How Sleeping Lives Affect Waking Lives - Essay Example

Three Surprises from the Sleep Article One of the surprises that I got from this article is about the existence ofa sleep debt which is accrued when people ignore getting adequate sleep. The article recommends that people should have a straight eight hour sleep but many persons in this country hardly catch half that amount of sleep. Interestingly, this sleep debt is responsible for the occasional drowsiness that people get when driving, in class or attending to activities that require high levels of concentration. Many of us usually blame meals or being in a cozy environment for lapsed concentrations whereas in real sense, our biological systems are trying to pay the accumulated sleep debt. Secondly, I also learnt that there are sleeping disorders which many of us the ordinary citizens do not know about and yet we are afflicted by them. Symptoms of sleeping disorders are usually easily and casually dismissed as normal adjustments of the body to lack of sleep. Depending on the magnitude and severity of a sleep debt, various sleeping disorders exist which afflict individuals. These disorders are just like other illnesses which require treatment and failure of seeking therapeutic intervention can be catastrophic. Although it does not require a lot of expertise to diagnose less severe sleeping disorders, some may involve the intervention of a physician who uses a sleep test (polysomnography) procedure to diagnose. Besides these two surprises, I also learnt that there is a high prevalence of sleeping disorders in the American society. Currently, it is estimated that obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) which is the commonest of all sleeping disorders affects over 30 million people in US. This high prevalence rate of OSA and other sleeping disorders is a reflection of how sleepy the nation is when it is supposed to be awake and alert. It has been reported through study that 56% of the US adult population suffer from daytime drowsiness while 34% of the population that confesses as having no drowsiness problem has high sleep problems. From these poll results, it can be inferred that the US adult population is highly sleepy and performs its daily tasks on a stupor which may be catastrophic. All these three facts are quite astounding and a wakeup call for everybody because sleep is something that is taken for granted by everyone. Many of us usually think that we can always get away with failing to sleep and hoping that somehow the sleep will go away on its own. Lack of sleep according to this article sets in motion a cascade of activities which may end up in a disaster. Inadequate sleep leads to a sleep debt which may accumulate to exceptionally high levels before the body starts to sag under its weight. When the body can no longer handle the sleep debt, it sends out signals for help and this help is only availed through sleeping. However, if the body is forcefully conditioned to sleep for fewer hours, it leads to the development of a sleeping disorder in an individual. The tragic part of these unfortunate events is that many people do not know about the existence of sleeping disorders let alone knowing that they suffer from them. Sleep Journal Day Time of Trying to sleep Estimate of Sleeping Time Waking up Time Amount of Slept time Sleep Debt in the Day (Hrs) Friday 2330 2345 0600hrs 6hrs 15 min 1hr 45 min Saturday 2250hrs 2300hrs 0600hrs 7hrs 1 hr Sunday 2230hrs 2300hrs 0500hrs 6hrs 2 hrs Monday 2300hrs 2330hrs 0500hrs 5hrs 30min 2hr 30min Tuesday 2245hrs 2300hrs 0530hrs 6hrs 30min 1hr 30min Spoon Test Day Time of Eyes Closing Time falling Spoon hit Plate Sleep Onset Time Info About if Felt Asleep or Not Monday (Night) 2000hrs 2015hrs 15 min Felt Wed (Mid morning) 1130hrs N/A > 20min Never Felt Wed (Evening) 1830hrs 1840hrs 10 min Felt Thursday (Night) 2035hrs 2043hrs 8 min Felt Friday (Night) 1945hrs 2000hrs 15 min Felt From my sleeping journal, it is quite clear I usually have a sleep deficit everyday which is not very healthy. Weekends are the days that I have the least sleep debt which can ostensibly be explained by the need to relax. During week days, most of my time is consumed by aggressive studying after classes which starts early in the morning and goes late into the night. The sleep debt accrued in the course of a week is supported by the spoon test which is a form of sleep onset latency test (SLT). In this test, the tests administered in the evenings when the body is fatigued have a fast sleep onset time. On the other hand, the test done in the morning has no sleep onset time because the body is fresh from sleep and has been conditioned to be vigilant. All these correlate well with sleep debt concept whereby when given a chance, the body will automatically try to shut off and enter into a trance. Shutting off is a concerted effort by the body to pay the sleep debt and revert to a normal eight hour sleeping schedule. One of the specific behavioral changes that I have to institute into my life so that I can change my sleeping pattern is to study and grasp what the lecturer is teaching in class. Most of the time I attend lectures for the sake of getting notes and I am not very attentive on the class proceedings. In order to reduce the many hours I always put up trying to understand my notes, I have to be very attentive in class. Moreover, it is often said that many hands make work easier therefore; I have to find a discussion group whereby I will be able to learn from my fellow classmates through discussions. I have since learnt that many of my fellow students that do not suffer from sleep debts or sleeping disorders are members of different discussion groups. Besides these, I have to make concerted efforts to change my weekend schedule time to relax and refresh myself. In this regards, weekends have to be for outdoor activities with friends after which I have to engage in a healthy eight hour sleep. In the course of my studies, I have discovered that I have developed a high consumption of beverages such as coffee and tea in an effort to suppress my sleep. Over consumption of caffeine is not healthy to my body and therefore I have to stop it since I am adapting a healthy sleeping pattern. Works Cited Dement William. What All Undergraduates Should Know About How Their Sleeping Lives Affect Their Waking Lives. Stanford University, Sept. 1997. Web. 10th Nov. 2012 http://www.stanford.edu/~dement/sleepless.html Read More