What Are You Doing Right Now? Get To Sleep!
Everyone has adjusted their watches, clocks, phones and laptops an hour earlier on November 6th. It may be that we all got “25” hours on the day, 
but let’s face it and allow me to ask, what have we done with the extra hour? With all the assignments and projects from different courses, social events with friends, schedules working times, most of us probably were not in our bed, sleeping.
Sleep-deprived individuals are usually associated with 10 out of 11 health risk behaviours, including smoking, drinking alcohol, lower physical activities, sexually active, feeling sad or helpless, suicidal thoughts, etc. Dr. Lisa Shives mentions “Chronic, partial sleep deprivation affects our ability to think straight, make good decisions, and impacts our behavior”, and that is the reason why we were always told to get a good night’s sleep before a test or exam.
In fact, researches had proved that lack of sufficient sleep means we are prone to increase our risk of high blood pressure, explained Dr. Susan Redline, Professor of Sleep Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard Medical School in Boston. When we have inadequate amount of sleep, especially with the lack of deep sleep, we tend to be tired during the day and wake up frequently during our sleep. Not getting enough sleep, i.e. at least six to eight hours of sleep every day, could also reduce our efforts in losing weight, even if we are on a diet and exercising regularly and properly.
Now, we might just assume that if we sleep-in on a weekend, we would make everything up during the week. However, Banks et. al. (2010) proves to be not enough to recover the effects of sleep loss. Just because we sleep 12 hours on a Saturday, it does not make up for the sleep debt accumulated during the weekdays.
So the next time you plan to stay up for whatever reason, have a second thought about it, because what is lost is lost, and there is no way to recover that.
For those of your who wish to improve your quality of sleep, please refer to this blog post by Dr. Lisa Shives. (http://nssleep.com/blog/sleep-disorders/insufficient-sleep-makes-losing-and-keeping-weight-off-more-difficult/)
References:
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/09/27/sleep-deprived-teens-take-more-risks/
http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/29/study-lack-of-deep-sleep-raises-blood-pressure/
http://www.aasmnet.org/articles.aspx?id=2332
http://www.aasmnet.org/articles.aspx?id=1817
http://www.journalsleep.org/ViewAbstract.aspx?pid=27855
November 8th, 2011 at 9:48 am
I’m going to bed on time from now on. I always gave up sleep for other tasks thinking I could make it up on the weekends. Guess I was wrong!
November 9th, 2011 at 1:24 pm
I feel like I sleep way too much. I often feel jealous of other students who can function on 6/7 hours of sleep. Personally, I feel like a dead person if I get less than 9 hours. But hey, at least I am reducing health risks!
November 9th, 2011 at 5:05 pm
I actually thought that by sleeping in on weekends, it would make up my lack of sleep during the weekdays. Now I’ve learned that it is not true at all. I also heard that sleep deprive can lead to a very serious illness where your body just become numb or something along that line. Sleeping is probably one of the most important things besides getting good grades.