Have you ever wondered what are the long-term effects of sleep deprivation?
We're going to start with the short-term effects and then we'll wrap into that as well.
Everybody knows that sleep is important. Some people may not know is
that different stages of sleep do different things for us and sometimes we
can become sleep deprived even if we're sleeping because we're missing out on
some of those deeper stages of sleep. We've addressed that in some of the
other videos. The quick version is that our stage four sleep or the deepest stage
of sleep is restorative, it kind of reboots or cleanses the machine a little
bit so that we can function at a better level. If we miss out on that stage of
sleep, we tend to have an increase of anxiety and stress. Interestingly enough,
anxiety and stress tend to make us miss out on more of our sleep and we get into
this nasty cycle sometimes. What about other forms of sleep deprivation? You
already know from your own experience that if you don't get enough sleep and
if that continues over a period of time, you start to notice some effects.
Probably the most obvious are the short-term effects. So let's talk about
what some of those short-term effects are first. I'm thinking the most obvious
one and the one that we most often notice ourselves is it decrease in our
attentiveness and performance and our ability to stay engaged in what it is
that we're doing during the day because we get kind of drowsy. I've looked at
some of the reported numbers on this and losing even as much as an hour and a
half off of our regular sleep schedule can decrease our performance by up to
30%. Kind of along the same lines that
decrease in attentiveness and ability to focus can start to impact our memory and
our cognitive functioning so I guess the short version there is, we're not as
smart as we would be if we're getting all of
our good sleep. Have you ever noticed also that if you don't get enough sleep,
you're not as pleasant to be around? You can check with other people in your home
if you want and they'll probably tell you this but you've noticed this with
other people too, if they don't get enough sleep they might be more grumpy
so this starts to put a strain on relationships that can also result in
more conflicts or moodiness or arguments or disagreements, all of the fun things
that come when we're not quite on top of our own game. All of these things affect
our experience of our life. Sometimes we call this quality of life. Quality of
life is just my subjective sense of how good is my life, tends to go down if
we're losing out on our sleep and again, we're still talking about short-term
effects. What about this one, maybe an obvious one but it's actually tied to
sleep. Have you seen the signs out on the freeway that say, don't drive drunk?
No, they don't say that anymore, do they? Although that's kind of a duh. Don't
drive drowsy. Why? Because drowsy drivers cause accidents. I actually found this
statistic as I was preparing for the video. The National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration estimates conservatively it says, that each year
drowsy driving is responsible for at least a hundred thousand automobile
crashes, 71 thousand injuries and 1,500 fatalities. Drowsy driving, these are all
short-term effects of the lack of sleep. So what about the long-term effects?
Now this is where it gets really scary because it's going to impact our health
and our well-being in a much bigger way if it becomes long-term. Some of the ones
that have been listed include high blood pressure, heart problems like heart
attack or heart failure, stroke, obesity because really you're not giving your
body the chance to reset some of the things that
actually help you to metabolize the things that are coming into your body.
Psychiatric problems, we've seen problems with mood for example and memory
and attention. ADHD is something that is diagnosed very frequently in children.
How much of that might have to do a sleep disturbance? Maybe some is what we
ought to be thinking and we've already talked about some of the other things
like mental impairment, increased risk of accidents, things like that.
Sleep is pretty darn important, we need to pay attention to that I've even seen
some sources that are comparing it to alcohol problems as a health concern.
That's pretty high level stuff. So what can we do about it? I think there's a
couple of really basic things we can do to improve our sleep, the most basic
thing that I can suggest here is called sleep hygiene, it's kind of like dental
hygiene, you know, you brush your teeth, you take good care of your teeth and
then your teeth are going to be around to help take care of you. In the same way if
we take good care of our sleeping and we look at our sleeping habits and the
context around our sleep, we can improve our sleep efficiency and make sure that
we're getting enough sleep. So I in terms of sleep hygiene, the first thing that I
would encourage you to take a look at is your schedule, okay. Are you actually
getting to bed at a decent time? And some of the research suggests that your time
for waking up being a consistent time, that's also a thing that you can do to
improve your sleep patterns. So take a look at your schedule. Are you getting
enough? And most of the opinions out there are saying anywhere from 6 to 10
hours for 4 adults is about what we need to shoot for and that varies depending
on health concerns and other life factors. Adolescents incidentally tend to
need a little more sleep than adults do, they've still got a developing brain and
that sleep helps to support that brain development. So take a look at the
schedule, make sure that you're giving yourself the time you need to sleep.
Now look at the physical environment. Is it dark enough? If you've got a lot
light coming in, light will enter your eye even through a closed eyelid and it
will trigger in the retina, something that's called the retinal thalamic
response, it's tied into your thalamus, it's tied into your brain chemistry. Okay,
you want to have it dark, not just because it's easier to go to sleep
because that alters your chemistry a little bit so having a darkroom. There
are some suggestions that a few degrees cooler is helpful rather than warmer.
Quiet is important to good sleep hygiene. Now you might be used to, for example, I
had some clients who who said, "Well, I can't get to sleep unless the TV's on."
There's probably a lot of reasons for that, most of them are behavioral and
conditioned. If you can get yourself to sleep in a quiet dark room instead of
one where there's some ambient light or noise, you're probably going to get a
little better sleep and that sometimes takes a little practice in training but
quiet is important. Comfortable, do you see how some of these are just kind of
obvious, but you want to have a comfortable bed or mattress, a
comfortable pillow. If it's not comfortable, you're going to be kind of
wrestling with that thing all night long or tossing and turning and it can be
kind of disruptive to your sleep. A lot of these new fitness trackers will
actually track your sleep and you'll get some information you didn't even have
before so if you wear one of those to bed, you might get some baseline
information that will help you to know, how many times in my awake, how does
this match with the baselines and you can kind of do a little self assessment of
how good a sleep am I getting and if it's lower than it should be, if you're
not quite hitting the baselines, you might want to look at some
of these sleep hygiene issues and see what you can do to address that.
In addition to that, there's some some other basic things to keep in mind.
Alcohol tends to disrupt sleep patterns. The more you can limit your alcohol intake, the
better sleep you're going to have which is counterintuitive to some people because
they'll use alcohol to help them get to sleep. Well that may be true but
it may also be disrupting some of your levels of sleep that you need to really
reboot and refresh your mind so staying away from alcohol.
The research shows that caffeine tends to disrupt some of those sleep patterns.
Caffeine has a half-life of five to six hours, meaning if you ingest the caffeine, five
to six hours later, you're still getting about have about half of that potency in
your system. The recommendation coming from some of the research is that you
limit your caffeine intake to less than 200 milligrams before noon, assuming that
you're on a regular sleep pattern and then the last one that has been coming
up in the research more lately is blue light. You can go do some self research
on this. The blue light that comes from the screens that we watch like the
television for example or the tablet or the smartphone, tends to be higher in the
blue wavelengths and that wavelength or that area in the spectrum tends to
activate our brain more than allow it to calm down so limiting our screen time
especially before bad is an important thing in limiting the amount of blue
light that might be creeping into the bedroom. Those are some simple things
that you can do in terms of sleep hygiene and maybe we can get ahead of
some of these effects both short-term and long-term of sleep deprivation.
So now we know how important sleep is. You're going to want to go get a little bit
of sleep but first you might want to watch that next video, it's awesome.