Can Music Make Bedtime Better for a Child with Autism? We Think So!

According to the Center for Disease Control, roughly 1 out of every 59 children has been identified Autism Spectrum Disorder. The disorder, often simply shortened to "autism", is not a single condition, but a spectrum of several different types, which can be severe enough to require constant care and attention. Autism indicators usually show themselves by the time a child is 2-3 years old, which presents a number of unique challenges to parents.

One of the most difficult is getting a child to sleep on time and ensuring he or she can rest well when they do sleep. Early results of a recent Stanford University study show that children with autism take longer to fall into REM sleep and spend less time there than other children. The study also suggests that autistic children are more likely to experience sleep apnea, which will wake them up several times as they have trouble breathing. But the sleep-related problems begin before the sleep actually starts. According to a researcher working in Australia, insomnia is a huge problem.

In the 1990s, Australian psychologist Amanda Richdale found that 44 to 83 percent of children on the spectrum have some kind of difficulty with slumber, based on parent reports. Since then, a growing number of studies using increasingly sophisticated objective methods — including video recordings and FitBit-like wristwatches that track movements during sleep — have confirmed the high prevalence of sleep disruptions in this population.
What they’ve found is that children on the spectrum most commonly struggle with insomnia that delays the onset of sleep. They also get less rest overall than do typically developing children, and frequently awaken during the wee hours, roiling the household. “I still remember the mother of a 19-year-old telling me that her daughter would wake for long periods of time at night, just lying in bed singing to herself,” says Richdale, associate professor of psychology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

So what is a parent of a child with autism to do? As it turns out, there are ways to help. The important things to remember is that bedtime routines matter. A lot. Children with autism generally respond well to predictable structure -- things like going to bed the same time every night and having the same bedtime "rituals" (having a story read to them, getting into their pajamas, closing the curtains and turning off the lights, making the room dark and calm).  "Calm" is the watchword. Just as adults need that time of "winding down" that makes sleep come more easily, children on the spectrum need a definite period of winding down, with minimal distractions and a focus on dark and soothing and quiet.

One of the more helpful tools to get there is quiet music or ambient "nature" sounds and there is, at least, anecdotal evidence that using either one can be a real help for parents of autistic children. Let me share one such story. A few months ago, we at My Butterfly Pillow got a message from a customer. She had given a pillow to one of her sons, who is autistic, so he could listen to soothing rain sounds through the built-in Night Owl Speakers. He fell in love with his new pillow. In fact, he told his Mom he couldn't wait for bedtime now so he could drift off to sleep while listening to the rain.

We don't yet have solid science that says listening to quiet music will help your child sleep better. As with anything, you have to experiment until you find what works for you and your child. We do know this: soothing music (most autism and sleep research organizations recommend soft classical music with a regular beat and moderate dynamic changes) or ambient nature sounds do work very well with quite a few people. There are literally dozens of smartphone apps and hundreds of playlists on streaming music services dedicated to those two things. Why are they there? To help people calm their minds so they can sleep. A child with autism who is having trouble sleeping may just benefit from the same thing that benefits everyone else. In fact, you may find it benefits them more, as it might give them a solid anchor on which to focus. Remember, focus is a big deal. So is calm.

Bedtime music can give both. It's worth a try.

(Photo Credit: pettycon on Pixabay)

Good Night; Sleep Tight; Get Your Bedtime Playlist Right!

In his 1697 play The Mourning Bride, William Congreve wrote "Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak." But music has one more charm -- the charm to help you sleep.

According to a recent analysis of several sleep studies, listening to music as you go to sleep "caused significant improvements in sleep quality". The benefits take time to work -- the two studies that showed little to no improvement lasted less than three weeks -- but they do exist. The studies did have some holes in how they were designed, which means they were not conclusive. That is, you can't say "science says sleeping with music will cure all your ills". The best we can say is "listening to music as you sleep helps you sleep better, though how much better or what types of improvements you see can vary", which isn't bad. What's more, none of the studies showed that music made sleep worse. So, according to the analysis, music can help, won't hurt, and is, as this 2008 study concluded, "safe, easy, and cheap".

How, though, do you pick the right music? Should you use headphones, earbuds, or a speaker? Where do you get the music? Hey, I'm glad you asked all those questions! As it turns out, we here at MyButterflyPillow love listening to music as we sleep (and steaming videos and lectures and audiobooks too, but let's just stick to music for now). We have a couple of tips for listening to music as you drift off to dreamland. Let's go!

1. Speakers are better than earbuds or headphones. You know how you move around as you sleep? Try that with a set of headphones on or a pair of earbuds stuck in your ears. If you winced, well, join the club. You're far better off connecting to a speaker, either directly or through a Bluetooth connection. Our Smarter Pillow comes with speakers that will let you listen to whatever you like without disturbing anyone sleeping next to you. Cool, right? 
2. Pick the music you like. This is usually where a web site suggests you listen to classical music or soothing ambient sounds. That's fine if you like those things. What if classical music drives you up the wall? What if listening to rain sounds makes you...antsy? If you listen to music, listen to music you like. That's where you'll find relaxation. However, you should know that you'll get your best results from choosing music with a tempo that most closely matches the average human resting heart rate (60 to 80 beats per minute). Maybe start with the music of Ed Sheeran or anyone else on this Spotify playlist. 
3. Be patient. The analysis earlier in this article suggests it can take more than three weeks to see the benefits of bedtime tunes. Don't sweat it if you don't see immediate improvement. Relax. Enjoy the good music. Remember that good sleep begins with comfort and relaxation. You won't get either one if you're worried about your inability to relax and be comfortable. Don't put that stress on yourself! Just lie back, hit the "play" button, and sleep tight. 

(Photo Credit: minka2507 on Pixabay)

What is Mindfulness and How Can It Help You Sleep Well?

Let's talk about falling asleep and staying there.

According to a 2005 National Sleep Foundation poll, more than 50 percent of us experience at least one symptom of insomnia at least a few nights a week. A third of those polled said they have at least one symptom every single night! That's a lot of tossing and turning and waking up in the middle of the night. If you ask us, that's far too much! We were not made for poor sleep. You can link any number of health problems to lack of sleep, and those problems can be serious. We're talking heart problems, depression, and high blood pressure, to name only three!

One way to get better sleep is to make sure you have a good bed for sleeping. You need a good mattress and the best pillow you can buy. Of course, we have a pillow recommendation, but that's not the point of this article.

The point of this article is the other big thing you can do to help you get better sleep: meditation.

Wait! Stop! Don't go running off like that. This is not the meditation (or, if you want to be modern and trendy, mindfulness) of the 60s and 70s. You don't need to sit in uncomfortable positions nor learn a mantra. This is simple meditation, geared toward calming your mind and focusing it on what is happening right now instead of rehashing the bad events of the past or fretting over the concerns of the future. You know what I mean, right? You know what it's like to lie awake in bed while your brain replays that time in high school when you embarrassed yourself so hard you thought you would actually die. You know what it feels like to be almost asleep only to have your brain play the "what if" game with you. What if, your brain says, you lose your job tomorrow? What if the car breaks down and you can't pay for the repair? What if someone finally launched that nuclear attack we were so worried about 30 years ago? 

Mindfulness is a way of quieting those memories and worries. And it works! This 2015 study showed that just a "low dose" of mindfulness caused a noticeable improvement not only on sleep duration and quality but also on work performance. We also have this 2010 study and this 2015 study that came to similar conclusions. A little bit of meditation at the end of the day helps a lot.

But what are we talking about here? What are these practices and principles? Fortunately, you don't need a lengthy class or venerable teacher. You need two things: breathing and focus. The simplest mindfulness exercise involves nothing more than lying still and quiet and breathing -- in and out, slow and regularly. As you breathe, focus on your breathing.  Count slowly to four while you inhale then to the same on your exhale. Whenever your brain would wander, bring your thoughts back to counting. Slowly and intentionally. One to four in the one to four out. Then again. You can almost feel yourself physically relax as you breathe slowly in and out and you count one, two, three, four...

Whew! Almost fell asleep there. See how well it works? And the very best thing is, anyone can do it, even while you're awake at your desk at work. You don't need a special app or anything! Of course, if you do want some guidance, you can find it easily from any of these mindfulness apps, all of which have a pretty solid free component to them.

Now all you need is a way to listen to the meditations in a way that won't disturb anyone around you. You could use headphones or earbuds, but if you sleep on your side, those will get uncomfortable pretty quickly. What you really need is a pillow with some Night Owl Speakers built right in so you can listen to calming night sounds while you slowly breathe and count yourself down to restful sleep. Yeah, something like that would be about perfect.

We do not endorse mindfulness on the edge of a cliff,
but what works for you, right? Don't fall off!

(Photo Credits: Olichel and AlainAudet on Pixabay)

Is it Time to Change Your Pillow? Let's Find Out!

Well, she has the pillow part right,
but she seems short four walls.

When was the last time you replaced your pillow?

Most people don't pay much attention to their pillows. We might swap one out if we spill something on it, the dog chews it up, or the cat uses it as a claw-sharpener. Beyond that, though, we just don't think about how old our pillows are. Then again, we might run to the other extreme, buying a new pillow every couple of months because the last one we bought was too soft or too hard or too big or too small or too...wrong. Just wrong. So we need another one that turns out to be just as wrong as the last one, but in a completely different way.

The general rule is you should replace your pillow every six months or so if you have one of those $5 Walmart or Target cheapies. If you have a good memory foam pillow, you can go as long as 36 months -- three whole years! -- before you'll need a new one. For most pillows, you can go a couple of years before you should replace it.

But how do you know?

At this point most web sites would give you a whole bunch of tips with links right back to their own pillows, because they're trying to sell you their pillow just as hard as they can. We're not like that here. Oh, don't get us wrong. We do want you to buy a My Butterfly Pillow. We'd love to sell a couple billion of our Smarter Pillows to everyone, everywhere. But we're not going to spam you with links to do it, nor are we going to be super-annoying about asking you to look us over.

We'll just give you a few tips we hope you find helpful, or at least entertaining:

• If your pillow squashes flat every time you put your head on it, it's done and you need a new one. The easy way to tell if you have a dead, flat pillow is to try to fold it in half. If you can fold it easily, it's time to retire it. 
• If your pillow smells...unpleasant, get a new one. Normally, you can wash a pillow cover (and you should! Often!), but over time sweat and makeup and drool and spilled wine gets through the cover into the material of your pillow itself. That stuff can make you very uncomfortable. Worse, it can make you sick. Don't do that to yourself. Just get a new one. 
• If archaeologists keep trying to break in and steal your down pillow because they suspect the feathers inside it came from an actual dinosaur, get a new pillow. But make sure to sell them you old one, because it's probably valuable! 
• If you can't remember the last time you got a new pillow, get a new pillow. Pillows are not that expensive -- not even the really high-quality pillows like you might see for sale at certain helpful pillow-based websites (*coughcough*). If that's not enough, let us say two more words to you: dust mites. Ew.
• If your pillow is made of wood, stone, or jade, please get a new pillow. Also, you may be an ancient Egyptian or Chinese Empress. Check on that, too.

Just remember, your choice of pillow is every bit as important as your choice of mattress, sleep wear, and blankets. Make sure you have a pillow you really like and that you replace it when it no longer gives you the rest you deserve!

I guess when I mentioned the four walls, I
should have specified an actual house.

(Photo Credit: Engin_Akyurt one and two on Pixabay)

Side-Sleeping and the Pregnant Woman: What You Need to Know

How important can your sleep position be if you are pregnant? In some cases, it can literally be a matter of life and death.

I know. That seems like one of those grand click-bait proclamations designed just to get your attention. It's not. Here's why.

In 2014, several groups who work to reduce the number of infant deaths in the UK and New Zealand got very concerned about some still birth studies done a few years earlier. There were three such studies, all of which pointed to a direct connection between the likelihood of stillbirth and a mother's sleeping position, especially late in her pregnancy. None of those studies were conclusive, so in 2014 the groups sponsored a study called the Midlands and North of England Stillbirth Study (MiNESS). The study took three years to complete, surveyed over a thousand women, and compared those who had experienced a stillbirth with those who had a live birth. Here is what it found:

Mothers who went to sleep on their back had at least twice the risk of stillbirth compared with mothers who went to sleep on their left‐hand side. This study suggests that 3.7% of stillbirths after 28 weeks of pregnancy were linked with going to sleep lying on the back. This study also shows that the link between going‐to‐sleep position and late stillbirth was not affected by the duration of pregnancy after 28 weeks, the size of the baby, or the mother's weight...

This is the largest of four similar studies that have all shown the same link between the position in which a mother goes to sleep and stillbirth after 28 weeks of pregnancy.

The reason for that involves one of the major veins in your body called the inferior vena cava (IVC). The IVC begins just above your waist and runs along your spinal column to your heart. Its job is to bring blood in need of oxygen to your heart, where it can fill up and head back out through the aorta. it's called "inferior" because it services the lower half of your body, just as its partner the superior vena cava handles your upper half.

Good so far? Okay. Here's where it gets tricky.

When a woman later in her pregnancy sleeps on her back, the weight of the baby in her uterus presses down on the IVC and restricts the flow of blood. Less blood going to the heart means less blood coming from the heart. Not only can that be fatal to the baby but it can also harm the mother due to low blood pressure (a condition with the sufficiently dreadful name of aortocaval compression syndrome). It's important to note here that not every woman experiences this condition and you should always -- ALWAYS -- talk to your doctor if you have even the slightest medical concern. With that in mind, if you're pregnant (especially if you already have sleep-related conditions like sleep apnea), we'd like you to talk to your doctor about side-sleeping. More information from a qualified medial professional is always a good thing to have!

The important takeaway here is that, for women in the third trimester of their pregnancy, side-sleeping is a no-brainer idea, recommended by many, many doctors and it may just be a thing for you. If you do adopt the Sleep on Side mentality, you will need the right equipment -- a comfortable mattress and pillow that will not only let you sleep well but will also help you stay on your side so you can get the best and most healthy rest for you and your new baby.

We may just have something to help.

(Photo Credit: pedroserapio on Pixabay)

The Good-Sleep Basics: Seeking Firmness and Loft

Mount Pillowmore (Some Assembly Required)

How did you sleep this week? Good? Bad? Did you wake up a couple times with a crick in your neck and the vague rumbling of a headache that'll probably last until mid-day? Did you have to stretch your shoulder because you got your arm trapped above your read underneath your own personal Mount Pillowmore? Did it take you a half-hour to get comfortable because you couldn't quite finish your Pillow Dance?

Before we go any further, let's be honest here. We are a pillow company. We make and sell an excellent pillow in which we have an amazing amount of confidence. We use our own pillows, love them to pieces, and want to get them under the heads of lots of people. That doesn't mean, though, that we care more about selling you a pillow than we do about making sure you get the right one for you.

So. First things first. Roughly 70 percent of us (according to a couple different surveys) are what we call side-sleepers. The other 30 percent of us split between sleeping on our back or our stomach (About 15 to 20 percent for the first and 10 to 15 for the other, depending on the survey). Our pillow is made to best-serve the side-sleeper. If you sleep on your back, our Smarter Pillow will be great for you, but it's not the optimal choice. If you sleep on your stomach, you're probably better-suited to a softer pillow with less "loft" or height. That doesn't mean you shouldn't consider our pillow, just that our Smarter Pillow is made for the particular demands of side-sleepers.

And what, exactly are those demands? First, you need a pillow with at least a medium level of firmness. If your pillow is too soft, your head will sink too far into it and you'll wake up with a stiff neck. That, of course, assumes you don't wake up in the middle of the night to fluff up your pillow or to grab another pillow and jam it under the one that's collapsed. Your pillow has to be firm enough to support your head but not so firm that it hurts your ear. Oh, hey. Did I mention that a certain pillow made for a certain style of sleep has a certain special feature that makes life better for your ear? You may also want to know that memory foam is "very good" when it comes to holding that firmness you want. No particular reason. Just seems to us like a thing you may want to know.

Now that you have an idea about how firm your pillow should be, you'll need to consider the height of your pillow. Pillow professionals call that "loft". When you go to Pillow Professional Palavers, they all stand around using words like "loft" nodding knowingly to each other. They can nod, of course, because their necks do not hurt. They have chosen the proper pillows with the proper "loft". The rest of us, who are not snooty Pillow Professionals who smoke pipes* and bandy around arcane technical sleep technology terms, simply call it "height". You want a pillow high enough to support your head all night but not so high that it makes you uncomfortable. The idea height, at is happens, appears to be 10 centimeters or a little less than 4 inches. Don't take my word for it! You can look right here at this 2015 study in the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics! If you can keep your head supported roughly four inches off your mattress through the night, you're probably going to have a good sleeping night.

The question, though, is how you keep your head supported at that height given that even firm pillows tend to settle over the first 10-20 minutes your head is on them. Now, if a pillow maker took that into account and put some sort of riser-type device on the pillow that not only kept the pillow at a good height but left room for you to put your arm under the pillow as well...

...but nah. You couldn't possibly get a Smarter Pillow made with such a clever device on this Earth, could you?

Awwwww! Side-Sleeping Kitty! I bet his pillow has proper
loft and a clever riser because he is a good sleepy kitty!

(Photo Credits: manbob86 and StockSnaps on Pixabay)

*To the best of my knowledge, no one at My Butterfly Pillow smokes a pipe. There might have been brief and unfortunate candy cigarette outbreak, but I couldn't swear to it. At all.

The Pillow: A Brief Tale of Snakes, Hairdos, and Feathers

An Ancient Egyptian headrest from the Middle Kingdom
via the The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, E.210.1900

Have you ever wondered why we even have pillows? That is, what happened in our history that we suddenly needed something under our heads as we sleep? Historians have found references to headrests in Mesopotamia that go as far back as 7000 B.C., which make them a far more recent invention than mattresses, the oldest of which dates back 77,000 years. Why do we have them?

It turns out, the first pillows had little to do with comfort. As best we can tell, they were chunks of stone with a curved indentation where you could rest your head. You used them when you slept on the ground to keep bugs and snakes out of your ears, which seems like a pretty good sleep strategy. "Keep bugs and snakes out of your ears when you sleep", the ancient Mesopotamian pillow merchant would say. "I'm going to carve that into a plinth and put it outside my market stall!" You would, of course, nod politely while you tried to remember what, exactly a plinth was.

We have found other ancient pillows, in Egypt and China. The Egyptians used wooden or stone headrests in their tombs, to keep the heads of the dead elevated, lest demons crept into their ears. As you can see, ancient people had some real concerns about various things crawling into their ears. The Egyptians were the first to decorate their pillows, often with carvings of gods or incantations from the Book of Coming Forth by Day, which we know from many old movies as the Book of the Dead. Here is a particularly useful incantation:

Doves awake thee from sleep; they alert thee to the horizon. Raise thyself, (for) thou dost triumph over what was done against thee. Ptah has overthrown thy enemies. It has been commanded to act against him who acted against thee. Thou art Horus the son of Hathor, the fiery Cobra, of the fiery Cobra group, to whom a head was given after it was cut off. Thy head cannot be taken from thee hereafter; thy head can never be taken from thee ...

Not only is this proof against ear-snakes but also against anyone who might want to steal your head. Thanks, headrest!

The ancient Chinese made their pillows from either jade or ceramics. Early on, historians believed they were used in tombs, in similar ways to how the Egyptians used them. Later, though, they came to learn that they were used most often by the living, not only to keep the head comfortable during sleep, but as a way for women to protect their ornate and complicated hairdos. They were not built for comfort, though I imagine if you used them the right way, they were better than cracking your head on a curved rock. Still, they were lovely and I imagine you'd be quite proud to lay your head on one of these beauties, even if they didn't come with an incantation against beheading.

Over time, people learned they could put padding on a headrest, or make them small enough to be comfortably portable (headrests in the ancient Egyptian style are still in use in East Africa today). Europeans appears to have pioneered the stuffed pillow, which date back at least to the 15th century. People stuffed those pillows with feathers or straw or some other plant, to make them softer. After that, the quest for the most comfortable pillow began in earnest. People sat on them, slept on them, kneelt on them, used them to whack each other upside the head, propped books or food trays on them, piled them up around themselves and named them Fort Pillowmore...

...or perhaps that was just me.

Once we humans started stuffing pillows, we also started making better stuffing for them. Nowadays, we have everything from synthetic down to medical grade polyurethane and it doesn't look like we're dong looking for the perfect pillow (though we have a suggestion). No matter which pillow you choose, we feel confident in one thing.

At least you didn't get a snake in your ear last night.

She's just here to keep your hairdo straight.
via the Victoria and Albert Museum.