In a recent Swedish study by researcher Jon Axelson at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, it was found that people were rated as being less attractive when they were sleep deprived verses people who were well rested.

It is also difficult for you to be attractive when an admirer is staring into your gapping maw when you’re letting out a big, lion like yawn.

So if you’re getting your eight hours of beauty sleep that’s great, but if not you may look and feel like you’ve been rode hard and put away wet.

Problems from a Lack of Beauty Sleep

Being sleep deprived can lead to stress which leads to an increase in abdominal fat and weight gain.

Your skin will look dull, tired and be dehydrated. There will be more lines and wrinkles and you will suffer from premature aging of your skin. Imagine an old baseball glove.

You will look and feel older. It’s hard to feel good when you’re shuffling through the day, praying for it to end.
 
You may have shadows and dark circles under your eyes. I get bags under my eyes that are so big that when I go to the airport I have to check my face.

You will have bloodshot and puffy eyes. Unless you’re a vampire or a zombie, red eyes aren’t for you.

Your hair will look dull and lifeless. Wow, this is bad. You know you’re not getting enough sleep when your hair is even tired.

When you’re too exhausted at the end of the day you’re apt not to give your face a deep cleaning and exfoliation and to apply a night cream.

If you’re too tired in the morning you may be too sleepy to put your face on properly. Ever wonder out with one eyebrow?

Get Your Beauty Sleep

Getting your beauty sleep can lessen the appearance of wrinkles in your face and neck as perspiration during your sleep helps to moisturize your skin. You will also help your skin because it renews itself from the harmful effects of the sun, dust, and pollution as your body produces growth hormone in the early hours of the night when you’re sleeping.

A good night sleep will allow you to feel well rested which will put you in a better emotional mood so you will feel marvellous and hence, you will look marvellous.

It not called beauty sleep for nothing, so wind down with a good bedtime ritual, keep your bedroom dark and quiet and look your best next morning.

Dead tired

One of the hardest things students have to learn in school is how to stay awake during class. Everyone has been there and it’s funny to watch someone else fight falling asleep in class, a victim of “The Bob”.

First your eyelids seem to be getting heavier by the minute, your breathing is getting shallower then your eyes shut even as you fight to keep them open. Then you’re momentarily jolted back into semi-consciousness as you snap your head back upright after it had fallen forward onto your chest or back until you were looking at the ceiling.

Maybe it was a late night studying, yeah right, stick with that story. More likely some gaming that couldn’t end until the end of the next round, or level 9000, whichever came first, or some late night TV, watching videos or visiting your favourite social networking sites.

High school is where many poor sleep habits start and they are many times worse in college. Apart from missing a lot of information, these bad habits will often follow you into adulthood and possibly dog you for the rest of your life.

25 Ways to Help Stay Awake in Class

1. Participate in discussions or ask questions. The teacher doesn’t have to know you’re doing it to stay awake
2. Sit up straight. Slouching is a sleep precursor
3. Chew gum or mints
4. Suck on cough drops
5. Concentrate on what the teacher is saying
6. Doodle
7. Take lots of notes
8. Bounce your crossed leg up and down
9. Shift around in your chair
10. Sip cold water
11. Sit at the front of the class
12. Move your feet
13. Pinch yourself
14. Stare wide-eyed into a light
15. Bite your tongue
16. Play with your pen
17. Don’t lean on your hands
18. Work on your to-do list or shopping list
19. Avoid mid-week late nights or all-nighters
20. Maintain a regular sleep schedule
21. Try to get 8 ½ to 9 ½ hours of sleep every night
22. Exercise in the morning or walk/ride to school
23. Eat breakfast for an extra energy boost
24. Eat healthy snacks instead of chocolate bars or chips
25. Eat a light lunch – avoid the hoggie or turkey sub

If you follow this list of 25 time-tested ways to help you stay awake in class, you may develop some good sleep habits and Buddha willing, maybe you’ll learn something.

What works best for you? Leave a comment below.

Many people gave up a good nights sleep in order to save some money and hunt for bargains during Black Friday – the official kickoff to the spending frenzy known as Christmas. Some of you got up early to line up, others camped out overnight and more than a few got up in the wee hours of the morning to drive for hours to make the store opening.

And then again today on Cyber Monday, there will be many a bleary eyed, online zombie shopper cruising from website to website in search for a bargain, compare prices and research the features on the clock/radio/toothbrush/mp3 player they are looking to buy for Aunt Sally.

Since you are in the shopping zone, it’s lucky you crammed eight pounds of food into yourself on Thanksgiving to keep you going for the long haul. I always wondered when my aunt ask “Do you want any more? I’m just going to throw it out anyways.” Sure, my stomach is a garburator, pile it on.

With the kids out of school for a few days, they took the opportunity to stay up late playing COD Black Ops, texting their friends and checking their Facebook every five minutes so they don’t miss out on anything.

Giving up sleep by staying up all night or getting up extremely early will reset your body’s internal clock and your sleep / wake cycle will be out of sync for a few days. Over eating can disrupt your sleep with indigestion and heartburn. You can toss and turn all night waiting for your body to digest all the food.

So today and probably tomorrow as well, you are going to feel exhausted. I had to wake my son up this morning and he was a pitiful site as he dragged his keister out the door to school. No doubt there will be some sleepy people at work today.

You can minimize some of the effects of today’s exhaustion if in the future you put a little more value on your sleep and limit drastic changes to your sleep cycle. If you stayed up late, don’t sleep in until noon but get up at your regular time. Take smaller portions so you can sample all of your favourite dishes and not feel blotted at bedtime. And if you will be up for long periods, try to sneak in a nap or two keep you energy levels up.

Further reading: Weekends, Circadian Rhythms

Jet lag occurs when you fly across one or more time zones. You seem to go through a “time warp” either speeding up or slowing down your daily rhythm. Your circadian rhythm is disrupted for one to several days until your body adjusts to the new time it is trying to run on.

Some jet lag symptoms can include insomnia, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, irritability, constipation and the urge to complete tax forms.

Here’s a top ten list of jet lag reducing tricks of frequent fliers

1. Eat light and avoid alcohol and caffeine for a few days before your flight
2. For a few days before your flight, try going to sleep earlier if you are heading east and stay up a little later if your are going west
3. Try eating a light meal before you flight and nothing during the trip
4. Adjust your sleep/wake time to you new destination a few days before you leave
5. Drink water and fruit juices on the plane to keep your self hydrated. Avoid alcohol and caffeine
6. If it’s night where you are going, sleep on the plane (try eye shades and ear plugs)
7. Try melatonin to help tell you brain that it’s time for sleep
8. Get into your new time zone as soon as you land
9. Light exercise outside to help you adjust to daytime
10. Use light therapy – daylight to waken up and a darkened room or eye shades to get to sleep

With a little preparation ahead of time, you can reduce the effects of jet lag during your next trip.

Phase shift disorder occurs when your sleep/wake cycle is out of step with most of the people  around you. They may go to bed at a normal time like 11pm and get up at 7am and you go to bed at 3am and get up at noon.  You miss meeting, meals with the family, find it difficult to find a job that conforms to your hours and you miss morning cartoons.

Sometimes there is a physical reason like it’s just the way you are wired. You don’t feel tired until the early hours and are a zombie if you have to get up at 6am. So forget being an accountant and look into stand up comedy, or another occupation that lets you work your own hours. I always wanted to be a stand up comic but I’m a closet extrovert and I’m in bed before 9pm. Now if comedy clubs would run matinees, then I might give it a try.

Sometimes the reason is psychological. You’re right and the rest of the world is wrong. Stupid world.

A lot of the times a phase shift disorder is caused by lifestyle choices.  You just got into the habit of staying up later and later until you shifted your sleep/wake schedule out of sync with those around you.

I knew a guy who used to get up at 4pm then smoke pot and drink beer for 16 hours then go to bed at 8am. He claimed he couldn’t function during the day. His problem was solved when he knocked up his girlfriend then had to get a J-O-B. Funny how that worked.

You don’t have to make a baby or chew gravel to solve a phase shift disorder. Try to adjust the time you go to bed by ½ hour earlier and get up ½ hour earlier. Keep this schedule to a few days then move it back another ½ hour. Gradually you can get your body back on a more conformal sleep/wake schedule.

You can also try using light therapy, that is, a light box to help reset your internal clock. The full spectrum lights can help signal your brain that it is day time and that it is time to wake up.

You go to bed pretty much the same time during the week but come Friday night, you’re coming home with the cat and waving good morning to your neighbour as he heads off for the early shift. You crawl into bed and accept for the occasional bathroom trip and fridge stopover to guzzle some hopefully non-expired liquid of some sort, you sleep until the afternoon.

When you do get up, the sun is blazing a hole through your slit opened eyes, you have a hangover that could kill an elephant and you seem to whiz orange juice. Some people can recover enough to do it all over again Saturday night, but regardless, Sunday is a write off and you know why Monday is referred to as Hell day (sometimes GWB Day).

Sleeping late on the weekend can interfere with your sleep until the middle of the following week and getting up at 6am Monday morning can feel like 3am for your body.

If you’re sleeping in on the weekend without the self mutilation of the party animal, it may be a sign you are sleep deprived during the week. If you need 8 hours of sleep every night and you are only getting 6 hours, then you build up a sleep debt that you try to repay on the weekend. Either way, you will mess up your sleep / wake cycle by varying the times you go to bed and the time your get up.

The only way to minimize the effects of the weekend lifestyle choice is try to get to bed at your regular time and if you don’t, then get up at your regular time regardless of when you went to bed. The key to a good nights sleep is consistency of your sleep/wake times.

More car accidents occur during Monday morning rush hour because people are sleep deprived from the weekend. And you thought it was because everyone else on the road is a jerk and can’t drive as good as you.

I spent years working shift work. Some people like it, but I always found that it often took me days to adjust to the new shift (I changed every week). Changing shifts is like jet lag where you are moved into a different time zone.  You can feel tired, irritable, suffer from foggy thinking and can have an upset stomach, bowel problems and the urge to vacuum.

Shift workers are also more likely to have sleep disorders, depression, high blood pressure, heart disease, abuse drugs and alcohol, be sick more often and have three buttocks.

I used to change from days to nights then to afternoons. During the time off between day shift and the night shift I was moving to, I would force myself to stay up as long as I possibly could to prepare myself for staying up all night. Rather than taking three to four days to adjust to the new shift, I could be o.k. after one or two days.

I once worked straight nights for quite a while and when I moved to day shift, keeping awake during the day wasn’t too bad, but I would wake up at 2am starving because that was the time I used to eat my dinner when I was working nights. I had a small snack for a few days then stopped to allow my body’s rhythm to adjust to my new work / sleep schedule.

Shift can also disrupt your family and social life. You miss family meals, your kid’s hockey game or recital and getting a date at 2am in the industrial area of town may get you a night in the city’s hoosegow with thugs, thieves and various unsavoury ruffians like accountants.

Contrary to what you may have heard, a circadian rhythm is not a drumming circle. A sleep gene, along with your body’s hormones, is influenced by sunlight and darkness and to some extent by exercise, eating and general lifestyle to create your sleep / wake cycle, or circadian rhythm. Simon Cowell may also affect your rhythm and either put you to sleep or keep you awake.

The morning light helps kick start the brain into wakefulness. This is one good reason to have dark window coverings in your bedroom, unless you want to get up at dawn. Full alertness usually only comes after nine and a half gallons of coffee.

Your circadian rhythm affects your alertness, how tired you are, your ability to perform physical and mental tasks and your body temperature (which goes down in the evening and rises before wakefulness). It also causes your neighbour to start cutting his lawn at 6am Sunday morning.

You can change your circadian rhythm to some degree to better suit your lifestyle and your body’s requirements for sleep. If you need to awake at 7am to allow you time to get ready to go to work and if you require the average 8 hours of sleep, then you should be going to bed 15-20 minutes before 11pm (the extra time is for winding down with light reading and for falling asleep).

If you find you have to get up earlier, try 6:30am and go to bed a little before 10:30pm. Adjust your time 30 minutes forward or backward until you find the times that work best for you. Stick with your new bedtime for a week before you change it again.

Keep to your sleep / wake rhythm during the week and on weekends. If you stay out late Friday or Saturday night dancing, drinking or delivering religious pamphlets, get up at your regular wake up time.

To nap or not to nap, that is the question. To nap or not has more to do with the cultural acceptability of napping than whether is it good or bad for you. In many cultures of the world an afternoon nap, or siesta, is accepted practice. In most of our western societies a person napping is viewed lazy and napping is a waste of productive time.

If you are sleeping well at night then napping during the day may very well interfere with your night time sleep. If on the other hand you are sleep deprived, then having a nap will reenergize you for the rest of the day and not affect your sleep at night.

Whether a nap may be good for you or not is often a mute point as there are not many companies that will allow their employees to nap during the day at work. You may also have a job that doesn’t allow you the time for a nap during your workday.

If you do have the opportunity and you feel there is a need for a nap then by all means give napping a try.

Taking a 15-20 minute nap early in the afternoon may help you if you are tired during the day by making up for lost sleep during the night. Try to keep your nap to about 20 minutes. This way you won’t fall into a deep sleep and feel groggy if awakened before a complete 90 minute sleep cycle completes. Set a timer with an alarm for 20 minutes or shriek awake with the next new tax, this is also every 20 minutes.

If a 20 minute nap does not refresh you, try a 90 minute one. That way you have completed an entire sleep cycle and should not feel groggy when you wake up.

Whether you take a 20 or 90 minute nap, treat them like your night time sleep. Find a quiet, dark place where you will not be disturbed. Turn off phones if you can and put up a do not disturb sign on the door. Set an alarm so you can get to sleep without being paranoid about sleeping too long that it keeps you awake.

If you often nap now and you have trouble falling asleep at night or staying asleep throughout the night, you should stop napping during the day and see if your sleep at night improves.

For most people, napping will disrupt their normal sleep/wake routine and it will disturb their sleep at night. If you have young children or are a new parent grapping a nap when your child goes to sleep may be your only chance for any sleep.

My cat naps 400 times a day and it doesn’t disturb her sleep one bit, whereas it doesn’t help me and even makes me sleepier the rest of the afternoon. It also gives me hair balls for some unknown reason.

Do you take a nap? Leave your comments below.