Brain and Behaviour
Alcohol disrupts sleep and how to drink less without trying, a little exercise goes a long way, and can drinking cold water and wearing shorts aid weight control? For RSS feeds, click on http://www.podcastmachine.com/podcasts/8966 and then the ‘RSS feeds’ button to the right. For help regarding the playing, downloading and subscribing of the podcasts, click […]
Brain and Behaviour
I was talking with someone yesterday who is generally fit and well, but has a bit of a ‘sleep issue’. He sometimes fails to get off to sleep easily. But even when he does, he tends to wake several times during the night, and can often have difficulty getting back to sleep again. It’s sometimes […]
Men's Health
I’m a huge advocate of sleep. There is a mass of evidence which bears testament to the importance of sleep’s role in physical and psychological wellbeing. The other thing is – it’s free. In recent years there has been growing interest in the scientific community regarding the relationship sleep has with risk of obesity. Generally, […]
Brain and Behaviour
I came across this story earlier this week. It concerns a study presented at a Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Minneapolis in the US. The details are somewhat sketchy from the report, but here’s what I think the researchers did and what their findings were. 262 teenagers with an average age of 17 were rated […]
Brain and Behaviour
Today’s post on drbriffa.com is its 1000th. I’m marking the occasion with a personal account of my health and wellbeing transformation over my life. Many people who don’t know me imagine, given my profession, that I’m a naturally health-conscious and relatively clean-living individual. Actually, that’s not true at all. For long periods in my earlier […]
Brain and Behaviour
Sleep and insulin resistance, ‘solar power’ for human beings and emotional eating.
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
There was an interesting, I think, study published this week in which the association between sleep habits and certain metabolic processes were assessed in diabetics and non-diabetics [1]. The study assessed sleep habits by self reports and something known as ‘actigraphy’ (the measuring of sleep through a device worn on the wrist). Health markers assessed […]
Sleep
My eye was caught by the report of a study presented this week at the American Heart Association meeting in Atlanta in the US. In short, what this research found is that sleep deprivation led to increased eating (in the order of about 300 calories a day). This is not the first study to link […]
Brain and Behaviour
I saw an individual in practice yesterday, who told me she’d recently had a bout of low mood that was ‘out of character’ and not for any obvious reason. The issue started around mid-December last year, but had recently appeared to lift. The first thing that occurred is perhaps this lady was suffering from seasonal […]
Brain and Behaviour
The adrenal glands sit on top of the kidneys, and are the chief glands in the body responsible for the body’s response to stress. In short, when our brain senses stress it signals the adrenal glands to produce hormones such as adrenaline (ephinephrine) and cortisol. These hormones allow the body to respond to stress. Once […]