Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Sleep As the Key to Happiness and Peak Performance

Arianna Huffington: Sleep Challenge 2010: Sleep As the Key to Happiness and Peak Performance:

"Tony Schwartz, President and CEO of The Energy Project, whose new book, The Way We're Working Isn't Working: The Four Forgotten Needs that Energize Great Performance (coming out in May), has a whole chapter on the importance of sleep....

'the way we are working (and the way the world works) isn't working, for most people or most organizations.' And he singles out the role sleep plays in making people happier, healthier, and more productive.

'No single behavior,' writes Schwartz, 'more fundamentally influences our effectiveness in waking life than sleep... sleep may well be more critical to our well being than diet, exercise and even heredity.'

Sleep is so vital to success in everything we do, Schwartz titles his chapter about it "Sleep or Die." In it, he cites the role lack of sleep played in numerous high-profile disasters -- including the Three Mile Island meltdown, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle -- and points out that "Amnesty International lists prolonged sleep deprivation as a form of torture, and it has widely been used as an interrogation tactic."

He also highlights the fact that sleep isn't just a time for our bodies to rest -- it's also a time for learning. "Sleep is not simply cognitively restorative," he writes, "but also a time during which considerable learning occurs. Although the acquisition of knowledge occurs only during waking life, there is evidence that we process, consolidate and stabilize memory during sleep." So, if you still look at sleep only as "down time," you need to think again. Sleep is also practice time for a wide variety of mental skills -- and the full 90-minute sleep cycle allows for different kinds of learning. In our deepest sleep, according to Schwartz, "we appear to process and consolidate fact-based information, such as a new language or the capital of a state." REM sleep, meanwhile, "appears to play a key role in remembering how to do an activity, such as typing or driving a car." And visual learning is processed both in deep (slow-wave) and REM sleep....

...he puts getting enough sleep at the apex of the things we can do to achieve peak performance."

The secret about drugs is that they only work in about half of the people who take them

Making Personalized Medicine Pay - BusinessWeek:

"The dirty little secret about drugs is that they only work in about half of the people who take them. So says an educational nonprofit called the Personalized Medicine Coalition, and many drug executives concede as much. Of the $292 billion spent in the U.S. on prescription drugs in 2008, as much as $145 billion went to medications that didn't help individual patients, said Jerel Davis, project manager at McKinsey, at a recent conference. And billions more are being spent to treat adverse drug reactions and other complications. "When you look at the data, it's shocking," says Dr. Robert S. Epstein, chief medical officer at Medco Health Solutions (MHS), a $51 billion company that manages drug prescriptions for 60 million Americans.

Researchers know how to solve this problem. First, figure out the differences between those patients who respond to a drug and those who don't, then treat only to those who will benefit. But this personalized medicine approach 'has been slower to develop than we thought 10 years ago,' says Richard K. Schatzberg, CEO of Generation Health, a startup that offers targeted medicine services. Lack of enthusiasm in the drug industry is a big reason; companies would lose billions of dollars if only those who actually benefit were to use such blockbuster drugs as antidepressants, arthritis medicines, and cholesterol pills...."

Saturday, January 09, 2010

Importance of sleep

Mark Hyman, MD: Sleep Tips: How To Sleep Better, Lose Weight, And Live Longer:

"You can lose weight without changing what you eat or doing one minute of exercise! It's a bold claim. And don't get me wrong: Nutrition and exercise are important! But there's another key to weight loss -- and most people don't even know about it. It's sleep.

In fact, besides eating whole foods and moving your body, getting enough sleep is the most important thing you can do for your health. On the flip side, sleep deprivation makes you fat -- AND leads to depression, pain, heart disease, diabetes, and much more."


Mark Hyman, M.D. practicing physician and founder of The UltraWellness Center is a pioneer in functional medicine. Dr. Hyman is now sharing the 7 ways to tap into your body's natural ability to heal itself.