Mind Space

Mindfulness Meditation Effective in Improving Sleep

- Adam Clare

Mindfulness meditation is already pretty great, and it keeps getting better! Not only can it help you go amongst your day in a more thoughtful, productive, focussed manner, it can even help you sleep!

A six week trial of getting people who had trouble sleeping to mediate proved to help them get better rest.

Importance
Sleep disturbances are most prevalent among older adults and often go untreated. Treatment options for sleep disturbances remain limited, and there is a need for community-accessible programs that can improve sleep.

Objective
To determine the efficacy of a mind-body medicine intervention, called mindfulness meditation, to promote sleep quality in older adults with moderate sleep disturbances.

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Conclusions and Relevance
The use of a community-accessible MAPs intervention resulted in improvements in sleep quality at immediate postintervention, which was superior to a highly structured SHE intervention. Formalized mindfulness-based interventions have clinical importance by possibly serving to remediate sleep problems among older adults in the short term, and this effect appears to carry over into reducing sleep-related daytime impairment that has implications for quality of life.

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Travel to Become a Better Person

- Adam Clare

When friends ask for life advice tell them to leave. Over at BBC Travel they have an article about how travelling can make you a better person. So what are you waiting for? Get out and explore the world!

You’ll gain a broader perspective

As Twain’s quote emphasises, travel can open people’s minds and allow them to see things from a new perspective.

“When you travel, you are faced with alternative cultures that have a different way of doing, thinking and believing,” said Simon Huggins. “It challenges your assumptions and makes you shift your way of looking at things. When you get home, you come back to your own culture with different eyes and a more questioning mind.”

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A New Perspective on Depression

- Adam Clare

Depression seemed to be talked about more last year than in previous years thanks to celebrities revealing their troubles with the affliction. There’s also been more research into depression. With more people thinking about and looking into depression we get new perspectives on the issue.

Now, some researchers are arguing that depression could be a symptom of lifestyle decisions and some influence from our evolution. The evolution aspect is rather interesting because it could be interpreted that depression is a reaction to help one person not infect others with communicable diseases.

So if people with depression show classic sickness behaviour and sick people feel a lot like people with depression – might there be a common cause that accounts for both?

The answer to that seems to be yes, and the best candidate so far is inflammation – a part of the immune system that acts as a burglar alarm to close wounds and call other parts of the immune system into action. A family of proteins called cytokines sets off inflammation in the body, and switches the brain into sickness mode.

Both cytokines and inflammation have been shown to rocket during depressive episodes, and – in people with bipolar – to drop off in periods of remission. Healthy people can also be temporarily put into a depressed, anxious state when given a vaccine that causes a spike in inflammation. Brain imaging studies of people injected with a typhoid vaccine found that this might be down to changes in the parts of the brain that process reward and punishment.

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Painting Neighbourhoods

- Adam Clare

Artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn create community art by painting entire neighborhoods, and involving those who live there — from the favelas of Rio to the streets of North Philadelphia. What’s made their projects succeed? In this funny and inspiring talk, the artists explain their art-first approach — and the importance of a neighborhood barbecue.

Keep Your Brain Healthy by Living in Walkable Neighbourhoods

- Adam Clare

Just when you think there couldn’t be more reasons to live in and build walkable communities another one pops up. We already know that walkable communities are safer, more environmentally healthy, and better for everyone’s health. We can now add to that
list that walkable places are good for keeping of mental issues that occur later in life!

The work builds on Watts’ long attention and study of health behaviors, prevention strategies, and bio-behavioral processes associated with cognitive decline and dementia as the University of Kansas (KU). “I’ve always been interested in why people choose to engage in healthy behaviors or not,” Amber Watts said. “I had been very focused around issues of the individual until I met and started working with architects who study how the physical world around us influences our choices. I found that fascinating, and I wanted to incorporate that into my work about health behaviors.”

This is supportive information for green city planners and city infrastructure layouts. More green planning in neighborhoods so that people will be able to make healthful choices is something we are lacking in much of the US. Good ambiance, sidewalks, and mixing of uses in a neighborhood can go a long way.

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