Clarissa

Diphenhydramine for Sleep: What the Research Says

Diphenhydramine, the active ingredient in Benadryl, Unisom SleepTabs, ZzzQuil, and most “PM” pain reliever formulations, is one of the most commonly used sleep aids in the US, despite not actually being recommended for regular sleep use by sleep medicine guidelines. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s 2017 clinical practice guideline recommends against using diphenhydramine for […]

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Melatonin and Sleep: What the Guidelines Actually Say

Melatonin and sleep are connected through a real, well-understood biological mechanism, melatonin is the hormone your pineal gland releases in response to darkness, signaling to your body that it’s time to wind down. Where it gets more complicated is exogenous, supplemental melatonin’s actual effectiveness as a general insomnia treatment. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s

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Inflammation and Sleep: What the Research Actually Shows

Inflammation and sleep are genuinely connected, but the real research has an interesting wrinkle that most content skips over. Large observational studies do consistently find that people with disturbed sleep have higher levels of inflammatory markers like CRP and IL-6. But when researchers directly tested this in controlled experiments, depriving healthy people of sleep for

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Cold Plunge and Sleep: Timing Matters More Than You Think

  Cold plunge and sleep are genuinely connected, but not in the simple, purely relaxing way most biohacking content describes. Cold water immersion first triggers a significant surge in norepinephrine, a stimulating stress hormone, activating your sympathetic (“fight or flight”) nervous system, not calming it. The calming, sleep-supportive effects, including a drop in core body

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Sleep and Performance: What the Research Actually Shows

Sleep and performance are connected through mechanisms that are unusually well-documented compared to most health topics, but the picture is more specific than “sleep more, perform better.” Sleep deprivation reliably and significantly impairs reaction time and cognitive function, in some studies to a degree comparable to legal alcohol intoxication, while its effect on raw physical

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