A person’s day to day can be stressful, full of worries and with little time to take a break from daily responsibilities. Looking at this scenario, physical and mental health is getting affected in one way or the other.
Eating a healthy and balanced diet, drinking enough water, practicing a sedentary routine or not, combined with good rest helps to counteract the effects of stress and the fast pace of life.
For many people, meeting these healthy needs is no easy task and they end up trapped in a cycle of fatigue and general malaise. As we mentioned, rest plays a fundamental role in human health. Insomnia affects 4% to 22% of adults and is linked to long-term health problems such as heart disease, diabetes and depression, reports an article in Europa Press.
Therefore, getting good sleep is more important than it is often thought. There can be many reasons for a person not getting enough sleep, from heavy digestion to recurring thoughts that cause extreme worry. But, along with these reasons, there are also details that cause us not to relax as we should.
Looking at the clock, a bad practice for relaxation
Amidst the despair of insomnia, it is a very common gesture to look at the clock and think about the number of hours we have left to sleep until the alarm goes off. Well, okay, that little act of looking at the clock may have more to do with difficulty sleeping than you think.
According to research published in ‘The Primary Care Companion for CNS Disorders’ led by Spencer Dawson, associate clinical professor and associate director of clinical training in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Looking at the clock when we are trying to sleep worsens insomnia and increases the consumption of sleeping pills, as explained above.
The study focused on a sample of nearly 5,000 patients who visited a sleep clinic, who filled out questionnaires about their insomnia, if they took medication to help them sleep, and if they experienced these difficult-to-sleep conditions. Monitor your behavior. The rest, while they were asked to report about any mental disorder. Mediation analysis was performed to find out how all these factors influenced each other.
Thanks to this analysis, it turned out that the time devoted to observing behavior in the event of insomnia greatly affects the consumption of sleeping drugs, as it worsens the symptoms of said insomnia, or what is the same, as much as we The more aware we are that we cannot sleep, the more likely we are to resort to sleeping pills to solve the problem.
As the professor leading the research reported by Europa Press indicates: «People are worried that they are not getting enough sleep, so they start to calculate how long it will take them to go back to sleep and they When will you have to get up to sleep? This is not an activity that facilitates your ability to sleep—the more stressed you are, the more difficult it is going to be.”
As a result of this discovery, Professor Dawson assures that, in the face of this problem, there is a simple solution, which he advises as to what people can do: «Flip or flip your clock, get rid of smart watch, put away the phone so they don’t just look at the time”, to which he added “there is no case in which looking at the clock is particularly useful”.
