Old people are known to be lousy sleepers, but a new study suggests it might all be in their heads, at least for many of them.

Medications, poor health, bad bedtime habits (such as watching a movie or drinking coffee or booze), circadian rhythms, and too much or too little in their personal “sleep bank” have all taken the blame for seniors’ common complaints of insomnia.

Elizabeth Klerman of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School set out to clear it up once and for all with a controlled study of 18 subjects ages 60 to 76 and 35 younger subjects, ages 18 to 32, all healthy and not on medication that might affect sleep.

Even people who had crossed more than one time zone in the past 3 months were disqualified, as well as those who had worked night or rotating shifts in the past three years.

After monitoring their sleep at home, the subjects were regularly instructed to lie quietly with their eyes closed and to try to sleep, for as much as 16 hours daily for several days in a row. They had all the time in the world.

It’s not necessarily laziness that makes people hit the “snooze” button in the morning.

Most likely, your body clock is mismatched with the demands of your life.

Your clock is controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a part of the brain that controls the body’s biological rhythms.

But, says Jean Matheson, a sleep-disorders specialist, these preset natural rhythms often don’t align with daily realities—work or school start times cannot be adjusted to fit a person’s sleep schedule.

People who have trouble crawling out of bed probably have an inner clock set to late wake-up and sleep times, a condition known as phase delay.

It is possible to adjust your phase-delayed body clock, Matheson says, but at a price: No sleeping in on the weekends.

“When people sleep late on weekends, they revert to their natural phase-delayed rhythm,” she explains. This makes it harder to wake up early on weekdays. You can train yourself to wake up earlier, Matheson says, by setting your alarm 15 minutes earlier each day.

Exposure to artificial light in the evening can also cause phase delay. The brain is very sensitive to light, and too much of it just before bed—from computer screens, televisions or bright reading lights—can trick the brain into thinking it’s daytime.

Raising kids can be a touchy subject to discuss. Every parent has their own philosophy in raising children.

Some of you can be more lenient while other parents can be strict.

As soon as your baby returns from hospital, you’ll start making choices based on your belief and values.

In the similar way, some of you can be totally against co-sleeping, while others consider it as a part of attachment parenting.

However, there are two sides to this particular co-sleeping issue. You can have benefits such as healthy form of parent-child relationship from safe co-sleeping.

But, for some families, co-sleeping can prove inconvenient and also dangerous, at times.

Is co-sleeping safe?

Despite of possible benefits, the U.S. Consumer product safety commission warns parents not to encourage co-sleeping in their children and it is not recommended to place the newborns to sleep in adult beds.

This sort of co-sleeping practice can put your child at risk of suffocation and strangulation. Even, the American Academy of pediatrics agrees with it.

However, in many non-western cultures, co-sleeping is wide spread practice. It is believed that the differences in mattresses, bedding and other sleeping and cultural practices may account to lower the risks involved with co-sleeping.

Obstructive sleep apnea may make nighttime heart attacks more likely than daytime heart attacks, a new study shows.

In obstructive sleep apnea, the upper airway becomes completely or partially blocked, interrupting regular breathing, several times per night.

The new study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, recommends that people who have heart attacks while sleeping at night be screened for obstructive sleep apnea.

The study included 92 people who had recently had a heart attack.

The patients reported what time their heart attack symptoms started. They also took part in a sleep study about 17 days after their heart attack. The sleep study showed that 64 patients had obstructive sleep apnea.

The patients with and without sleep apnea were pretty similar in their backgrounds and medication use. But the timing of their heart attacks was different.

The patients with obstructive sleep apnea were six times more likely to have had their heart attack between midnight and 6 a.m. than during the rest of the day. In contrast, the patients without sleep apnea were more likely to have had their heart attack between 6 a.m. and noon.

Growing evidence indicates that exposure to irregular patterns of light and darkness can cause the human circadian system to fall out of synchrony with the 24-hour solar day, negatively affecting human health - but scientists have been unable to effectively study the relationship between circadian disruptions and human maladies.

A study by researchers in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting Research Center (LRC) provides a new framework for studying the effects of circadian disruption on breast cancer, obesity [Effects of Obesity], sleep disorders, and other health problems.

Light and dark patterns are the major synchronizer of circadian rhythms - the biological cycles that repeat approximately every 24 hours - to the solar day.

Inadequate or irregular light exposure can cause circadian rhythm disruptions that are believed to manifest into a variety of health ailments.

However, ecological studies to measure human light exposure are virtually nonexistent, making it difficult to determine if, in fact, light-induced circadian disruption directly affects human health.

LRC researchers have created a small, head-mounted device to measure an individual’s daily rest and activity patterns, as well as exposure to circadian light - short-wavelength light, particularly natural light from the blue sky, that stimulates the circadian system.

According to the researchers, postmenopausal women who regularly sleep more than nine hours a night may have an increased risk of ischemic stroke.

Compared to women sleeping seven hours, the risk of ischemic stroke was 60-70 percent higher for those sleeping nine hours or more, said lead author Jiu-Chiuan Chen, M.D., Sc.D., assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health in Chapel Hill.

“After accounting for all common clinical conditions predictive of stroke, we found this increase was statistically significant: sleeping nine hours or more is strongly associated with increased risk of ischemic stroke,” he said.

Researchers also found that women who slept six hours or less [Less sleep] were at 14 percent greater stroke risk than those who slept seven hours a night.

Nearly twice as many women reported sleeping less than six hours (8.3 percent) than those who reported sleeping nine hours or more (4.6 percent).

“The prevalence in women of having long sleep duration is much lower than having sleep duration less than six hours. So the overall public health impact of short sleep is probably larger than long sleep,” Chen said.

If your sleep is being interrupted by the annoying habit of snoring, learning different ways to get better snoring relief is the best solution for your problem.

However, certain extreme circumstances or loud snoring, gasping breaths imply more serious health condition and need immediate and effective medical treatment.

Fortunately, getting better snoring relief is not as tough as you think. You can make these simple and necessary lifestyle changes to get better snoring relief.

Change your sleep position!

Usually snoring mainly takes place when the soft palate, tongue, tonsils, uvula and other muscles in your back throat rub each other and as a result generates a vibrating sound during sleep. Snoring occurs only when you lie on back and your tongue falls back.

So, if you are among those snorers who lie on their back, sleep on your sides that will help you to get better snoring relief.

Avoid alcohol and other sedatives!

Anything that causes sedation such as low dose alcohol or sleeping pills also causes snoring, as they tend to suppress your breathing process. So, avoid drinking alcohol or using other sedatives to get better sleep, in turn to stop snoring during your sleep.

Girls moving through adolescence may experience unhealthy levels of weight gain, but the reasons for this are not always clear.

In fact, many potential causes of weight gain are easily overlooked.

A new study analyzes the effect of Internet usage, sleep, and alcohol and coffee consumption on weight gain in adolescent girls.

Dr. Catherine Berkey and colleagues from Harvard Medical School, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and Washington University led the Growing Up Today Study (GUTS), which surveyed more than 5000 girls between the ages of 14 and 21 years from all 50 states.

They asked the girls to reflect on their weekly habits over the past year and report the following: 1) hours of sleep per night; 2) time spent on the Internet (excluding time for work or school); 3) number of alcoholic beverages consumed;[Effects of alcohol on sleep] and 4) number of coffee beverages consumed.

The girls also reported their height and weight at the beginning and end of the one-year study.

The researchers found that more Internet time, more alcohol consumption, and less sleep resulted in extra weight gain during the study year.