James' World 2

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One of the most consumed drugs in the US – and the most commonly taken analgesic worldwide – could be doing a lot more than simply taking the edge off your headache, according to scientists.

Acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol and sold widely under the brand names Tylenol and Panadol, also increases risk-taking, according to a study published in 2020 that measured changes in people’s behavior when under the influence of the common over-the-counter medication.

“Acetaminophen seems to make people feel less negative emotion when they consider risky activities – they just don’t feel as scared,” neuroscientist Baldwin Way from The Ohio State University explained last year.

“With nearly 25 percent of the population in the US taking acetaminophen each week, reduced risk perceptions and increased risk-taking could have important effects on society.”

The findings add to a recent body of research suggesting that acetaminophen’s effects on pain reduction also extend to various psychological processes, lowering people’s receptivity to hurt feelings, experiencing reduced empathy, and even blunting cognitive functions.

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There are a number of different factors in your day-to-day life that can make it difficult to get to sleep, from stress to our central heating. People are reporting sleep disturbances more than ever: the average person is losing two hours of sleep a night and 37% of people in Britain are sleep deprived, according to 2021 research from fitness tech brand Zepp.

But what if we told you that the answer could lie in something much more simple than lavender sprays and supplements? When it comes to getting a good night’s sleep, your diet can play a huge role. Studies, including a 2016 paper from Columbia University, have found that our dietary patterns and consumption of specific foods can have a significant impact on our sleep quality, with some foods having the potential to really disrupt our time snoozing.

Certified Health Education Specialist Brielle Merchant and Dr Aishah Iqbal both know just how important sleep is, and how much our eating habits can affect it. So we asked them for their expert insights into the link between diet and sleep, what you can eat to ensure you sleep well – and what foods are most likely to disrupt your rest. 

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Photos by Getty Images

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The pandemic has ruined our sleep

“In one study conducted across 49 countries in March and April 2020, 40 percent of people said their sleep was worse than before the pandemic. Participants’ use of sleeping pills increased by 20 percent,” reports a horrifying but hardly surprising Vox article detailing the virus’s toll on the nation’s sleep. 

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If you’re looking to reduce your body fat, you’ve probably heard that you should have frequent, small meals, because it’s “good for the metabolism”.

However, as with a lot of topics in the sphere of nutrition, this is a complicated matter, and the current literature is leaning towards avoiding snacks if we want to reduce our body fat. Frequent snacking leads to greater fat gain due to the body remaining in fat-making mode from the constant influx of food. Therefore, for optimal health, we want to avoid eating between meals. This allows our fat-making processes to switch off and our bodies to start burning stored fat.

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

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For a long time, I believed that my only hope of becoming a professional writer was to find the perfect tool. A few months into my career as a book critic, I’d already run up against the limits of my productivity, and, like many others before me, I pinned the blame on Microsoft Word. Each time I opened a draft, I seemed to lose my bearings, scrolling from top to bottom and alighting on far-flung sentences at random. I found and replaced, wrote, and rewrote; the program made fiddling easy and finishing next to impossible.

I’d fallen into the trap that the philosopher Jacques Derrida identified in an interview from the mid-nineties. “With the computer, everything is rapid and so easy,” he complained. “An interminable revision, an infinite analysis is already on the horizon.” Derrida hadn’t even contended with the sirens of online life, which were driving writer friends to buy disconnected laptops or to quarantine their smartphones in storage bins with timed locks. Zadie Smith touted Freedom, a subscription service that cut off the user’s devices—a chastity belt for procrastinators.

I tried “distraction-free” writing apps that encouraged mindfulness, disabled the backspace key, or, in a few extreme cases, threatened to delete everything if I took my hands off the keyboard (Write or Die). Later, I tried coding my own writing tools, a hobby as rewarding as it was ineffective. The experiments gradually meshed into a literary Rube Goldberg machine, a teetering assemblage of Scriveners and SimpleTexts that left me perpetually uncertain of which thought I’d written down where. Longhand was a luxury I couldn’t afford: Wendell Berry boasted in Harper’s that he didn’t need a computer because he had a wife, but I was a mere urban freelancer, whose boyfriend had a job. So I continued the search for word processing’s Excalibur, a perfect union of consciousness and composition.

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