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You're Only as Tired as You Think You Are
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You don't need some Gallup poll to tell you that people feel like they don't get enough sleep -- if you work with other human beings, you almost certainly have a co-worker who won't shut up about how they feel like shit because their neighbor's dog was barking all fucking night. And we all have days when we are that annoying co-worker.
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We call those days "weekdays."
But there might be an easy way to solve your sleep problems: stop whining about it.
Researchers at Colorado College hooked subjects up to a machine that measured their brainwaves while they slept. It kept track of how much REM sleep they were getting and, as the subjects were told, the amount of time you spend in REM has a huge effect on how rested you feel the next morning. Except the researchers were lying; nobody was measuring REM sleep (note: a significant proportion of human experimentation consists of just lying right to people's faces).
Then, they randomly split the subjects into groups. One group was told they had spent plenty of time in REM sleep. The second group was told they had a poor night's sleep, not spending much time in REM.
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These three were told they spent exactly the right amount of time in REM.
Now, you probably think we're going to say that, due to the placebo effect, the people who were told they slept fitfully started yawning and asking for a blanket. That would at least make some kind of sense -- it's not much different than your friend who starts acting drunk after one sip of a Bud Light. But what actually happened was they gave both groups cognitive tests and found that, somehow, the first group performed significantly better. Just because they were told they had gotten quality sleep, their brains actually started working better.
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