The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that somewhere between 50 and 70 million adults in the United States have chronic sleep and wakefulness disorders.

 Not surprisingly, approximately one-third of adults are sleeping fewer than 7 hours each night – the National Sleep Foundation recommends 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night for most adults. 

According to the National Institutes of Health, sleep disorders account for approximately $16 billion in annual health care costs, and Cornell University psychologist and sleep expert James Maas estimates that sleep deprivation and sleep disorders cost the American economy at least $150 billion a year!

If these stats don’t worry you, maybe these CDC findings will. Sleep deprivation is not only costly, but dangerous too. After a review of national behavioral health data, the federal agency found:

• More than 1 in 3 adults (37.9%) said they unintentionally fell asleep during the day at least once in 30 days.
• Nearly 1 in 20 adults (4.7%) reported nodding off or falling asleep while driving at least once in 30 days.

Most recently, a study by researchers at Scripps Clinic Viterbi Family Sleep Centre in San Diego has linked hypnotic sleeping pills to a 4.6 percent greater risk of death and a 35 percent increased risk of cancer among regular pill users.

What many people do not realize is that getting a better night’s sleep may be as simple (and as safe) as changing their pillows. According to the Johns Hopkins Hospital Neck-Pain and Quality-of-Sleep Study published in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, proper selection of a pillow can significantly reduce neck pain and improve quality of sleep. In this same study, the Mediflow Waterbase pillow was shown to improve the quality of sleep (and reduce neck pain) best, over all pillows tested.

The Johns Hopkins study examined four factors: (1) How quickly subjects fell asleep, (2) How few times subjects woke up, (3) Perceptions of sleep compared to normal, and (4) Overall quality of sleep. Mediflow’s water-based pillow ranked “Best” in all four categories when compared to the others tested. 

Before turning to pharmaceuticals or other more drastic measures, you should make sure to examine the factors that might be contributing to your sleep problems. The answer to your insomnia may be simpler than you think.

When I was a child, my older relatives attempted to deter me from staying up past my bedtime by warning me that I would get sick if I didn’t get enough sleep.

Of course, I never listened. Considering this expert health advice was coming from the same people who insisted I would drown unless I waited a full hour to swim after eating and that if I swallowed my chewing gum it would stay in my stomach for seven years, my lack of adherence was not unfounded.

But it turns out, my mom’s claims were not without medical merit.

A 2009 study challenged conventional theories of sleep evolution when it compared the sleep durations of numerous mammals to the species’ susceptibility to infection. The study found that sleep does influence immunity, as the species that slept the longest suffered substantially reduced levels of parasitic infection.

Studies in humans have proven that lack of sleep negatively affects your immune system. Lack of sleep increases the production of inflammatory cytokines in your body. Cytokines, which are infection-fighting proteins, interact with cells of the immune system in order to regulate the body's response to disease and infection. When your body overproduces these proteins, you will feel the effects of the sickness your body normally would be fighting.

Furthermore, sleep deprivation not only plays a role in whether we come down with illnesses; it also influences how we fight illnesses once we are sick.

So I guess I have to admit that my mom  was right on this one. As for that chewing gum, well, there might still be some inside of me somewhere – you never know.

Need help getting more sleep? Watch Mediflow’s Top Ten Sleep Tips video.

Lately, a multitude of articles discussing a recently coined ailment affectionately referred to as “text neck” have been occupying a lot of space in my Google alerts. “Text neck” refers to head, neck and shoulder pain resulting from excessive mobile device usage. Evidently, the unnatural, hunched over position most of us adopt while using technology is not at all healthy for our spine.

Some experts are estimating that tens of thousands of people in the U.S. alone are affected by some degree of text neck.

And, while it seems somewhat contradictory, one Florida chiropractor has even gone as far as to develop a mobile phone app that helps alert users of a posture problem while texting.  Using the angle your phone is being held at as an indicator, a green light in the corner of the screen means proper posture, while a red light means the opposite.

Of course all of this raises a big question: is our addiction to technology bad for our health?

I know I am extremely guilty of phone lust, though I prefer the less accusatory description of myself as “tech savvy.” Between texting, checking work emails, updating my Facebook status, becoming a super mayor on Foursquare and tweeting things I find hilarious, my phone feels like it is part of me.  I try to blame it on my career choice (Social Media Coordinator) but the truth is, I’m addicted – not to my phone (I hate every phone I try) but to the constant contact it gives me with my family, friends and outside universe.

But it makes sense that anything you spend a significant amount of time doing can be harmful if it puts your body in an unnatural position. Even something as seemingly harmless as sleeping, when improperly executed, can cause discomfort due to the fact that we spend so much of our lives doing it. If you sleep with an overly stuffed pillow, for example, you can force your spine out of alignment and put your neck in a position it’s not meant to be in. If done on a nightly basis, this will most likely lead to pain and even lasting injury.

The answer is not to give up on sleep or technology, but rather to be more aware that anything done repetitively has the potential to cause harm if we are not vigilant. I’m happy to report though, so far I’m “text-neck” injury free. But I do sleep on a Mediflow pillow (with my phone underneath it) every night, just in case.