NEWS
Screens or sleep: it’s one or the other
N
orwegian research published on 31 March 2025 in Frontiers in Psychiatry
made no significant difference. To improve sleep quality, the researchers recommend cutting down on screen use at least 30-60 minutes before going to sleep.
looked at the impact of screen time on sleep. The study involving 45,000 young adults reveals that spending an extra hour’s screen time before going to bed increased the risk of insomnia by 59% and led to 24 minutes’ less sleep; the type of screen use (social media, films, gaming, etc.)
frontiersin.org
Sleeping with your favourite pet R esearch by the Mayo Clinic in the USA shows that sleeping with pets can improve sleep quality. 41% of the 150 participants in the study reported that they slept better when they had their cat or dog with them because they felt safer, helping the owners fall asleep faster and facilitating restorative sleep. Only 20% of participants said they were woken up by their pet, so it turns out that sharing your bedroom with your cat or dog could well be a key to sleeping better!
Dream on
E ven in ancient times, understand them as a way into our unconscious. Hippocrates pored over them (combined with the stars) in search of signs of illness. Dreams have inspired poets and artists such as the Surrealists, too, as well as being a constant source of interest in human science – despite which they remain something of a mystery. Ever Socrates saw dreams as the expression of our repressed desires; later, Freud came to since the Victorian era, groups of dreamers have set up ‘dream banks’:
intimate, collective archives that are still studied today in an attempt to understand the times we live in – and our own brains. There’s no exhaustive inventory of dream banks, but the largest are often accessible online; DreamBank, for instance, lists some twenty thousand dreams.
dreambank.net
4
Made with FlippingBook Digital Publishing Software