The Sleep Cycle moves from Stage I to REM then it starts all over again, continuing throughout the night. Most people complete 3 to 5 cycles each night, each cycle lasts from 90 to 110 minutes. Towards the end of sleeping, the individual does not reach stages III or IV as the body prepares to wake up.
Non REM sleep
Stage I
Light sleep
Eye and muscle activity slow
Brain activity decreases by 50%
Individual may experience sudden muscle contractions
On this stage the individual and be easily aroused
Stage II
Eye movement stops
Muscle activity stops
Brain waves slow down
Small burst of brain activity begin (also known as Sleep spindles)
Stage III
Deep sleep Starts
Brain begins to produce slow delta waves
There is no eye or muscle movement
Stage IV
Deep sleep
Brain produces only delta waves
No muscle or eye movement
Hard to awaken
REM sleep
Heart and breathing rates increase
Eye movement is quick and irregular
Blood pressure rises
Breathing becomes shallow
Almost complete loss of muscle control
Penile erections (males) and vaginal moistening (females)
Sleeper begins to dream (more intense, vivid dreams)
A tension headache is head pain that results from muscle tightening (contraction) in the neck and head. The muscle contraction leads to a slight decrease in blood flow to the surrounding areas and an irritation of pain fibers in the skin, muscles, and blood vessel walls.
WHAT CAUSES IT?
The causes are unknown. Anxiety, depression, and emotional conflicts are often associated with tension headaches. Headaches may also result from muscle strain associated with injury to the neck muscles. An abnormality in the bones at the back of the neck (cervical vertebrae) or in the area where the mouth opens and closes (temporomandibular joint) may also put tension on the surrounding muscles and lead to a tension headache. On occasion, a child who has been incorrectly fitted with glasses may suffer from a tension headache due to eye muscle strain.
WHAT ARE ITS COMMON SYMPTOMS?
More than 90 percent of tension headaches are on both sides of the head. The headache is often described as a pressure or band-like sensation around the head. The dull, steady pain builds gradually and is often intense at the end of the day. In some individuals, the headache continues day and night. Even after sleep, the headache may still be present.
IS IT CONTAGIOUS?
No.
HOW LONG WILL IT LAST?
Tension headaches may last a few hours, several days, weeks, or even months.
HOW IS IT TREATED?
Treatment for this problem consists of two important parts: (1) what you can do, and (2) what your health care provider can do.
Some people get relief by applying heat to the area of the head or neck where the pain is most severe. Apply heat in the form of a dry towel warmed in the oven, or use a heating pad on a low setting for brief time periods. Other people gain relief by applying an ice bag wrapped in a towel to the painful area.
A gentle fingertip massage over the area just in front of and above the ears (temporal area) may reduce the pain.
Lying down and relaxing may also help to decrease the pain. Many people find concentrating on a soothing thought or image while taking slow, deep breaths helps them relax.
Record on a calendar the date of the headache, the time it started and ended, the amount of medication you took. Remember to brink this record with you on follow-up visits to your health care provider. It will help in your treatment.
WHAT CAN YOUR HEALTH CARE PROVIDER DO?
If the cause of the tension headache is a cervical vertebrae or temporomandibular joint problem, medical correction of the condition will be necessary. Incorrectly fitted eyeglasses must be refitted if they are the cause of tension headaches. A neck injury that is contributing to a tension headache can be helped with supportive collar, which allows the muscles in the neck to rest and relax.
Medications are needed for some individuals. Your health care provider may prescribe one or more of the following medications.
Analgesics — These medicines reduce the pain of a tension headache.
Muscle relaxants — These medications aid in relaxation by causing sedation and decreasing anxiety. They have little or no direct effect on relaxing the muscles of the head and neck that contribute to the headache. Some of these medications can become addictive.
CAN YOU PREVENT IT?
Because tension headaches recur in some individuals for years and because continual use of medication can lead to serious side effects, prevention is a key aspect in the management of tension headaches.
Tension headaches are often a response to stress, anxiety, and emotional conflict in a person’s life. It is important to find ways to reduce these conflicts. Regular exercise (e.g., walking, biking, swimming) and relaxation techniques (e.g., yoga, meditation) may help you. Exercise and relaxation not only reduce stress but also decrease the severity of head pain. A trained counselor can help provide assistance to identify the stresses in your life and make suggestions to resolve the problems.
COMMON MYTHS
It is a myth that tension headaches are inherited. However, people tend to imitate the stress reduction and responses of those around them. They may develop a tension headache as a result of ineffective stress management.
FOLLOW-UP
It is important to return for your follow-up care as advised.
HOW IS IT DIFFERENT FROM MIGRAINE..TAKE A LOOK..
REMEMBER
Notify your health care provider if you have any of the following:
Changes in vision
Difficulty speaking
Numbness or tingling in your arms or legs
Marked change in severity of your headache
Sudden onset of a fever with a headache
Difficulty walking
Questions concerning the symptoms you are experiencing
Improving memory tip 1: Don't skimp on exercise or sleep
Just as an athlete relies on sleep and a nutrition-packed diet to perform his or her best, your ability to remember increases when you nurture your brain with a good diet and other healthy habits.
When you exercise the body, you exercise the brain
Treating your body well can enhance your ability to process and recall information. Physical exercise increases oxygen to your brain and reduces the risk for disorders that lead to memory loss, such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Exercise may also enhance the effects of helpful brain chemicals and protect brain cells.
Improve your memory by sleeping on it
When you’re sleep deprived, your brain can’t operate at full capacity. Creativity, problem-solving abilities, and critical thinking skills are compromised. Whether you’re studying, working, or trying to juggle life’s many demands, sleep deprivation is a recipe for disaster.
But sleep is critical to learning and memory in an even more fundamental way. Research shows that sleep is necessary for memory consolidation, with the key memory-enhancing activity occurring during the deepest stages of sleep.
Improving memory tip 2: Make time for friends and fun
When you think of ways to improve memory, do you think of “serious” activities such as wrestling with the New York Times crossword puzzle or mastering chess strategy, or do more lighthearted pastimes—hanging out with friends or enjoying a funny movie—come to mind? If you’re like most of us, it’s probably the former. But countless studies show that a life that’s full of friends and fun comes with cognitive benefits.
Healthy relationships: the ultimate memory booster?
Humans are highly social animals. We’re not meant to survive, let alone thrive, in isolation. Relationships stimulate our brains—in fact, interacting with others may be the best kind of brain exercise.
Research shows that having meaningful relationships and a strong support system are vital not only to emotional health, but also to brain health. In one recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health, for example, researchers found that people with the most active social lives had the slowest rate of memory decline.
There are many ways to start taking advantage of the brain and memory-boosting benefits of socializing. Volunteer, join a club, make it a point to see friends more often, or reach out over the phone. And if a human isn’t handy, don’t overlook the value of a pet—especially the highly-social dog.
Laughter is good for your brain
You’ve heard that laughter is the best medicine, and that holds true for the brain as well as the body. Unlike emotional responses, which are limited to specific areas of the brain, laughter engages multiple regions across the whole brain.
Furthermore, listening to jokes and working out punch lines activates areas of the brain vital to learning and creativity. As psychologist Daniel Goleman notes in his book Emotional Intelligence, “laughter…seems to help people think more broadly and associate more freely.”
Looking for ways to bring more laughter in your life? Start with these basics:
Laugh at yourself. Share your embarrassing moments. The best way to take ourselves less seriously is to talk about the times when we took ourselves too seriously.
When you hear laughter, move toward it. Most of the time, people are very happy to share something funny because it gives them an opportunity to laugh again and feed off the humor you find in it. When you hear laughter, seek it out and ask, “What’s funny?”
Spend time with fun, playful people. These are people who laugh easily–both at themselves and at life’s absurdities–and who routinely find the humor in everyday events. Their playful point of view and laughter are contagious.
Surround yourself with reminders to lighten up. Keep a toy on your desk or in your car. Put up a funny poster in your office. Choose a computer screensaver that makes you laugh. Frame photos of you and your family or friends having fun.
Pay attention to children and emulate them. They are the experts on playing, taking life lightly, and laughing.
Improving memory tip 3: Keep stress in check
Stress is one of the brain’s worst enemies. Over time, if left unchecked, chronic stress destroys brain cells and damages the hippocampus, the region of the brain involved in the formation of new memories and the retrieval of old ones.
Improving memory tip 4: Eat a brain-boosting diet
Just as the body needs fuel, so does the brain. You probably already know that a diet based on fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and “healthy” fats will provide lots of health benefits, but such a diet can also improve memory. But for brain health, it’s not just what you eat—it’s also what you don’t eat. The following nutritional tips will help boost your brainpower and reduce your risk of dementia:
Get your omega-3s. More and more evidence indicates that omega-3 fatty acids are particularly beneficial for brain health. Fish is a particularly rich source of omega-3, especially cold water “fatty fish” such as salmon, tuna, halibut, trout, mackerel, sardines, and herring. In addition to boosting brainpower, eating fish may also lower your risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. If you’re not a fan of fish, consider turning to fish oil supplements. Other non-fish sources of omega-3s include walnuts, ground flaxseed, flaxseed oil, pumpkin seeds, and soybeans.
Limit calories and saturated fat. Research shows that diets high in saturated fat (from sources such as red meat, whole milk, butter, cheese, sour cream, and ice cream) increase your risk of dementia and impair concentration and memory. Eating too many calories in later life can also increase your risk of cognitive impairment. Talk to your doctor or dietician about developing ahealthy eating plan.
Eat more fruit and vegetables. Produce is packed with antioxidants, substances that protect your brain cells from damage. Colorful fruits and vegetables are particularly good antioxidant "superfood" sources. Try leafy green vegetables such as spinach, broccoli, romaine lettuce, Swiss chard, and arugula, and fruit such as apricots, mangoes, cantaloupe, and watermelon.
Drink green tea. Green tea contains polyphenols, powerful antioxidants that protect against free radicals that can damage brain cells. Among many other benefits, regular consumption of green tea may enhance memory and mental alertness and slow brain aging.
Drink wine (or grape juice) in moderation. Keeping your alcohol consumption in check is key, since alcohol kills brain cells. But in moderation (around 1 glass a day for women; 2 for men), alcohol may actually improve memory and cognition. Red wine appears to be the best option, as it is rich in resveratrol, a flavonoid that boosts blood flow in the brain and reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Other resveratrol-packed options include grape juice, cranberry juice, fresh grapes and berries, and peanuts.
Improving memory tip 5: Give your brain a workout
By the time you’ve reached adulthood, your brain has developed millions of neural pathways that help you process information quickly, solve familiar problems, and execute familiar tasks with a minimum of mental effort. But if you always stick to these well-worn paths, you aren’t giving your brain the stimulation it needs to keep growing and developing. You have to shake things up from time to time!
Memory, like muscular strength, requires you to “use it or lose it.” The more you work out your brain, the better you’ll be able to process and remember information. The best brain exercising activities break your routine and challenge you to use and develop new brain pathways. The activity can be virtually anything, so long as it meets the following three criteria:
It’s new. No matter how intellectually demanding the activity, if it’s something you’re already good at, it’s not a good brain exercise. The activity needs to be something that’s unfamiliar and out of your comfort zone.
It’s challenging. Anything that takes some mental effort and expands your knowledge will work. Examples include learning a new language, instrument, or sport, or tackling a challenging crossword or Sudoku puzzle.
It’s fun. Physical and emotional enjoyment is important in the brain’s learning process. The more interested and engaged you are in the activity, the more likely you’ll be to continue doing it and the greater the benefits you’ll experience. The activity should be challenging, yes, it should also be something that is fun and enjoyable to you. Make an activity more pleasurable by appealing to your senses—playing music while you do it, or rewarding yourself afterwards with a favorite treat, for example.
Use mnemonic devices to make memorization easier
Mnemonics (the initial “m” is silent) are clues of any kind that help us remember something, usually by helping us associate the information we want to remember with a visual image, a sentence, or a word.
Mnemonic device
Example
Visual image - Associate a visual image with a word or name to help you remember them better. Positive, pleasant images that are vivid, colorful, and three-dimensional will be easier to remember.
To remember the name Rosa Parks and what she’s known for, picture a woman sitting on a park bench surrounded by roses, waiting as her bus pulls up.
Acrostic (or sentence) - Make up a sentencein which the first letter of each word is part of or represents the initial of what you want to remember.
The sentence “Every good boy does fine” to memorize the lines of the treble clef, representing the notes E, G, B, D, and F.
Acronym - An acronym is a word that is made up by taking the first letters of all the key words or ideas you need to remember and creating a new word out of them.
The word “HOMES” to remember the names of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior.
Rhymes and alliteration - Rhymes, alliteration (a repeating sound or syllable), and even jokes are a memorable way to remember more mundane facts and figures.
The rhyme “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November” to remember the months of the year with only 30 days in them.
Chunking - Chunking breaks a long list of numbers or other types of information into smaller, more manageable chunks.
Remembering a 10-digit phone number by breaking it down into three sets of numbers: 555-867-5309 (as opposed to5558675309).
Method of loci - Imagine placing the items you want to remember along a route you know well or in specific locations in a familiar room or building.
For a shopping list, imagine bananas in the entryway to your home, a puddle of milk in the middle of the sofa, eggs going up the stairs, and bread on your bed.
Tips for enhancing your ability to learn and remember
Pay attention.You can’t remember something if you never learned it, and you can’t learn something—that is, encode it into your brain—if you don’t pay enough attention to it. It takes about eight seconds of intense focus to process a piece of information into your memory. If you’re easily distracted, pick a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted.
Involve as many senses as possible. Try to relate information to colors, textures, smells, and tastes. The physical act of rewriting information can help imprint it onto your brain. Even if you’re a visual learner, read out loud what you want to remember. If you can recite it rhythmically, even better.
Relate information to what you already know.Connect new data to information you already remember, whether it’s new material that builds on previous knowledge, or something as simple as an address of someone who lives on a street where you already know someone.
For more complex material, focus on understanding basic ideas rather than memorizing isolated details. Practice explaining the ideas to someone else in your own words.
Rehearse information you’ve already learned.Review what you’ve learned the same day you learn it, and at intervals thereafter. This “spaced rehearsal” is more effective than cramming, especially for retaining what you’ve learned
Internet addiction is described as an impulse control disorder, which does not involve use of an intoxicating drug and is very similar to pathological gambling. Some Internet users may develop an emotional attachment to on-line friends and activities they create on their computer screens. Internet users may enjoy aspects of the Internet that allow them to meet, socialize, and exchange ideas through the use of chat rooms, social networking websites, or "virtual communities." Other Internet users spend endless hours researching topics of interest Online or "blogging". Blogging is a contraction of the term "Web log", in which an individual will post commentaries and keep regular chronicle of events. It can be viewed as journaling and the entries are primarily textual.
Similar to other addictions, those suffering from Internet addiction use the virtual fantasy world to connect with real people through the Internet, as a substitution for real-life human connection, which they are unable to achieve normally.
What are the warning signs of Internet addiction?
Preoccupation with the Internet. (Thoughts about previous on-line activity or anticipation of the next on-line session.)
Use of the Internet in increasing amounts of time in order to achieve satisfaction.
Repeated, unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back or stop Internet use.
Feelings of restlessness, moodiness, depression, or irritability when attempting to cut down use of the Internet.
On-line longer than originally intended.
Jeopardized or risked loss of significant relationships, job, educational or career opportunities because of Internet use.
Lies to family members, therapists, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with the Internet.
Use of the Internet is a way to escape from problems or to relieve a dysphoric mood. (e.g. Feelings of hopelessness, guilt, anxiety, depression.)
What are the effects?
Internet addiction results in personal, family, academic, financial, and occupational problems that are characteristic of other addictions. Impairments of real life relationships are disrupted as a result of excessive use of the Internet. Individuals suffering from Internet addiction spend more time in solitary seclusion, spend less time with real people in their lives, and are often viewed as socially awkward. Arguments may result due to the volume of time spent on-line. Those suffering from Internet addiction may attempt to conceal the amount of time spent on-line, which results in distrust and the disturbance of quality in once stable relationships.
Some suffering from Internet addiction may create on-line personas or profiles where they are able to alter their identities and pretend to be someone other than himself or herself. Those at highest risk for creation of a secret life are those who suffer from low-self esteem feelings of inadequacy, and fear of disapproval. Such negative self-concepts lead to clinical problems of depression and anxiety.
Many persons who attempt to quit their Internet use experience withdrawal including: anger, depression, relief, mood swings, anxiety, fear, irritability, sadness, loneliness, boredom, restlessness, procrastination, and upset stomach. Being addicted to the Internet can also cause physical discomfort or medical problems such as: Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, dry eyes, backaches, severe headaches, eating irregularities, (such as skipping meals), failure to attend to personal hygiene, and sleep disturbance.
Please see the Video...For More Detailed Explaination..
How can someone get help?
The first step is to determine if there is a problem. Psychiatrists and counsellers trained in identification and treatment of Internet addiction can effectively perform an assessment to determine what level of care is most appropriate..Please consult your doctor.
