Sleep is as important to human health as food and water. Sleep requirements differ from one to another, depending on age, physical activity levels, general health status and other individual factors. In general, children and teenagers need about nine to ten hours of sleep per night, and adults need about eight hours. However, 40% of American (100 million people) adults may be putting themselves at risk for injury, health and behavior problems because they aren't meeting their minimum sleep need in order to be fully alert the next day. Lack of essential amount of sleep even in a period of time is termed sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is a result of life style, physical and metal disorder, and consequently affects people’s health and normal life.
Sleep deprivation is often a direct result of lifestyle choices. Drinking caffeine before bedtime will artificially create energy and keep people awake. Overuse of alcohol may lead to poor quality of sleep though certain amount of alcohol is helpful for sleeping. Staying up late to socialize or entertain such as chatting online or through phone, hanging in bars, watching television or reading good books may excite certain brain areas, and therefore causes sleep disorder including difficult being asleep and less deep sleep. In addition, working shifts in many professions easily disrupt normal sleep-wake cycles. For example, nurses have jobs and schedules that lead to sleep deprivation. This includes rotating shifts, being on call all night and then working regularly assigned shifts the next day, or working double shifts and having home responsibilities that prevent them from sleeping during precious free hours. International airline attendants or frequent travelers tend to have irregular sleeping patterns because their biological clock has to switch from one time zone to another. People on these occupations find it almost impossible to make up sleep loss during daylight hours. Parents always suffer inadequate sleep when their young children wake up at nights for feeding or comfort. Students sacrifice required sleep to prepare their exams or papers, which will negatively influence their health.
Physical discomfort plays critical roles in sleep deprivation. People with colds and stuffy nose are usually not able to breathe smoothly. As a result, heavy breathing, snoring and frequent waking directly fragment sleep. Headache and migraine are also reasons for the prevalence of sleep deprivation, especially among women, though not always vice versa. Sleep does not always relieve fatigue. Sometimes extreme exhaustion in association with sore arms and legs triggers sleep disorder.
There is a close relationship between minddisorder and sleep deprivation. Instead of relaxing mentally and physically, lying in bed worrying robs and disturbs sleep. The more stress and anxiety one experiences, the more one worries, the more depressed one becomes, the less likely he/she will sleep well. Sleep deprivation is also a result of other emotional states such as fear, grief and loneliness. Moreover, sleep may be disrupted for a range of environmental reasons along with related mood swing, for example, because the bedroom is too hot or cold, or because neighbors are too noisy.
Sleep deprivation is a serious disease and impairs human health in a huge range. The most common physical problems include aching muscles, blurred vision, dizziness, nausea, hand tremors, headache, weight loss or gain. Sleep deprivation weakens the immune system leaving people more vulnerable to other diseases and disorders such as common cold, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and even cancer. Sleep deprivation adversely affects brain function. For example, a study showed that the brain regions activated in rested subjects doing the arithmetic problems were not active in the sleep-deprived subjects. No other region of the brain became activated when subjects performed arithmetic when sleep-deprived. Subjects had fewer correct answers and omitted more responses when sleepy than when rested. Furthermore, sleep deprivation may be linked to more serious diseases, such as mental illnesses including psychosis, bipolar and even death. Psychologically, decreased mental activity, reduced alertness, impatience, irritability, memory loss, poor judgment, emotional highs and lows, and reduced work efficiency extensively occur to sleep-deprived individuals. Studies have shown that people who get too little sleep may have higher levels of stress hormone. Therefore, they are easy to be stressed out, anxious and depressed. Sleepy people are less focused and concentrated, and this could not only lead to physical injuries like falls but also become lost on an unfamiliar street. Over 100,000 traffic accidents each year are caused by fatigue and drowsiness, and related reduced alertness. Sleep loss in children and teenagers greatly affects mood, behavior, and academic performance. Poor sleepers are reported being more likely to have a negative self-image and inferior coping behaviors and they have more behavioral problems such as naughtiness, poor self-control and risk-taking behaviors at home and in school.Researchers suggest that one more hour of sleep helps kids learn and reduces negative feelings.
Sleep deprivation has become a problem in modern society where people always feel they have too little time for too much work. However, there is truly a two-way street between sleep deprivation and physical and mental health. To keep human body functions properly, sleeping is an effective way to restore energy rather than a waste of time.
melly 发表评论于
回复goodbaby98的评论:
Baby, this essay echoed one of your postings about how much time people should spend on sleeping.
January 17, 2008 · Almost everyone has heard a story about someone famous who doesn't need much sleep: Martha Stewart, Bill Clinton, Condoleezza Rice, Margaret Thatcher, the list goes on and on.
In our fast-paced, global society, many people consider it a big plus to need as little sleep as possible. But almost every sleep researcher will tell you that most people need at least seven hours of sleep for biological and psychological health. So there is a glaring disconnect between what the messages in our culture say about sleep and the messages we receive from scientists.
The Sleepless Badge of Honor
Think of the scene in the film Thank You for Smoking. Nick, a public relations guy for the smoking industry, is talking to a Hollywood mogul, who calls him up late at night to give him an update on a deal.
"Are you still at the office?" Nick asks.
"Do you know what time it is in Tokyo?" replies Jeff, the mogul, "4 p.m. tomorrow. It's the future!"
"When do you sleep?" Nick asks.
"Sunday," says Jeff, in a priceless moment.
The scene in the film encapsulates this myth that successful people don't need sleep and even provides a rationale: that our fast-paced society no longer lets us have such luxuries.
Dr. Eve Van Cauter, a sleep researcher and professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, says that many people today, especially in the United States, take pride in not getting much sleep.
"Sleeping as little as possible is viewed as a badge of honor here," Cauter says.
Short sleepers, people who can do with five hours of sleep a night, do exist. But most sleep researchers say they comprise only 10 percent or less of the population.
Dr. David Dinges, a sleep researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, questions whether they are "as prevalent as is claimed in society" and whether they are really so special.
Dinges also believes that many people who say they are short sleepers are getting more sleep than they are willing to admit. For example, they sleep on the way to the airport in the limo.
Dinges says people often don't count dozing off as sleep if they are not in their pajamas or in bed. He also notes that many people who fall asleep in meetings or consume large amounts of coffee consider that normal these days and not a sign of being sleep-deprived.
Van Cauter notes that every time she takes a morning flight, one-third of the plane is fast asleep within minutes of the plane taking off.
I live and report in New York City, and there is definitely a kind of pride or resignation here about lack of sleep. I started listening to people talking about sleep habits in the coffee shop where I get my morning coffee.
"Sleeping more than five hours feels like a waste of time. You could be reading or on eBay," Evangeline Morphos, a Columbia University professor, told me.
Attorney Carolyn Schrager's high-school-age daughter told her the one thing she wishes she could change about her life is to do away with the need for sleep.
Less Sleep Than Ever
Although it is hard to get real statistics about how much people slept in different periods of history, there are some pretty good indications that even five decades ago, people slept much longer on average.
Van Cauter notes that the National Cancer Society surveyed more than a million Americans in 1960 and found that people said they got an average of eight-and-a-half hours of sleep.
This was, of course, in a time period when television stations went off the air by midnight, and there were few late-night diversions, like online shopping.
Van Cauter says most surveys today put the average sleep time of Americans at six or seven hours.
"The data is limited, but they strongly suggest that over the past four or five decades, sleep duration has decreased by one and a half to two hours," she says.
Sleep Disconnect
And Van Cauter even wonders about all those famous people who supposedly don't need sleep. She notes that Bill Clinton, a notorious short sleeper, had heart surgery in his 50s, with no obvious risk factors.
Dinges says most people will show serious impairments if they are deprived of sleep for even a few days. The problem is most people assume they are fine when they are not.
"People will often say, 'I am good to go,'" he says. "It is that disconnect between your ability to introspect your alertness and impairment and how impaired you are cognitively, which is why we think many people believe they are doing fine when they not doing so fine."
Cliff Sloan, the publisher of Slate magazine, says he needs only five hours of sleep. He gets up early in the morning, and regards the early morning hours as a special time when the world is peaceful.
He notes that his wife is the complete opposite. She gets eight hours of sleep, would love 10, and "is someone who loves sleep and thinks it is absolutely insane that I am not indulging in one of life's greatest pleasures."
Sloan notes that both he and his wife are extremely productive. These are just differences of temperament and physiology, so it's ridiculous to claim that there is a link between success and lack of sleep, he says.
Sloan may be one of those unusual people who don't need so much sleep, although Dinges says, "I always say to these people, come to my lab and find out for real."
And Van Cauter makes a very unusual argument. She says that the amount of sleep you need also depends on what type of work you do. Celebrities, politicians, leaders of various kinds may actually need less sleep than others because the work they do involves constantly shifting their focus and attention. They might talk to a person about one thing, and then go on to another group, and then move to a new location.
"If, on the other hand, you have to get on the road and drive on a flat highway for four hours," sleep might well overwhelm the same person, she says.
Trendy Today, Dangerous Tomorrow?
Van Cauter believes we are in a period now very similar to where we were with smoking 20 years ago. She envisions a time 20 years from now, when knowledge, research and even litigation (perhaps lawsuits against sleep-deprived drivers who cause accidents) will combine to change public perception so that lack of sleep is finally seen as dangerous, not something to be proud of.
But Dinges says changing public perception may not be so easy since there is something built into our brains that makes us want to do more and more in less and less time.
"We are the ones that came up with artificial light and skyscrapers and going to the moon," he says, not the birds or crocodiles.
There is something very attractive to human beings about wanting to do with less sleep, no matter how much sleep restores us, helps our immune system or allows us to be more emotionally stable.
melly 发表评论于
If you have got used to 5-6 hours, it would be fine. One of my colleagues always teased me to sleep too much. Based on his point of view, sleeping 5 hours is more than enough. Eight hours sleeping is a waste of life. You are a perfect example for his theory since you have read a lot and learned a lot. I wish I were tough enough to be like you and wisely use my bed time.
Sleep tight.
melly 发表评论于
wish I would have the luxury of sleeping eight hours every nig
来源: RPV 于 08-01-21 16:08:47
回答: Sleep Deprivation 由 melly 于 2008-01-21 13:14:33
I usually take five or six hours sleep to energize myself for next day, even though I know it’s not very good for my health. It’s hard for me to go to bed before certain time and always wake up early morning. Life seems unfair for me to have enough sleep to stay younger, but it gives me more time to read more in bed. I have read countless books and learned a lot in my bed time.
Good sleep is a good way to keep us looking younger. It’s essential for good health, mental and emotional functioning and safety, especially for women to stay younger. Hope people in here always have quality night sleep, for your health, and for your family.
melly 发表评论于
Thank you Dr. melly. That's a very nice article about sleep (de
来源: YuGong 于 08-01-21 15:52:20 [
Sleep is indeed very important. We spend roughly one third of our life in sleeping!
melly 发表评论于
回复归来的评论:
haha, your dream life applies to everybody.similarly, your picture of current life mirrors everybody's too.
take it easy, you are doing fine as long as you have enough sleep.
归来 发表评论于
My dream life is that I go to bed with peace and open my eyes in the morning with natural, unforced mind.
So far, I go to bed with my mind are full of stock, projects, kids… and is waked up by alarm clock. :))
