utilize sleep as a part of their overall training programs. Athletes like LeBron James, Roger Federer, and Michelle Wie average more than 10 hours of sleep per night.
You can also join the Sleep Smarter Facebook group via the bonus resource guide (sleepsmarterbook.com/bonus) and get matched up with some helpful accountability there, too.
When selecting a one-on-one accountability partner, avoid choosing someone who has a history of struggling with the same challenge that you have.
If your issue is simply getting to the gym, then don’t partner up with someone else who s...
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Research published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine found that a poor night’s sleep led to less frequent and shorter workouts the next day.
Make sure that you’re lifting weights at least 2 days per week.
The experiment revealed that after the phone was switched to “talk” mode (as if you were on a call), brain wave patterns called delta waves remained depressed for more than 1 hour after the phone was turned off. These delta brain waves are the most reliable marker of deep sleep.
When the test subjects were allowed to go to sleep, they ended up remaining awake twice as long after the phone was shut off. They could not
fall into deeper levels of sleep for nearly 1 full hour after the cell phone radiation stopped playing hide-and-go-seek with their brain waves.
Starting the day checking e-mails and messages on your phone immediately puts other people’s priorities ahead of yours. You start the day addressing other people’s needs instead of taking time to care for yourself physically and getting focused on your own goals for the day.
Our appliances and electronic devices emit both electric and magnetic fields known as EMFs.
Electric fields are easily blocked by walls and other objects, but magnetic fields can pass through walls, buildings, and the human body with ease.
EMFs have been found to cause disruption in the communication among th...
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EMFs from our common electronic friends have been linked to leukemia, brain tumors, and breast cancer, along with several other serious issues.
The World Health Organization has now classified cell phone radiation as a Group 2B carcinogen.
study published in Radiation Protection Dosimetry found that melatonin
secretion is significantly disrupted by exposure to electromagnetic fields.
melatonin is not just a critical hormone for regulating our sleep; it’s also an important anticancer hormone. With consistent exposure to EMFs, our body’s melatonin production can be thrown out of whack.
children’s cells reproduce faster, so they’re more susceptible to aggressive cell growth. The biggest issue today is that kids face longer lifetime exposure. Many adults can clearly remember a time when cell phones didn’t exist, whereas all the younger people alive today were born into the widespread use of cell phones. According to Lennart Hardell, MD, PhD, professor in the department of oncology at University Hospital in Örebro, Sweden, people who begin using cell phones heavily as teenagers have four to five times more brain cancer as young adults.
Television, laptops, cell phones—all of these things are kicking out radiation that is disrupting your sleep.
Numerous studies have confirmed that watching television before bed
disrupts your sleep cycle. It might seem like a mundane activity to sit back and watch TV in your bed, but parts of your brain are being set off like fireworks. You’re actually putting a stressor on your brain and body, especially if it’s time to be winding down for bed. Data show that children with televisions in their bedrooms score lower on school exams and are more likely to have sleep problems.
It’s suggested that things like televisions, stereos, air conditioner units, computers, and refrigerators be at least 6 feet away from your bed at night (that means 6 feet in the vertical sense, too!).
