Book Excerpt
THE POWER OF SLEEPGiven that you might need to spend at least a third of your life sleeping, you should know what's going on. As I mentioned in my introduction, sleep is not a vast wasteland of inactivity. The sleeping brain is highly active at various times during the night, performing numerous physiological, neurological, and biochemical housekeeping tasks. These are essential for everything from maintaining life itself to reorganizing and enhancing thinking and memory. This enables us to remember the past, organize the present, and anticipate the future. The process of sleep, if given adequate time and the proper environment, provides tremendous power. It restores, rejuvenates, and energizes the body and brain. The third of your life that you should spend sleeping has profound effects on the other two thirds of your life, in terms of alertness, energy, mood, body weight, perception, memory, thinking, reaction time, productivity, performance, communication skills, creativity, safety, and good health. If our sleep is limited, our health and daytime potential is significantly reduced, if not destroyed. With adequate sleep and its concomitant brain activity, the world is our oyster ... a pretty good deal for something that is enjoyable to do and doesn't take much, if any, effort! ASLEEP IN THE FAST LANE Before Thomas Edison's invention of the electric light in 1879, most people slept ten hours each night, a duration we've just recently discovered is ideal for optimal performance. When activity no longer was limited by the day's natural light, sleep habits changed. Over the next century we gradually reduced our total nightly sleep time by 20 percent, to eight hours per night. But that's not nearly the end of the story. Recent studies indicate that Americans now average seven hours per night, approximately two and a half hours less than ideal. Amazingly, and foolishly, one third of our population is sleeping less than six hours each night. Are we losing our minds? In just the last twenty years we have added 158 hours to our annual working and commuting time--the equivalent of a full month of working hours. According to Dr. William Dement, professor of medicine at Stanford University, working mothers with young children have added 241 hours to their work and commuting schedules since 1969. Those who also provide care for aging parents who may have age-related sleep problems might be doubly vulnerable to loss of sleep. We now live in a twenty-four-hour society, a "rat race" where sleep is not valued. With heavy demands of work, household chores, parenting and family responsibilities, and a desire for social life, exercise, and recreation, four out of every ten of us are cutting back on sleep to gain time for what seems more important or interesting. This can be an extremely costly and dangerous mistake. Stop sleeping altogether and you will die. Large periods of sleep deprivation, as often occur in brainwashing of war captives or cult members, "can cause even heroically patriotic citizens to denounce their own nations and ideals, to sign patently false declarations, and to join political movements that have been lifelong anathemas to them," notes J. Allan Hobson, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. People who by choice or because of work, illness, or force of circumstance go without sleep for five to ten days become irrational, paranoid, confused, and even hallucinatory. Few of us are subjected to such extreme sleep loss. But most of us, consciously or unconsciously, occasionally if not chronically, deprive ourselves or others of adequate sleep. Can we adapt to minimal sleep without feeling drowsy and experiencing a decline in mood and performance? On a day the White House planned to bask in good economic news, President Clinton instead exploded in anger at reporters' questions.... Within an hour of his comments, Clinton summoned the reporter ... Bill Plante of CBS News, to apologize for losing his temper. Clinton said he hadn't been sleeping much since the July 17 crash of TWA Flight 800. Let's look at some statistics: * High school and college students are among the most sleep-deprived people in our population. Thirty percent fall asleep in class at least once a week. On November 25, 1991, when President George Bush spoke at an Ohio high school, "At least a third of the high school students were clearly asleep in the overheated auditorium. . . ." If these students can't stay awake for the President, it's no wonder teachers can't keep them awake. * Thirty-one percent of all drivers have fallen asleep at the wheel at least once in their lifetime. The National Sleep Foundation reports that each year on our highways at least 100,000 accidents and 1,500 fatalities (the equivalent of four fully loaded Boeing 747 airplanes) are due to failing asleep at the wheel. This is a very conservative estimate, as most states do not keep adequate statistics. The actual annual figures might be as high as 200,000 accidents and 5,000 fatalities (the equivalent of twelve fully loaded 747s). In addition to the tragic loss of lives, these accidents cost American society more than $30 billion annually. In 1990 a high school student in New Hampshire who had been named America's Safest Teen Driver fell asleep at the wheel around 5 p.m., drifting over the yellow line into oncoming traffic. He killed himself and the nineteen-year-old female driver of another car. According to his father, "Safe driving was an obsession with him. The question of why he didn't recognize the fatigue and respond to it is something we will never know." * The transportation industry is being hit hard by the ravages of sleep deprivation on the highways, the rails, at sea, and in the air. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, "Fatigue is the No. 1 factor that detrimentally impacts the ability of pilots." In the PBS television documentary "Sleep Alert," a Boeing 747 captain noted: "It is not unusual for me to fall asleep in the cockpit, wake up twenty minutes later and find the other two crew members totally asleep." In another report, "A Boeing 757 captain told how his forehead hit the control column on his approach to New York's Kennedy airport as the need for sleep became overwhelming." * Even airline passengers are not exempt from the effects of sleep deprivation. Job demands are forcing business executives and government officials to operate well beyond the design specifications of the human brain and body. They undertake exhausting schedules, whisk across multiple time zones, and work long days. Often suffering from the debilitating effects of jet lag, these people's health and performance are put in jeopardy. Dr. Martin Moore-Ede, a professor of physiology at Harvard Medical School and an expert on circadian rhythms and sleep, described President Bush's grueling schedule of sixteen-hour days on the back side of the clock during a ten-day visit to Japan: It is 5:30 A.M. in Washington, D.C., but [Bush] has already put in a long day in Tokyo. Suddenly, under the unforgiving eye of the TV cameras, he vomits, collapses, and slides under the table at a banquet with the Japanese Prime Minister, Kiichi Miyazawa, where Bush is the guest of honor.... His biological clock was still set somewhere in mid-Pacific and had not yet joined him in Japan. He became just one more victim of the human drive to reach beyond our physiological capacities. * Twenty percent of all employees work at night, and suffer disproportionately from drowsiness, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular problems, infertility, depression, and accidents. Fifty-six percent of shift workers fall asleep on the job at least once a week. The Wall Street Journal reported that $70 billion is lost per year in productivity, accidents, and health costs as a result of workers' inability to adjust to late-night work schedules. For example, the near cataclysmic nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island all occurred in the early-morning hours, during one of two periods in the twenty-four-hour day when we are most fatigued. The disasters all started because "nightshift workers missed or were confused by warning signals on their control panels." * Medical residents and interns are among the most severely sleep-deprived individuals. Many work more than 130 hours per week in shifts of twelve to sixty hours' duration, and every other night they are on call. They may be responsible for the care of forty to sixty patients. Sometimes mistakes are made. Fatal mistakes. An eighteen-year-old woman died "after a night of inattentive care by fatigued and inexperienced residents in one of New York's major teaching hospitals.... A Manhattan grand jury concluded that the patient had received `woefully inadequate' care and had suffered repeated mistakes by first-year interns and second-year residents who had had little sleep." We are biologically ill-prepared to function on minimal sleep. Our prehistoric genetic blueprint for sleep has not evolved quickly enough to keep up with the pace of our frenetic society that runs twenty-four hours a day. As Dr. Moore-Ede asserts, "If we operated machinery the way we are now operating the human body, we would be accused of reckless endangerment." According to recent Gallup surveys, 56 percent of the adult population now reports daytime drowsiness as a problem. The cost of sleep deprivation is nothing short of devastating in terms of wasted education and training, impaired performance, diminished productivity, loss of income, accidents, illness, the quality of life, and the loss of life. Are you victimizing yourself and endangering the welfare of your family and your career by not getting adequate sleep? | |
