Too busy to read?

I'm here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.

Sleepiness was responsible for 250,000 traffic accidents in 2009,

Scientists measure the depth of someone's depression using something named the Hamilton scale, which was invented by a scientist named Max Hamilton in 1959. The Hamilton scale ranges from 0 (where you're skipping along merrily) to 51 (where you're jumping in front of trains). To give you a yardstick: you can get a six-point leap in your Hamilton score if you improve your sleeping patterns. What Irving found is that, in the real data that hadn't been run through a PR filter, antidepressants do cause an improvement in the Hamilton score--they do make depressed people feel better. It's an improvement of 1.8 points.

Here are some guidelines for a good night's sleep: Go to bed at the same time every night. Wake up at the same time every morning. Set an alarm clock if necessary. If you have to stay up late one night, still get up at your fixed time the next morning--in the short run, the consistency of your cycle is more important than the amount of sleep. Sleep in a cool, dark room. Cover your windows if necessary to keep out light.

Disrupted sleep even two or three days after an experience can disrupt your memory of it months or years later.

Sleep is among the most critical factors for peak performance, memory, productivity, immune function, and mood regulation. Even a mild sleep reduction or a departure from a set sleep routine (for example, going to bed late one night, sleeping in the next morning) can produce detrimental effects on cognitive performance for many days afterward. When professional basketball players got ten hours of sleep a night, their performance improved dramatically: Free-throw and three-point shooting each improved by 9%.

Too much sleep is also detrimental, but perhaps the most important factor in achieving peak alertness is consistency, so that the body's circadian rhythms can lock into a consistent cycle. Going to bed just one hour late one night, or sleeping in for an hour or two just one morning, can affect your productivity, immune function, and mood significantly for several days after the irregularity.

Most of the memory consolidation occurs in the first two hours of slow-wave, NREM sleep, and during the last 90 minutes of REM sleep in the morning. This is why drinking and drugs (including sleep medications) can interfere with memory, because that crucial first sleep cycle is compromised by intoxication. And this is why sleep deprivation leads to memory loss--because the crucial 90 minutes of sleep at the end is either interrupted or never occurs. And you can't make up for lost sleep time. Sleep deprivation after a day of learning prevents sleep-related improvement, even three days later following two nights of good sleep

For example, scientists know that your brain triggers the hunger sensation and hunger hormones like leptin and ghrelin when you don't get enough sleep.6 The next time you have one of those days when you can't eat enough to satisfy your hunger, ask yourself how much sleep you got the night before. You'll be surprised at how often a bad night of sleep leads to nonstop eating.

Naps longer than about forty minutes can be counterproductive, though, causing sleep inertia. For many people, five or ten minutes is enough.

sleep plays a vital role in the consolidation of events of the previous few days, and therefore in the formation and protection of memories.

Millions of people report difficulty sleeping straight through the night. Because uninterrupted sleep appears to be our cultural norm, they experience great distress and ask their doctors for medication to help them stay asleep. Many sleep medications are addictive, have side effects, and leave people feeling drowsy the next morning. They also interfere with memory consolidation. It may be that a simple change in our expectations about sleep and a change to our schedules can go a long way.

That is, until we look at a less well-known finding from the same study: that the second most important factor differentiating the best violinists from the good violinists was actually sleep. The best violinists slept an average of 8.6 hours in every twenty-four-hour period: about an hour longer than average. Over the period of a week they also spent an average of 2.8 hours napping in the after-noon: about two hours longer than the average. Sleep, the authors of the study concluded, allowed these top performers to regenerate so that they could practise with greater concentration. So yes, while they practised more, they also got more out of those hours of practise because they were better rested.

And don't think your lie-in at the weekend is helping either. One researcher has shown that the Monday-morning blues is just your body struggling to cope with mild jet lag - your body is suddenly having to get used to a different sleeping pattern after a weekend of lounging in bed.

the quality of sleep with sleeping pills is poor, disrupting the normal brain waves of sleep, and there is usually a sleeping pill hangover of dulled alertness the next morning. Because medication-induced sleep quality is poor, memory consolidation is affected, so we experience short-term memory loss--we don't remember that we didn't get a good night's sleep, and we don't remember how groggy we were upon waking

The only caveat was that the naps had to be timed to insure that the subjects didn't fall into deeper stages of sleep. After more than thirty to forty minutes of sleep, many of them emerged feeling groggy and even more fatigued than if they hadn't napped at all.

Sleep experts will tell you that the worst place to watch television is in bed. If you do it often enough, you won't be able to fall asleep without watching television first. Watching a thought-provoking or emotion-grabbing television show is a bad way to relax into your evening snooze. A better approach is to use your bed for sex and sleeping and nothing else.