My year-old daughter is finally entering the homestretch of sophomore year, and she has been chronically sleep deprived since September. The reasons are multiple but when you add together 45 minutes of homework per class per night, plus a few extra-curricular activities, plus the downtime spent everyday watching a John Green video on YouTube or chatting with friends, and a normal amount of procrastination, it adds up to between 5 and 7 hours of sleep on an average school night. Throw in a term paper or heavy exam week and the average can easily drop to 3 or 4. My daughter is hardly atypical. In fact, multiple studies have shown that the vast majority of teens today are living with borderline to severe sleep deprivation.
What’s going on here?
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A viral video has revealed the shocking detrimental effects that sleep deprivation can have, both on your mental and physical state. With that in mind, a sleep expert has detailed the drastic consequences that sleep deprivation can have on your overall wellbeing in the short term and in the long term. Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, explained how sleep or lack thereof can seriously impact your health. As many may already be aware, losing sleep is also connected with having a weaker immune system, Walker explains. Walker explains that a deficient amount of sleep can increase your risk of developing bowel, prostate or breast cancer later in life. Having as little as six hours sleep a night can lead to a per cent increased risk of suffering a stroke or fatal heart attack during your lifetime, he warns. So, how much time can we spend awake before we our mental and physical capabilities start to become impaired?
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People who have restless nights can cause motor vehicle crashes and workplace mistakes. In addition to these social consequences , poor sleep has social causes such as family and workplace stresses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that anywhere from 50 million to 70 million U. In fact, over a third of adult respondents to a nationwide study reported less than seven hours of sleep during a typical hour period seven to nine hours per night are recommended. Young and middle-age adults report less sleep. Among racial and ethnic groups, Black Americans report sleeping few hours. Sleep deprivation makes even routine daily tasks more difficult. Especially severe, 1, deaths and over 40, injuries in the United States annually are due to sleepy drivers, according to the National Department of Transportation. In addition to the public health costs of traffic accidents, poor sleep reduces labor productivity and can increase costly mistakes at work. Sleep loss and night shift accidents have been partially to blame for dramatic environmental health disasters such as the grounding of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker in Alaska and the chemical plant disaster in Bhopal, India.
The whole world is exhausted. But particularly me. A comparison Walker might hate. He warns, in the strongest possible terms, about the harms of that particular stimulant. He ran down all the ways in which sleep deprivation hurts people: it makes you dumber, more forgetful, unable to learn new things, more vulnerable to dementia, more likely to die of a heart attack, less able to fend off sickness with a strong immune system, more likely to get cancer, and it makes your body literally hurt more. Lack of sleep distorts your genes, and increases your risk of death generally, he said. It disrupts the creation of sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone, and leads to premature aging. Apparently, men who only sleep five hours a night have markedly smaller testicles than men who sleep more than seven. Sleep is a nonnegotiable biological necessity.
