- Nutrition and Health: Why knowledge is not enough
- Why we struggle with food, and how we can change our eating behavior
- 7 benefits of exercise I can believe in
- Exercise: It doesn’t have to be Olympian
- What is stress, anyway? And how do you deal with it?
- What stress does to your body and brain
- The consequences of inadequate sleep
- 7 tips for a better night’s sleep
- Alcohol: the negatives
- Dealing with recovery effects from smoking
- Getting on with other people
- A Transforming Practice
Despite many years of research, nobody is sure yet why we sleep. The smart money is on it being at least partly to do with the needs of maintaining a complex brain. Insects don’t appear to sleep at all, some fish and amphibians reduce their awareness without ever actually becoming unconscious, reptiles sleep but don’t dream, birds dream a little and mammals dream a lot.
Whether it’s to keep us safe by making sure we don’t wander around when we can’t see properly, or to give us downtime to organize our memories or maintain our bodies, or just to reduce our energy consumption, nobody knows. A complex behavior like sleep probably fulfills a whole list of purposes. We do know some things that happen when we don’t sleep, though, and when we don’t sleep well over a long period some of these negative effects begin to creep in just as if we hadn’t slept at all for a night or two.
We become irritable and have trouble concentrating when we miss sleep. We make more mistakes. Long periods of sleep deprivation lead eventually beyond forgetfulness and mood swings to hallucinations, paranoia and (animal studies have shown) eventually death.
But even a little sleep deprivation affects us quite strongly. According to the Australian National Sleep Research Project (which unfortunately cites no sources), seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood-alcohol level of 0.05%. For comparison, the legal limit in most jurisdictions varies between 0.02% and 0.08%.
The same website claims that after five nights of partial sleep deprivation, the effect of actual alcohol doubles, and that 18- to 24-year-olds suffer more impaired performance from sleep deprivation than older adults. If you think of those three things together, and then think about the number of young people who habitually stay up late during the week and then go out drinking on the weekend, accident statistics come into sharp focus. The more so since subjective awareness of being tired reduces after a few days, and alcohol impairs judgment.
Other groups drastically affected by sleep deprivation are shift workers and the parents of young children. But most of us are at least a little sleep-deprived. Rather than following the changes in day length linked to the seasons, we use electric lights to extend our days, and our average sleep time is less than that of our recent ancestors. Missing sleep not only reduces our ability to concentrate, pay attention, make decisions and generate new ideas (which in a complex modern life can be critically important), it also reduces our immune function, and can contribute to depression, heart disease, weight gain, high blood pressure, insulin resistance (as in diabetes) and accelerated aging, according to sleepdeprivation.com.
Ironically enough, I wasn’t able to finish this post yesterday because I hadn’t slept well. Creative thinking and concentration are among the first casualties of poor sleep, though they certainly aren’t the last.
In my next post, I’ll offer some tips and advice for getting better sleep.
Technorati Tags: sleep, sleep deprivation, alcohol
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