It is not uncommon for us to feel sleepy at work every once in a while. You need to get an important assignment done, but all that you want to do is curl up and take a nap. We all have our days of drowsiness. But when it becomes a daily habit and begins to interfere with productivity, it is a cause for concern. Chronic fatigue and drowsiness can almost always be traced back to underlying medical conditions, such as low blood sugar levels or depression. There are many simple remedies for this issue that you can resort to if you wish to kick off your work days with a bang.

Here are a few tips for those days when you just can’t seem to make it through work:

1. Meditate: A few minutes of meditation before work in the morning can effectively make you more alert and engaged for the rest of the day. The point of meditation is not only to bring calmness and relaxation into your life but also to make you more mindful and active. Be sure to be sitting upright and breathing properly while you meditate.

2. Eat right: Having poor eating habits could be making you drowsy at work. It is important that you eat just the right quantity of food for every meal because overeating will surely make you sleepy and lethargic. Avoid oily and rich foods and eat just as much as you need.

3. Sleep well: Your night time sleeping habits are probably at the root of your daytime drowsiness. Staying up late or not getting undisturbed sleep can leave you feeling agonizingly exhausted at work. It is of utmost importance that you get enough sleep every night.

4. Peppermint: Peppermint is a natural stimulant and will surely leave you feeling fresh in the morning. Brush your teeth with peppermint toothpaste and sip on a cup of peppermint tea in the morning to knock the drowsiness right out of yourself.

5. Move around: When you feel sleepy, your first impulse is to take a nap. But often the solution to that problem is to engage in physical activity. Pace around and do some stretching exercises in the morning to get your blood circulating and you will be amazed at how refreshed you feel.

Follow these simple methods and in no time, your productivity levels at work will shoot right up.

Browsing on the phone before you sleep can potentially cause serious damage to your health. According to studies the side effects can be far reaching and detrimental for your overall health. It can disrupt your sleep and contributes to several complications like heart diseases, obesity, etc.

Following are the bad effects of browsing on the phone before bed:


Browsing on the phone till late in the night affects your sleeping pattern and deprives your body from the rest it requires. Loss and lack of sleep significantly contributes to various health problems like poor sleep, depression, stroke, cardiovascular problems, obesity etc.

Staring at a bright screen for a long time before sleeping can slow down the activity of neurons that make you sleepy, thereby, keeping you in a state of wakefulness. Staring at artificial lights suppresses melatonin, the sleep hormone, which affects the sleep wake cycle of your body.

Browsing on the phone before sleep also takes a toll on your eyes. It can cause serious damage to your eyes if you make a habit out of it. You can see visible signs if you wake up with dark circles in the morning and feel tired and lousy. Looking at brightly lit screen for a long time especially in the dark puts a lot of strain in your eyes and also affects mental health.

Browsing on the phone till late in the night will make it difficult for you to wake up on time. The light on your cell phone affects your sleep, which can even trigger insomnia. Lack of sleep affects your alertness and concentration level and makes you feel drowsy and exhausted.

Pregnant women who experience certain breathing problems during sleep may be more likely to develop complications like high blood pressure and diabetes, recent U.S. research suggests.

In the study of more than 3,000 women, researchers did home-based sleep studies twice during pregnancy to check for what's known as apnea, a potentially serious sleep disorder that involves repeated stops and starts in breathing. Risk factors for sleep apnea include older age and obesity.

Women who had sleep apnea were almost twice as likely to develop what's known as preeclampsia, a type of pregnancy-related high blood pressure, and up to 3.5 times more likely to develop pregnancy-related diabetes, the study found.

"Although we found an association with sleep disordered breathing preceding the development of both pregnancy-related hypertensive disorders and gestational diabetes, we cannot conclude that universal screening for, and treatment of sleep disordered breathing in pregnancy would reduce the risks of these adverse outcomes," said lead study author Dr. Francesca Facco of the University of Pittsburgh's Magee-Women's Hospital.
That's because even among people who are not pregnant, there isn't conclusive evidence that the most common treatment for apnea can reduce the risk of developing hypertension or diabetes, Facco said by email.

For the most common apnea treatment, patients wear breathing masks at night. The masks are connected to a machine that provides continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), which splints the airway open with an airstream so the upper airway can't collapse during sleep.

Some patients can't tolerate sleeping with CPAP machines. This intervention may not make sense for pregnant women, particularly if they have only mild apnea, Facco said.

"We do not know if treating sleep-disordered breathing in pregnancy will improve clinical outcomes in pregnancy, and our study cannot answer that question," Facco added.

Sleep tests done for the study found that early in pregnancy, between six and 15 weeks gestation, 3.6 percent of the women had apnea. Later in pregnancy when they had gained more weight, between 22 and 31 weeks gestation, 8.3 percent of the women had apnea.

Overall, 6 percent of the women had preeclampsia, 13 percent had pregnancy-related hypertensive disorders and 4 percent developed gestational diabetes, researchers report in the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Early in pregnancy, women with apnea were 94 percent more likely to develop preeclampsia, 46 percent more likely to have hypertensive disorders and 3.5 times more likely to develop diabetes than women without sleep disordered breathing.

Women who had apnea later in pregnancy were 95 percent more likely to develop preeclampsia, 73 percent more likely to develop hypertensive disorders, and 2.8 times more likely to have diabetes than women without sleep disordered breathing.

The study is observational and doesn't prove apnea causes these pregnancy complications.
One limitation of the study is the potential for home-based sleep tests to leave some cases of apnea undetected, potentially underestimating the prevalence of sleep-disordered breathing.

"Currently, we still need more data on whether improving or treating sleep-disordered breathing will lessen the risk of high blood pressure or diabetes during pregnancy," said Dr. Sirimon Reutrakul, a researcher at Mahidol University in Bangkok who wasn't involved in the study.

"However, overweight or obesity is a risk factor for high blood pressure and diabetes during pregnancy, as well as sleep-disordered breathing," Reutrakul added by email. "Therefore, keeping healthy body weight through diet and exercise should lessen the risk for these problems."

Women have many health reasons to start pregnancy at a healthy weight and a younger age, two things that may also lower the odds for apnea, said Dr. Marie-Pierre St-Onge, a researcher at Columbia University Medical Center in New York who wasn't involved in the study.

"Obstructive sleep apnea is associated with obesity," St-Onge said by email.

"Although this study did not find an interaction between weight status and OSA on hypertension and diabetes, I would suggest that women enter pregnancy at a normal weight and gain weight appropriate for their weight status," she said.

"Whenever possible, avoiding delaying pregnancy to a more advanced age would be advisable," St-Onge added.

We usually do not bother about how we are sleeping as long as we are having a sound sleep. But are you aware of the fact that way we sleep and the side we sleep on, has positive as well as negative effect on our health be it left side, right side, back or on stomach. Out of these, most of health benefits are attached with sleeping on your left side.

Benefits of sleeping on your left side:

Prevents snoring.

Pregnant women get the advantage of better blood circulation, flowing of blood to uterus, fetus, and kidneys and relief from back ache.

Helps in proper digestion after meals.

Gives relief to people having back and neck pain.

Helps in filtering and purifying toxins, lymph fluids and wastes.

Prevents serious illness as accumulated toxins are flushed out easily.

Liver and kidneys work better

Smooth bowel movements

Reduces workload on heart and its proper functioning

Prevents acidity and heartburn

Prevents fatigue during morning

Fats gets digested easily

Positive impact on brain

It delays onset of Parkinson's and Alzheimer

It is also considered to be the best sleeping position according to Ayurveda.


Everyone has a different habit of sleeping and it might be difficult for them to change it. But now that we know about so many benefits of sleeping on the left side, we must give it a try. After all, it's a question of getting healthier day-by-day and it will be no-big change if you make efforts. So, till now if you were sleeping on either right side, back or on stomach, try sleeping on your left side and see the benefits you get. Keep a check!

Scientists have found that multiple sclerosis (MS) may be identified at least five years earlier as the patients were more likely to undergo treatments for nervous system disorders like pain or sleep problems, according to a study.

MS results from the body's immune system attacking myelin -- fatty material that enables rapid transmission of electrical signals -- which disrupts the communication between the brain and other parts of the body, leading to vision problems, muscle weakness, difficulty with balance and coordination, and cognitive impairments.

"The existence of such `warning signs` are well-accepted for Alzheimer`s disease and Parkinson`s disease, but there has been little investigation into a similar pattern for MS," said lead researcher Helen Tremlett from the Division of Neurology at the University of British Columbia in Canada.


"We now need to delve deeper into this phenomenon, perhaps using data-mining techniques. We want to see if there are discernible patterns related to sex, age or the `type` of MS they eventually develop," Tremlett added.

For the study, published in the Multiple Sclerosis Journal, the team examined health records of 14,000 people with multiple sclerosis and compared them to the health records of 67,000 people without the disease.

Fibromyalgia -- a condition involving widespread musculoskeletal pain -- was found more than three times in people who were later diagnosed with MS as compared to those who did not.

Irritable bowel syndrome was almost twice as common in people who developed the disorder. Migraine headaches and any mood or anxiety disorder, which includes depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder were also found in higher rates among the group.

Further, higher rates of these illnesses also correspond with higher use of medications for musculoskeletal disorders, nervous system disorders, and disorders of the genito-urinary tract, along with antidepressants and antibiotics.

The findings may enable physicians to diagnose the disease earlier and start the treatment, thus possibly slowing the damage it causes to the brain and spinal cord.