Currently, 27.5% say they regularly sleep in a separate bed to avoid their partner’s habits

July 8, 2024 by Journalistic Leave a Comment

Over the years, the trend of ‘sleep divorce’ has become more popular with couples, with celebrities such as Cameron Diaz preaching the benefits. Couples’ bedtime habits are a topic of wide discussion, with arguments galore as they try to navigate new and old nuisances – Mattress Online previously showed over half of Brits sleep separately at night to avoid them. But which bedtime habits annoy partners the most and how can separate sleeping improve relationships?

Mattress Online asked 5,000 Brits to reveal their biggest bedtime grievances with partners – firstly ‘sensory-related’ habits (e.g. snoring, room temperatures and smells), and then general bedtime-related habits (e.g. tossing and turning, hogging blankets). They also reveal the impact of these on their relationships.

Key findings:

• Currently, 27.5% say they regularly sleep in a separate bed to avoid their partner’s habits
• A quarter of Brits (24.3%) disagree over room temperature before bed – the biggest sensory nuisance among couples
• Eating in bed comes in second at 23.7%, with 26.8% actually admitting to the habit
• It takes 30% of Brits over an hour to go back to sleep if disturbed
• Restless tossing and turning is the biggest general annoyance amongst Brits – at 18%
• Almost a fifth (18%) of Brits sleep with a snoring pet – 15% claim this as their biggest annoyance
• A third (33%) of Brits say sexual intimacy is affected by bedtime habits

We hope you find this information useful; if you wish to use it, we kindly ask that you credit appropriately with a link to Mattress Online, who commissioned the study.

The most common sensory grievances at bedtime

Please find the full survey results attached here.

The most common sensory nuisance amongst British couples is temperature disagreements at 24.3% – anything from leaving the bedroom window open to arguing about the heating. With the current hot temperatures, this doesn’t bode well for couples who can’t agree!

The second most annoying sensory habit is eating in bed, which leaves crumbs and other mess – 23.7% of respondents chose it as their biggest pet peeve at night. Interestingly, even more (26.8%) admitted to doing it themselves despite it annoying their partners!

This is followed in third by the well-known culprit – loud snoring! 17.6% of Brits name this as their biggest grievance.

The most common general grievances at bedtime

Mattress Online were also intrigued to investigate the worst general disturbances between couples, and they can reveal the top answer to be restless tossing and turning, which annoys 18.1% of people.

The second biggest annoyance is bringing work to bed on, for example, a laptop, with 16% choosing this as their biggest irk. Interestingly, a higher percentage (18.4%) admitted to the bedtime crime on a regular occurrence.

This is followed closely by sleeping with a snoring pet in third place. It’s easy to say yes to your dog’s pleading eyes, yet 15.1% of partners say it affects their sleep. Not only that, there are many alleged health concerns with sharing a bed with your pet.

Finally, Mattress Online were eager to investigate the strain annoying bedtime habits can have on a relationship – they found that:

• Bedtime annoyances cause regular arguments amongst 30% of Brits
• A third of people (33%) even say it has reduced sexual intimacy between a partner
• Further still, one in 10 (10%) have broken up with a partner due to it

Bedtime annoyances can shatter a relationship’s foundations, which is why there has been an increasing number of people choosing to sleep in a separate bed from their partner. While the trend of ‘sleep divorce’ can reduce arguments between couples and strengthen relationships, it can also help improve a person’s quality of sleep by eliminating the grievances that might keep someone up at night.

Note to editors

We hope you find this information useful. If you wish to use it, we kindly ask that you credit appropriately with a link to Mattress Online, who commissioned the study. A linked credit allows us to keep supplying quality information that you may find helpful for future articles.

Please do not hesitate to reach out with any further questions.

Methodology:

1. Mattress Online were eager to investigate which common bedtime habits annoy British couples the most, and how relationships have been affected by them.

2. They collaborated with the official survey company uStats.org, to conduct a survey of 5,000 British residents between 18th May and 23rd May 2023.

• Residents across age, gender, relationship status and profession were consulted for a reliable results base.
• Respondents were firstly asked which ‘sensory-related’ bedtime habits annoy them the most, for example those related to hearing, smelling and temperatures. They were then asked the same, but for general bedtime annoyances like hogging blankets, frequent bathroom tips, and tossing and turning.
• These were followed with questions like how often they are disrupted by bedtime habits, their most annoying general bedtime habit, their most annoying sensory bedtime habit, how many of them were guilty of any of the listed bedtime habits, if you have been confronted/confronted your partner about any habits, and how much they have impacted your sleep and relationships.

3. The results were collected across respondents, and final conclusions were drawn. Please find the full survey results attached here.

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Photo credit: iStock

By John Daley, Colorado Public Radio

G Kumar’s vaping addiction peaked in college at the University of Colorado, when flavored, disposable vapes were taking off.

“I’d go through, let’s say, 1,200 puffs in a week,” Kumar said.

Vaping became a crutch for them. Like losing a cellphone, losing a vape pen would set off a mad scramble.

“It needs to be right next to my head when I fall asleep at night, and then in the morning, I have to thrash through the sheets and pick it up and find it,” Kumar recalled.

They got sick often, including catching covid-19 — and vaping through all of it.

Kumar, now 24, eventually quit. But many of their generation can’t shake the habit.

“Everyone knows it’s not good for you and everyone wants to stop,” said Jacob Garza, a University of Colorado student who worked to raise awareness about substance use as part of the school’s health promotion program.

“But at this point, doing it all these years … it’s just second nature now,” he said.

Marketing by e-cigarette companies, touting the allure of fruity or candy-like flavors and names, led many teens to try vaping. As more high schoolers and younger kids experimented with e-cigarettes, physicians and researchers warned it could lead to widespread addiction, creating a “Generation Vape.”

Research has shown nicotine is highly rewarding to the brains of young people.

New data on substance use among adults ages 18-24 suggests that many former teen vapers remain e-cigarette users. National vaping rates for young adults increased from 7.6% in 2018 to 11% in 2021.

It’s not surprising that many of them start in high school for social reasons, for all sorts of reasons,” said Delaney Ruston, a primary care physician and documentary filmmaker. “And many of them now — we’re seeing this — have continued to college and beyond.”

Her latest film is “Screenagers Under the Influence: Addressing Vaping, Drugs & Alcohol in the Digital Age.”

In Colorado, the share of those 18 to 24 who regularly vaped rose by about 61% from 2020 to 2022 — to nearly a quarter of that age group.

“That’s an astounding increase in just two years,” Ruston said.

Trends in that state are worth noting because, before the pandemic, Colorado led the nation in youth vaping among high school students, surpassing 36 other states surveyed.

Nationally, vaping rates among high schoolers dropped from 28% in 2019 to 10% in 2023, according to the Annual National Youth Tobacco Survey. But for many young people who started vaping at the height of the trend, a habit was set.

At Children’s Hospital Colorado, pediatric pulmonologist Heather De Keyser displayed on her screen a clouded X-ray of the lung of a young adult damaged by vaping.

For years, doctors like her and public health experts wondered about the potentially harmful impact of vaping on pre-adult bodies and brains — especially the big risk of addiction.

“I think, unfortunately, those lessons that we were worried we were going to be learning, we’re learning,” said De Keyser, an associate professor of pediatrics in the Breathing Institute at Children’s Hospital Colorado.

“We’re seeing increases in those young adults. They weren’t able to stop.”

It’s no coincidence the vaping rates soared during the pandemic, according to several public health experts.

For the past couple of years, undergraduates have talked about the challenges of isolation and using more substances, said Alyssa Wright, who manages early intervention health promotion programs at CU-Boulder.

“Just being home, being bored, being a little bit anxious, not knowing what’s happening in the world,” Wright said. “We don’t have that social connection, and it feels like people are still even trying to catch up from that experience.”

Other factors driving addiction are the high nicotine levels in vaping devices, and “stealth culture,” said Chris Lord, CU-Boulder’s associate director of the Collegiate Recovery Center.

“The products they were using had five times more nicotine than previous vapes had,” he said. “So getting hooked on that was … almost impossible to avoid.”

By “stealth culture,” Lord means that vaping is exciting, something forbidden and secret. “As an adolescent, our brains are kind of wired that way, a lot of us,” Lord said.

All over the U.S., state and local governments have filed suits against Juul Labs, alleging the company misrepresented the health risks of its products.

The lawsuits argued that Juul became a top e-cigarette company by aggressively marketing directly to kids, who then spread the word themselves by posting to social media sites like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

“What vaping has done, getting high schoolers, in some cases even middle schoolers, hooked on vaping, is now playing out,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.

Juul agreed to pay hundreds of millions in settlements. The company did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

R.J. Reynolds, which makes another popular vape brand, Vuse, sent this statement: “We steer clear of youth enticing flavors, such as bubble gum and cotton candy, providing a stark juxtaposition to illicit disposable vapor products.”

Other big vape companies, like Esco Bar, Elf Bar, Breeze Smoke, and Puff Bar, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“If we lived in an ideal world, adults would reach the age of 24 without ever having experimented with adult substances. In reality, young adults experiment,” said Greg Conley, director of legislative and external affairs with American Vapor Manufacturers. “This predates the advent of nicotine vaping.”

The FDA banned flavored vape cartridges in 2020 to crack down on marketing to minors, but the products are still easy to find.

Joe Miklosi, a consultant to the Rocky Mountain Smoke-Free Alliance, a trade group for vape shops, contends the shops are not driving vaping rates among young adults in Colorado. “We keep demographic data in our 125 stores. Our average age [of customers] is 42,” he said.

He has spoken with thousands of consumers who say vaping helped them quit smoking cigarettes, he said. Vape shops sell products to help adult smokers quit, Miklosi said.

Colorado statistics belie that claim, according to longtime tobacco researcher Stanton Glantz. The data is “completely inconsistent with the argument that most e-cigarette use is adult smokers trying to use them to quit,” said Glantz, the former director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California-San Francisco.

For recent college graduate G Kumar, now a rock climber, the impetus to quit vaping was more ecological than health-related. They said they were turned off by the amount of trash generated from used vape devices and the amount of money they were spending.

Kumar got help from cessation literature and quitting aids from the university’s health promotion program, including boxes of eucalyptus-flavored toothpicks, which tasted awful but provided a distraction and helped with oral cravings.

It took a while and a lot of willpower to overcome the intense psychological cravings.

“The fact that I could just gnaw on toothpicks for weeks on end was, I think, what kept me sane,” Kumar said.

This article is from a partnership that includes CPR News, NPR, and KFF Health News.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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Previously Published on kffhealthnews.org

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What makes some people more attractive to mosquitoes? Researchers have answers for you.

July 7, 2024 by Futurity Leave a Comment

By JAMES URTON-U. WASHINGTON

Summer is just around the corner, and with it, more opportunities to have fun and frolic in the sun. But more time outside means more chances for another common warm-weather annoyance: mosquito bites.

University of Washington researchers are hoping those itchy bumps could soon become a thing of the past.

Jeffrey Riffell, a professor of biology, studies mosquito sensory systems, particularly their sense of smell. He and his team want to understand how mosquitoes find food, whether it be males—who drink nectar—or females, who drink blood when they are trying to produce eggs.

Riffell’s research has shown that hungry female mosquitoes find us by following a trail of scent cues, including chemicals exuded by our skin and sweat, as well as the carbon dioxide gas we exhale with each breath.

Mosquitoes also like colors, at least certain ones. His team is investigating how the visual and olfactory senses work together to help a mosquito zero in for the final strike and get her blood meal.

In the United States, climate change is opening new habitats for mosquitos. Washington currently boasts 20 species, including ones that can transmit West Nile virus.

Knowing what attracts mosquitoes—males to flowers, females to people—can help develop better control and containment efforts against these insects, whose bites can also transmit malaria, Zika, dengue, yellow fever, and other diseases.

Traps that kill or poison mosquitoes, for example, would be more effective if they released a mosquito-attracting scent.

Mosquito-borne illnesses kill hundreds of thousands of people each year. Riffell and his team hope their efforts can help take a bite out of those numbers.

Source: University of Washington

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Previously Published on futurity.org with Creative Commons License

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