Fall Asleep in 60 Seconds with These Breathing Tricks

There's no question that many of us would like to improve the quality of our sleep each night. Tossing, turning, waking up frequently, struggling to fall back asleep -- and that's if we can even drift off in the first place.

We are notorious for allowing bright screens into the bedroom and daily doses of anxiety to hit the pillow alongside our heads -- seemingly subconscious habits that leave us annoyingly alert rather than calm and relaxed.

One of the best ways to bring the body into its relaxed state is one we shouldn't have to think about: breathing. You read that right. Proper inhales and exhales have become a lost art among today's fast-paced, highly stressed society, robbing us of one of the best (not to mention free) tools for logging quality shut-eye. Taking the time to address your breathing could be just what you need to shut down your stress and solve your sleep problems, killing the proverbial two birds with one soothing stone.

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The Myth of the 8-hour Sleep

By Stephanie Hegarty/ Source: BBC

We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.

Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.

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Sleep Your Way to Better Sex

Source: Digital Sandman

Remember having sex when it was so all-consuming and thrilling it was all you could think about for days? Days of anticipation, mind-blowing, body-shaking sex, then remembering it for days or even years afterwards…

Either that was a long time ago for you and you’d like to have that kind of sex in your life again. Or you’re having that kind of sex at this point in your life. Whichever description you identify with, you could be making a mistake that is reducing the quantity and quality of your sex life. You might not be getting enough good sleep.

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Tibetan Yoga Helps Sleep

By Kate Ramsayer / Houston Chronicle

East meets West in one corner of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, where researchers are using the techniques of Western medicine to examine the efficacy of Eastern practices.

Along with his colleagues, Dr. Lorenzo Cohen of M.D. Anderson recently published a report in the journal Cancer that found cancer patients who participated in a Tibetan yoga course noticed improvements in their sleep patterns.

"It was quite remarkable to us that we were actually able to have an impact on patients' sleep," said Cohen, the director of the integrative medicine center at M.D. Anderson and an associate professor in the behavioral science department.

"Cancer patients' sleep can be so disruptive, so to have designed a program that significantly improved their sleep seems quite beneficial."

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