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Trouble sleeping? Meditation expert's 'house-tour hack' could help you get the ZZZs you crave.

"It sounds like it makes no sense."

via Canva/Photos

Familiarity breeds relaxation, apparently.

Few things are better for your mental and physical well-being than a good night’s sleep. Getting the correct amount of sleep each night is great for your immune system, reduces stress, and lowers your risk for chronic conditions such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. It also makes you feel great and helps you concentrate during the day at work or school.

However, far too many people aren’t getting enough shut-eye to enjoy all these incredible benefits. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 1 in 3 adults in the United States reported not getting enough rest or sleep daily. Nearly 40% of adults fall asleep accidentally during the day without meaning to, and 50 to 70 million Americans have ongoing sleep disorders.

A technique to help you fall asleep.

There is no right way to fall asleep at night, but if counting sheep hasn’t worked for you since middle school, meditation expert Emily Kessler has an easy-to-do technique to help you get the sleep you need. Kessler, a medication coach in Brooklyn, New York, is “happiest when helping people tap into their truest selves.” She shared the technique, known as the "house-tour hack," in August 2024 on TikTok, and it has had over 2 million views.

@emilymeditates

I repeat: I have never made it to the upstairs 😂 Try this & let me know what happens!! #sleephack #fallasleepfast #fallingasleep

“When you are trying to sleep at night, and you're laying in your bed, what I recommend is taking a few nice, deep breaths calming your body a little bit and then start to visualize a house,” Kessler begins her post. “Not your own house, but a house that you know really well. I use my grandmother's old house.”

“You basically visualize yourself slowly walking up to the house, noticing all the details about the outside, going up to the door, opening the door, walking in, seeing the layout, and then slowly going through each room, noticing things in as much detail as possible. Making your way through every room, seeing the art, the furniture, the layout,” she continues. “There is something about this that distracts your thinking, busy mind enough to let you fall into sleep. I've literally never made it upstairs at her house.”


Visualization can help people fall asleep.

Kessler’s house-tour hack uses a visualization technique known as “visual distraction,” which researchers have scientifically proven to help insomniacs fall asleep faster. Visualizing a calm, serene scene, such as visiting your grandmother's house, effectively prevents intrusive, stressful thoughts from taking hold while you lay in bed at night.

Some commenters shared the visualization techniques they use to fall asleep. "I pick a topic and then try to think of a related word for each letter of the alphabet. Usually only make it to G," Hillary wrote. "A hack that I do is just immediately create a dream and trick my brain into thinking I’ve already fallen asleep. It's no joke; the dream continues, and I fall asleep," Najah added. "I used to 'pray' for all of my family members. I would list every single one down to great aunts and uncles, and I rarely made it all the way through," Samantha wrote.

How to fall asleep using cognitive shuffling.

Another popular technique that we recently highlighted on Upworthy is called "cognitive shuffling." Denver-based board-certified dermatologist Dr. Scott Walter says it has been a game changer for helping him fall asleep. “One is just thinking of random words or objects that have nothing to do with each other,” Walter said. “For example, cow, leaf, sandwich, butter, liver, things like that — just random words that make no sense,” he said on TikTok. He adds that it's successful because it “mimics what are called 'microdreams,' which occur during the transition to sleep, [letting] your brain know, hey, it’s safe to fall asleep.”

Ultimately, it seems that our minds are the greatest barrier to getting a good night’s sleep because, no matter how badly our bodies want to turn off, the mind loves to chatter away when it should be calming down. According to science, and meditation expert Emily Kessler, we can calm our busy brains by conjuring dreamlike images to help us fall into deep, restorative sleep.





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Female bonobos shut down violent males. Here's what humans can learn from them.

Who run the bonobos world? GIRLS!

Hey ladies, you know that uncomfortable moment when you're at a bar with your girlfriends and some sketchy dude comes over to hit on one of you?

Maybe this dude elbows his way into your conversation or maybe he leans too close and tries to buy a round of drinks. Then maybe he not-so-subtly drapes a sweaty hand on one of your shoulders? Yeah, it sucks.

Image via iStock

If that sounds familiar to you, then you'll probably recognize what happens next because it's kind of awesome: Your friends close ranks and block the dude's unwanted approach.

Even more awesome? This behavior isn't limited to humans.

Scientists at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University have observed female bonobos employing similar behaviors when a female in their group feels threatened by a male.

In fact, according to a four-year study on bonobos (cousins to chimpanzees) conducted in the Congo, female bonobos purposely form all-female groups to keep aggressive males at bay.

Females of all ages from different families would come together in these groups, with the older bonobos looking out for the younger ones by keeping them in the center of a protective circle. Researchers even found that female bonobos from different families were incredibly tolerant of one another, and that female-on-female bonobo aggression was surprisingly rare.

Bonobos females holding each other. Photo via Georges Gobet/Getty Images.

Nahoko Tokuyama, the leader of the study, believes this ability to get along is the key to female dominance in the bonobo population.

In species that display what humans might call "stereotypically gendered behavior," males are more often observed using aggressive tactics to coerce copulation and/or acquire higher social status. This could be anything from a male trying to mate with a female to a male bonobo feeding on a tree that a female bonobo has claimed as hers.

Sound familiar? Yeah.

But in the Kyoto University study, researchers noticed female bonobo grouping together to prevent this kind of male aggression. They called these groups "female coalitions," but you or I might describe them as "deep female friendships."

If there's one thing males in pretty much every species know, it's not to mess with a group of angry women. Photo by Mark Dumont/Flickr.

If one female in a coalition attacked a male for any reason, the rest would follow suit and come to her aid.

According to Tokuyama, 69% of these female coalitions were observed forming after or during an incident of aggressive male behavior.

What's more, female coalitions rarely (if ever) lose to a male aggressor, and because the male bonobos know they can't win, they're less prone to acting out with aggression or violence in the first place.

"Males frequently direct display and charge toward females, but they seldom attack females physically, even though males are bigger," Tokuyama told Upworthy.

A coalition of female bonobos attacking an offending male. GIF via animal coalition/YouTube.

Of course, meeting aggression with aggression might not sound like the best approach to conflict resolution. And this isn't to say that bonobos of all genders are inherently violent either. But these female coalitions have been so effective that they've virtually eliminated violent outbreaks in the bonobo population.

GIF from "Game of Thrones."

Another reason researchers think bonobo groups are less aggressive than their chimp cousins? Sex. Lots of it.

Researchers have observed bonobos engaging in all kinds of sexual acts — not just heterosexual intercourse. They're down with everything from same-sex sex to masturbation to oral sex to group sex and also, uhhh, rubbing each others' genitals as a form of casual greeting when a new group comes into the area.

We humans might be inclined to call that "kinky." But to them, it's just a very, very friendly way of saying, "Hello, how are you today?"

Self-explanatory. Photo by Jaume F. Lalana/Flickr.

Of course, we can't know for certain whether bonobos are actually engaging in this behavior for pleasure.

But whatever the reason, it has helped to decrease the number of tense confrontations between individuals and groups. When everybody's gettin' it on on the reg — for pleasure, not for force — then the whole group is generally calmer and less violent.

Contrast this to the observed behavior of their chimpanzee cousins. They have plenty of sex, but theirs appears to be more about power and dominance than personal or shared pleasure. They're known to engage in rape, murder, and infanticide, and they are more likely to have violent interactions with newcomers.

(Again: sound familiar?)

Anthropological data analyzed by neuropsychologist James Prescott suggests societies that are more sexually open are also less likely to be violent. The key to understanding this correlation, however, is that it's the society as a whole that is more sexually open and not just a small percentage of individuals.

Photo by Ted/Flickr.

So, to bring it back to that guy approaching a group of women at the bar: is there anything we as humans can learn from bonobos?

It's pretty clear the combination of female coalitions of bonobos defending their own, and bonobos of all genders engaging in casual sex seems to have resulted in a less violent ape society. (In this case, let's assume that "sex" means "pleasure and fulfillment.)

While bonobos' behavior doesn't exactly translate to modern human society, it is an important reminder that if humans work to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to feel fulfilled and to feel pleasure on a regular basis, we may find ourselves living in a less violent, less aggressive society.

It's really as simple as that.

Heroes

In the '80s, they called Gaetan Dugas the patient zero of HIV/AIDS. Except he wasn't.

U.S. doctors first noticed the disease that would come to be known as HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s.

The story starts with a group of doctors, who noticed an outbreak of a rare skin cancer called Kaposi sarcoma in young gay men in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. We now know that Kaposi sarcoma is linked to HIV/AIDS, but at the time, those doctors didn't know what was causing the rare form cancer.

CDC researchers, suspecting that whatever was causing this disease was sexually transmitted, started asking patients to name their partners. And, through this work, the researchers started to build out a map of cases.

That's where a man named Gaetan Dugas comes in.

Photo from Anonymous/Assoicated Press.

Dugas was a Canadian flight attendant, and he was named by several of the patients as one of their sexual partners. Soon enough, the scientists started talking to him. It turned out he was sick too.

Dugas' case started the phrase "patient zero," which you may have heard of. But the term — and its tie to Dugas — was more or less an accident.

Dugas did end up near the center of their map, which some people took to mean that he was the original source of this new and rare infection in the United States. But the scientists didn't mean to imply that.

A re-creation of the 1984 "map" of infections. Dugas' spot is highlighted in red. Image from Niamh O'C/Wikimedia Commons.

Even the term, "patient zero" was an accident. Dugas was originally anonymized as Patient O, for "out(side)-of-California." It was only later, in a misunderstanding, that Dugas became "patient zero."

Dugas was originally anonymous, but once the media learned who he was, they turned him into the great HIV/AIDs villain.

Dugas' name first appeared in the book "And the Band Played On," by Randy Shilts. And the media, once they got wind of who he was, painted Dugas as some sort of purposefully malicious villain — the man who "brought" HIV/AIDS to the U.S.

"Gaetan Dugas is one of the most demonised patients in history, and one of a long line of individuals and groups vilified in the belief that they somehow fueled epidemics with malicious intent," said Cambridge's Richard McKay in a statement.

But not everyone believed this was true, so scientists investigated. And they may have just cleared his name.

There have been previous suggestions that Dugas did not deserve the dubious moniker of "patient zero," but now a team, including McKay and led by Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona, may have definitive evidence that Dugas was not the original carrier of HIV.

To do this, the scientists got a hold of old blood samples containing the virus from Dugas and eight other patients. They then used sophisticated genetic techniques to sequence each HIV infection's genome, effectively building a kind of family tree of the virus.

If Dugas was really the first infectee (or what scientists more properly call the "index case"), his sample should have been at the root of the tree. But that wasn't the case. Instead, their research suggests that the disease actually entered the United States from the Caribbean sometime in the 1970s. It turned out he was simply another patient with a really tough disease.

This study will help us better understand how HIV/AIDS entered the United States. But it also shows why the idea of a patient zero can be so problematic.

We often want someone to blame when big things go wrong — a scapegoat makes things a lot easier. The idea of a patient zero provides an all-too-easy target.

"Blaming 'others' — whether the foreign, the poor, or the wicked — has often served to establish a notional safe distance between the majority and groups or individuals identified as threats," said McKay. And Dugas, an unashamed gay foreigner in the 1980s, was, to many in America, one of the "others."

Though we have a much better grasp on HIV/AIDS today than we did in the 1980s, we continue to see this vilification with other diseases.

Take the stigma the family of Emile Ouamouno, the 2-year-old patient zero of the 2014 West African Ebola epidemic, has had to live through.

An aid workers sets up beds in Liberia in 2014. Photo by Photo by John Moore/Getty Images.

Scientifically, this vilification can be problematic as well. Identifying the origin of a disease is an important step in understanding how it spreads, but solely focusing on that can obscure other, larger contributing factors that contribute to how a disease spreads, such as unequal access to health care, said McKay in The Guardian.

In the end, the idea of a patient zero can also eclipse the human cost.

Rather, we can get so wrapped up in our obsession with blaming a patient zero, that we can lose sight of the very human cost of the disease itself, which often plays out right in front of us.

"It is important to remember that, in the 1970s, as now, the epidemic was driven by individuals going about their lives unaware they were contracting, and sometimes transmitting, a deadly infection," said McKay.

The early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic were a terrible, dark time for everyone who lived through them, and reducing that story to blaming just one man is a grave mistake. McKay said they hope this research will give people pause before using the phrase again.

Dugas died in 1984 of AIDS-related complications.

Family

What habitual liars should know about their brains.

They say each lie is easier than the last.

Let's try it out.

I had a bagel for breakfast this morning. I am completely happy with my diet. My loan and rent payments are — deep breath — entirely reasonable. I am totally fine with ... how this political season ... has ... gajsdfasdjfklsadf.

Photo from iStock.

Damn it. I can't do it.

But there is a well-known idea that little white lies can eventually snowball into giant ones. (For reference, consider any romantic comedy movie, ever.)

So scientists from University College London decided to see if lies really spin out of control like we think they do.

To test this, they made people play a lying game, and scientists watched their brains.

The game was pretty simple: The player's task was to look at a jar of pennies and try to tell a friend how many pennies there were. They'd each get a prize based on their guesses. Sometimes the prizes would be better if they cooperated, but sometimes the player would get better prizes if they lied to their friend.

While this was all happening, the scientists used a type of brain scan called an fMRI to watch the activity in the person's brain.

If the player lied, a region of their brain called the amygdala would light up on the scans.

The amygdala is kind of like an emotional control booth in our brains. It lights up whenever something makes us feel an intense emotion, such as learning your child bought an alligator.

Photo by iStock.

The scientists saw that same emotional center light up when a person told a lie.

But the amygdala didn't always stay lit up and that's the interesting part of this story.

Each time a person told a self-serving lie, their amygdala reacted a little less. And larger drops in activity predicted an increase in the size of the person's lies.

So if the amygdala controls emotion, and we see less activity after repeated lying, that means...

Repeated lies might blunt the brain's emotional response.

At least, that's what the scientists are speculating. (They're a little cautious about making a big statement just yet.) They think that the first time we lie, our amygdala produces a strong emotional response, such as shame or guilt. The more you lie, however, the less the amygdala protests. Basically, the more you lie, the easier it is for you to keep lying.

However, the scientists didn't see the same pattern when the lie actually benefited the player's friend — just when it screwed them over.

So those little white lies we tell to protect our friends? Those stay with us. But the lies we tell to serve ourselves? Those can get so easy, we don't even feel them.

Scientists think this could also teach us new things about decision-making in general too, but they need to do a bit more research on that line of thinking.

"We only tested dishonesty in this experiment, but the same principle may also apply to escalations in other actions such as risk taking or violent behavior," study author Neil Garrett said in a statement.

Let's try this lying thing again...

I did not eat pizza last night. I am definitely not currently bingeing my way through Luke Cage. The traffic in my city is — eye twitch — fine. Just fine. And I am definitely not freaking out about climate change. Nope. Not at all.

I did it! Take that, amygdala.

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