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- Counting Sheep: Does It Work?
Hello again!
March is National Sleep Awareness Month, and since so many struggle with getting enough sleep on a regular basis—and given how important adequate sleep is to heart and whole-body health—we’ll be taking a look at techniques to promote better sleep in each issue of Speak for the Heart this month.
This issue also provides an in-depth look at why optimists live longer …
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To your health,
Yasmine S. Ali, MD
Weekly Heart-Health News: The Highlights
My Take:
This is a “crossover” from my Positive Vibes newsletter, which focuses on sharing good news and fostering a spirit of healthy optimism, and this is why: study after study has shown that optimists live longer than pessimists. Optimists have lower blood pressure, lower stress levels, lower levels of inflammation, better heart health, and on and on.
And in this article, you’ll find study results showing that “individuals with higher levels of optimism experience a 35% lower risk of cardiovascular events … The most optimistic people tend to take better care of themselves, especially by eating healthily, exercising, and not smoking.”
In fact, as the article also notes, optimists live an average of 11% to 15% longer than pessimists, and have an excellent chance of achieving “exceptional longevity.”
To get a weekly dose of optimism in your inbox, you can also subscribe for free to my Positive Vibes newsletter, if you haven’t done so already:
My Take:
So, the results are mixed as to whether or not counting sheep, specifically, works for insomnia, but this article does an interesting deep-dive into how the practice came about—and, even more helpfully, gives a number of tips for strategies that do work.
One of those strategies, “gratitude,” works for me every single time, and I do it every night: “coming up with 3 things in your life that you are grateful for and then saying those to yourself before sleep.”
My Take:
This has happened to all of us at some time or other, whether you’re waking up before your alarm or waking up before you had intended to. This article gives some good tips for how to deal with that—and the main tip might surprise you.
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