Sleep Should Have A High Priority In Your Life

It can make you hallucinate. It can reduce your ability to devise logical and creative solutions to problems. It can lower verbal and mathematical test scores. It can be a contributing factor in depression, psychosis, and obesity. In laboratory settings, it even kills rats.

Question: What is it?

Answer: Sleep deprivation.

How much sleep do we need?

Our need for sleep varies throughout our lives:

Infants need roughly 16 hours of sleep a day. Most parents with infants will argue that no infant will ever sleep that much and add that infants will never sleep when the parents want to sleep. Although it may feel like that to the parent who is awake for a 3am feeding, infants do usually sleep for 16 hours in a 24 hours period.
Teenagers need about 9 hours of sleep to function at their full potential. Given the busy lives of an American teenager, this rarely happens. It also explains why a teen son or daughter might sleep in really late on days they don’t have school. Their bodies are trying to recoup lost sleep.
Adults need 5 to 10 hours of sleep each night. The typical adult needs 7 to 8 hours of sleep.
The Elderly need less sleep than middle-aged people…this is considered “common knowledge”. But in truth, the studies that have researched this have come up with conflicting information. Some studies support that claim and say that the elderly need 2-3 hours less sleep than they did in their 30s or 40s. Other say the elderly need the same 7 to 8 hours of sleep as anyone else. Sleep disorders are unfortunately common amongst the elderly and most people should strive for quality sleep over quantity of sleep in order to get the greatest health benefits.

Sleep is good for your mind & body

How many people are getting their recommended amount of sleep? The answer is: not nearly enough of us.

Approximately 35% of Americans are “dangerously” sleep deprived. According to Gallup Poll surveys 56% of the population shows some signs of sleep deprivation. Sanford conducted a survey of their undergrads, medical students, and nursing students and learned that as many as 80% showed signs of sleep deprivation.

As a country, we’re doing pretty darn well for a bunch of people who keep missing a date with Mr. Sandman. So how bad is sleep deprivation? What can is actually do to us or than just make us sleepy?

Our bodies need sleep to regenerate, rest, and recover from the previous day. Muscles will regenerate and recover while awake, but still resting. Neurons do not have that same ability. As a result our mental acuity and memory processes suffer when we lack sleep. MRI scans indicates that a sleep deprived brain is more primal in its reactions. This can cause overreactions and emotional outbursts. Sleep deprivation is also considered a causal factor in depression and other mental illnesses including psychotic breaks.

People who are sleep deprived have worse coordination than those are intoxicated. Driving while sleep deprived is responsible for 100,000 car accidents, 71,000 injuries (vehicle related), and 1,550 fatalities (also vehicle related) annually.

All right, so fine, you can’t touch the tip of your nose while leaning your head back and reciting the alphabet backwards while sleep deprived. So what? That’s not worth stopping short of “one more level” in your favorite online game.

Is there some reason why you can't sleep?

Sleep deprivation can make you fat. Now the Americans are paying attention. As a society we’ll shrug off something that might cause a nervous breakdown or kill us, but anything that might mess with our waistlines gets our attention. There are two “tummy related” hormones that are influenced by sleep. Leptin suppresses appetite and ghrelin which increases appetite. Sleep deprived people have lower levels of leptin and higher levels of ghrelin. They also tend to crave high carb foods.

Sleep deprivation has been in the news recently not due to the health risks, but due to security matters.

Sleep deprivation as a means of interrogation is not an urban legend. According to a 2005 memo from the Bush administration as well as a recently declassified report from the Senate Armed Services Committee, the US government uses sleep deprivation during “enhanced interrogation”. It is viewed as one of the more effective means of acquiring information and is often used in conjunction with other tactics. The maximum amount of time a detainee can be kept awake is 180 hours.

In a 1983 study involving rats and sleep deprivation, rats began dying after being deprived of sleep for two weeks.

What have we learned by our short but detailed look at the effects of sleep loss?

Sleep is important – very important.

So, before you set your next alarm, make sure to give getting a good night’s sleep a high priority in your life!

Stop reading online blogs like this one and go to bed at a reasonable hour.