This Awesome Technique Can Improve Your Sleep Quality

Guided sleep meditation is a way to allow you to relax your body and to let go of worried thoughts before you drift off to sleep. Like other types of meditation, this kind involves shifting your focus from your mind to your bodily sensations. Practicing this type of meditation on a regular basis has been found to improve sleep quality. Keep reading to learn all about it.

According to the American Sleep Association, around 30% of adults have short-term problems with insomnia, while approximately 10% suffer from chronic insomnia. Furthermore, around 33% of adults claim that they get less than 7 hours of a sleep each night. 

 

Better sleep quality can contribute to stress reduction as well as the development of a stronger immune system. However, getting restful sleep can be tricky if you are a victim of anxiety and stress. Many sleep issues start with your thought processes at night, and this is precisely where guided sleep meditation can be of use. 

 

Basically, guided sleep meditation is simply meditating before going to sleep, typically while already in bed. While you can actually practice sleep meditation by yourself, guided practice usually consists of you listening to an audio recording that will improve your ability to fall asleep and stay asleep all night long.

The Benefits of Guided Sleep Meditation 

 

Meditation helps you to be in the present moment and to move outside your head. When you lie down at night, previously suppressed thoughts suddenly start racing around in your mind. Without any external distractions, it can be difficult to control your thoughts which could end up leading to anxiety or depression. 

 

Through guided sleep meditation, you end up ridding yourself of such thoughts, thereby activating your parasympathetic nervous system, which in turn allows you to reduce your heart rate and slow down your breathing rate. This can be so effective that you may find yourself drifting off to sleep in the middle of the meditation practice. 

 

After practicing sleep meditation for a number of weeks, you should begin to notice daytime benefits of the practice too. This is because getting enough sleep at night is related to how you feel during the day.

How to Practice Guided Sleep Meditation 

To practice guided sleep meditation, you will first need to get your hands on an audio recording, such as the ones provided by UCLA. Many others are also available on Youtube or other websites. 

 

Typical guided sleep meditations will redirect your focus away from your thoughts and towards your physical body. During such meditations, you will mentally scan the various regions of your body from top to bottom, becoming more aware of the different sensations such as tension, heaviness, tingling, temperature, and tightness. As you do this, you will be told to gently relax and release tension by breathing into that part of your body.

You will also be instructed to allow your troubled thoughts to move beyond you as if they are leaves floating down a river or clouds floating in the sky. As you do this, your body will begin to relax and soften and you will begin to breathe more deeply. 

 

Guided sleep meditation may also incorporate other practices, such as breathing exercises, visualizing peaceful scenes, or even focusing on being grateful and showing loving kindness to yourself.

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

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Why the Coronavirus Seems to Hit Men Harder Than Women

Women mount stronger immune responses to infection, scientists say. And in China, men smoke in much greater numbers.

The coronavirus that originated in China has spread fear and anxiety around the world. But while the novel virus has largely spared one vulnerable group — children — it appears to pose a particular threat to middle-aged and older adults, particularly men.

This week, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention published the largest analysis of coronavirus cases to date. Although men and women have been infected in roughly equal numbers, researchers found, the death rate among men was 2.8 percent, compared with 1.7 percent among women.

Men also were disproportionately affected during the SARS and MERS outbreaks, which were caused by coronaviruses. More women than men were infected by SARS in Hong Kong in 2003, but the death rate among men was 50 percent higher, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Some 32 percent of men infected with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome died, compared with 25.8 percent of women. Young adult men also died at higher rates than female peers during the influenza epidemic of 1918.

A number of factors may be working against men in the current epidemic, scientists say, including some that are biological, and some that are rooted in lifestyle.

When it comes to mounting an immune response against infections, men are the weaker sex.

“This is a pattern we’ve seen with many viral infections of the respiratory tract — men can have worse outcomes,” said Sabra Klein, a scientist who studies sex differences in viral infections and vaccination responses at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“We’ve seen this with other viruses. Women fight them off better,” she added.

Women also produce stronger immune responses after vaccinations, and have enhanced memory immune responses, which protect adults from pathogens they were exposed to as children.
“There’s something about the immune system in females that is more exuberant,” said Dr. Janine Clayton, director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health.

But there’s a high price, she added: Women are far more susceptible to autoimmune diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, in which the immune system shifts into overdrive and attacks the body’s own organs and tissues.

Nearly 80 percent of those with autoimmune diseases are women, Dr. Clayton noted.

The reasons women have stronger immune responses aren’t entirely clear, and the research is still at an early stage, experts caution.

One hypothesis is that women’s stronger immune systems confer a survival advantage to their offspring, who imbibe antibodies from mothers’ breast milk that help ward off disease while the infants’ immune systems are still developing.

A stew of biological factors may be responsible, including the female sex hormone estrogen, which appears to play a role in immunity, and the fact that women carry two X chromosomes, which contain immune-related genes. Men, of course, carry only one.

Experiments in which mice were exposed to the SARS coronavirus found that the males were more susceptible to infection than the females, a disparity that increased with age.

The male mice developed SARS at lower viral exposures, had a lower immune response and were slower to clear the virus from their bodies. They suffered more lung damage, and died at higher rates, said Dr. Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology at the University of Iowa who was the senior author of the study.

When researchers blocked estrogen in the infected females or removed their ovaries, they were more likely to die, but blocking testosterone in male mice made no difference, indicating that estrogen may play a protective role.

“It’s an exaggerated model of what happens in humans,” Dr. Perlman said. “The differences between men and women are subtle — in mice, it’s not so subtle.”

Health behaviors that differ by sex in some societies may also play a role in disparate responses to infections.

China has the largest population of smokers in the world — 316 million people — accounting for nearly one-third of the world’s smokers and 40 percent of tobacco consumption worldwide. But just over 2 percent of Chinese women smoke, compared with more than half of all men.

Chinese men also have higher rates of Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure than women, both of which increase the risk of complications following infection with the coronavirus. Rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are almost twice as high among Chinese men as among women.

In the United States, women are more proactive about seeking health care than men, and some small studies have found the generalization applies to Chinese students at universities in the United States, as well.

In unpublished studies, Chinese researchers have emphasized that patients whose diagnoses were delayed, or who had severe pneumonia when they were first diagnosed, were at greatest risk of dying.

One study of 4,021 patients with the coronavirus emphasized the importance of early detection, particularly in older men. And men have been turning up in hospitals with more advanced disease.
But in areas of China outside Hubei Province, the disease's epicenter and where the majority of those affected are concentrated, the patterns are different: The disease appears to have dramatically lower mortality rates, and men are being infected at much higher rates than women, according to the Chinese C.D.C. analysis.

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