Suffering from insomnia? Blame it on your phone

 We’ve all been there. You wake up in the middle of the night and grab your smartphone to check the time — it’s 3 am — and see an alert. Before you know it, you fall down a rabbit hole of email and Twitter. Sleep? Forget it. Well, I’ve found a $7 solution: an oldfashioned alarm clock. My smartphone has been banished from the bedroom. 

    Sure, you can flip your phone to quiet mode. But the draw to roam in the early hours is powerful. Sleep researchers say this isn’t good for you. You might as well get up and drink a shot of espresso. “It’s a very slippery slope, once you’ve picked up your phone, to see what time it is, to checking your email, to lying awake with anxiety,” said Dr David M Claman, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. “If you wake up in the middle of the night and check your phone, you will inevitably get frustrated and worried by something you’ve seen, leading your body to tense up.” 
    Then it’s game over. You’re tossing and turning, thinking about an email, a text or a meeting in six hours. 
    Claman said mobiles in the bedroom have led to a rise in sleep-related complaints from his patients. “For people I see in their 20s and 30s, the phone is becoming a more common contributing factor to insomnia,” he said. 
    Some large, long-term studies on sleep disorders in the UK and Finland have found that stress-related issues have led to a rise in insomnia over the last decade. In the US, according to the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research at the National Institutes of Health, as many as 40% of Americans suffer from insomnia in a given year. Ten to 15% have chronic insomnia. 
    All these sleep interruptions lead to work problems. A 2011 study by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found insomnia costs $2,280 in lost productivity per American worker every year. That adds up to $63 billion a year for the nation. NYT NEWS SERVICE

MOBILE BLUES

YOUR CITY NEEDS A MAKEOVER

TOI survey shows citizens are unhappy with traffic, roads, and feel the city is becoming unsafe for women     Cities are living organisms. They take birth. They grow, they flourish. They breathe vibrancy. And they also decay. Mumbai is no different. It is a heaving, throbbing metropolis, evolving in places and declining in others. Every part of it is pulsating with activity and some parts are creaking under pressure.      TOI’s Mumbai Patrol survey captures impressions of this changing Mumbai by sketching its problems, old and new. It draws attention to the poverty of open spaces, concerns over safety of women, the over-crowding and broken seats on local trains, the queues on railway platforms, the rudeness of autorickshaw and taxi men, rash driving by bus drivers, and  the need for carpooling. It reveals how severe these problems are, where they are concentrated, and offers an insight into people’s expectations as well as their perceptions.      In this survey can be traced the city’s shifting dynamics. In it can be seen the administration’s failures. And in it can be heard citizens’ desperate calls for better infrastructure.      The most desperate call seems to be for a solution to the traffic mess. In a city always on the move, traffic gets the least approval rating of 3.2 out of 5 (see graphic). The total length of roads has been more or less stagnant at about 1,940 km for a long time, but the vehicular population continues to increase every year by 8%. So far has the city travelled down this slippery road that, by one estimate, it now has 674 vehicles for every kilometre. The result has been ever-worsening jams.      A study some years ago pegged the average one-way commute time in Mumbai at 47.45 minutes, far more than Delhi’s 43 minutes and New York’s 31.37 minutes. The TOI-IMRB survey reveals that frustrated over snarl-ups, people want more flyovers and a bigger traffic police force.      The arduousness of journeying in Mumbai emerges as a dominant theme. Citizens complain about the terrible quality of roads. They bemoan the paucity of footpaths (which get a score of only 3.5), their poor maintenance and the rampant encroachments on them. They are upset with the uncleanliness on local trains and at railway stations. They protest about overcharging by autorickshaw and cab drivers. They indict the police and government for having little success in stemming refusals by auto and taxi men. Above all, they are worried about the insecurity they increasingly feel on the city’s streets.      Inner roads are seen as unsafe for women in nearly all parts of Mumbai. And in several areas, it is not just the inner roads but the main streets, seafronts, bus stops, railway stations — indeed, “all places”. After the horrors at Shakti Mills, many women in the area around Mahalaxmi feel the need to carry self-defence objects.      The survey, in essence, reflects the spiralling discontent in the city and the disappointment with services. It brings into focus the issues that have become blurred by dint of their everydayness and ubiquity. It holds a mirror to the good and the bad. And the bad, it shows, is getting the upper hand.      Mumbai’s slide into decay must be arrested. The survey is the first step towards doing that.      Tomorrow: Happy and Unhappy Wards THE SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE CITY NEEDS TO BE CONSIDERABLY IMPROVED, ESPECIALLY SCHOOLS AND HOSPITALS. INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS LIKE THE METRO, FLYOVERS AND SEA-LINK EXTENSIONS ARE TOO SLOW IN IMPLEMENTATION. AN EARLY COMPLETION, AS IN THE CASE OF THE EASTERN FREEWAY, WOULD ADD VALUE. AND SLUM CLEARANCE NEEDS TO BE EXPEDITED BY HAVING PRACTICAL SCHEMES WITH HIGH FSI — ADI GODREJ THE STATE AND CITY GOVERNMENTS NEED TO REAFFIRM THAT THIS IS THE FIRST CITY OF INDIA—IN THEIR OWN MINDS—AND AIM AT MAKING BOMBAY A CITY OF      EXCELLENCE. WE HAVE ALREADY SLIPPED IN TERMS OF INFRASTRUCTURE AND QUALITY OF LIFE. WE ARE ASPIRING TO BE ANOTHER STATE CAPITAL WHEN WE SHOULD BE ASPIRING TO BE THE PREMIER CITY OF INDIA  — AABHA NARAIN LAMBAH THE FACT THAT 70% OF THE 27,000 CRORE MUNICIPAL BUDGET REMAINS      UNSPENT AT THE      BEGINNING OF FEBRUARY, JUST TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE END OF THE FINANCIAL YEAR, SHOWS THAT THE BMC IS UNABLE TO TACKLE THE CITY’S PROBLEMS. THE POSSIBLE SOLUTION IS FOR CITIZENS TO GET INVOLVED WITH THE RUNNING OF THEIR OWN LOCALITIES AND TO BE ALLOWED TO DO SO BY THE MUNICIPALITY  — GERSON DA CUNHA