The cell phone on the nightstand is not “frying” your brain, but science is beginning to understand why it prevents you from resting

It is practically a ritual today: connect your phone to the charger, set the alarm and leave it on the nightstand just 30 centimeters from the pillow to sleep. According to the data, for 95% of adultssleeping with your phone within reach is a logistical necessity; For a growing stream of longevity experts, It’s a biological miscalculation. because we rest less. To do this, we have analyzed the bibliography to know exactly the effect of having your cell phone next to you. The culprit confirmed. Before entering the swampy terrain of the possible problems that radiation can generate when it is around us, we must point out the “elephant in the room.” The most solid evidence we have today does not blame antennas for having a bad sleep, but to the screens and what we do with them. To give us an idea, a meta-analysis over 36,000 participants concluded that excessive use of smartphone increases the risk of having poor quality sleep by 228%. The double responsible. The first is the suppression of melatonin, since the blue light emitted by the LED panels of mobile phones tricks our brain making him believe that it is still day. This delays the release of melatonin and fragments the architecture of sleep. But not only the blue light is information, since responding to a WhatsApp or doing doomscrolling on TikTok before bed keeps the brain alert. A study of medical students suggested that nighttime cell phone use corresponded to poorer sleep. The radiation debate. It has always been a mantra for many: having your cell phone nearby is having a large source of radiation that causes many health problems. In this case, organizations such as the WHO or ARPANSA have traditionally maintained that evidence of damage from low-level electromagnetic fields is “insufficient.” However, it does not mean that it is non-existent. The most recent studies They are beginning to see the non-thermal effects that mobile phones have. One of the most interesting was done with baby monitors that have a frequency of 2.45 GHz, similar to Bluetooth or Wifi, to simulate environmental exposure. The result was that the exposed group, compared to the placebo, showed a worse subjective quality of sleep and alterations in heart rate variability, suggesting that sensitive people do notice the invisible “presence” of the electronic device nearby. Brain wave modulation. Other research on 5G signals found that exposure to 3.6 GHz waves affected sleep spindles during N2 phasethat is, light sleep that accounts for 50% of the total rest time. The curious thing about this study is that the effect depended on genetics: only carriers of certain variants of the CACNA1C gene showed alterations in the electroencephalogram. This qualifies the warnings of some experts, since radiation may not affect us all equally, but for a genetically predisposed subgroup, sleeping next to a continuous emission source could be fragmenting their N2 phase, crucial for memory consolidation. The habit factor. It is often cited Sinha’s studio to demonize radiation, but what this study really measured were habits in a sample of 566 participants. In this case, it was seen that those people with high mobile phone use took longer to fall asleep, their sleep was less efficient, and 22.6% reported worse quality of sleep. In this way, the conclusion was not that the waves prevented them from sleeping, but that the habit of having their cell phone nearby inevitably leads to using. If it’s on the table, you look at it. If you look at it, you become active. It is a behavioral rather than a radiological vicious circle. Hygiene protocol. The question in this case is inevitable: should we wrap the room in aluminum foil? It’s not necessary. In this case, physics works in our favor thanks to the inverse square law: the intensity of the radiation falls drastically with distance. That is why the most important thing is to move the device at least one meter away from the bed, since at this distance the exposure falls to negligible basal levels, making Sleeping with your cell phone under your pillow is the worst possible decision. If we want to go a little further, we can put it in airplane mode, although the best advice, as the Spanish Society of Neurology points out, is to have a sacred hour, where the recommendation is to leave the screens an hour before going to sleep. Images | Nubelson Fernandes In Xataka | We thought insomnia was just not being able to sleep. Now we know that there are five different disorders

It’s not about not resting, but rather the opposite.

Quite a while ago we explained a universal concept about weight loss: there is no single premise that works the same for everyone. What there is are general guidelines that, to a greater or lesser extent, can help us reduce the scale. From then until now we have learned a lot about exercises to lose weight, the diets to followor the most basic: why the hell I can’t stop gaining kilos. A method that experts always recommend is, a priori, the easiest to do: walk. and now we know what is the best way to do it. The advertisement. We knew that walking is a recommended exercise to keep us healthy and even help us control weight and lose weight. Now, if you’ve been leaving home for half your life and trying to get to destination A team of researchers from the University of Milan led by Francesco Luciano carried out a series of experiments reaching the same conclusion: contrary to what is usually thought, if you want to burn calories by walking, it is more effective to make stops to rest You have to do it consistently from start to finish. The work is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The intrastory. As and as they have explainedbegan the study after observing that many estimates of the energy needed to walk were based on data from people exercising in a stable metabolic state, that is, when the heart rate is constant and the body’s energy production and consumption are balanced, such as the state of a car traveling at cruising speed. Thus, and to learn more about the energy needs for different walks, the researchers recruited 10 healthy volunteers who were monitored while they exercised on a stair climbing machine and a treadmill. The exercises covered three different speeds with sessions lasting from ten seconds to four minutes. The results. The idea, therefore, was to measure the oxygen and energy demands of short walks compared to longer walks. What did they find? Than walking or climbing stairs in periods of 10 to 30 seconds required 20 to 60% more oxygenan indicator of energy consumption, than covering the same distance in a continuous session, largely because walking is more efficient after several minutes in motion. For Lucianomakes perfect sense if we think that when we walk for shorter periods, we use more energy and consume more oxygen to cover the same distance, “it’s like having a car that consumes more fuel during the first few kilometers than later.” Energy records. They said in their work that for each exercise session they recorded how much oxygen each person consumed and calculated the metabolic demands for the different walks. They discovered that more energy was needed at the beginning of each walkto get going and warm up the body, than later in the exercise, when the body was already moving and working more efficiently. According to Lucianothe key is what we do at the beginning of that walk, “when we start walking, we may incur some fixed costs at the beginning of the session. By analogy, driving a car requires some fuel to start the engine or get the car out of the garage. We found that, when starting to walk from rest, a significant amount of oxygen is consumed just to start walking. We incur this cost regardless of whether we walk for 10 or 30 seconds, so, proportionally, it weighs more in the shorter sections than in the longer ones.” And more. Apparently, measurements of participants on the exercise machines also revealed that, in the early stages of a walk, people are less efficient at converting oxygen and energy in an effective movement, a situation that improves as they gain rhythm, when we have already “warmed up.” A work that highlights the health benefits of short walks and jumping up stairs, particularly for people who are largely sedentaryand that can also explain the improvements in physical condition that occur with so-called “exercise snacks.” The perfect hike. The study also closed the circle on what we could call the “perfect” walk in “caloric” terms. We already knew that the key to walking as an exercise was in consistency, and that about 150 minutes a weekor two and a half hours, are the minimum recommended average. Now we must add that the intensity that is always claimed does not refer so much to how long it takes us to get from A to B, but rather the opposite, walk in short periods and with stops of the same distance. Image | Diana Robinson, PickPick In Xataka | The truth about intermittent fasting to lose weight: deciding whether its benefits have a scientific basis or are pure hype In Xataka | We’ve been trying to figure out why we gain weight for decades. Science is becoming clearer

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