Why can't you sleep with your head facing east and your feet facing west? Is there any scientific basis for this claim?
Sleep is very important to human health. Sleep can make your body rest in time and keep you healthy. According to statistics, in a person's life, sleep time occupies about 1/3 of the time, which shows how important a role sleep plays in a person's life.
A person can maintain adequate sleep time every day, sleep well, sleep well, and live longer or longer. In the folk, there are also some sayings about sleeping, such as "you can't sleep with the lights on", "you can't sleep with your feet facing west and head facing east" and so on.
Why can't I sleep with the light on? Why can't people turn their feet to the west and their heads to the east when they sleep? Is there any scientific basis for these two sentences? Below, I will tell you in detail.
- Why can't you "turn your feet west and head east" when you sleep? I finally found out today
The quality of sleep depends on many factors, such as a person's sleeping environment, sleeping habits, etc. These factors can affect a person's sleep quality. However, in addition to these factors, there is another factor that is easily overlooked, which is the magnetic field in the human body .
Speaking of magnetic fields, everyone must be familiar with it. The entire earth is surrounded by magnetic fields, and everything in the world also has magnetic fields, so there are also magnetic fields in the human body. There is a saying that when the magnetic field of the human body is in the same direction as the magnetic field of the earth, the human body will not be affected by the magnetic field of the earth.
Therefore, the folks began to spread the saying that "you should never sleep with your feet facing west and head facing east, but should sleep in the north-south direction".
However, this claim is not scientific. Studies have shown that the earth's magnetic field is so large that it cannot be seen or touched, and it has almost no effect on the human body. The reason that really affects people's sleep quality lies in people's sleep environment, as well as people's health and mental state.
Therefore, the so-called "sleep with feet west and head east" is wrong.
So, about the "can't sleep with the lights on" mentioned above, is this sentence correct? Below, I will reveal the secret to you.
In March 2022, researchers from Northwestern University in the United States published a new research paper in the journal PANS, which shows that sleeping with the lights on is very harmful to people's health. The researchers selected 20 healthy young people and divided the 20 into two groups, the first group spent the night in a low-light environment, and the second group spent the night in a medium-light environment.
Soon, researchers discovered that exposure to stronger light in a sleeping state caused the body to enter a higher alert state and a person's heart rate increased. This nighttime increase in heart pressure may lead to adverse effects on a person's heart health.
At the same time, the researchers also unexpectedly found that the subjects in the second group had increased insulin resistance early in the morning. The so-called insulin resistance refers to the decrease of the body's sensitivity to insulin, the lack of utilization of glucose in the blood, causing the pancreas to produce more insulin, but the phenomenon of increasing blood sugar.
Studies have shown that sleeping with the lights on for a long time will greatly increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes. Therefore, the anecdote "can't sleep with the light on" is correct, and for the sake of health, people should keep it in mind and strictly follow it.
- How terrible is lack of sleep: it makes you stupid and forgetful! It's a chronic suicide!
Obviously, lack of sleep can be described as a hundred harms and no benefits. Below I will introduce some of the harms caused by lack of sleep.
Lack of sleep can cause a person's brain to slow down and memory loss. Studies have shown that sleep is the best way for the brain to eliminate fatigue. Long-term lack of sleep will cause the brain to be in a state of fatigue for a long time. If the brain cannot get a rest, the work efficiency will naturally decrease, so the reaction speed will decrease and the memory will decrease.
Back in 2017, a study was published in the journal Nature Medicine, which claimed that "lack of sleep is as harmful to the brain as drunkenness." The researchers took 12 test subjects who had a habit of staying up late, implanted electrodes in their brains, and had them respond to the images as fast as they could.
Experiments have shown that the deeper the degree of staying up late, the slower the electrode reflexes in the test subjects' brains, especially in the temporal lobe, which is involved in visual recognition, memory and other activities. This also explains why lack of sleep leads to slower brain responses and memory loss.
Lack of sleep promotes obesity. In September 2020, the Scripps Translational Research Institute in the United States published an article in the JAMA sub-journal that obese adults have shorter sleep time, and obesity tends to reduce sleep quality and enter a vicious circle.
The researchers analyzed more than 120,000 anonymous data and monitored sleep for up to two years. Data shows how much sleep obese adults spend relative to leaner people
Generally shorter and more irregular sleep times.
The study pointed out that the average sleep time of obese people was 6.62 hours, while the average sleep time of people with a BMI index below 30 (the obesity standard) was 6.87 hours, a difference of 0.25 hours.
Studies have shown that maintaining a stable sleep pattern may be as important as getting enough sleep time. From the data analysis results, people with a higher BMI index have more or less sleep per night.
It is necessary to explain here that the so-called BMI index (Body Mass Index) is the body mass index , which is an important standard for evaluating the degree of fatness, thinness and health of a person. The calculation formula is weight (kg) divided by height (meters). squared value.
Therefore, studies have shown that sleep deprivation and obesity constitute a vicious cycle of "lack of sleep-promoting obesity-obesity worsening sleep quality".
Staying up late is very bad for your heart health. In March 2022, a new study published in the journal "Scientific Reports" found that staying up late for a long time increases the risk of heart disease by 141%.
The researchers collected data from participants in the study from 2004-2009 and 2011-2014, some of whom wore actigraphy to monitor their sleep.
The researchers linked measures of sleep regularity, sleep efficiency, and sleep duration to the risk of heart disease in these subjects. After sorting and analyzing more than 7,000 experimental data, the researchers established a Poisson regression model. The model showed that sleep health was significantly associated with heart disease risk.
If you break down the numbers into numbers, each additional unit of poor sleep quality increases the risk of heart disease by 141%, while the risk of heart disease decreases by 42% for people who do not stay up late.
- One-year clinical trial: treatment of insomnia, improvement of sleep quality, better resistance exercise!
From the previous description, it is not difficult to know that adequate sleep, especially high-quality sleep, is very important to people's physical and mental health.
According to statistics, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases have become the “number one killer” of global health, claiming 18.6 million lives last year alone, 86% more than the number of deaths due to cancer worldwide.
Many studies have shown that lack of sleep is related to obesity, diabetes and other diseases, which will increase the risk of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases. Sleeping too long or too little has also been shown to increase the risk of stroke and heart disease . Therefore, it is very necessary to have a sufficient amount of time and high quality sleep.