Bereavement often leads men to turn to drink

As reported by Emily Braeger of the London Daily Express, April 28, 2022:

Men often turn to drink and recreational drugs to numb the heartbreak of bereavement, research has revealed.

They admitted they reached for alcohol 13 times a month on average, according to the Sue Ryder charity.

And nearly a quarter said they used drugs every day after the death of a loved one.

Women were more likely to use prescription drugs to combat depression and anxiety, the poll said.

Sue Ryder, which has launched a Grief Kind campaign to encourage more openness, said support from friends and family would have prevented many from using drugs or drinking.

The charity's Bianca Neumann said: "This suggests men are turning to short-lasting and numbing coping mechanisms. Encourage them to visit their GP!"

People who have trouble falling asleep have the most anxiety--or is it the other way around?

Is it the anxiety that's making it difficult for people to fall asleep, or is it the inability to sleep that's causing the anxiety? Only the scientists know for sure, as reported by Mari Rian Hanger and Nancy Bazilchuk in ScienceNorway, October 9, 2019 (bold, link in original):

Sleeplessness, or insomnia, takes different forms. Some patients have trouble falling asleep at night. Others wake up very early in the morning, without being able to fall back asleep again. A third group struggles with constantly waking during the night.

Now, sleep researchers who have looked at these three types of insomnia have found differences in anxiety levels in people with the different types.

"Patients who have trouble falling asleep have significantly higher levels of anxiety than those who struggle with waking during the night or waking early in the morning," said the lead researcher behind the new study, Daniela Bragantini, a biologist at the Department of Mental Health at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

The study was recently published in the journal Sleep Health.

Population-level study

The researchers had access to information from one of the largest health studies ever performed, called HUNT, the Nord-Trøndelag Health Study. This study of residents of the former county of Nord-Trøndelag includes a database with information on nearly 120,000 individuals. In this case, the researchers relied on data collected from 4317 people between 2006-2008 who had reported at least one symptom of insomnia to the HUNT researchers.

A total of 3616 controls, or people who did not have insomnia, were also included in the sleep study.

Participants had completed a questionnaire in which they answered questions about insomnia and also questions about anxiety.

“We compared their responses and saw that people with insomnia generally had a higher level of anxiety than those who slept well at night,” Bragantini says.

People with insomnia are known to suffer from more anxiety and depression than average. But few researchers have studied the differences between different types of sleep problems.

Trouble falling asleep associated with anxiety

People who had trouble falling asleep, whether combined with other types of sleep problems or alone, had the highest anxiety score.

Those who suffered from waking early in the morning, or waking multiple times at night, had lower levels of anxiety.

“It's interesting that having problems falling asleep is more closely related to anxiety than other insomnia symptoms,” says Bragantini.

She said that the anxiety levels in question were not very high and that not everyone needs professional help. But the differences between people with different symptoms were significant.

It seems that people who have trouble falling asleep struggle to turn off their brains.

“Their brains continue to think, even if it really supposed to be time to sleep. It is difficult to say which comes first, anxiety or insomnia — often the two disorders can sustain each other, so that it becomes a circle of stress. Sometimes it may also be that the anxiety comes first, but that the sleep problems become an independent disorder, which does not necessarily disappear even if the anxiety is treated,” she says.

Other research has shown that a patient’s mental disorders often get better when they are treated for insomnia.

Sleep anxiety can cause insomnia

Concerns over how important sleep is can also cause people to feel anxious, Bragantini said.

“It can be easy to think that it is bad for your health if you don’t get your eight hours of sleep. This type of information can be taken out of context and can feel daunting. It can cause people to develop even more anxiety about their lack of sleep, which makes it even more difficult to sleep at night,” she said.

Bragantini and her co-researchers believe a diagnosis of insomnia actually consists of several different subtypes, based on the symptoms the patients have.

“There may be different reasons for different types of insomnia. I am looking into the different biological causes behind these different types of insomnia,” she says.

Consequently, she thinks different types of insomnia may also require different treatment.

“A person who struggles with falling asleep may need treatment for anxiety, while those who wake up very early in the morning may benefit from other types of treatment. We want to continue this line of inquiry,” says Bragantini.

Most often, anxiety comes first

Ståle Pallesen, who is a professor at the Department of Psychosocial Science at the University of Bergen, says it’s not surprising that people who struggle to fall asleep have the most anxiety.

“If you have a lot of worries, and struggle with anxiety, it is not surprising that it can be difficult to turn off your cognitive activity in the evening when you are trying to sleep. Anxiety patients can also have physical symptoms that make it hard for them to fall asleep,” says Pallesen.

He believes that in some cases, having trouble falling asleep can also lead to anxiety.

“Not being able to sleep at night gives you more time to lie there and worry,” he says.

Still, he believes that in most cases, anxiety comes first, and leads to sleep problems in these patients.

Reference:

Daniela Bragantini et al.: Differences in anxiety levels among symptoms of insomnia. The HUNT study. Sleep Health, August 2019

Laughter is contagious

A neuroscientist confirms it, in an interview with Andrew Anthony in the British newspaper The Guardian, December 24, 2017 (bold, links in original):

Sophie Scott is a senior fellow at University College London. She is an expert in cognitive neuroscience, particularly in relation to communications. This year, she is giving the Royal Institution Christmas lectures looking at how evolution has shaped our bodies to communicate with each other. She also does standup comedy...

...Many animals laugh, including, apparently, rats. What have rats got to laugh about?
They laugh for the same reasons as other animals: it’s a social behaviour. We tend to associate laughing with jokes and humour in adult humans, but actually laughter is always something that happens primarily around members of your own species. Particularly the ones you know, particularly the ones you like. Rats laugh when they’re tickled and when they’re playing. That’s true of apes and humans too.

What are the advantages of laughter over a wry smile?
They are twofold. Laughter is a very strong cue to others to join in. So it works as a behaviourally contagious phenomenon. It also feels good to laugh. You get a kick from laughter. It’s having an effect at multiple levels. There’s some very good research from Robert Levenson on positive affect. If both members of a couple laugh or smile, they can deal with stressful situations. But only if they both do it.

We’re 30 times more likely to laugh with someone than on our own. Is laughing alone an activity that should be of concern?
All laughter’s good. Don’t worry about laughing on your own. It’s a statistical phenomenon – you’re much more likely to do it around other people. I realised the other day the same is true of speaking. You’re much more likely to talk around other people.

Close friendships are good for you

The psychologists who conducted this study apparently have no close friends themselves, or they'd already know this. As reported by Anne Sutherland in the Montreal Gazette, January 29, 2012:

MONTREAL - ..."We've long studied the effects of friendship on the behaviour and emotional well-being of children and we wanted to see if the HPA axis (hypothalamic, pituitary and adrenal systems) varied (under stress) when a friend is with you," said William Bukowski of his study published in the journal Developmental Psychology.

If a child is alone when he or she gets into trouble, there is a measurable increase in levels of a coping hormone and a decrease in feelings of self-worth, Bukowski said.

A group of schoolchildren, in Grades 5 and 6, were given journals to record their feelings and had their saliva tested four times a day for four consecutive days.

For privacy reasons, Bukowski would not reveal which school the children attended, but said they came from all walks of life.

They were tested and questioned before school, right after recess, after lunch and after school, the classic schoolyard periods outside of class time when bullying or hassling are most prevalent.

When the body is stressed, the adrenal glands produce cortisol, a hormone that metabolizes sugar to provide energy for the flight or fight reaction.

Bukowski and his team looked for levels of cortisol in the children as an indicator of stress levels.

Bukowski's participants who were with their best friends showed lower levels of the hormone during stressful situations.

"We knew what the experiences the kids were having through their journals, so we could monitor the cortisol levels of both positive and negative experiences," he said.

The researchers found no discernible gender difference between boys and girls and their best friends.

"We chose kids in Grades 5 and 6 because friendships are very important at this age and the child is developing the emotional patterns that will continue through adolescence," Bukowski said.

Besides handling stress, having a best friend is very good training for all that life has to offer, teaching children to take into account the needs of others and not to be selfish, Bukowski said...

Snipers face less stress than other soldiers

The Canadian Armed Forces have made the shocking discovery that snipers are less stressed than other soldiers, and enjoy their work more. Gee, I wonder if that may be because snipers aren’t directly in the line of fire. I have the suspicion that the study’s finidings regarding Canadian snipers are probably true for snipers in armies the world over. As reported by Andrew Mayeda of Postmedia News on January 5, 2011:

OTTAWA — Canadian snipers who have served in Afghanistan report being less traumatized by the war than the average soldier, according to a study that offers a rare glimpse into the minds of Canada's battle-hardened troops.

Rather than expressing regret over their deadly line of work, snipers say they feel justified in killing enemies who pose a threat to Canadian troops and Afghan civilians. Moreover, most show high levels of career satisfaction, and say their job has been a positive influence in their lives.

Yet snipers report being more troubled than other soldiers when asked about specific combat experiences, such as knowing that someone has been seriously injured or killed in action, or seeing members of their unit become a casualty.

The findings are part of an ongoing three-year study commissioned by Defence R&D Canada, the research arm of the Department of National Defence. They paint a complex, at times contradictory, portrait of the carefully screened, elite soldiers who are paid to take out the enemy from afar.

A House of Commons committee has estimated that 1,120 of the 27,000 Canadian soldiers who served in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2008 showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet a number of soldiers who have returned from the war have complained that the military does not provide adequate care to those afflicted with the disorder.

After reports of snipers being traumatized, the former commander of Canada's land forces, Lieut.-General Andrew Leslie, called for an examination of their psychological well-being. Previously, little was known about the unique makeup of snipers.

"Unlike other soldiers who can deflect their responsibility for killing by rationalizing that they were led into battle by their officers, or had to kill in order to stay alive, snipers have more autonomy than conventional combat soldiers and often have discretion as to who they kill and who they don't," writes study author J. Peter Bradley, a retired lieutenant-colonel in the Canadian Forces who now works as a professor at Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont.

In his initial exploratory study, Bradley interviewed 19 snipers who had served in Afghanistan and been back to Canada for at least six months. Most had killed someone in combat. Because of the small sample size, Bradley cautions that more research needs to be done before any firm conclusions can be drawn about the sniper community.

Compared with a general benchmark, the snipers exhibited escalated levels of psychological stress after taking a test known as the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale. However, their stress levels were actually lower than the average scores of Canadian soldiers who served in Afghanistan.

Bradley notes the Canadian Forces have been developing a system of tests to filter out candidates who don't fit the right psychological profile. According to this research, snipers tend to score low on "neuroticism," high on conscientiousness and low on "tender mindedness."

According to conventional theory, soldiers typically feel an initial sense of euphoria after killing someone in combat. Most later express remorse, and in the third stage, they try to rationalize their actions — a process that can haunt soldiers for the rest of their lives, Bradley notes.

But the snipers he interviewed showed little remorse, with one third stating that they had no feelings about killing, since they were just doing their job.

Bradley says it's possible snipers truly have no regrets and are coping well. "First, killing in combat may not be as traumatic as one might think. Humans have been killing one another in combat for millennia. Second, even if we assume that killing in combat is traumatic, not everyone suffers after experiencing trauma."

However, he also suggests the snipers could have been concealing their feelings to reconcile conflicting emotions about killing, or to "protect their place within the sniper community."

"Snipers are top soldiers and weakness is not consistent with the sniper image," Bradley writes.

Fathers in Tokyo work too many hours

As reported by Reuters:

Tokyo fathers spend less time playing with their children and pitching in with the housework than dads in other big Asian cities due to working such long hours, according to a Japanese survey.

Among Tokyo dads, only 37 percent spend at least two hours a day with their children on weekdays compared with 50 percent for fathers in Seoul and about three-quarters of Beijing and Shanghai dads, the survey by education services provider Benesse showed.

It also showed that fathers in Tokyo come home from work much later than their Asian counterparts, with about 40 percent getting in the door after 9 p.m. versus 29 percent in Seoul and a low 3 percent in the Chinese cities.

Wounded war veterans bring their wounds home with them

This will come as a surprise only to those who've never heard of war. And here's another possibility these "scholars" might want to investigate: Families and caregivers of those who suffer serious injuries not related to war may also suffer from stress.

Military families suffer collateral damage
Caring for injured soldiers has steep price: study
Keith Gerein, The Edmonton Journal

EDMONTON - When a Canadian soldier loses a limb in combat, or suffers paralysis or develops severe depression, the injuries can be devastating.
But when that soldier returns home, the impact can be passed on to spouses, parents and children -- caregivers who suffer in profound and often unrecognized ways, say the authors of a new University of Alberta study...

Watching close, exciting games is more stressful than watching boring, lopsided games

Canadian Football League coaches (especially Danny Maciocia and Tom Higgins) have been very effective in recent years in preventing heart attacks by doing everything they could to remove all the entertainment from the games.

Don't be a Super Bowl statistic
Stress of watching the big game can be hazardous to heart, research suggests
By Jeremy Manier | Tribune reporter
January 31, 2008

Most sports fans can recall a close game that made their hearts skip a figurative beat, but a new study suggests that the stressful emotions of big contests may in fact increase the risk of chest pains or cardiac arrest in spectators...