Sleep..who needs it?...

Sleep, who needs it?

Apparently we all need it. And lack of sleep can be detrimental to your health. We all know this, right? Well, I thought I did, but I never realized how impactful not getting enough sleep could be...until tonight, when I was rudely awoken out of my slumber. Deciding to take advantage of the 4 extra hours I now have in this day, I went and researched how sleep deprivation effects your body and I found out that it is pretty severe.

In a study done in 2014, 147 participants showed a significant brain reduction in those that were sleep deprived versus those who weren't. The most significant results found in those over 60. Yep, SD (sleep deprivation) could shrink your brain ...

Lack of sleep or poor sleeping patterns has been linked to Alzheimer's or dementia. Researchers believe that sleep and memory performance are connected and the lack of sleep slows down cognitive abilities and reduces memory functions. (which may be noticeable in this post).

Another study done in 2014 proposes that SD may lead to irreversible physical damage and cause you to lose brain cells:

Using a mouse model of chronic sleep loss, Sigrid Veasey, MD , associate professor of Medicine and a member of the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the Perelman School of Medicine and collaborators from Peking University, have determined that extended wakefulness is linked to injury to, and loss of, neurons that are essential for alertness and optimal cognition, the locus coeruleus (LC) neurons.
"In general, we’ve always assumed full recovery of cognition following short- and long-term sleep loss," Veasey says. "But some of the research in humans has shown that attention span and several other aspects of cognition may not normalize even with three days of recovery sleep, raising the question of lasting injury in the brain. We wanted to figure out exactly whether chronic sleep loss injures neurons, whether the injury is reversible, and which neurons are involved." ...

Poor sleep patterns also effect the immune system, cardiovascular health, diabetes, weight, and increase the risk of cancer.

What happens when we don't sleep? That is the original question I typed into Google. The process actually has been documented up to 11 days so far. The results are not extra ordinary, it is what anyone who has missed a few days of Zzzs has experienced. All the symptoms listed below increase in intensity as new ones occur:

• After missing one night of sleep, expect fatigue, reduced attention span and problems with short-term memory.
• After missing 2 to 3 nights, one will also suffer poor coordination, muscle twitches, marked loss of concentration, impaired judgment, blurred vision, nausea, and slurring of speech. Often one will experience episodes of microsleep (briefly sleeping for a few seconds at a time, without being aware of it).
• At about 4 to 5 days without sleep, expect extreme irritability, hallucinations, and delusional episodes.
• After about 6 to 8 missed nights, add slowed speech, tremors in limb extremities, memory lapse, confusion concerning one’s own identity, unusual behavior, and paranoia to the list.
• After 9 to 11 nights without sleep, fragmented thinking occurs (beginning sentences without completing them), and prolonged episodes of unresponsive “conscious stupor ...

As you can see, SD has some serious possible consequences. But it also can effect the way you age. Sd can cause you to age prematurely. A study done shows a correlation between poor sleeping habits and premature aging of the skin:

The recently completed study, commissioned by Estée Lauder, demonstrated that poor sleepers had increased signs of skin aging and slower recovery from a variety of environmental stressors, such as disruption of the skin barrier or ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Poor sleepers also had worse assessment of their own skin and facial appearance. ...

Sleep cycles have been linked to the biological aging process. An average teenager needs about 9-10 hours of sleep a night, a baby about 10-13,and an adult anywhere from 7-8 hours. The older you get, the less sleep you need. Some studies say that the aging population needs only 6 hours of sleep a night and that sleep is directly related (somehow) to the aging process:

Results show that one night of partial sleep deprivation activates gene expression patterns in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) consistent with increasing accumulation of damage that initiates cell cycle arrest and increases susceptibility to senescence. These findings causally link sleep deprivation to the etiology of biological aging, and further supports the hypothesis that sleep deprivation may be associated with elevated disease risk because it promotes molecular processes involved in biological aging ...

So, there ya go, something to contemplate as you start your day after a good nights sleep (hopefully). Those are some pretty good reasons for you to get a good nights rest! As my day started at 1:00a.m. and it is now 5 in the morning, I doubt I will be able to remedy my own sleep cycle tonight. But now that I know how important sleep really is to the performance and functionality of my whole body, I'm gonna try my best to get the hours I need.

As always, thanks for reading! (and hope you all got a good nights sleep!)
Blend57

a reply to: blend57

Sleep, sleep, not enough sleep. We need it and don't understand it in spite of a third of our lives doing it. Up at 1am and awake at 5am will exhaust you.

A sleep study in America found life changing differences between two communities on either side of the time line.

So Gibson and Shrader looked at similar populations that lie at opposite ends of time zones — for instance, Huntsville, Alabama (on the eastern edge of the Central Time Zone), and Amarillo, Texas (on the western edge). Even though cities like this are on the same clock, the western city gets roughly an hour more of sunlight – which means that people there tend to go to bed later. But they have to wake up the same time as people in the eastern city – so, on average, they get less sleep. Gibson and Shrader could then look at the wage data in places like this to see how an extra dose of sleep affects earnings:

Economics of Sleep II by the Freakonomics podcast

In our household we have no tech in the bedroom apart from bedside lights. I travel a lot, swallowed my pride years ago, and wear an eye mask as well as noise-cancelling headphones. Sleep is like the greatest gift we can give ourselves.

But seriously, I am an absolute wreck when it comes to sleep. I just can't. I can be up for 2-3-4 days and get so exhausted and tired, but as soon as I lay down in the hopes of sleep, my brain just wont give up. or I sleep for 2 hours and am unable to get back to sleep. Often it is the rising sun around 6am where I actually do get sleep, but have to be up shortly after, so for a long while, energy drinks and coffee were my only hope.

If it shrinks your brain, then that explains why I'm as dumb as a wallnut in a peanut factory.

I actually think the amount of alcohol I drink has in fact offset the SD shrinkage and increased the size of my brain. and heart, liver, stomach, pancreas.. you know, those organs we can do without. There is one organ, however, that seems to have shrunk... never used it anyway, so it's of no consequence...

a reply to: blend57

Risk of depression as a complication of insomnia?

Sleep Deprivation is actually one of the treatments for depression, and very effective it is too.

It just goes to show how little we understand this sleep thingy.

Much more research is needed.

a reply to: CJCrawley

Research on sleep could be done, but if all someone needs to do to cure depression is sleep 4 hours. That would severely cut into a big part of pharma's pie.

I am all for researching, but I don't count.

... i sopose i shouldent be suprised
Sleep is ... well something i want more of and cant have

Yea after day 2 it gets crazzy i would not want to talk to me on day 2+ i am a mean ahole who makes no since ... i normaly black out anything after day 2 also

I guss i need to donate my brain when im done with it ... once i die i bet im short many years of sleep

a reply to: CJCrawley

100% correct. Pills took over where sleep dep was just coming on line as a therapy.

In the 1970s, a depressed insomniac discovered that getting much less sleep than he wanted surprisingly improved his mood the next day. Doctors who treated depression began using sleep deprivation as a form of therapy. But sleep deprivation's popularity was brief, and soon the evolution of highly effective antidepressant medications made it all but obsolete.

www.webmd.com...

I need my sleep. Simply can not function well without it. When in pharmacy school, I had a full time job and went to school every weekend for 3 solid years. There was not time for much sleep, or relaxation, or fun of any kind. There would be stretches of solid weeks where I only got 3 hours or less of sleep a night. I am convinced that this long cycle of disrupted sleep patterns and lack of rest lead to quite of few years of moderate to severe anxiety issues....but thankfully they have subsided, without having to use any of the typical meds.

Torturers know about sleep deprivation, it is one of their primary tools used in interrogations.

A subject is kept awake for five days straight before questioning even begins.

Alexander Soljenitzen(spelling?) wrote about it in "Gulag Archipelago".

Detainees were made to sit up in their bunks, if they even nodded they were poked with a ten foot pole thru bars in the door windows by watchful guards.

originally posted by: intrptr


Torturers know about sleep deprivation, it is one of their primary tools used in interrogations.

A subject is kept awake for five days straight before questioning even begins.

Alexander Soljenitzen(spelling?) wrote about it in "Gulag Archipelago".

Detainees were made to sit up in their bunks, if they even nodded they were poked with a ten foot pole thru bars in the door windows by watchful guards.

Alexander Soljenitzen(spelling?) wrote about it in "Gulag Archipelago".

Wow. Everyone I know has that book on their shelves, including myself, but I don't know anyone who has actually read it.

































tried to get all this space out. Can't. think of it as the pages of my mind this morning.

a reply to: angeldoll

Want to understand the police state machinations, Gestapo, KGB, CIA?

must read...

Are many of you having trouble sleeping right now?

For about four days, I haven't slept... or at most I will doze between 5 AM and 7 AM. Last night I put on headphones and did youtube binaural beats for sleeping, hypnosis...each time I seemed to get totally relaxed and "almost" asleep, but never completely.

I don't seem to be especially tired during the day though, either, which is wierd. I'm trying to up the exercise to tire myself out- doing running and weights in the morning, bike riding in the evening. But the most I seem to get is a twenty minute nap that I wake up invigorated from!

I'm thinking it is just the summer long days messing up my internal clock. I have the opposite happen in winter, where I drag myself around all day and need to sleep 9 hours a night.

But I do think, besides feeling physically awake, that my mind isn't feeling so sharp....

a reply to: blend57


Ummm...I was thinking the other day that the sleep cycle was a means to keep the wake mind tethered to what we perceive as "reality"...Or the reality we're led to perceive...

More so...a programming or re-stitching period designed to prevent the awake aspect from going off script...preventing the mind from realizing it's potential or that it need not be tethered to a perceptual version...or escaping the construct...


Of course...I go off script fairly frequently...just along for the ride wherever my thoughts are led...I must not be getting enough REM...

Maybe it would make a good story or script...Shades of Matrix and Inception...



YouSir

a reply to: blend57


Just the 4 hours you missed, you should feel today. In my 20s I would go out to the clubs in Chicago, stay out till 3am and then go home sleep for an hour and go to work. There were days after doing that I would be exhausted, but I did it quite a bit. Now I am 46 and if I even went out until 1 am, I would be tired the next day for sure. There is a Christmas party we go to in November, we stay there until 12am or so, and by the time we are home and in bed its well after 1:30am its on a weekend so the next day I always try and sleep till at least 7am and I am okay, if I did that every weekend after a couple of those nights I don't think I would fair so well.


My dad used to play cards till all hours of the AM with his poker buddies, and in Vegas we would go for like 10 days, he would be on a gambling high and not sleep but for an hour or so here and there. When we got on the plane to go home He was out, and when we got home he would sleep for like 12 hours.

a reply to: blend57

Gah. No wonder I woke up feeling far older than my years! My Son with autism has difficulty sleeping through the night, and I or both my husband and I would get up with him nearly every night for months at a time - getting a good night's sleep has been the exception for the past 15 years...

Getting better though...

a reply to: kurthall

I have had the same experience in Vegas. Was there on Labor Day weekend about 15 years ago and think I may have slept an hour in 3 days. Didnt feel it at all when there, but on the plane ride home, the stewardess had to basically pour a bottle of water on me to wake me from my slumber.

Tell that to our corporate overlords. They don't care about our depression or sleep deprivation.

originally posted by: CJCrawley
a reply to: blend57

Risk of depression as a complication of insomnia?

Sleep Deprivation is actually one of the treatments for depression, and very effective it is too.

It just goes to show how little we understand this sleep thingy.

Much more research is needed.

Maybe in a controlled environment, like shock therapy, but I can tell you, it does not help my depression at all. Jitters, that gnawing sickness, everything LOUD AND BRIGHT, just adds to any overwhelming desire to crawl away from the world again..

back in 2002 or so, driving was the worst. I'm amazed I didn't actually end up in, or be the cause, of accidents. but "Hey boss, yeah I'm tired, can't come in today..." wouldn't have worked :/

originally posted by: Bluesma
Are many of you having trouble sleeping right now?

For about four days, I haven't slept... or at most I will doze between 5 AM and 7 AM. Last night I put on headphones and did youtube binaural beats for sleeping, hypnosis...each time I seemed to get totally relaxed and "almost" asleep, but never completely.

I do that a lot. Binaural beats, or even guided meditation, if it's an hour at least. I get so comfortable and almost asleep, but as soon as it stops, bam, right back awake again.

That and my earbuds always make my stupid ear balls itchy.

it's 11:30 right now, I've been up since around 5am. I should be hitting the sack. but the thought of the empty loud darkness, and my mind screaming at me, makes me sit here watching youtube. checking fb. reloading ats.

Maybe one more wine or 10.... and I have to go out tomorrow and do shopping. in this damn winter cold snap. I think I'll just stay awake..

a reply to: blend57

Unfortunately, i do.. my days are very physically demanding and my body needs the proper rest to heal, or else I will wither down and shrink into a raison.

But if it was up to me, I would be a vampire and skip sleep all together.. imagine all that free time!!