You Want To Make Sure You’re Getting Enough Slow-Wave Sleep—Here’s Why

mindbodygreen Editorial AssistantBy Sarah Regan

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Throughout the night, we go through four stages of sleep that each have their own function. Stage 3, also known as “slow-wave sleep” or “deep sleep,” is one of those stages, and it’s vital for things like muscle and tissue growth, cellular repair, and “cleaning out” the brain, among other things. Here’s everything you need to know about Stage 3 sleep, plus how to make sure you’re getting enough.

What happens during Stage 3 sleep?

As Hannu Kinnunen, Chief Science Officer at Oura, explains to mbg, “Stage 3 sleep falls into the category known as ‘deep sleep,’ which focuses on restoring your body.” During deep sleep, he says, your body kicks into repair mode, and a number of things happen, including:

• Your blood pressure drops
• The body promotes muscle growth and repair
• Blood flow increases to muscles
• Growth hormone is released
• Tissue growth and cell repair occurs
• Your brain flushes waste and exhibits long, slow brain waves

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What is the purpose of Stage 3 sleep?

According to Kinnunen, research is still being conducted on the benefits of deep sleep for the body and brain, however, “there’s evidence that the ‘flushing’ that occurs during this stage is necessary for ‘cleaning the brain’ and making way for building new connections moving forward.”

As far as how heart and respiratory rates help with this “flushing,” research is still being conducted there, too, “but what we know for sure is that flushing response is strongest during sleep and is a sign that every part of your body is working together during deep sleep to promote repair,” Kinnunen explains.

And if you’re missing out on deep sleep, you aren’t giving your body a chance to rebuild and recover from the demands of your day, he adds. “This is especially true for athletes who are putting extra strain on their bodies.” 

How to know if you’re getting enough:

Though the recommended amount of sleep per night is somewhere around eight, hours, we only spend a small portion of that time in deep sleep. “A good rule of thumb is to aim for 90 minutes of deep sleep—but the most important signal is matching your data with how you feel,” Kinnunen notes.

If you didn’t get enough, you may experience things like body aches, tight muscles, and of course, droopy eyelids and a persistent feeling of tiredness. “As you get to know your body, you’ll learn what amount of deep sleep helps you feel your best,” he adds. “Getting enough deep sleep helps you wake alert and ready to face the day.”

Certain patterns to look for include how your body feels after a hard workout, traveling, or when you feel under the weather, Kinnunen says. “If you notice your body responding by increasing your deep sleep to help you rebound faster, your body is responding to stress,” he explains, adding, “If your sleep gets disturbed and you’re not getting that restorative sleep, it could be a sign to lighten your training or take a rest day.”

How to get more Stage 3 sleep:

1. Improve your nighttime routine.

When it comes to getting quality stage 3 sleep, you’re better off optimizing your regular sleep habits and practicing good sleep hygiene than trying to play catch up with an occasional extra-long sleep.

“Instead of maximizing your deep sleep on a single night, it is more favorable to concentrate on building routines and conditions that support a good amount of deep sleep regularly,” Kinnunen says. “Deep sleep tends to occur more in the first half of the night—so ensuring your bedtime routine supports good sleep is key.”

Along with doing relaxing things to unwind, he says it helps to avoid heavy meals and heavy exercise at least three hours before bed, ditch the caffeine later in the day, limiting blue light exposure, and setting your bedroom temperature to around 65.

2. Try a sleep supporting supplement, like magnesium.

Taking a sleep supporting supplement like magnesium glycinate before bed may help promote deeper sleep, as it’s been shown to help people fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer.*magnesium+The deep and restorative sleep you’ve always dreamt about*★ ★ ★ ★ ★★ ★ ★ ★ ★ (4.8)SHOP NOW

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3. Have a consistent sleep/wake schedule.

And lastly, keeping your bedtime and wake time consistent helps your body get into a natural rhythm, Kinnunen says. “Keeping your wake-up time consistent ensures that about 16 hours thereafter, you’re sending your body the same, strong signal: ‘this is the right time to power down,'” he notes. When your circadian rhythm is strong, it can deepen your sleep and improve daytime alertness—a win-win. He also notes naps can throw this rhythm off, so it’s a good idea to avoid them later in the day and keep the ones you do take short.

The bottom line.

There’s no magic secret to getting more deep sleep; When it comes to being well-rested and energized on a regular basis, consistency is key. But if you continually pay mind your sleep hygiene, not only will you get restorative slow-wave sleep, but you’ll feel energized when you wake, too.

Targeting metabolism to influence aging

1. Christopher Pan, 
2. Jason W. Locasale

 See all authors and affiliationsScience  15 Jan 2021:
Vol. 371, Issue 6526, pp. 234-235
DOI: 10.1126/science.abf6368

• Article
• Figures & Data
• Info & Metrics
• eLetters
•  PDF

Glutamine has a host of metabolic functions, including biosynthesis, redox maintenance, and chromatin biology. Drugs are currently available to target glutamine and related metabolism. However, the use of these compounds has been limited by finding appropriate applications because the role of glutamine in health and disease is still poorly understood. Some studies have pointed to a limited role of glutamine metabolism in vivo; others have found specific roles in critical areas of biomedical interest, such as the potentiation of immune responses in cancer. On page 265 of this issue, Johmura et al. (1) report a role for glutamine in maintaining the viability of senescent cells and the senescence-associated secretory phenotype, which may be a major factor in the aging process. Thus, targeting glutamine and associated metabolic processes could be an attractive, clinically feasible way to modify the aging process.

It was noted in the 1950s that culture of cell lines such as mouse fibroblasts and human HeLa cells requires copious amounts of glutamine, which was counter to its identification as a nonessential amino acid (2). Almost 70 years later, glutamine continues to be the most abundant amino acid in many formulations of cell culture media (3). Glutamine metabolism has many functions, including the use of the carbon atoms of glutamine to fuel the biosynthetic tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle in mitochondria, a process called anaplerosis (4). Furthermore, nearly all other functions of glutamine have been found to have some role in supporting cell proliferation. Moreover, many of the major oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes, such as KRAS, MYC, and TP53, can influence the activity of glutamine metabolism (5). Other studies have indicated that tumor glutamine metabolism and cancer phenotypes could be affected by dietary glutamine (6).

Drug development efforts to target glutamine metabolism have focused on glutaminase 1 (GLS1), the enzyme that converts glutamine to glutamate and ammonia as the initial step in the breakdown of glutamine (glutaminolysis). For example, CB-839, a small molecule derived from the parent compound bis-2-(5-phenylacetamido-1,3,4-thiadiazol-2-yl)ethyl sulfide (BPTES), and the compound IACS-6274 have been administered in humans with, for example, renal cell carcinoma (4). Additionally, analogs and derivatives of glutamine involving 6-diazo-5-oxo-L-norleucine (DON) have been developed as agents that have pleiotropic effects on glutamine metabolism (7).

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The role of glutamine metabolism has had its controversies. One study concluded that the use of glutamine, particularly in the TCA cycle, in vivo was less than anticipated in certain mouse cancer models, which suggested that the importance of glutamine may have been overemphasized in part owing to stronger effects in cell culture that result from high concentrations of glutamine in culture media (8). Nevertheless, several studies have found an essential role for glutamine in mice, including situations that have clinical application, such as combining GLS1 inhibition with immunotherapies in mice (7).

Aging can be defined by a progressive decline in tissue function and is a risk factor for many pathologies, including fibrosis and cancer. There is emerging evidence suggesting that cellular senescence, which has been studied in cancer, is a key biological process that links multiple pathologies of aging. Cellular senescence is characterized by a stable cell cycle arrest that is thought to occur after exposure to stress, including oxidative, mitochondrial, and replicative stress (9). Senescent cells secrete a myriad of proinflammatory chemokines and cytokines, called the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP). SASP alters the surrounding microenvironment and may propagate tissue senescence though paracrine signaling. Senescent cells have been proposed to accumulate during aging and underlie chronic inflammation mediated by SASP, eventually leading to tissue dysfunction and the onset of various age-associated pathologies. Recent observations in mice support the idea that removal of senescent cells can extend healthy life span (10, 11). These findings have led to the exploration of pharmacological approaches to induce selective death in senescent cells (senolysis).

Although it has been found that metabolism can influence cellular senescence, a general understanding of the links between metabolism, senescence, and aging is still in its early stages (12). Johmura et al. reveal that glutamine metabolism may contribute to the pathogenesis of age-related disorders (see the figure). They found that GLS1 expression was up-regulated in multiple cell types in response to diverse senescent stimuli, and its depletion induced senolysis and improved various age-associated organ dysfunctions in mice. As a possible mechanism, the authors present evidence that senescent cells utilize glutamine to neutralize the intracellular acidosis that results from senescence-associated lysosomal dysfunction. Indeed, supplementation of ammonia could ablate the senolytic activity of GLS1 inhibition. A number of interpretations are consistent with this finding, including the anabolic functions of ammonia that could then couple to the activity of the TCA cycle. More analysis of metabolic pathway activity in the presence of ammonia and supplementation with other nutrients might address this. These possibilities could be separate or interconnected metabolic mechanisms from those that involve nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD⁺), which along with mitochondrial metabolism are perhaps the most studied molecular features associated with aging (13). Given the pleotropic roles of glutamine metabolism, more work is needed to better define the metabolic requirements of senescent cells.

The general molecular traits of senescent cells and their contribution to aging and related diseases remain open questions (14). The identification of GLS1 as a senolytic target confirms metabolism as a major regulator of aging, thus providing some rationale for how therapeutics that target metabolism might achieve specificity for senescent cells as anti-aging agents. GLS1 is an attractive target for anti-aging therapies because clinical studies for cancer indications have so far established safety (4). Much attention has been focused on the use of dietary supplementation or possibly metformin or rapamycin use to manipulate aging. These efforts have included increasing NAD⁺ concentrations and altering mitochondrial metabolism, which, although promising, may not be the entire picture (13). The findings of Johmura et al. suggest a complementary strategy, although more research is needed.http://www.sciencemag.org/about/science-licenses-journal-article-reuse

This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.

References and Notes

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Acknowledgments: J.W.L. advises Restoration Foodworks, Nanocare Technologies, and Raphael Pharmaceuticals.

Do Some Types of Light Help You Sleep Better?

• Best colors for sleep
• For babies and children
• Worst colors
• Other factors
• Summary

You may have heard that you should avoid bright lights before bed. While this is good advice, it turns out that some colors of light may disrupt your sleep more than others.

Your body natural sleep-wake cycles are largely controlled by a hormone called melatonin. Specialized photoreceptors in your eyes send information back to your brain and influence your production of melatonin.

According to a 2017 review of studiesTrusted Source, research has found that these receptors are most sensitive to light with wavelengths around 450 to 480 nanometers (nm). To most people, this light appears blue.

There’s still a limited amount of research looking at the effects of other light colors on our sleep cycles. However, there’s some evidence that warm colors may help lull you to sleep more quickly than cool colors.

Let’s take a look at which colors have the potential to lull you to sleep the quickest and which might have you tossing and turning all night.

Colors that may help you sleep

Up until now, most studies examining the best types of lights to stimulate sleep have been performed on rodents. However, because rodents are nocturnal and color-blind, it’s hard to draw conclusions from these studies.

Limited research of humans has suggested some evidence that red light may help stimulate sleep. There’s also some evidence that individual preference may also play a role.

Since pink light is made up of a combination of red and purple light waves, it could also be beneficial — in theory. However, there’s no research backing the claim at this time.

Red light

It’s thought that colors close to red on the light spectrum might stimulate melatonin production. However, at this time, more research is needed to support this theory.

A small studyTrusted Source from 2012 examined the effect of 30 minutes of nighttime red light therapy in a group of 20 female basketball players.

The researchers found that after 14 days, participants who received light therapy improved their sleep quality and melatonin levels significantly compared to participants not exposed to any light.

One 2017 studyTrusted Source on mice found that red light at an intensity of 10 lux or higher had the potential to induce sleep. The researchers noted that light under 10 lux had no effect.

Individual differences

Another 2017 studyTrusted Source found evidence that individual taste may also play a role in determining which color light is best for inducing sleep. In the study, researchers ran two different experiments.

In the first experiment, participants were exposed to white light, a random color, or their self-selected preferred color. The researchers observed that participants exposed to their preferred light color fell asleep significantly quicker.

Color	Time to fall asleep
white	18.8 minutes
random nonpreferred color	18.1 minutes
preferred color	11.8 minutes

In the second experiment, the researchers also included a group that was only exposed to darkness.

Once again, the researchers found that the group exposed to their preferred color fell asleep significantly quicker than participants in the other groups.

Color	Time to fall asleep
white	21.2 minutes
darkness	21.1 minutes
random nonpreferred color	16.8 minutes
preferred color	12.3 minutes

What color of light promotes the best sleep for babies and children

Babies and children seem to also be negatively impacted before bed by blue and white lights. That’s why warmer colors are often recommended for night lights.

A 2018 studyTrusted Source examined the impact of two colors of light — whitish-blue and yellow — on the sleepiness levels of children and adults.

The researchers found that children had greater melatonin suppression than adults in both cases, but their melatonin was even more suppressed when exposed to yellow light.

Some people worry that exposing infants to bright lights at night while nursing could negatively impact their health. However, one 2016 studyTrusted Source of 42 infants found that brief exposures (fewer than 15 minutes) didn’t have any negative impact on the babies’ health.ADVERTISING

Worst colors to light up a room for sleep

It’s well-documented that exposure to blue light can negatively impact your sleep quality. Electronic screens, LED lights, and fluorescent lights can all contain blue light.

One small older studyTrusted Source from 1991 and one 2016 study on mice found evidence that green light could also negatively impact melatonin levels.

The same 2016 study found that violet light could have a similar effect as blue light. However, there’s been no research on the effect of violet light in humans.https://756a78cf0638dfbc7a7196c86d3b62c2.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

What bedroom factors may help you sleep better

Many factors can impact the quality of your sleep. Here are some tips to help you sleep better.

Habits to minimize:

• exposure to electronic screens, such as phones or television, before bed
• ingesting caffeine late in the day
• drinking too much water before bed
• consuming alcohol
• going to bed and waking at irregular times
• long naps during the day

Habits that may improve sleep:

• exposing yourself to bright light during the day
• exercising regularly
• sleeping on a comfortable mattress and pillow
• having a quiet sleeping area
• doing something relaxing before bed
• keeping your room at a comfortable temperature

Takeaway

There’s some evidence that red light may induce sleepiness. However, more human research is needed to back this theory.

It’s well-documented that blue light can have a negative impact on your melatonin levels.

Exposure to green and purple light could also potentially hinder your ability to fall asleep, but more research is needed to fully understand their effects.Try a top-rated app for meditation and sleep

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How to get more people to eat fake meat in 2021

Marnie ShureToday 11:26AM201

We’re several years into the infiltration of plant-based meat’s into our grocery stores, fast food chains, and collective consciousness. But for all the good things we have to say about the Impossible Whopper and Jimmy Dean’s new meatless breakfast sandwiches, many of us haven’t made fake meat products a regular part of our daily existence yet, either in the form of our usual Dunkin’ order or our typical grocery haul. As companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods seek to change our long-term purchasing patterns, they need to know what customers are and aren’t willing to settle for in the move away from meat.

According to a survey of 2,000 Americans commissioned by Sprouts Farmers Market and conducted by OnePoll, 63% of people, on average, would be willing to switch to a plant-based diet, if and only if the products met certain criteria. First and foremost, it has to taste the same as the animal-based equivalent, or at least on par with the flavor they’re used to. Next, the cost has to be the same as what they pay for meat: many meatless alternatives are working against an established reputation of being the splurge item in people’s grocery carts. Third, the texture has to be the same as meat, which interestingly was listed as a whole separate consideration from the taste. Respondents also expect the plant-based stuff to be as healthy as real meat, which is notable specifically because people aren’t demanding that it be healthier than meat—this might mean that people are growing wise to the fact that they shouldn’t think of Beyond and Impossible as miracle health foods, a mistaken impression that many people had just a couple years ago. Finally, respondents said that they’d make the switch to fake meat if it were “more ethical.” While the jury is still out on how much better plant-based meat is for the environment, it’s true that the production of beef is a huge source of greenhouse gas emissions, and you are, at least, doing cows a solid when you opt for Beyond tacos. Bottom line: Whether you buy alternative meat products or not, simply skipping the meat for a few meals a week can have a number of positive impacts, and it’s a habit worth considering.Subscribe to our newsletter!Type your emailSign me upBy subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

On the flip side, the poll also asked people why they might be hesitant to make a habit of plant-based foods. Some noted that these products were hard to find, others cited taste, texture, and cost—but some people simply refuse to eat it because “I believe it’s just a fad/trend.” Are they right? Time will tell.

Study: Retinal stem cells from cadavers may help restore vision in blind

ByBrian P. Dunleavy (0)Retinal stems cells could help treat blindness, researchers say. Photo by Requieri Tozzi/Pixabay

Jan. 14 (UPI) — Retinal stem cells collected from human cadavers offer a potential treatment for blindness, according to the authors of an article published Thursday by Stem Cell Reports.

Healthy retinal pigment epithelium cells implanted under the macula of blind monkeys used in the study restored at least some vision without serious side effects, researchers from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City said.

The retinal pigment epithelium is a layer of pigmented cells in the retina and the macula is the central part of the retina.

The transplanted cells effectively took over the function of the monkeys’ natural retinal pigment epithelium, enabling them to see, according to the researchers.RELATED Brain prosthesis that may restore some vision shows promise in monkeys

“We have demonstrated that [donor cells] at least partially replace function in the macula of a non-human primate,” study co-author Timothy Blenkinsop said in a statement.

“Human cadaver donor-derived cells can be safely transplanted underneath the retina and replace host function, and therefore may be a promising source for rescuing vision in patients with retina diseases,” said Blenkinsop, assistant professor of cell, developmental and regenerative biology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Retinal pigment epithelium dysfunction can lead to eye disorders such as macular degeneration, causing vision loss and blindness, which affects about 200 million people worldwide, the researchers said.RELATED New drug may stop blindness from thyroid eye disease

The region of the eye functions as a barrier and regulator in the maintenance of normal vision.

To restore this population of cells in the primates used in this study, the researchers extracted retinal stem cells from donated cadaver adult eyes.

Using cadaver donor eyes can help ensure donor cells match well with recipients, and can serve as a recurring source of human retinal pigment epithelium, the researchers said.RELATED Clinical trial to test stem cells against type 1 diabetes

Retinal pigment epithelium “patches,” or small quantities of collected cells, transplanted under the primates’ maculas remained “stable and integrated” for at least three months, without serious side effects such as immune-system rejection or light sensitivity.

The transplanted cells also worked well with the existing retinal pigment epithelium to support the existing photoreceptors in their eyes, which helps with light absorption, among other functions.

Transplantation of retinal pigment epithelium stem cells derived from human adult cadaver eyes could replace the defective retinal pigment epitheliums and serve as a possible treatment for macular degeneration, the study suggests.

However, additional research on this approach is necessary to explore whether stem cells derived from cadaver adult eyes can restore vision in human patients, according to the researchers.

“The results of this study suggest human adult donor retinal pigment epithelium is safe to transplant, strengthening the argument for human clinical trials for treating retina disease,” Blenkinsop said.

Use the 3-6-5 Method for Meditative Breathing To Help You Sleep Better Every Night of the Year

Mary Grace Garis・January 15, 2021

This isn’t your standard New Year’s plan. No restrictive diets, no weekly weigh-ins, no “whole new you” for this new year—because, hey, you’re pretty great already. These four expert-led plans—designed to help you move your body, eat more veggies, get a better night’s sleep, or show yourself some loving care—are all about developing healthy habits that better align with your goals.Get the Program

Wouldn’t it be oh-so-delightful if falling asleep were as simple as 1-2-3? Perhaps, but given the stress levels associated with living through unprecedented times like these, many might find conking out to be at least a smidge more difficult. So if you’re being kept up by chronic doomscrolling, the fear of pandemic nightmares, the fear of the living nightmares, or anything else, check out the 3-6-5 method for sleep, which is a meditative breathing technique to be used throughout the whole day. It’s not as simple as 1-2-3, but it’s pretty damn close.https://f5b377eb98c526fd23f4d83ebdb05772.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

According to Stephanie Gailing, an astrologer and wellness consultant who shares information about the 3-6-5 method in her book The Complete Book of Dreams, many of us rapidly inhale and exhale, with more than 12 breaths per minute—and that’s not necessarily helping our ability to drift off peacefully come bedtime. “It’s been found that slower, more mindful breathing can have impacts on the nervous system, helping to tamp down the activity of sympathetic nervous system, which is often associated with being in [a state of] hyperarousal and fight-or-flight [mode] and activating parasympathetic nervous-system activity,” she says. To wit, the 3-6-5 method uses mindful, slowed-down breathing to basically help the the body chill out throughout the course of the day.

To practice it, commit to doing the practice three times per day, taking six full breaths per minute, and for a total of five minutes. If this sounds similar in spirit to the tranquilizing 4-7-8 technique, that’s fair; the endgame of achieving better sleep by way of reducing stress is the same. But 3-6-5 can be a better option for those who’d rather treat breathwork for sleep as ongoing interval training rather than a right-before-bed sprint. That is, instead of one long session, this method takes three rounds at different levels.

“For many people, doing practices like paced breathing is easier to do in short stints than in longer-duration practices,” Gailing says. “So doing it three times a day, for five minutes may be easier for some people than doing it for a longer period of time. The 3-6-5 reflects the ideal of doing it every day [of the year], and the benefits that having it be part of your self-care routine may yield.”

How to practice the 3-6-5 method of meditative breathing for better sleep

1. Find a comfortable position

“You want to be as relaxed as you can be, since not only is that the aim of this practice, but also, in the beginning, taking longer breathes may take some getting used to,” Gailing says. “Find a comfy chair, or sit on your bed or meditation cushion. Some people do like to lie down, as they feel more relaxed that way.

2. Have a method for tracking your breaths

“You can use a breathing app for pacing, or just count the seconds on your own,” Gailing says. “Some people find it less stressful to set a timer for five minutes rather than counting their breaths. Yet if you find that counting enhances your mindfulness, you can take that approach.”

3. Breathe slowly and deeply into your diaphragm for five seconds, and then exhale slowly for five seconds

So again, if math’s not your strong suit, this step ultimately leads you to doing six full breaths a minute. Do this for five full minutes, and you’re golden!

4. Repeat two more times at different in your day

And there you have it! The rule of threes helps you essentially punctuate your day with the practice. You can start it after waking up, fit in a round of breaths after lunch, and end your day with one, right before your head hits the pillow. The benefits don’t end at the technique being a sedative: Breathwork meditations offer a host of physical- and mental-health benefits, too. “Any practice—such as paced breathing—that helps us to rebalance the nervous system…will help us become more resilient to stress,” says Gailing.

So, why not give it a shot? If easier days and restful nights are on the table, might as well carve out some time to 3-6-5 yourself to sleep.

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Put on a happy face? “Deep acting” associated with improved work life

New research suggests you can’t fake your emotional state to improve your work life — you have to feel it.

KEVIN DICKINSON15 January, 2021

Credit: Columbia PicturesDeep acting is the work strategy of regulating your emotions to match a desired state.New research suggests that deep acting reduces fatigue, improves trust, and advances goal progress over other regulation strategies.Further research suggests learning to attune our emotions for deep acting is a beneficial work-life strategy.

In the film adaptation of “Bye Bye Birdie” (1963), Dick Van Dyke sings to a dour Janet Leigh to simply put on a happy face. “Wipe off that ‘full of doubt’ look, / Slap on a happy grin! / And spread sunshine all over the place[…].” This classic—if admittedly hokey—ditty it seems has become the mantra of our “service with a smile” corporate culture. And it may actually be good advice.

New research suggests that putting on a happy face reduces fatigue at work and improves our relationships, but only if we employ “deep acting” strategies over “surface acting” ones to regulate those emotions.

What is deep acting?

Arlie Russell Hochschild (pictured) laid out the concept of emotional labor in her 1983 book, “The Managed Heart.”Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Deep and surface acting are the principal components of emotional labor, a buzz phrase you have likely seen flitting about the Twittersphere. Today, “emotional labor” has been adopted by groups as diverse as family counselors, academic feminists, and corporate CEOs, and each has redefined it with a patented spin. But while the phrase has splintered into a smorgasbord of pop-psychological arguments, its initial usage was more specific.

First coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 1983 book, “The Managed Heart,” emotional labor describes the work we do to regulate our emotions on the job. Hochschild’s go-to example is the flight attendant, who is tasked with being “nicer than natural” to enhance the customer experience. While at work, flight attendants are expected to smile and be exceedingly helpful even if they are wrestling with personal issues, the passengers are rude, and that one kid just upchucked down the center aisle. Hochschild’s counterpart to the flight attendant is the bill collector, who must instead be “nastier than natural.”

Such personas may serve an organization’s mission or commercial interests, but if they cause emotional dissonance, they can potentially lead to high emotional costs for the employee—bringing us back to deep and surface acting.

Deep acting is the process by which people modify their emotions to match their expected role. Deep actors still encounter the negative emotions, but they devise ways to regulate those emotions and return to the desired state. Flight attendants may modify their internal state by talking through harsh emotions (say, with a coworker), focusing on life’s benefits (next stop Paris!), physically expressing their desired emotion (smiling and deep breaths), or recontextualizing an inauspicious situation (not the kid’s fault he got sick).

Conversely, surface acting occurs when employees display ersatz emotions to match those expected by their role. These actors are the waiters who smile despite being crushed by the stress of a dinner rush. They are the CEOs who wear a confident swagger despite feelings of inauthenticity. And they are the bouncers who must maintain a steely edge despite humming show tunes in their heart of hearts.

As we’ll see in the research, surface acting can degrade our mental well-being. This deterioration can be especially true of people who must contend with negative emotions or situations inside while displaying an elated mood outside. Hochschild argues such emotional labor can lead to exhaustion and self-estrangement—that is, surface actors erect a bulwark against anger, fear, and stress, but that disconnect estranges them from the emotions that allow them to connect with others and live fulfilling lives.

Don’t fake it till you make it

Most studies on emotional labor have focused on customer service for the obvious reason that such jobs prescribe emotional states—service with a smile or, if you’re in the bouncing business, a scowl. But Allison Gabriel, associate professor of management and organizations at the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management, wanted to explore how employees used emotional labor strategies in their intra-office interactions and which strategies proved most beneficial.

“What we wanted to know is whether people choose to engage in emotion regulation when interacting with their co-workers, why they choose to regulate their emotions if there is no formal rule requiring them to do so, and what benefits, if any, they get out of this effort,” Gabriel said in a press release.

Across three studies, she and her colleagues surveyed more than 2,500 full-time employees on their emotional regulation with coworkers. The survey asked participants to agree or disagree with statements such as “I try to experience the emotions that I show to my coworkers” or “I fake a good mood when interacting with my coworkers.” Other statements gauged the outcomes of such strategies—for example, “I feel emotionally drained at work.” Participants were drawn from industries as varied as education, engineering, and financial services.

The results, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, revealed four different emotional strategies. “Deep actors” engaged in high levels of deep acting; “low actors” leaned more heavily on surface acting. Meanwhile, “non-actors” engaged in negligible amounts of emotional labor, while “regulators” switched between both. The survey also revealed two drivers for such strategies: prosocial and impression management motives. The former aimed to cultivate positive relationships, the latter to present a positive front.

The researchers found deep actors were driven by prosocial motives and enjoyed advantages from their strategy of choice. These actors reported lower levels of fatigue, fewer feelings of inauthenticity, improved coworker trust, and advanced progress toward career goals.

As Gabriel told PsyPost in an interview: “So, it’s a win-win-win in terms of feeling good, performing well, and having positive coworker interactions.”

Non-actors did not report the emotional exhaustion of their low-actor peers, but they also didn’t enjoy the social gains of the deep actors. Finally, the regulators showed that the flip-flopping between surface and deep acting drained emotional reserves and strained office relationships.

“I think the ‘fake it until you make it’ idea suggests a survival tactic at work,” Gabriel noted. “Maybe plastering on a smile to simply get out of an interaction is easier in the short run, but long term, it will undermine efforts to improve your health and the relationships you have at work.

“It all boils down to, ‘Let’s be nice to each other.’ Not only will people feel better, but people’s performance and social relationships can also improve.”SPONSORED BY ADVERTISING PARTNER

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But as with any research that relies on self-reported data, there are confounders here to untangle. Even during anonymous studies, participants may select socially acceptable answers over honest ones. They may further interpret their goal progress and coworker interactions more favorably than is accurate. And certain work conditions may not produce the same effects, such as toxic work environments or those that require employees to project negative emotions.

There also remains the question of the causal mechanism. If surface acting—or switching between surface and deep acting—is more mentally taxing than genuinely feeling an emotion, then what physiological process causes this fatigue? One study published in the Frontiers in Human Neurosciencemeasured hemoglobin density in participants’ brains using an fNIRS while they expressed emotions facially. The researchers found no significant difference in energy consumed in the prefrontal cortex by those asked to deep act or surface act (though, this study too is limited by a lack of real-life task).

With that said, Gabriel’s studies reinforce much of the current research on emotional labor. A 2011 meta-analysis found that “discordant emotional labor states” (read: surface acting) were associated with harmful effects on well-being and performance. The analysis found no such consequences for deep acting. Another meta-analysis found an association between surface acting and impaired well-being, job attitudes, and performance outcomes. Conversely, deep acting was associated with improved emotional performance.

So, although there’s still much to learn on the emotional labor front, it seems Van Dyke’s advice to a Leigh was half correct. We should put on a happy face, but it will only help if we can feel it.

This AI smart crib gently bounces waking babies back to sleep

Cradlewise learns your child’s sleep habits and patterns.

Amber Bouman, @damerightJanuary 14, 2021 1Comments 179Shares 

There is nothing in the world more valuable to new parents than sleep. To help with that, Cradlewise developed a smart crib that uses AI and a built-in monitor to help your little one stay snoozing for as long as possible. A sleekly designed bassinet in white and light-colored wood, it features an arch over the crib that contains the monitor and camera. The bed portion of the crib can be lowered as the child ages so it can switch from a bassinet to a crib.

The Cradlewise crib learns your child’s sleep patterns and senses when they start to shift and wake. When that happens, it automatically begins to bounce gently to ease the child back to sleep before they start to fuss or cry. Once your babe falls back to sleep, the crib will stop moving. It can also play music if preferred, and the crib will learn your child’s patterns to create personalized “sleep recipes” of their sleep, waking habits and favorite sounds.

The monitor also provides a video feed so parents can check in on their babies from anywhere via the app. The app will also provide analytics on how your kiddo is sleeping, send notifications and control the crib features. However, the crib will also respond to a hand placed in front of the sensor so you don’t have to search for your smartphone in the middle of the night to get it to stop bouncing. 

Though it’s not yet widely available, the company has just completed a successful round of beta testing in the Bay Area and expects to take pre-orders for the crib in March.

Google Brain’s Switch Transformer Language Model Packs 1.6-Trillion Parameters

Google Brain’s Switch Transformer language model packs a whopping 1.6 trillion parameters while effectively controlling computational cost. The model achieved a 4x pretraining speedup over a strongly tuned T5-XXL baseline.

BY SYNCED2021-01-14COMMENTS 0

In the ongoing quest for bigger and better, Google Brain researchers have scaled up their newly proposed Switch Transformer language model to a whopping 1.6 trillion parameters while keeping computational costs under control. The team simplified the Mixture of Experts (MoE) routing algorithm to efficiently combine data, model and expert-parallelism and enable this “outrageous number of parameters” while also achieving a four-times pretraining speedup over a strongly tuned T5-XXL baseline (Google’s previously largest language model).

The mammoth language models are introduced in the paper Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity.

Although many recent and simpler deep learning architectures have outperformed more complicated algorithms, these performance gains have come with enormous computational budgets, huge datasets and large parameter counts. The team notes that deep learning models tend to reuse the same parameters for all inputs, while Mixture of Experts (MoE) models instead use different parameters. They focused their attention on the large-scale training of language models using only a subset of the neural network weights (parameters) for each incoming example, with the sparsity coming from a newly proposed technique for simplifying the MoE paradigm.

In the context of deep learning architectures, the MoE routing algorithm allows models to combine the output of several expert networks, where each of the expert networks specializes in a different part of the input space. In this way, a learned gating network essential mixes the expert networks’ outputs to produce a final output. “This (MoE) resulted in state-of-the-art results in language modelling and machine translation benchmarks,” the researchers explain. One of the study’s key contributions is the simplified MoE paradigm’s reduced communication and computational costs. Unlike previously proven MoE strategies that route to more than one expert network to enable non-trivial gradients on the routing functions, the proposed models use only a single expert.

The team says the proposed simplified technique ensures the model weights increase with the number of devices while maintaining a manageable memory and computational footprint on each device. Switch Transformer pretrained on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4) using 32 TPU cores consumes less compute while outperforming both carefully tuned dense models and MoE models.

In experiments, Switch Transformer improved on the multilingual T5-based (mT5) model on 101 different languages in the multilingual variant of the Common Crawl dataset (mC4). Switch Transformer also achieved a mean pretraining speedup over the mT5 baseline, with 91 percent of the 101 languages seeing four-times speedups. Moreover, the team demonstrated the possibility of pushing the current scale of language models by pretraining Switch Transformer with 1.6 trillion parameters in one-quarter the time required for the T5-XXL model.

The paper Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity is on arXiv.

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Reporter: Fangyu Cai | Editor: Michael Sarazen

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This report offers a look at how China has leveraged artificial intelligence technologies in the battle against COVID-19. It is also available on Amazon Kindle. Along with this report, we also introduced a database covering additional 1428 artificial intelligence solutions from 12 pandemic scenarios.

Amazon launches Alexa Custom Assistant to let brands build their own voice assistants

Kyle Wiggers@Kyle_L_WiggersJanuary 15, 2021 5:00 AM

Image Credit: Seth Colaner / VentureBeat

The 2021 digital toolkit – How small businesses are taking charge

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Amazon today launched Alexa Custom Assistant, a product that allows automakers and device manufacturers to create intelligent assistants built on the AI technologies powering Alexa. It marks the first time Amazon is granting third parties access to Alexa’s framework, and the company says it will enable brands to create assistants featuring voices, custom wake words, and capabilities that can coexist with Alexa.

The pandemic appears to have supercharged voice app usage, which was already on an upswing. According to a study by NPR and Edison Research, the percentage of voice-enabled device owners who use commands at least once a day rose between the beginning of 2020 and the start of April. Just over a third of smart speaker owners say they listen to more music, entertainment, and news from their devices than they did before, and owners report requesting an average of 10.8 tasks per week from their assistant this year compared with 9.4 different tasks in 2019.Australian regulator warning for Google, Facebook100K4PauseUnmuteToggle Close CaptionsLoaded: 66.58% FullscreenUp Next

Amazon describes Alexa Custom Assistant as a “simultaneous multi-assistant cooperation” service that allows two assistants — Alexa and a branded assistant — to work in tandem to fulfill users’ requests. Basically, the service allows a brand’s assistant to act as a product specialist with features unique to it, while Alexa handles tasks like setting timers, serving up notifications, and the rest of the experience.

Amazon says that Fiat Chrysler (FCA) will be the first to integrate Alexa Custom Assistant into its vehicles. FCA previously supported Alexa through app integrations, allowing customers to do things like start their cars or lock their doors using an Amazon Echo, and the automaker’s Uconnect 5 infotainment software added Alexa support to newer Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram, and Fiat vehicles for controlling music, sports and weather updates, and more.

“Voice assistants are a key part of the digital experiences, but building a custom, intelligent experience can be a costly, complex endeavor … Alexa Custom Assistant enables access to the same voice technology that powers Alexa, as well as Alexa’s ongoing improvements in AI, privacy and security, and new capabilities that are delivered to the vehicle automatically,” an Amazon spokesperson told VentureBeat via email.

Alexa Custom Assistant adopts the core tenets of Amazon’s Voice Interoperability Initiative, a coalition aimed at ensuring that voice-enabled products like smart speakers and displays allow users to choose among multiple voice assistants. A whitepaper published earlier this year by the group — whose over 77 members include Facebook, Salesforce, and Microsoft — lays out suggestions for agent transfer and universal device commands (UDCs), which address user requests one assistant can’t fulfill without summoning another assistant. UDCs are commands any assistant recognizes even if the assistant wasn’t used to kick off the experience, including volume and timer controls.

On the one hand, Alexa Custom Assistant appears to be a play for the increasingly lucrative and expanding automotive market. While skyrocketing used car sales are expected to depress new car sales at least through 2022, VynZ Research anticipates that the automotive voice recognition system segment will grow at a 30.5% rate between 2020 and 2026, eventually eclipsing $39 billion. Moreover, in-car conversational assistant use is expected to become widespread within the next three years. Statista found that 54% of respondents in a 2019 survey expect to tap assistants like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri “all the time” in their cars “in the near future.”

Alexa — which was already available in Audi, BMW, Ford, Toyota, Lamborghini, and Rivian vehicles; Amazon’s cassette-shaped Alexa-powered Echo Auto; and a range of in-car devices from JVC, Kenwood, iOttie, and Nextbase — competes with Google, Apple, and SoundHound, among other rivals, in the automotive voice assistant space. In an effort to beat them back, Amazon launched the third version of its Alexa Auto SDK in October, which introduced a feature called Alexa Auto Client Service that uses standard Android intent messaging to interact with in-vehicle infotainment apps like navigation and maps, phone dialers, and HVAC controls. Alexa Auto SDK 3.0 also added support for SMS and new navigation and local search features, as well as a multilingual mode that allows users to speak in two different languages.

Amazon’s Ring also recently introduced new products for the car, including the Ring Car Cam and Ring Car Alarm. Both optionally integrate with Alexa; with Car Cam, users can say, “Alexa, I’m being pulled over” to trigger the cameras and save footage to the cloud.

On the other hand, Alexa Custom Assistant furthers Amazon’s ambitions of building bespoke brand experiences that leverage its AI innovations. In February, Amazon launched Brand Voice, a fully managed service within Amazon Polly, Amazon’s cloud service that converts text into lifelike speech, that pairs customers with Amazon engineers to build AI-generated voices representing certain personas. As the company explained at the time, Brand Voice allows organizations to differentiate their brand by incorporating unique vocal identities into their products and services.

While Alexa maintains pole position in terms of global smart speaker market share, Google Assistant and voice assistants developed by Baidu, Alibaba, and Xiaomi remain close competitors. If the bet with Alexa Custom Assistant pays off and brands embrace the service with open arms, it could cement Alexa’s lead for the foreseeable future while providing a valuable new revenue stream for Amazon.