My Research on Sleep Deprivation

about 1 year ago

Sleep is one activity that we are supposed to participate in, no matter our color, race, and believes. We are supposed to sleep of about one-third of our entire life but a lot of us, in the race to get a better life for ourselves, and some people having sleep disorder, a lot of people have become sleep deprived. I start to ask myself, what happens when a person is deprived of sleep?

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It is not news that in decades now, sleep hours have reduced by 1 to 2 hours and I think I can testify to it. While we have a recommendation of 7 to 8 hours night sleep time, a lot of us do not even have 5 hours sleep anymore. This reduction in seep hours can be as a result of insomnia, of work shift, like in my area where there are a lot of factories and those factories function all day and night, with people doing night shifts. Another reason for this sleep reduction is Night partying and night life. The Sleep Latency test is a good way to know if you are sleep deprived or not, and since I had not been having proper sleep, I decided to try my own sleep latency test. I took a metal cup, a tray and my stop watch. I lay down on the bed, started the stopwatch and held the cup up above the tray away from the bed. When I started to fall asleep, the cup fell off my hands and hit the tray, and when I looked at the time it was 6 minutes and 20 seconds and that was a true sign that I am sleep deprived. You can try it at home as well. Falling asleep within 10 to 20 minutes shows healthy sleeping, and less then 8 minutes means sleep deprived.

Genes can tell a lot about us, so can less sleep be genetically associated? There is no much known about gene and sleep but it is seen that gene ADRB1 can tell us how much sleep a person need, and genes could tell what are causing the sleep deprivation. One thing that has been associated with sleeping is Caffeine intake. Taking caffeine affects sleep just as much as alcohol does. I have a friend who doesn't sleep well whenever she takes alcohol. She usually have interrupted sleep, causing poor sleep quality.

While I was reading, I started to see links of poor sleeping to Diabetes type 2. Lack of sleep can make a person's tired and also affect hormones such as the stress hormone Cortisol, and it can lead to obesity and type 2 diabetes. Sleep deprivation can lead to an increase in glucose (blood-sugar) and when there is sleep deprivation people tend to eat more as it increase the appetite hormone.

A lot of us really have a lot of things taking over our sleeps starting with our technology, work pattern, and night life activities. A lot of people who do not have good sleep resort to sleeping pills, so then I ask myself if sleeping pills are good or bad. Sleeping pills can become addictive when they are being used, and resistance can be grown over time causing the use of more pills to have the same quality of sleep. So we can say that sleeping pills do not solve the sleeping problem at the long run but it can be used in the short run to get sleep.

Sleep is very important in to our health, and a lack of sleep can be very detrimental as I have shown in my writing based on my research. It is important to work with out normal body clock and sleep rhythm, so we do not have poor quality of sleep.