Daily Health Bulletin

Lots of us have the false sense that if we sleep in on the weekend, or during a vacation we can make up for chronic sleep loss.

But new research finds that regular sleep loss can’t be fixed so easily. And in our 24/7 world, where one in six Americans regularly get six or less hours of sleep each night, where shift work and overtime are increasingly popular, the results cannot be overlooked.

The National Institutes of Health suggests that adults get 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night in order to maintain good health.

If you’re not getting this regularly, you run an increased risk of health problems, impaired memory and even a weakened immune system.

Too little sleep also impacts your reaction times and is often to blame for all manner of accidents.

Researchers looked at the effects of both short and long term sleep loss using nine young, healthy volunteers, aged 21 to 34 years old, whose sleep habits the team disrupted over a three-week period.

The subjects stayed awake for 33-hour stretches with 10 hours of sleep in between – a quirky enough schedule that didn’t let the subjects internal clocks adapt.

The sleep depravation used here is about the same as someone who gets 5½ hours a night and can be compared to the typical on call schedule of a resident physician.

Both cognitive and motor skills tests every few hours during the wakeful period were used to measure the subjects’ ability to stay alert as compared to a control group of volunteers who were getting a normal amount (8 hours) of sleep per night.

The sleep-deprived subjects didn’t do so badly during the first few hours after waking, especially during that first week. But their reaction times got worse and worse with each hour they were awake.

There was a big drop in performance between the first and second week of sleep depravation.

This effect persisted even if the subjects had tried to catch up on sleep the night before. And while a well rested person can catch up from the occasional late night pretty easily, the more sleep deprived you are, the more you lose that sense of rejuvenation that comes from a good night’s sleep.

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Sleeping In Is NOT The Answer Continued…

The team found that when the chronically sleep deprived subjects stayed up past bedtime again, their performance plummeted just as their circadian rhythms (the term for our internal body clock) reached a natural low point.

The drop was so impressive that Dr. Daniel A. Cohen (a neurologist at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) and the team were convinced these subjects were increasingly at risk to accidents or mistakes.

These findings are certainly important to anyone who works an alternate shift, or is constantly cheating themselves of sleep. Don’t think there aren’t consequences to the body of doing this.

“We know that staying awake 24 hours in a row impairs performance to a level comparable to a blood-alcohol content beyond the legal limit to drive,” said lead researcher Cohen, also associated with Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston. But when the already chronically sleep-deprived don’t sleep at all, “the deterioration is increased tenfold.”

What this tells us is you can’t “bank” sleep on the weekend. You need to practice good sleep habits, along with other smart lifestyle choices, to ensure your body gets the rest it needs to function at its best.

Future work in this area will try to uncover how quickly you might recover from chronic sleep loss once you change your sleeping habits.

Daily Health Bulletin
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