How to sleep with a woman

2013-03-04

By :Hugh Wilson

According to new research, what you do in bed can seriously undermine your relationship.

And on this occasion, the experts aren’t talking about sex. Hotel chain Premier Inn surveyed 2,000 adults and found that bedroom battles caused by cold feet, snoring and late night loo trips are putting more and more relationships under stress.

In all, these bedroom bothers led to 167 arguments a year, the survey found.

So how do you successfully sleep – and we mean sleep – with a woman. Here’s our handy guide.

Don’t hog the duvet

According to the study, hogging the duvet is the number one cause of arguments among couples in the bedroom, leading to lost sleep and serious resentment. So don’t be a duvet hogger if you can help it.

Admittedly, it can be pretty hard to help it, given that many of us wrap the warm cosy things around ourselves – pulling them off our partners in the process – when we’re fast asleep. The answer? Think of investing in two single quilts rather than one double.

“Our research shows that most of the arguments couples have in the bedroom are down to habits that are easy to resolve as a relationship develops,” said spokeswoman Claire Haigh.

Get help for your snoring

Snoring was the next most hated bedroom baddie, with 20% of respondents claiming that a snoring spouse cost them up to two hours of sleep a night. More women than men complained of a snoring partner.

“People suffer from snoring to varying degrees and the research shows it can impact on our day-to-day lives, especially if one person in the relationship is missing out on much needed sleep,” said Haigh.

So what’s the answer? The British Snoring and Sleep Apnoea Association has a handy guide to help you determine what sort of snorer you are and what you can do about it.

It’s also worth knowing that lifestyle factors such as being overweight and drinking alcohol before bed can make your snoring worse. Similarly, overwork or a poor sleep routine can mean that when you do finally hit the sack you’re seriously overtired, another risk factor for snoring.

Be a gentleman in bed

When it comes to bedroom etiquette, it can be the simple things that matter most.

According to the study, one irritation is a partner who leaves the lights on to read. Another is a partner who comes home late and doesn’t get undressed in another room. Yet another is a man who comes home a little the worse for wear and stumbles around the bedroom trying to remove his socks. And then there are those of us who just have to get up to go to the loo in the night.

It’s no wonder the research found that one in 10 partners had considered ending their relationship because of disturbed nights and bedroom annoyances.

Much of this is easily remedied, of course. If you want to read when your partner wants to sleep, do it in another room. And when you do come to bed get ready elsewhere and slip silently between the sheets undetected.

And if all else fails, there is one more radical option that may improve your relationship no end…

Many couples are now choosing to sleep separately, at least every now and then, for the good of their physical health and the health of their relationships. In fact, a study published earlier this year found that one in 10 couples that live together regularly spend nights in separate rooms or at least separate beds.

That might go right against your grain. Conventional wisdom says that couples that sleep apart do so because they can’t stand each other. But Dr Neil Stanley, one of the UK’s leading sleep researchers, says that sleeping apart can be a good thing for many of us. Couples suffer 50% more sleep disturbances, Dr Stanley claims, when they share a bed.

That’s serious, because disturbed sleep leads to tired days and tiredness leads to cranky couples. You’re more likely to argue, bicker and put strain on your relationship when you’re tired. Dr Stanley says that poor sleep increases the risk of divorce, as well as a host of physical and mental problems.

So perhaps the most gentlemanly thing you can do in bed tonight is to get out of it. If you don’t have a spare room, maybe you can invest in a sofa bed or fold-up mattress?

That’s not to suggest you sleep apart all the time – there’s some evidence to suggest that sex lives and relationships can suffer if couples never share a bed. But on nights when you’re out late, or you know you’re particularly tired, or you’ve had a drink, sleeping in a separate room could ensure you both get a good night’s sleep, and wake up healthier, happier and nicer to be around in the morning.

Most Common Psychiatric Disorders Share Genetic Roots

By Maia Szalavitz

Diverse mental illnesses may actually represent variations on a common theme rather than separate disorders.
(NIMH), which provided some of the funding for theResearch Domain Criteria
A quiet autistic child is certainly unlike a manic adult with bipolar disorder, or a person suffering a bout of paranoia due to schizophrenia, but new research suggests that these varied conditions may be more alike than previously thought.

Researchers analyzed genetic data from some 33,000 people of European descent who had either autism, schizophrenia, major depression, bipolar disorder or attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).  They were compared with nearly 28,000 unaffected controls. Scanning the entire genome, the scientists found variants in four different regions that affected risk for all or most of these conditions.

The results suggest that it may be possible to move away from classifying psychiatric disorders primarily based on profiles of symptoms and focus on biological causes of mental illness, according to the study’s lead author, Dr. Jordan Smoller of Massachusetts General Hospital.

“This was a really well done study and the best yet at trying to address the question of whether there might be common processes underlying what we have long though to be very different psychiatric conditions,” says Dr. Bryan King, director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital, who was not associated with the research.

“It’s really very exciting to see scientists from 19 countries bringing together data on tens of thousands of different patients to ask questions about the genetic architecture of these various mental illnesses,” says Dr. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute on Mental Health (NIMH), which provided some of the funding for the that was published in The Lancet.

Two of the four variants are involved in regulating calcium channels, which are crucial for the proper functioning of nerve cells.  “They are fundamental to the working of neurons,” says King. “Calcium and chloride balance is critical to the proper electrical activity of the neuron.”

The findings could help explain many apparently odd connections between psychiatric disorders.  For example, autism was once known as childhood schizophrenia, in part because people with both conditions seem to be mesmerized by their own internal worlds.  Conversely, some of the adults labeled as having schizophrenia in the past might have been diagnosed with autism instead if their childhood history had been known.

“In families with bipolar disorder, the risk of schizophrenia is increased, so we knew that there was some overlap, but it was not clear to what extent,” says Thomas Lehner, a co-author of the study and branch chief of genomics for the NIMH.

The new knowledge of the common gene-based roots could help to tease apart some of these overlapping symptoms and diagnoses. Some of the variants the researchers found are more common in patients with depression, for example, while others are more prevalent among those with schizophrenia. But without biological tests to differentiate between disorders, until now, symptoms have been the only guide to classifying psychiatric conditions. To make matters worse, many people have symptoms of more than one disorder and many disorders share some of the same symptoms.

Insel compares the situation to diagnosing people with malaria, the flu and a bacterial infection as having the same disease.  “All of them have a fever of about 103 and they look really miserable, with sweating and muscle aches. Under the DSM, they’d all have same thing,” he says, noting that this does not mean that psychiatric disorders are any less real, just that we don’t yet have precise ways of characterizing them.

The genetic revelations are only a first step, however. Scientists still have to figure out why a problem with calcium channels might lead to autism in one case and bipolar disorder in another. And the knowledge may lead to a re-thinking of at least the five psychiatric conditions found to share some genetic changes.

“When we say with the DSM that this person has ADHD and autism [together],  at some level we’re saying those two entities are somehow distinct,” says King, “Instead, the truth may very well be, at least in some instances, that ADHD manifestations and autism manifestations are part of some overarching problem that’s neither one nor the other.”

Insel and Lehner stress that none of the genetic variants the scientists identified are a major cause of any of the disorders.  “This confers a very small amount of risk,” says Insel, “If you went out and had your genotype looked at and you had this particular variant, does that mean that you have a greater likelihood of schizophrenia? Only in a very, very tiny way, maybe a 10% increase in risk.”

But understanding the places where development may be going astray or how circuitry may be disrupted could eventually provide leads for better treatments. “The shared biology opens the door to the exploration of novel treatment approaches and early interventions,” says King.

To capitalize on such approaches, the NIMH is developing the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), an alternative system for classifying psychiatric illness that considers symptoms in many different ways. Anxiety, for example, may involve a problem with a fear circuit that in turn is related to variants of a specific gene that is activated, or triggered by an early childhood experience of terror.  Genetic studies that identify common genes that psychiatric conditions share could help to fill in such multi-dimensional views of mental illness.  “RDoc is saying let’s build in many levels of information,” says Insel, “We know that the DSM approach is not the way to understand these disorders. It may be a way to bill for them, but it’s not a way to develop science or even identify who should get what treatment.”

That understanding could lead to a more biology-based understanding that psychiatric disorders that many experts welcome. Factoring in the effect that genes have in dialing up or turning down risk may prove invaluable in improving our understanding of how the brain develops, and how we might intervene when that process goes awry.

More Sex Partners Linked to Higher Risk of Drug Addiction, Alcoholism

And the risk is especially great for women, according to new research.

Researchers explored the relationship between addictions and risky sexual behavior in a report published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. They followed virtually all of the 1037 children born between 1972 and 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand, and asked about their sexual partners as well as alcohol and other drug use. Women who had more than two to three sex partners when they were 18 years to 20 years old were nearly 10 times more likely than those who had none or one sexual partner to develop a drug problem, primarily involving alcohol or marijuana, at age 21.

Having more than two to three partners from age 21 to age 25 increased addiction risk at age 26 by a factor of 7. And at age 32, the risk was nearly 18 times greater for women who had more than two to three partners when they were aged 26 to 31 compared to those with one or no partners during that time.

Continue reading More Sex Partners Linked to Higher Risk of Drug Addiction, Alcoholism →

Lasting Legacy of Childhood Bullying: Psychiatric Problems In Adulthood

2013-02-22

By Alexandra Sifferlin

It’s not just the victims of bullying that experience long-term consequences; bullies themselves are also at risk of mental health issues later in life.

In a study published in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers report that bullying can have serious consequences on childhood development, and shouldn’t be dismissed as simply a playground rite-of-passage.

Starting in 1993, the scientists followed over 1,400 children at three different ages — 9, 11 and 13, and interviewed them and their caregivers every year until the kids turned 16.

Continue reading Lasting Legacy of Childhood Bullying: Psychiatric Problems In Adulthood →

Relationship status influences actions……

2013-02-20

With Age Comes Happiness

2013-02-19

Wisdom may come with age, but does happiness follow suit?

Some studies show that the elderly may be more prone to depression and loneliness, which can lead to higher rates of unhappiness, not a surprise given the health and emotional challenges that tend to accompany aging. But increasing, more and more studies suggest that happiness may actually rise after middle age — at least when scientists take into account some of the non-biological factors that can influence reports of contentment.

In a new study, which was published in Psychological Science, researchers led by Angelina Sutin of Florida State University College of Medicine examined data from two large samples of people; one included nearly 2,300 primarily white and highly educated people with an average age of 69 living in a Baltimore community between 1979 and 2010. The second group included reports of well-being collected in the 1970s from a representative sample of some 3,000 adults from the U.S. population who were in their late 40s and 50s at the time of the study.

Sutin and her colleagues were particularly interested in exploring whether differences in happiness reported by different generations — the middle-aged vs. the elderly, for example — were related to factors that have nothing to do with aging itself, but rather reflect life situations reflecting when they were born.

For instance, growing up in tough economic times might reduce the sense of well-being of an entire generation— and if this group is compared to younger folks who got their start in better times, being older might seem to cause a decline in happiness, when instead, the older people were actually less happy because they were unable to overcome the effects of early adversity.

When the researchers adjusted for the influence of such generation-wide life experiences, says Sutin, “Well-being may increase with age and also across generations. Those born during the early part of the 20th century had lower levels of well-being than those born more recently. Once we accounted for the fact that people grew up in different eras, it turns out, on average, people maintain or increase their sense of well-being as they get older.”

This suggests that previous studies that compared people across generations measured a decline in well-being that was mis-attributed to aging, and was actually due to initial differences in happiness, related to events such as the Great Depression and ongoing improvements in longevity and health.

People born in 1940, for example, scored nearly 3 times higher on measures of well-being related to the time period immediately preceding the survey (responses to items like “I enjoyed life” and “I was happy”), compared to those born in 1900.

What does that mean for the current generation, which is facing another difficult recession with high unemployment and wage stagnation? “The … [r]ecession was certainly devastating for many people. Too many people lost their jobs and their homes and the repercussions are still being felt,” Sutin says.

And those consequences may leave a lasting legacy. “The extent to which this recession will have a long-lasting effect on well-being is an open question at this point. A number of longitudinal studies have shown that after periods of unemployment, well-being does not quite recover to pre-unemployment levels. When unemployment is widespread, as was the case during the Great Depression, the well-being of a whole generation may not recover.”

Fortunately, however, even those born in tough times will see some rise in happiness with age — or at least they won’t become unhappier. Although the change is not as large as the difference in happiness that comes from being born in a better time, it is measurable and occurs consistently. “[R]elative to their starting point, all of the cohorts increased rather than decreased in well-being with age,” the authors write.

So why do we tend to think of older people as primarily depressed and unhappy, a perception that seems to be supported by the fact that the elderly have the highest suicide rates, when they themselves often report being happier now than when they were younger — and when studies show well-being rises after mid-life?

One reason for the happiness and suicide rates being at-odds could be related to the fact that happiness ratings often rely on general population figures, not measures of particular individuals, which can be much more varied. As data from several Scandinavian countries shows, it’s possible for a country to lead the world in both population happiness and suicide rates. While the reasons aren’t clear — perhaps the cold, dark winters are difficult to take for some, or perhaps being depressed when everyone around you is happy is even harder to take — the conflicting trends do occur simultaneously.

“It does seem like a paradox, but both happiness and depression can increase with age,” says Sutin. It is possible to swing between the two states and it is also possible that age pushes people to one extreme or another. “With age, people tend to become more emotional and experience both sadness and happiness,” she says. That could account in part for why we tend to see the elderly as sad: the sadness is both more visible and more congruent with our expectations about this stage of life.

“Especially when we’re young, it’s really easy to look at older adults and see the loss: loss of youth, loss of mobility, loss of loved ones,” Sutin says. “We assume that all of that loss would make older adults unhappy. It’s harder to see the benefits of aging: feelings of pride for children and grandchildren, a meaningful career, more confidence, wisdom. There are a lot of reasons to be happy in older adulthood, but they may not be as visible as the losses.” When they are, however, it turns out that happiness is one of the benefits that come with age.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/02/18/with-age-comes-happiness/#ixzz2LKsgTWqe