Sharing a Bed is bad for your Health

I have always known it, and said it to many people for decades: Sharing a bed is bad for your health.

Now, after all those years when people looked at me strangely, laughed at me or even thought I had problems with my sex life, renowned British scientists and medical experts have confirmed my long-held opinion in full.

Couples should consider sleeping apart for the good of their health and relationship, say the experts.

Somnologist (sleep specialist) Dr. Neil Stanley told the British Science Festival how sharing a bed can cause rows over snoring and duvet-hogging, and how it robs precious sleep.

One of several studies into sleep patterns found that - on average - couples suffered 50% more sleep disturbances if they shared a bed.

Dr. Stanley points out that we were never meant to share our beds, and that historically human beings hardly ever did it until very recent times.
The modern practice of the shared marital bed only began with the industrial revolution (in the late 18th and early 19th century), when many people were moved from the land to overcrowded towns and cities, where they found themselves short of living space.

Before the Victorian era it was not common for married couples to sleep together. And in ancient Rome, for example, the marital bed was a place for sexual congress only, but never for sleeping.

Dr. Stanley, who set up one of Britain's leading sleep laboratories at the University of Surrey, says the people of today should consider returning to the old tradition of sleeping separately.

"It's about what makes you happy. If you've been sleeping together and you both sleep perfectly well, then don't change," he explains. "But don't be afraid to do something different. We all know what it's like to have a cuddle and then say 'I'm going to sleep now' and go to the opposite side of the bed. So why not just toddle off down the landing?"

Poor sleep is linked to depression, heart disease, strokes, lung disorders, traffic and industrial accidents, and divorce as well. Yet sleep is largely ignored as an important aspect of health.

"People actually feel that they sleep better when they are with a partner," says Dr. Robert Meadows, a sociologist at the University of Surrey. "But the evidence suggests otherwise."

Dr. Meadows carried out a study to compare how well couples slept when they shared a bed, versus sleeping separately.
He found that when couples share a bed and one of them moves in his or her sleep, there is a 50% chance that their slumbering partner will be disturbed as a result.

Despite this, couples are reluctant to sleep apart, with only 8% of those in their 40s and 50s sleeping in separate rooms.

Dr. Stanley, who is happily married for nine years, sleeps separately from his wife, who is happy with the arrangement as well.

Having served in the Navy for a long time and thus spent many years at sea, I have slept alone for most of my life. And as I am not married, this continues now in my civilian life. Even at times when I was in a relationship with a woman, I tried to sleep alone as often as possible. And most of the nights I shared a bed I was indeed disturbed by one thing or another, woke up several times and did get a lot less rest than I would have normally.

As a result of many years at sea, I never sleep very long. Between three and four hours of sleep is all I need within 24 hours, which means that I have more time for other things than most people (who on average sleep about eight hours each night).
One of the habits I developed over the years is to read and write during the hours of darkness, when it is quiet, no one disturbs me and no telephone calls interrupt my train of thought. So I hardly ever go to bed before 3 a.m., and by 7 a.m. at the latest I am up again.

In contrast to myself, my most recent partner needed a lot of sleep. By 10 p.m. - a time I am getting ready to write another couple of thousand words - she was totally worn out and tired and had to go to bed. Had I joined her there at 3 a.m., I would most likely have woken her up during her deep sleep. So separate beds are not only more healthy for most people, in our case they also helped to give both of us the sleep we need and protect domestic peace.

In fact, my long-standing criticism of modern sleeping habits goes even further than sleep itself. I think that our whole attitude to life, including the way we design and organise our houses, is in need of a drastic reform. Everywhere in the western world houses are rated by their number of bedrooms. Even the concept of a 'bedroom' is quite wrong in my opinion.

Why do we have one of the main rooms in the house (and several when it is a family home) designated for nothing but sleeping during the night? Unless one is an extreme long-sleeper, this means that a large space in the house is not used for anything for two thirds of every day. This is not only strange, but - more important - a terrible waste of good domestic space.

In my opinion we should re-design our houses, and instead of 'bedrooms' that stand empty all day and are thus pretty useless except for spending the night, we should have personal rooms that include a bed. Couples should have their separate personal living spheres, where they can do what they like best, follow their hobbies and keep things they are particularly fond of. These rooms should include a bed for sleeping alone.
Whenever romantic feelings occur, the partners can be intimate in whatever form and room they want. This would be a lot more interesting than limiting all sexual encounters to the marital bed in one designated and shared 'bedroom'.

As the sleep experts from the University of Surrey have established beyond any doubt, partners sleep better alone and will have more physical and mental energy after a good night's rest.
This should lead rather to more intimacy and happiness than to less. Not even to mention the many couples where one of the partners snores. This can not only ruin the other partner's sleep each night, it can - and does - also lead to disliking the snorer, to estrangement and eventually split-up and divorce.

So, as I have been saying for most of my life, sleeping apart makes happier and healthier people, and more couples stay together for life when they sleep separately at night.

Don't be shy, stubborn or inflexible! Discuss it with your partner and try it out. If you miss each other terribly, then - by all means - go back to a shared bed. But if you feel better and stronger in the morning, and are happier and more relaxed, then it would be the best to return to the long-established sleeping habits of our distant ancestors from before the industrial revolution.

The Emerald Islander


P.S. - When you sleep separately, you also do something good for our ailing economy. Buying two beds instead of one can stimulate business, and when you are happier and more relaxed, you are also more likely to do other things as well that will stimulate the economy. The only people who might see a decline of business would be psychiatrists, psychologists, marriage guidance counsellors and divorce lawyers. And this would not be a bad development at all.

'Big Bang Day'

Yesterday has been designated as 'Big Bang Day' by scientist and media around the world. The reason was the official start of operations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Research Centre CERN in Geneva.

CERN is the abbreviation of Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which was a provisional council for setting up the laboratory, established by eleven European governments in 1952. The acronym was retained after the provisional council was dissolved and the name changed to the current OERN - Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in 1954.

For more than fifty years now CERN has been the number one (and the world's largest) research institution for Particle Physics. It's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy Physics research. Numerous experiments have been conducted there by international collaborations. The main site at Meyrin (photo below), a suburb of Geneva in Switzerland, also has a large computer centre containing very powerful data processing facilities, primarily for experimental data analysis. Because of the need to make them available to researchers elsewhere, CERN has historically been (and continues to be) a major world-wide networking hub and was in the early 1990s the original initiator of the world-wide web or internet (invented by CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee).

More than 10,000 scientists from many different countries are currently working for CERN on various research projects. It is a truly international institution, which is officially neither under Swiss nor French (some of the facilities are on French soil) jurisdiction. The 20 member states of OERN (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK) contribute for this year a total of 1 billion Swiss Francs (about € 664 million, US$ 1 billion) to the operational costs of CERN. Six countries from outside Europe (India, Israel, Japan, Russia, Turkey and the USA) as well as the EU Commission and UNESCO have an observer status at CERN.

From 1989 to 2000 the most advanced facility of CERN was the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), which was the world's largest machine of its kind and housed in a 27 km long circular tunnel (right), 100 metres underground, ranging from Geneva's airport to the Jura Mountains. In eight years of hard and highly sophisticated work the LEP was replaced by an even more powerful machine, the Large Hadron Collider.

The LHC (detail photo left), which cost over € 6 billion and took 14 years to develop, is the world's largest and most sophisticated machine ever built, as well as the largest science experiment on the planet. It is designed to smash protons together with cataclysmic force and scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions of Physics. Its main aim is to recreate the conditions in the seconds after the 'Big Bang' that created the Universe.

Findings from the research could revamp modern Physics and unlock secrets about the Universe and its origins. The experiments might also lead to the discovery of so far unknown forms of energy, which would not only solve the current world energy crisis and end our dependence on highly polluting fossil fuels, it could also help to develop propulsion systems that would enable us to conduct space exploration to far-away regions of the cosmos, which are not reachable with the conventional technology we have developed so far. If the kind of space flight we see in StarTrek should ever become possible, CERN and especially the LHC could provide the key knowledge for it.

Yesterday morning at precisely 9.38 am CEST (8.38 am BST) the LHC was officially switched on for the first time. Moments later the group of scientists assembled in the control room burst into spontaneous applause and shouts of joy when project leader Lyn Evans told them: "We have a beam on the LHC."
The first - clockwise - beam completed its first circuit of the underground tunnel at just before 9.30 am BST. The second - anti-clockwise - beam successfully circled the ring after 2 pm BST.

The beams have not yet been run continuously. So far, they have been stopped after just a few circuits. This evening engineers hope to inject clockwise and anti-clockwise protons again, but this time they will "close the orbit", letting the beams run continuously for a few seconds each.

CERN has not yet announced when it plans to carry out the first collisions. It is expected that low-energy collisions (like the one pictured right, which was done in the old LEP) could happen in the next few days. This will allow engineers to calibrate instruments, but will not yet produce data of scientific interest. This will come at a later stage. It is impossible to say how long it will take, but there is no doubt among scientists that the LHC will provide answers to the most fundamental question: What is mass?
That alone would bring Physics a huge step forward, and anything beyond that would be a bonus. The scientists at CERN can at this stage not say much more, but they are confident that with the help of the LHC they will be able to reshape the 21st century in yet unimaginable ways. But the first and most important step is to recreate the 'Big Bang', to see how the Universe was formed and to understand how it works.

"We will be able to see deeper into matter than ever before," said Dr. Tara Shears, a particle physicist from the University of Liverpool.
"We will be looking at what the Universe was made of billionths of a second after the 'Big Bang'. That is amazing and really fantastic."

"We know the answer to the question of our existence will be found at the LHC," added Prof. Jim Virdee, a particle physicist from Imperial College London.

The currently favoured model involves a particle called the 'Higgs boson' (named after the British scientist Dr. Peter W. Higgs) or BEH Mechanism, popularly also called the 'God Particle'. It is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle, predicted to exist by the Standard Model of Particle Physics, and is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed. According to the theory, particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field carried by the 'Higgs boson'.

The latest astronomical observations suggest that ordinary matter - such as the galaxies, gas, stars and planets - makes up just 4% of the Universe. The rest is dark matter (23%) and dark energy (73%). Physicists think the LHC could provide clues about the nature of this mysterious "stuff".

"Nature can surprise us. We have to be ready to detect anything it throws at us," said Prof. Virdee.

The idea of the Large Hadron Collider emerged in the early 1980s. The project was eventually approved in 1996 with an original budget of 2.6 billion Swiss Francs. However, CERN underestimated equipment and engineering costs when it started the project, and subsequently the institution was facing a cash crisis. CERN had to borrow hundreds of millions of Euros from banks to get the LHC completed. The current price is nearly four times of what was originally envisaged.

During winter the LHC will be shut down, allowing the equipment to be fine-tuned for collisions at full energy, which are expected to take place next year.

I am no scientist, but I take an interest in the fundamental questions of this world. And though I do not understand all the details of the experiments conducted by CERN, I find them - as well as the fact that CERN exists at all - fascinating. And I share the hopes of the thousands of scientists involved that with enough effort the secrets of the Universe will eventually be revealed, for the better of all of mankind.

It is also interesting that the LHC has been built and is operated by 20 European countries, and not by the world's apparently one remaining 'super power', the USA. Ever more Americans seem to fall under the spell of fanatic religious fundamentalists who denounce evolution, science and the realities of Nature and believe in 'creationism' (or 'intelligent design'), which pretends that the world was created by 'God' in six days about 6000 years ago (as described in the Old Testament of the Bible). These people have gained a lot of political influence and power in recent years, counting among their believers many prominent Republican politicians, including George W. Bush and Sarah Palin.

In my opinion this will eventually destroy the USA and diminish America's power and influence in the world. It is already evident that the USA are by far not as organised and powerful as they pretend to be. Their health care, education, social security and housing are in disarray, their banks and financial institutions are collapsing one after another, and crime of all sorts rules in all parts of the USA (with more than 2 million people - out of 300 million - in prisons), right from the White House down to the last slum.
Since America does no longer produce enough people with high academic, scientific and technical qualifications, the USA are for the past 20 years already dependent on qualified immigrants from all over the world, even to maintain the status quo of research, science and technology. Sooner or later this brain drain will dry up, and the consequence of that will be stagnation, followed by rapid decline.
The only kind of power the USA still have is the brute force of their military. And that is already shrinking as well, since George W. Bush created two wars they will never be able to win. Thus the strength and morale of the armed forces is undermined and will eventually collapse like the housing market and the financial institutions.

Meanwhile Europe has created the greatest scientific institution in history, and with the LHC the largest scientific experiment ever attempted by mankind. I am very happy to have the privilege of living in Europe, which will in future stand strong beside the coming 'super powers' China and India. If the LHC will indeed provide the answers CERN scientists expect to find, Europe could even - once again - become the dominant force on the planet. This time - hopefully - as leaders in philosophy, science and technology rather than as colonialists.

The Emerald Islander

P.S. I did start this entry already yesterday, but due to work commitments I had no time to finish it. I hope you don't mind that it is posted one day after the event, and hope you will find it still interesting and worth reading.