Soothing music – Music to heal and enjoy

Posted 12 October, 2010 By Dr Sleep and has no comments yet.

Soothing Music

Soothing Music

The benefits of soothing music are more than what you know. It not only helps in improving your sleep quality, but increases your productivity, and in turn boosts your confidence. The soft melodies of the music helps you relax and make your mind free of all worries and give you a clear head to think positively.

You can even combine two different tracks of soothing music. Choose your favorite place. It could be your personal spa, your bedroom, or a bathtub. Create a please environment with your favorite music, some candles, etc. You can use it in your office also. Just before important meetings and presentations, you can sit in your office for five to 10 minutes and relax and revitalize yourself with a piece of soothing music.

Generally the soothing music without vocals is advisable. This makes you run your own imagination, and connects you well with the music. In other words it helps your feelings and emotions grow stronger. The instruments like flute, piano, and harp creates the soothing atmosphere. It gives a calming effect, which the electric guitar will fail to do. The classical music is source of soothing music.

The way to find out that the music is really helping you is to find out the symptoms related to it. If your breathing gets slower, and also your heart rate, then the music is really relaxing you.

There are many different types of soothing music you can choose from:
Natural sounds are very comforting types. The nature sounds of birds chirping, water flowing, sound of ocean waves, help you to calm your mind. Listening to such sounds takes you to those natural spots.

Instrumental sounds are music without vocal sound. The instruments like flute, harp, piano, help you relax and give good sleep. These instruments have a capacity to create slow beats.

Ambient sounds are very popular soothing music forms. They help in creating relaxed ambience.

Jazz sounds are also calming. The jazz music generates different emotions that direct us to relaxation and enjoyment.

Tribal beats are also very useful soothing music. They are the repetitive beats of drums and bamboo. The repetitive rhythm produces a regular rhythmic sound in our mind, which helps you to relax and removes all anxiety.

The classical relaxation music generally Mozart, Beethoven are very widely used as soothing music.

You can choose any of the variety or can combine them to create a form of music that relaxes you.

Through scientific research has shown that around 60 beats/minute of musical tunes makes your mind relaxed. You feel relaxed by slow brain rates and slow pulse rate. Soothing piano music creates this effect. It is observed that soothing piano music can help you heal from health problems and even eradicate any kind of fear.

Here is something you interesting you might like to hear. The first soothing music was created to eradicate the elevator fear from the minds of people. The music was played in elevator which masks the sound of elevator and help people relax and remove their fear.

There are many advantages of soothing music. You should try to find out your soothing music and help yourself relax and enjoy.

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Meditation music – Have a soothing experience

Posted 13 September, 2010 By Dr Sleep and has no comments yet.

Meditation Music

Meditation Music

A spiritual voyage to the path of god can be termed as meditation. Meditation is a mode that will assist you in conversing with the heavenly being in a super-conscious level. It is an attentive act of a transcending physical state by relaxing the mind and the soul. It is believed that prayer is when you talk to god and meditation is when god talks to you. Meditation is also considered as a therapeutic as well as self improving practice which enlightens the soul with deep thoughts. It’s a media to relieve stress, restore ability to focus, improve your energy level and create radiant health, reduce anxiety, improve your relationships and enhance sleep.

Meditation can be practice with various ways some love to practice alone, some love to listen music during meditation. Listening to music during meditation helps increasing the level of mindfulness. Music facilitates in creating great elevations during meditation practice. As music has the great potential to go beyond the individual’s mind in a state of super-conscious, listening to music makes one feel relax. Meditation with music will definitely helps to relieve stress and combat negative health issues.

You can choose your meditation music according to the type of meditation you are undergoing. The strict meditation is where the general idea is to enter into emptiness. To achieve this meditation and become empty requires complete absence of mind. This is believed as the difficult way to enter into the state of meditation and therefore meditation music is least conductive here.

Another sort of meditation is not that much rigid but the aim is to take you in the identical space of emptiness and to entering into that special state. In this form of meditation the calming music serves the function of relaxing and helping you to get into meditative state as it is little more free meditation. The meditation that uses narrated instructions and guidelines needs a soothing music in background. These kinds of meditations comprise of narrated instructions which are softly spoken or even hypnotically over the soothing background music.

The meditation music has the power which allows you to put yourself in a world of fantasy. This will make you to go into a state of meditation devoid of even becoming conscious about it. It has the power and magic that makes us feel relax as the healing chants or soft relaxing instrumentals enlighten the mood. Meditation music is the best way to enhance your meditation power as the chants create a magic power.

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Lack of sleep ‘linked to early death’

Posted 5 May, 2010 By Dr Sleep and has 1 comment.

Insomnia

Not too little sleep, yet not too much, the experts advise

Getting less than six hours sleep a night can lead to an early grave, UK and Italian researchers have warned.

They said people regularly having such little sleep were 12% more likely to die over a 25-year period than those who got an “ideal” six to eight hours.

They also found an association between sleeping for more than nine hours and early death, although that much sleep may merely be a marker of ill health.

Sleep journal reports the findings, based on 1.5m people in 16 studies.

The study looked at the relationship between sleep and mortality by reviewing earlier studies from the UK, US and European and East Asian countries.

Premature death from all causes was linked to getting either too little or too much sleep outside of the “ideal” six to eight hours per night.

But while a lack of sleep may be a direct cause of ill health, ultimately leading to an earlier death, too much sleep may merely be a marker of ill health already, the UK and Italian researchers believe.

Time pressures

Professor Francesco Cappuccio, leader of the Sleep, Health and Society Programme at the UK’s University of Warwick, said: “Modern society has seen a gradual reduction in the average amount of sleep people take and this pattern is more common amongst full-time workers, suggesting that it may be due to societal pressures for longer working hours and more shift-work.

“On the other hand, the deterioration of our health status is often accompanied by an extension of our sleeping time.”

Five hours is insufficient for most people
Sleep expert Professor Jim Horne

If the link between a lack of sleep and death is truly causal, it would equate to over 6.3 million attributable deaths in the UK in people over 16 years of age.

Prof Cappuccio said more work was needed to understand exactly why sleep seemed to be so important for good health.

Professor Jim Horne, of the Loughborough Sleep Research Centre, said other factors may be involved rather than sleep per se.

“Sleep is just a litmus paper to physical and mental health. Sleep is affected by many diseases and conditions, including depression,” he said.

And getting improved sleep may not make someone better or live longer, he said.

“But having less than five hours a night suggests something is probably not right.

“Five hours is insufficient for most people and being drowsy in the day increases your risk of having an accident if driving or operating dangerous machinery.”

Categories: Sleep Advice

Working Shifts Linked Relaxing Music – To Sleep Problems, Especially Among Workers In Their 30s And 40s

Posted 26 April, 2010 By Dr Sleep and has no comments yet.

There appears to be a link between working nightshifts and sleep problems, especially among workers in their 30s and 40s, according to a study published in the April edition of Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, the official journal of ACOEM (American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine).

As younger workers with sleep problems are more likely to leave their jobs, the sleep problems do not appear to worsen with time, the study reports. This study was led by Philip Tucker, Ph.D., of Swansea University, Swansea, Wales, U.K.

Using a large database employment database, the investigators studied the relationship between shiftwork and sleep problems in workers of different ages and over various lengths of time. As seen in previous studies, shiftworkers had a higher rate of sleep problems compared to dayworkers. Shiftwork was specifically related to waking up too early rather than other types of sleep problems.

The effects were most apparent in the early to middle years of working life-workers in their 30s and 40s. Former shiftworkers had more sleep problems than those who had never done shiftwork. However, more years of shiftwork did not lead to greater sleep problems. Instead, workers who gave up shiftwork seemed to be a “self-selected” group who tended to have more problems with shiftwork.

The study bears out the findings and conclusions unveiled in previous studies regarding a link between shiftwork and sleep problems, while lending new insights into the course of those problems over time. Sleep problems seem to be a “reversible consequence” of shiftwork-although it may take awhile after giving up shiftwork before sleep returns to normal.

Categories: Sleep Advice

Taking A Nap Improves Learning – relaxing music

By Dr Sleep and has no comments yet.

Researchers reporting online on April 22nd in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, offer more evidence that successful study habits should include plenty of napping. They found that people who take a nap and dream about a task they’ve just learned perform it better upon waking than either those who don’t sleep at all or those who sleep but don’t report any associated dreams.

The learners in the study were asked to sit in front of a computer screen and learn the layout of a three-dimensional maze so that they could find their way to a landmark (a tree) when they were plopped down at a random location within the virtual space five hours later. Those who were allowed to take a nap and also remembered dreaming of the task found the tree in less time.

“We at first thought that dreaming must reflect the memory process that’s improving performance,” said Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School. “But when you look at the content of the dreams, it was hard to argue that.”

In a couple of cases, the dreamers said they recalled just the music from the computer maze. One subject said they were dreaming that there were people at particular checkpoints in the maze, even though the real maze didn’t have any people or checkpoints. Another said they dreamed about an experience they’d had tromping through bat caves and thinking that the caves were like mazes.

“We think that the dreams are a marker that the brain is working on the same problem at many levels,” Stickgold said. “The dreams might reflect the brain’s attempt to find associations for the memories that could make them more useful in the future.”

In other words, it’s not that the dreams led to better memory, but rather that they are a sign that other, unconscious parts of the brain were working hard to remember how to get through the virtual maze. The dreams are essentially a side effect of that memory process.

Stickgold said that there may still be ways to take advantage of this phenomenon for improving learning and memory. For instance, it may be better to study hard right before you go to sleep than in the afternoon, or to take a nap after a period of intense afternoon study. More generally, people might take notice of the study habits or mental processes while awake that lead them to dream about something they need to remember. Perhaps other more directed ways to guide dreams could even prove useful to make your brain work on what you want it to at night.

But, Stickgold said, the most exciting thing to him is the notion that this line of evidence might elucidate a deeper question that has seemed almost impossible to tackle: Why do we dream? What is its function?

“Some have viewed dreaming as entertainment, but this study suggests it is a by-product of memory processing,” he said. Whether you have to remember your dreams to get the benefits isn’t yet entirely clear, but Stickgold suspects not. After all, he said, people generally remember only a small fraction, no more than 10 to 15 percent, of their dreams.

The researchers hope to follow up their study by manipulating the learning environment in ways that boost incorporation into dreams. They also plan to study the same phenomenon following a full night of sleep as opposed to a nap.

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