The Human body's Circadian biological clock: Scientists redraw the blueprint

The discovery of a major gear in the biological clock that tells the body when to sleep and metabolize food may lead to new drugs to treat sleep problems and metabolic disorders, including diabetes.

Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, led by Ronald M. Evans, a professor in Salk's Gene Expression Laboratory, showed that two cellular switches found on the nucleus of mouse cells, known as REV-ERBα and REV-ERBβ, are essential for maintaining normal sleeping and eating cycles and for metabolism of nutrients from food.

The findings, reported March 29 in Nature, describe a powerful link between circadian rhythms and metabolism and suggest a new avenue for treating disorders of both systems, including jet lag, sleep disorders, obesity and diabetes.

"This fundamentally changes our knowledge about the workings of the circadian clock and how it orchestrates our sleep-wake cycles, when we eat and even the times our bodies metabolize nutrients," says Evans.

"Nuclear receptors can be targeted with drugs, which suggests we might be able to target REV-ERBα and β to treat disorders of sleep and metabolism."

Nurses, emergency personnel and others who work shifts that alter the normal 24-hour cycle of waking and sleeping are at much higher risk for a number of diseases, including metabolic disorders such as diabetes.

To address this, scientists are trying to understand precisely how the biological clock works and uncover possible targets for drugs that could adjust the circadian rhythm in people with sleep disorders and circadian-associated metabolic disorders.

In mammals, the circadian timing system is orchestrated by a central clock in the brain and subsidiary clocks in most other organs.

The master clock in the brain is set by light and determines the overall diurnal or nocturnal preference of an animal, including sleep-wake cycles and feeding behaviour.

Scientists knew that two genes, BMAL1 and CLOCK, worked together at the core of the clock's molecular machinery to activate the network of circadian genes.

In this way, BMAL1 acts like the accelerator on a car, activating genes to rev up our physiology each morning so that we are alert, hungry and physically active.

Prior to this work REV-ERBα and β were thought to play only a minor role in these cycles, possibly working together to slow CLOCK-BMAL1 activity to make minor adjustments to keep the clock running on time.

However, genetic studies of two genes with similar functions can be very difficult and thus the real importance of REV-ERBα and β remained mysterious.

The Salk scientists got around this hurdle by developing mice in which both genes could be turned off in the liver at any point by giving them an estrogen derivative called tamoxifen.

Now mice could develop normally to adulthood, at which point the scientists could turn off REV-ERBα and REV-ERBβ in their livers, an organ crucial to maintaining the correct balance of sugar and fat in blood, to see what effects it had on circadian rhythms and metabolism.

"When we turned off both receptors, the animal's biological clocks went haywire," says Han Cho, first author on the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in Evan's Salk laboratory.

"The mice started running on their exercise wheels when they should have been resting. This suggested REV-ERBα and REV-ERBβ aren't an auxiliary system that makes minor adjustments, but an integral part of the clock's core mechanism. Without them, the clock can't function properly."

Digging more deeply into the clockworks, the Salk scientists mapped out the genes that the REV-ERBs control to keep the body operating on the right schedule, finding that they overlap with hundreds of the same genes controlled by CLOCK and BMAL1.

This and other findings suggested that the REV-ERBs, act as a break on the genes BMAL1 activates.

"We thought that the core of the clock was an accelerator, and that all REV-ERBα and REV-ERBβ did was to pull the foot off that pedal," says Evans.

"What we've shown is that these receptors act directly as a break to slow clock activity. Now we've got a accelerator and a break, each equally important in creating the daily rhythm of the clock."

The scientists also found that the REV-ERBs control the activity of hundreds of genes involved metabolism, including those responsible for controlling levels of fats and bile.

The mice in which REV-ERBα and REV-ERBβ were turned off had high levels of fat and sugar in their blood, common problems in people with metabolic disorders.

"This explains how our cellular metabolism is tied to daylight cycles determined by the movements of the sun and the earth," says Satchidananda Panda, an associate professor in Salk's Regulatory Biology Laboratory and co-author on the paper.

"Now we want to find ways of leveraging this mechanism to fix a person's metabolic rhythms when they are disrupted by travel, shift work or sleep disorders."

Provided by Salk Institute

Sleep: Accentuating the positive memories

Sleep plays a powerful role in preserving our memories, but while recent research shows that wakefulness may cloud memories of negative or traumatic events, a new study has found that wakefulness also degrades positive memories.

Sleep, it seems, protects positive memories just as it does negative ones, and that has important implications for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“The study of how sleep helps us remember and process emotional information is still young,” says Alexis Chambers of the University of Notre Dame.

Past work has focused on the role of negative memories for sleep, in particular how insomnia is a healthy biological response for people to reduce negative memories and emotions associated with a traumatic event.

Two new studies presented this week at a meeting of cognitive neuroscientists in Chicago are exploring the flip side: how sleep treats the positive.

“Only if we investigate all the possibilities within this field will we ever fully understand the processes underlying our sleep, memory, and emotions,” Chambers says.

Protecting the positive

To test how sleep affects positive memories, Rebecca Spencer of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and her colleagues split 70 young adults into two groups, one that got to sleep overnight and one that had to stay awake.

Both groups viewed images of positive items, such as puppies and flowers, and neutral items, such as furniture or dinner plates.

The researchers then tested the participants’ memories of and emotional reactions to the images 12 hours later, after either the period of sleep or wake.

They found that “sleep enhances our emotionally positive memories while these memories decay over wake,” Spencer says.

“Positive memories may even be prioritized for processing during sleep.” But while people remembered the positive images more than the neutral ones, their emotional response to the positive images did not change over sleep versus wake.

“It doesn’t matter if you went to sleep or stayed awake, what you thought was a ’9′ i.e. really great, you still think is a ’9′,” she says.

The results, she says, could have significant implications for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, as using wakefulness could have the unintended effect of degrading of positive memories in addition to negative memories.

“It suggests that insomnia should be treated at some point after a traumatic event – perhaps a few days/weeks depending on the level of trauma, so that these positive memories can be strengthened and eventually outweigh the negative,” Spencer says.

Read more: Accentuating the positive memories for sleep | ScienceBlog.com

Daylight saving time can throw you off your normal sleep cycle

Sunday 19th March is the start of daylight saving time and although it will throw off the clock only by an hour, it's enough to leave people feeling groggy for a day or two, sleep experts say.

By setting clocks ahead an hour, daylight saving time allows us more light through the spring, summer and fall. But when the time changes at 2 a.m. Sunday (except in Arizona and Hawaii), it will cost one hour of sleep. We'll regain that when the clocks fall back on Nov. 4.

"Losing an hour is harder than gaining an hour," says Steven Feinsilver, director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. "It's sort of like a mini jet lag."

It takes no more than 48 hours to adjust to a one-hour loss, says New York pulmonologist and sleep specialist Nicholas Rummo of Northern Westchester Hospital's Center for Sleep Medicine. "The day or two after people aren't quite alert," he says. "Most people might feel it Monday into Tuesday."

Some people will be more sluggish than others Monday morning — particularly those without regular sleep habits, such as waking up at a consistent time or snoozing seven to eight hours each night.

"Millions of people can ill afford to lose one more hour of sleep given that so many of them are so sleep-deprived," says Russell Rosenberg, board chairman for the US National Sleep Foundation.

Sleep directly affects health and safety, Rosenberg says, and the sleep loss associated with daylight saving time has been linked to increases in traffic and on-the-job accidents the Monday following the time change.

Specialists encourage people to use this, the US National Sleep Foundation's National Sleep Awareness week, to adopt good habits so that next year, it won't be quite so tiring to make the leap forward. Sleep doctors offer a few tips for making up for lost z's:

•Start early. Move your schedule up a few minutes each day, eat dinner and go to bed 10 to 15 minutes earlier every night.

•Take a nap Sunday to "build up a little sleep in your sleep bank," says Russell Rosenberg, board chairman for the National Sleep Foundation, noting that siestas should be less than an hour.


•Every minute counts Set the alarm clock for the last possible minute Monday morning.

•Soak up the sun. Sunlight jump-starts our bodies and sets our internal clocks forward, so sip your coffee in front of a window for an extra jolt. "Light in the morning makes us want to go to bed earlier," says New York pulmonologist and sleep specialist Nicholas Rummo.


•Avoid alcohol and caffeine. These interfere with the hormones and chemistry that regulate our bodies and make it more difficult to fall asleep and wake up.

Sleep Apnea and Snoring in Children Linked to Behavioural Problems

Children with night-time breathing problems such as snoring or sleep apnea are more likely to develop behavioural problems such as hyperactivity, anxiety or aggressiveness and have problems with peer relationships, according to a new study in Pediatrics.

Children with "sleep-disordered breathing" such as snoring and sleep apnea were 40 percent to 100 percent more likely to develop behavioural issues by age 7 than the children who breathed normally through the night, researchers found.

The study surveyed 11,000 children over six years and found nearly over half of the children, 6,000 in total, had breathing disorders during sleep.

"This is the strongest evidence to date that snoring, mouth breathing, and apnea can have serious behavioural and social-emotional consequences for children," Karen Bonuck, lead author and professor of family and social medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, said in a statement.

"Parents and pediatricians alike should be paying closer attention to sleep-disordered breathing in young children, perhaps as early as the first year of life," she said.

Sleep apnea and snoring decrease oxygen levels and increase carbon dioxide levels in the brain, according to the study.

The imbalanced brain chemistry interrupts the restorative process of sleep and leads to an inability to regulate emotion and impairs the ability to pay attention, plan ahead and organize, researchers said.

"We are sleeping to restore our brains, and sleep-disordered breathing interferes with that process," Bonuck reported. "For kids, these are critical periods in brain development."

Researchers saw symptoms of sleep-disordered breathing appear as early as 6 months in some children. Children who presented symptoms while very young, were between 40 and 50 percent more likely to experience behavioural problems.

"Although snoring and sleep apnea are relatively common in children, pediatricians and family physicians do not routinely check for sleep-disordered breathing," Bonuck said in a statement.

"In many cases, the doctor will simply ask parents, 'How is your child sleeping?' Instead, physicians need to specifically ask parents whether their children are experiencing one or more of the symptoms of SDB, i.e. snoring, mouth breathing or apnea." she said.

About one in 10 children snore regularly and 2 to 4 percent have sleep apnea, according to the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery.

The journal Pediatrics published the study on Monday 5th March 2012.

People with sleep apnea take abnormally long pauses between breaths in their sleep. The pauses can last up to several minutes and may occur up to 30 times per hour, forcing them to wake up often during the night to take a breath, according to the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Sleep apnea can cause frequent headaches and mood swings and if left untreated increases the risk of heart attack, stroke and diabetes, according to the NHLBI. Enlarged tonsils, also commonly cause sleep-disordered breathing.

Being overweight is one of the largest risk factors for sleep apnea and snoring, according to the NHLBI. Losing weight helps to reduce the effects.

Other treatment for sleep-disordered breathing includes the use of a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machine. A CPAP machine consists of a mask that fits over the user's mouth and/ or nose and blows air continuously into the throat, keeping the airway open and allowing the user to breathe easier.

Surgery is sometimes performed to remove excess tissue in the mouth and throat to reduce symptoms.

US Healthcare costs related to Sleep Apnea costs about $1,336 per year, for a total of $3 billion annually, according to a 1999 study published in the journal Sleep.

Sleep Standards are Slipping

Kids never got enough shuteye, even back in grandpa's day.

That's according to a century's worth of expert advice and sleep studies, which a team of researchers has now distilled into a brief report in the journal Pediatrics.

"There is a common belief that children are not getting enough sleep and that children's total sleep time has been declining," Lisa Anne Matricciani of the University of South Australia in Adelaide and colleagues write.

And while it's true that kids aren't getting as much sack time now as they were in the late 1800s, that doesn't mean experts weren't worried back then, too.

In fact, as the Australian researchers combed through older and older literature, the recommended sleep time was always a good half-hour higher than what kids, or their parents, said they got.

"No matter how much sleep children are getting, it has always been assumed that they need more," the team says.

So why are the standards slipping?

According to Matricciani and company, there just isn't any good science on which to base recommendations. They went through 32 sets of sleep advice, and only one provided any reasoning for its guidance: the actual sleep of 500 healthy kids.

Today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH US) says adults commonly need between eight and eight and a half hours of sleep, whereas newborns should get 16 to 18 hours a day.

Children fall in between, with preschoolers needing 11 to 12 hours of slumber and older kids and adolescents 10 hours.

Those standards are based on how long people sleep when they're not interrupted but one expert reported that there is still little ironclad science behind the numbers.

"We need to do due diligence and do the nitty-gritty effort of measuring sleep in a large group of the population to find out what's normal," said Dr. David Gozal, an expert in childhood sleep problems at the University of Chicago. "That has never been done."

He went on, "If you don't know what's normal because you haven't measured it, then your recommendations are going to reflect what you believe is normal, although that's not necessarily correct."

That also explains why expert recommendations have been shifting downward over time, Gozal said, because physicians are influenced by changing societal expectations the same as everybody else.

"It only reflects the nature of our parental expectations," mused Gozal.

Based on 218 articles that contained self- or parent-reported sleep for children, the Australian researchers estimate that kids' actual sleep duration fell by 73 minutes over a century.

By comparison, recommended sleep times dropped by 71 minutes, but remained 37 minutes above the estimates of real sleep.

Like other researchers, Gozal blames our shorter nights on the accelerated pace of modern society with its 24-7 demands on parents and kids alike.

"The concern that kids aren't sleeping enough is real," he said. "More than 80 percent of parents need to wake up their kids, indicating that their kids don't get enough sleep."

Although it's next to impossible to prove conclusively that diminished shuteye is taking a toll on our health, several studies have linked it to a plethora of ailments, from obesity in American kids to attention problems in Korean high school students to heart disease around the globe.

"We are in fact reducing the amount of sleep as a society, and that is translating, at least in my mind, to an increased risk of many diseases," said Gozal.

So how do you know when your kid has had enough sleep?

"You will know that your child is sleeping enough if they wake up on their own rather than being awoken," Gozal advised. "If they don't get up on time, make them go to bed earlier."

SOURCE: bit.ly/cxXOG Pediatrics, online February 13, 2012.

For more good advice and support on how to solve children's sleep issues visit www.dream-angus.com

Zeo Sleep System for adults - YouTube

Do you have problem falling asleep? Been dreaming of a resting night? Want to stop waking up in the middle of the night? Do you have an iPhone?

Then you need the Zeo Sleep System that was shown at CES 2012.

With 64 million Americans facing sleep issues every night and an additional 49 million Americans experiencing problems at least a few nights a week, the need for a good night’s sleep as part of optimum health and wellness has become almost epidemic.

The new Zeo Sleep Manager is the only consumer system that tracks all sleep phases and offers science-based solutions to everyday sleep issues that affect health, aging, mental acuity, energy level, stress level and physical performance.

Zeo Sleep Manager is the only consumer sleep tracking system that measures actual sleep phases, including Light, Deep and REM sleep.

The system uses a wireless headband equipped with SoftWave sensor technology to track these sleep phases and provide a nightly ZQ score, a customized sleep quality score.


The new Zeo Sleep Manager Mobile system sends sleep data directly to users’ smartphones, which then sync automatically to their online Zeo accounts, so they can access online analytical tools to see why they’re not falling asleep.

My guess is, it’s because they spend too much time online looking at the analytics on why they can’t sleep.

For more information on sleep and sleep problems, plus real solutions to real issues, go to www.dream-angus.com

Sleep Infographic: What If You Don't Sleep Enough?

To see the full Infographic chart click on the sample image.

How many times have you told yourself "... it's just sleep." but what happens to your health when you're not sleeping enough?

This infographic designed by FFunction for Zeo, a company that makes an electronic "sleep coach," is less of a real data visualization than a set of illustrated facts but those facts are pretty impressive.

For example, we seem pretty tired all the time and only 7% of people get the necessary eight hours of sleep at night but the effects of this might be more than inconvenient. They may be disasterous.

Getting less sleep is now associated with a 200% rise in cancer, a 100% rise in heart disease, and a 20% rise in the likelihood you'll be dead in 20 years.

UnfortunatelY, not only will you be less healthy, you'll also be fatter. People who sleep an hour more each day lose 14.3 pounds per year and 1 in 3 women find themselves too sleepy for sex!

Studies have shown that sleeping too little effectively puts the body on "high alert," creating increased stress hormones and chemicals associated with inflammation.

Sleep Problems impairs the health of young diabetics

Young people with type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) may have difficulty getting a good night's sleep, resulting in difficulty controlling blood sugar and decreased performance in school, according to a study published in the January issue of SLEEP.

Michelle M. Perfect, Ph.D., of the University of Arizona in Tucson, and colleagues used home-based polysomnography, actigraphy, and questionnaires to track the sleep health of 50 patients, aged 10 to 16 years, with T1DM; results were compared with a control group without diabetes matched for sex, age, and body mass index.

The level of glucose control was simultaneously assessed using continuous glucose monitors and hemoglobin A1C values.

The researchers found that, overall, young patients with T1DM spent about 21 minutes (or 5 percent) less time per seven-hour night in deep sleep than individuals without diabetes.

Even those with mild sleep difficulties experienced more hyperglycemia and emotional and behavioural difficulties, reduced diabetes-related quality of life, lower grades, depression, sleep-wake behaviour problems, poor sleep quality, sleepiness, and lower math scores.

Patients with sleep apnea had associated higher blood sugar levels. As sleep is a potentially modifiable behaviour, the authors suggest that improving clinician awareness of potential sleep problems could help these children and adolescents improve their quality of life.

"Overall, this study supports the need to inquire about sleepiness and sleep habits as part of the clinical care of youth with T1DM.

Clinicians and school-based professionals need to be aware that reports of daytime sleepiness, disrupted sleep, or poor sleep habits, may affect patients' daytime functioning, including the possibility of interfering with their diabetes self-care, quality of life, and school performance," the authors write.

Co-Sleeping Ad Aims To Reduce Infant Deaths - YouTube

A controversial ad circulating in Milwaukee is meant to grab parents' attention to the potential dangers of co-sleeping.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, at least 9 children have died in the city this year, possibly a result of unsafe sleep environments. The latest incident makes it the 10^th on record.

Co-sleeping deaths are believed to occur because the infant is usually suffocated by a parent rolling over onto them, while sharing the same bed.

In an effort to spread awareness and get a discussion going on the subject, a controversial ad campaign shows a baby nestled in its parents' bed, with a butcher knife nearby. The tagline reads: "Your baby sleeping with you can be just as dangerous."

The eye-catching ad, launched to enlighten parents over the dangers of sleeping with their infants, has sparked immense outrage among people.

Sleep paralysis more common in students

Sleep paralysis, a condition that affects less the 8 percent of the general population, is defined as “a discrete period of time during which voluntary muscle movement is inhibited, yet ocular and respiratory movements are intact,” according to a new study in the current issue of Sleep Medicine Reviews.

Some experts now suspect the townspeople involved in the Salem witch trials may have been experiencing sleep paralysis and in the 19th-century novel Moby Dick, the main character Ishmael experiences an episode of sleep paralysis in the form of a malevolent presence in the room.

Some people who experience these episodes may regularly try to avoid going to sleep because of the unpleasant sensations they experience. But other people enjoy the sensations they feel during sleep paralysis, notes Brian A. Sharpless, clinical assistant professor of psychology at Penn State.

“I realized that there were no real sleep paralysis prevalence rates available that were based on large and diverse samples,” Sharpless says. “So I combined data from my previous study with 34 other studies to determine how common it was in different groups.”

He looked at a total of 35 published studies from the past 50 years to find lifetime sleep paralysis rates.

These studies surveyed a total of 36,533 people. Overall he found that about one-fifth of these people experienced an episode at least once. Frequency of sleep paralysis ranged from once in a lifetime to every night.

When looking at specific groups, 28 percent of students reported experiencing sleep paralysis, while nearly 32 percent of psychiatric patients reported experiencing at least one episode.

People with panic disorder were even more likely to experience sleep paralysis, and almost 35 percent of those surveyed reported experiencing these episodes. Sleep paralysis also appears to be more common in non-Caucasians.

“Sleep paralysis should be assessed more regularly and uniformly in order to determine its impact on individual functioning and better articulate its relation to other psychiatric and medical conditions,” Sharpless says.

He looked at a broad range of samples—papers were included from several different countries.

People experience three basic types of hallucinations during sleep paralysis—the presence of an intruder, pressure on the chest sometimes accompanied by physical and/or sexual assault experiences, and levitation or out-of-body experiences.

There has been little research conducted on how to alleviate sleep paralysis or whether or not people experience episodes throughout their lives.

“I want to better understand how sleep paralysis affects people, as opposed to simply knowing that they experience it,” says Sharpless. “I want to see how it impacts their lives.”

Sharpless hopes to look at relationships between sleep paralysis and post-traumatic stress disorder in the future.

Jacques P. Barber, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, contributed to the research, which was supported in part by the National Institute of Mental Health.

More news from Penn State: http://live.psu.edu/

Dyslexia - Blue Coloured Filters

The effects of blue on dyslexia
Coloured filters, either worn as spectacles or used as overlays, have been successfully employed in the treatment of dyslexia for many years but there is no agreement about how they work.

Bright white light increases the activation of the parts of the brain involved in directing attention, such as the posterior parietal cortex.

Abnormal function in these attention-modulating parts of the brain has been implicated in the pathogenesis of dyslexia.

It is therefore likely that blue light selected optimally to recruit ipRGCs will have the greatest effect on improving alertness and concentration and may therefore be the best for remediating the impaired attentional responses seen in dyslexia.

The DRT has carried out a randomised control trial that showed that in suitable dyslexic children wearing blue filters for 3 months improved their reading age by an amazing 9 months.

The effects of blue light on sleep
Blue light therapy has been shown to help people with sleeping problems, to improve alertness during night shift work and to help overcome jet lag.

It probably works on the suprachiasmatic nucleus to alter the timing of diurnal rhythms. We found that children whose reading benefitted from wearing blue filters during the day often reported also that their sleeping patterns had improved, and we showed that this was probably due to an effect on the SCN; at night secretion of the sleep hormone, melatonin, which is also under the control of the SCN, can be inhibited by just 15 minutes of blue light ie blue light can reset the SCN rhythms to improve sleeping.

The effects of blue light on migraine
Likewise we found that in these dyslexics, who often complain of migraine type headaches, the blue filters often improved their headaches.


Migraine was previously thought to be due to swelling of the arteries in the membranes surrounding the brain, the meninges, but we now believe that the hypothalamus and specifically the SCN is responsible.

Coloured filters, worn as spectacles, have been found to be highly effective in reducing the frequency of migraine symptoms. Their efficacy probably does not result from their effects on conscious visual perception via the retinogeniculocortical pathway, but rather by affecting the hypothalamus via the retinohypothalamic pathway.

So blue filters are the most efficacious in reducing migraine.

Light and Seasonal Affective Disorder
Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a depressive syndrome experienced by around 5% of the population, the symptoms of which recur in winter and autumn.

A number of experimental findings combined with the circannual pattern of symptom expression implicate disordered diurnal rhythms controlled by the SCN in the pathogenesis of SAD.

SAD symptoms are likely to be the result of an abnormal phase-delay in the circadian rhythm. Hence exposure to blue light, particularly in the morning, often improves SAD greatly.

Fluorescent Lighting
Exposure to natural daylight at work and school is often minimal and fluorescent electric lighting is usual.

Unfortunately most fluorescent lights radiate very little short wavelength blue light.

Full spectrum fluorescent lights, the spectral output of which is similar to that of natural daylight, or blue light should therefore be superior for the promotion of human health and cognitive function because they stimulate the retinal hypothalamic system more effectively.

Dyslexia Research Trust - Vision & Coloured Filters

Sleep Deficit and ADHD, which came first?

Researchers have long since found that children with ADHD demonstrate significantly more difficulty sleeping at night than their undiagnosed peers.

Unfortunately, too many psychiatrists have overlooked sleep disturbances as a possible cause of the ADD/ADHD because previous studies on the subject provided mixed evidence.

Recent finding that children with ADD/ADHD do have more sleep disturbances, however, means that future studies are needed and should be aimed at the possibility of separating the causes, from the condition.

This would mean that the treatment and reduction of sleep disturbances and poor sleep behaviour, may improve daytime ADHD symptoms.

Parents and guardians know that children with ADD/ADHD demonstrate more bedtime resistance, e.g. refusing to get ready for bed, refusing to remain in their own bed, difficulty with falling asleep, restless and disturbed sleep, etc.

ADHD children are also more likely to have other sleep orientated or sleep disordered symptoms e.g. snoring, long pauses in breathing, sleep apnea, etc. This has the added issue of the children not being able to wake properly, or on time.

We all know the detrimental effects of not sleeping well and not feeling refreshed from a night spent sleeping. We feel grouchy, are more clumsy and later in the day we will experience increased daytime sleepiness and be looking for a catch-up nap.

Resolving Sleep Disorders
Children with ADD/ADHD are reported to take longer to transition from full wakefulness, through sleepiness to finally falling asleep, as well as experiencing more shallow breathing and a lower respiratory rate while sleeping.

We learn good bedtime routines from our parents and family. Good sleep behaviour is a learned experience and it needs to be taught to modern children, living in a 24 hour always-on society.

We need to teach them how to withdraw at the right time, how to relax and calm the senses before preparing for bed. The bedroom is a place for sleeping, so no TV, no computer games or other stimulating activities. It should be warm, not hot. A safe, secure place to fall comfortably asleep.

Seek Help
Sleep problems with ADHD children can be addressed separately from their other ADHD symptoms and once this hurdle is overcome it will have a calming effect on the child and a beneficial effect on their behaviour generally.

The skills learned in treating sleep deficits can be expanded into everyday life and will have added beneficial effects on the whole family. The need to improve the difficult relationships inside a family affected by ADHD is essential if everyone is to get the best out of their lives.

For more invaluable information on sleep behaviour training and bedtime parenting skills click on the link to Dream-Angus.com