HitsGarden

Are you going through some stressful situation in your life? In this case, that can ruin your good night’s sleep even 6 months after your problems are solved…This is the result of a five-year long research led by Dr. Jussi Vahtera, of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Helsinki, Finland, made on a sample of 16,627 men and women with normal sleep and 2,572 with disturbed sleep. At the beginning of the research, each subject was assessed for anxiety, regarded as a general feeling of stressfulness connected with symptoms of hyperactivity.

The team focused on the connection between post-onset life events (like death or illness in the family, divorce, financial difficulty and violence) and sleep impairment during the five years monitoring. The data revealed a strong connection between proneness to anxiety in cases of negative life events and sleep impairment. Read the rest of this entry »

Is meditation really beneficial? The integrative body-mind training (IBMT), a type of meditation, has been tested by a team from Dalian University of Technology in Dalian, China, and University of Oregon on college undergraduate Chinese subjects, assigned to 40-person experimental or control groups.

The control group received five days of relaxation training, while the tested group five days of IBMT training, the team focusing on how the subjects’ attention and responses to stress are influenced.

Both groups were tested before and after these experiments for attention and reactivity to mental stress (provoked by mental arithmetic). The IBMT group displayed higher improvement than the control group in an attention test assessing the subjects’ capacities to deal among stress stimuli. Read the rest of this entry »