Burning the Midnight OilDo you know how much of the year 2001 you spent asleep? If you got the right amount of sleep, then you spent a total of about 137 days in dreamland. It's likely that you got much less sleep than that, though: instead of the nine hours a night that adolescents need, you probably got an average of seven. So over the course of 2001, you lost about 30 valuable days of sleep.
It isn't surprising that sometimes you get less sleep than you should. Students are pressed for time, having to balance after-school activities, such as sports or clubs or even jobs, with homework and family obligations. But what if you found out that cutting corners on sleep was making you age faster than normal or risk doing badly on your PSAT or SAT?
Are you burning the candle at both ends? Are your friends burning the midnight oil or pulling all-nighters to finish papers for school? The modern American notion that we need to cram more and more into each day and that "sleep is for wimps" is leading to an epidemic of grumpy, yawning, accident-prone citizens. People are suffering from sleep debt — and it's serious.
Lack of sleep is proving to have enormous consequences for our society. Estimates place the economic cost of sleep deprivation at between $100 billion and $150 billion annually in terms of illness, accidents and loss of life, and overall loss of productivity on the job. For example, drivers who fall asleep at the wheel cause 200,000 traffic accidents and 1,500 deaths in the U.S. each year.
What happens when a person doesn't get enough sleep? Sleep deprivation can:
- affect the body's natural immune system and make it more likely for a person to get sick cause memory problems
- cause irritability
- cause an inability to concentrate
- bring on symptoms resembling early-stage diabetes and premature aging
Hitting the Snooze ButtonThe adolescent brain has surprised sleep researchers. Contrary to what was expected, many teenagers prefer to be up later at night and then sleep later in the morning. This behavior is not so much a choice as something dictated by their biological clocks. Think about your own daily schedule. You may be trying to force your body to sleep on a schedule that it doesn't want to follow!
Some communities are looking at sleep research data and changing the hours teenagers attend school. Studies show that the ideal time for high school to start in terms of a typical student's ability to be awake and at his or her sharpest is around 10:00 a.m. In communities where kids travel to school on buses, the complications of buses needing to run multiple routes for different schools often pushes the starting time for high school classes to around 7:30 a.m. High schools in Minnesota that have experimented with starting classes at 8:30 a.m. — just one hour later — have reported that student grades are up and discipline problems are down. Montgomery County, Maryland, decided in 1998 to give high school students a choice between 7:25 and 9:15 a.m. start times, and other school systems across the country are looking into similar systems. What might be the drawbacks of later start times? If you could start your school day at any time, when would that be?
- Students at the Patrick Henry High School in San Diego participated with researchers from the University of California San Diego in a sleep study of typical teenagers' grade point averages (GPA) versus sleep habits. Do the results sound plausible to you?
Not getting enough sleep for more than a day or two can lead to what's called "sleep debt." Sleep debt is defined as the difference between the hours of sleep people need and the hours they actually get. Many people think that because they can "get by" the next day with as little as five hours of sleep, then that must be enough. But five hours may only be enough rest for their bodies. Their brains may need a lot more sleep.
Research is only beginning to explain why the brain needs so much sleep. Measurements of sleeping subjects show that the brain is very active during sleep, re-energizing itself while the body rests. The brain also appears to take information stored that day in short-term memory and moves it into long-term memory.
It's not just the quantity but the quality of sleep that can determine whether you have a sleep debt. The best sleep for restoring and refreshing the human brain is rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the part of the sleep cycle when dreaming takes place. Research shows that most people get a whole hour of quality REM sleep between the seventh and eighth hour of sleep. However, if you only sleep six hours, you are missing that last hour of REM sleep completely. Now, you "owe" your brain some quality sleep.
Studies suggest that brain activity either decreases or becomes less efficient with lack of sleep, leading to an impaired ability to perform everyday tasks. Research subjects show less ability to memorize and recall words or complete simple math problems after 35 hours without sleep. When it comes to verbal tasks, the brain tries to compensate by shifting the processing from one part of the brain to several different parts. It doesn't work all that well. No such compensation activity is observed in a tired brain trying to do math problems.
- Are you suffering from sleep deprivation? Take a short Sleep Test at CNN.com and find out.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Repaying a sleep debt isn't as simple as sleeping a little later on the weekend. The more days you run up a debt, the more hours of extra sleep you will need to "pay down" your sleep debt. If you don't get enough sleep for one night, getting a couple of hours of extra sleep the next night might be enough to repay the sleep debt. However, two late nights may require five extra hours of sleep. And if you run up a long-term sleep debt, it may take more than a month of getting eight or more hours of sleep per night to restore your body.
What can you do about your own sleep deficit? First, you can do what many American adults seem incapable of doing: admit that you need more sleep than you are getting. Studies show that a typical teen gets about seven hours of sleep on a school night, but over nine hours of sleep on the weekends. Additional research shows that average teens need around nine to 10 hours of sleep every night. And, difficult as this may be to accept, teenagers actually need one or two hours more sleep per night than they did when they were nine or 10 years old. You can read an excellent discussion of this at the Teens and Sleep site from St. Mary Medical Center.
Take some time to discuss the following questions with your friends and classmates:
- How many hours of sleep per night do you think you need to function at your best?
- How many hours of sleep do you actually get per night?
- What changes to your schedule would you need to make to get enough sleep?
- What practical considerations might get in your way?
|
|
||
 |
|
Sweet Dreams Why do we have dreams? What do they mean? Find out in this Riverdeep archive article. |
|
|
|||
 |
|
Blood
Pressure and Circulation During deep sleep, our blood pressure, pulse, and body temperature drop. See what happens to blood pressure when the heart contracts, then relaxes. |
|
|
|||
 |
|
Ssshhh... Dijit's Sleeping How many hours does Dijit sleep per day? Find out and solve a problem on percents in this Destination Math workout. |
|
|
|||
 |
|
You Light up my Life For more on the human biological clock and how it is affected by seasonal exposure to light, see this Riverdeep archive article. |
|
 |
|||
