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"  To those who find making their bed a chore, I submit: Try making your bed. As in, actually constructing it. There&amp;#039;s a great deal of extremely detail-oriented work involved\u2014especially if the bed in question is from H\u00E4stens, a Swedish luxury brand known for handmade mattresses so sumptuous that they have been the official favorite of the country&amp;#039;s royal court since 1952. Devotees claim that the experience of snoozing on a H\u00E4stens is akin to what it must feel like to drift, weightless, on a cloud, which is a prospect tantalizing enough to bring me to the factory in K\u00F6ping, Sweden, where I recently found myself down on one knee, wearing goggles, attempting to secure a wily box spring onto a pine frame with a tiny metal clamp. This is my bed-of-dreams experiment: I&amp;#039;m hoping that if I build it, sleep will come. I&amp;#039;ve never been a champion sleeper. As a child, I would disrupt family camping trips with sleepwalking excursions into the woods. Around adolescence, my nocturnal strolls ceased, but I began to talk in my sleep. (I once shouted, evidently referring to some LL Cool J-esque dream protagonist, &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s too sweaty to carry the boom box!&amp;quot;) I grew out of that, too, thankfully, but it doesn&amp;#039;t mean my nights have become any less restless. My sleep is fitful at best, and at least once a week I stare at the ceiling for a few hours, wondering desperately if the sandman has stood me up completely. I&amp;#039;m not alone. According to the National Sleep Foundation, 60 percent of Americans experience sleep problems almost every night\u2014so many of us that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared insufficient shut-eye a public health epidemic. Chronic sleep deprivation\u2014defined as getting fewer than six hours a night\u2014has been linked to obesity, cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, lowered immunity, and neurological problems. Our time between the sheets is when our cells divide and repair, memories are consolidated, and growth hormones are released. As reporter David K. Randall wrote in his 2012 book, Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep (W.W. Norton &amp;amp;amp; Company), sleep affects every aspect of our lives: &amp;quot;Relationships, creativity, memories\u2014all of these things that make us who we are depend on the hours we spend each night with our heads on the pillow.&amp;quot; It also affects our looks. In a 2010 study conducted by researchers at Sweden&amp;#039;s Karolinska Institutet, participants were photographed twice in the same lighting conditions\u2014once after an eight-hour night&amp;#039;s sleep and once after being kept awake for 31 hours. When impartial volunteers were asked to select which faces they found most attractive, they overwhelmingly chose the images in which the subjects were well rested. Looking at a sample photo pair, I can see why: In the post-sleepless-night pic, the subject looks more puffy eyed and, well, angrier. Not a big surprise. But as a landmark study conducted by scientists at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, recently found, lack of sleep doesn&amp;#039;t just make you look a little rough: Over time, it can drastically accelerate the signs of skin aging. Researchers divided participants into poor sleepers (30 women who had gotten fewer than five hours of sleep each night for at least a month preceding the study) and good sleepers (30 women who had slept more than seven hours a night for at least a month), and found that fine lines, uneven pigmentation, slackening of skin, and reduced elasticity were twice as great in the sleep-deprived group. Compared with the women who had gotten adequate z&amp;#039;s, they also exhibited impaired skin-barrier function, increased moisture loss, and slower recovery from sunburn. And here&amp;#039;s the kicker: The poor sleepers were perceived to be four years older than they actually were by independent dermatologists; the good sleepers, eight years younger. When I visited Case Medical Center to learn about the study, I was shown photographs of some of the subjects, and the visible difference between sleepers and nonsleepers of the same age was, indeed, startling. The women with a history of abbreviated slumber looked more than tired; they appeared\u2026weathered. When I took the same test that was used in the study to separate the good resters from the tossers-and-turners, a questionnaire called the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, I landed solidly where I expected to be, in the latter group. Curiously, though, several of the participants went into the study thinking they were good sleepers: It was only once the test revealed that they woke during the night or kept erratic hours that they realized they weren&amp;#039;t actually logging as much dozing time as they thought. The scientists involved in the study, which was commissioned by Est\u00E9e Lauder, also discovered something interesting about a process called catabolysis, in which skin cells purge free-radical-generating damaged proteins: It peaks early in the sleep cycles of younger people (which might be one reason why a 20-year-old can look passable after conking out for only a few hours) and declines drastically with age, indicating that older skin no longer derives as much benefit from sleep. Enter Lauder&amp;#039;s new Advanced Night Repair Synchronized Recovery Complex II, which not only encourages so-called clock genes within skin cells to activate DNA repair during slumber, but also contains peptides targeted to enhance catabolysis activity. If older skin can be encouraged to behave like younger skin when we hit the sack, that means the effects of environmental damage that accrues during the day can be substantially lessened. Although it&amp;#039;s been known for some time that the skin is most receptive and permeable after dark\u2014hence the ubiquity of night creams and skin-care sleep masks\u2014many of the latest nocturnal anti-aging treatments seek to address the changes that occur when the body&amp;#039;s circadian rhythm gets knocked out of whack (a result of exposure to artificial light, jet lag, or working late). Chanel La Nuit, for example, is fortified with an anti-inflammatory frankincense extract to reduce moisture loss overnight. &amp;quot;The whole &amp;#039;getting your beauty sleep&amp;#039; thing is really true,&amp;quot; says Chanel consulting dermatologist Amy Wechsler, MD. &amp;quot;Beta-endorphins and growth hormones are at their highest levels. You want to bathe your skin in as much of those good, healing molecules as possible.&amp;quot; While it&amp;#039;s a relief to know that some of the adverse effects of sleeplessness can be mitigated topically, even high-tech super-potions can&amp;#039;t do it all. A normal night&amp;#039;s sleep contains multiple 90-minute-long cycles, each consisting of up to five stages with specific restorative actions, so the body needs at least seven hours of rest to get through a full sequence of repair. As Daniel B. Yarosh, PhD, senior vice president of R&amp;amp;amp;D at Est\u00E9e Lauder, says, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re not offering sleep in a bottle. What we&amp;#039;re saying is, we know what the consequences of bad sleeping habits are, and there&amp;#039;s something you can do. But it&amp;#039;s not a substitute, health-wise, for getting good sleep.&amp;quot; So where does that leave me? Frankly, concerned that even if I&amp;#039;m not tossing and turning myself into an early grave, I&amp;#039;m still going to end up looking like I&amp;#039;ve just crawled out of one. According to the National Sleep Foundation website, the best ways to set the stage for slumber include retiring at the same time every night, getting regular exercise, not eating within three hours of sleep, and making sure that you have ample space on a comfortable, supportive mattress. I&amp;#039;m a major failure on all of these accounts, but especially the last: I&amp;#039;ve been sleeping, or attempting to, on the same lumpy 1-800-MATTRESS bed and defeated IKEA pillow since about 2004. I also tend to lie on my stomach (not good; a study has actually been done to prove that mashing your face every night increases wrinkles), and my husband&amp;#039;s feet are equipped with daggerlike weapons I call Nosferatoes. Optimum REM-summoning conditions, these are not. As for many insomniacs, sleeping pills provide my only recourse (I stick to OTC because Ambien scares me: I&amp;#039;m afraid I&amp;#039;ll wake up in the morning and find my dog in the oven), but I find they work sporadically at best. And even if pills ferried me seamlessly to the Land of Nod, it wouldn&amp;#039;t necessarily make much difference: According to Alcibiades Rodriguez, MD, codirector of the New York Sleep Institute, pharmaceutically assisted sleep can be less restorative than natural rest. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s also,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;the feeling of heavy sedation that may hit you in the morning.&amp;quot; Not a big plus for those of us who are already essentially in a vegetative state until about noon. So when H\u00E4stens invited me to see how their beds are made\u2014and contribute to building my own\u2014I couldn&amp;#039;t get on an airplane fast enough. H\u00E4stens&amp;#039; brand philosophy rests (so to speak) on the fact that we spend about one third of our lives sleeping. A bed, therefore, should be the most important piece of furniture we&amp;#039;ll ever buy. Due to their artisanal mode of manufacture\u2014each mattress is a veritable layer cake of biodegradable cotton, wool, flax, and horsehair (heat-treated to be hypoallergenic) and is guaranteed to be slumberworthy for 25 years\u2014H\u00E4stens beds don&amp;#039;t make for cheap sleep. Prices start at $6,500 and reach $99,900 for the top-of-the-line Vividus, which takes 160 man-hours to produce and comes emblazoned with a brass plaque bearing the purchaser&amp;#039;s name. Mind-boggling, yes, but in the &amp;quot;You paid what for a mattress?&amp;quot; spectrum, such numbers aren&amp;#039;t all that extreme: The Kluft Beyond Luxury Palais Royale (available at Bloomingdale&amp;#039;s, but don&amp;#039;t stampede) goes for about $36,000, and British manufacturer Savoir Beds launched a $175,000 Royal State Bed this March. Can you really snooze more satisfactorily on a mattress that costs as much as a car than on, say, a Sealy? The jury&amp;#039;s still out. But premium mattresses are more likely to be breathable\u2014materials such as horsehair and wool wick moisture and promote ventilation, unlike the heat-trapping latex, foam rubber, polyurethane, and polyester that comprise most assembly-line beds\u2014and studies have shown that one of the key elements of quality sleep is a cool environment, preferably in the neighborhood of 66 degrees. Our bodies release heat during the night as part of the sleep cycle, so anything that prevents our core temperatures from dropping may also keep us from drifting off. I don&amp;#039;t expect that getting a new bed will make my dozing difficulties vanish instantaneously, but it&amp;#039;s a step in the right direction. &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t catch up from chronic sleep loss in a night or over a weekend. It takes more like a full week or two,&amp;quot; says Orfeu Buxton, PhD, assistant professor in the division of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School. &amp;quot;But think about it: You don&amp;#039;t eat salad for a day and then say you have a healthy diet. Getting healthy sleep needs to become a part of your lifestyle.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s possible that a person&amp;#039;s belief in the drowsy-making powers of her bed is just as important as its actual comfort. This might be why cognitive behavioral therapy has proven to be an effective method for many patients with chronic insomnia: Essentially, if you don&amp;#039;t worry so much about not sleeping, you&amp;#039;ll sleep. I think about this as I pat down sheets of cloud-white cotton onto the frame of what will soon be my own H\u00E4stens bed, feeling like Goldilocks or the persnickety royal in &amp;quot;The Princess and the Pea.&amp;quot; If nothing else, I realize, making this bed\u2014just like slathering a nighttime serum on my skin\u2014is going to give me peace of mind. Everything else will follow. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/advice/a13878/the-science-of-sleep/>