So what's it matter if you don't get a good night's sleep?
July 24th 2008 00:26
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More on sleep from: Dallasnews.com
1. It makes us better athletes
When basketball players underwent similar sleep studies, their performance improved dramatically, too.
Conversely, not enough sleep has the opposite effect. Studies cited in Runner's World link longtime sleep deprivation to the following: Becoming exhausted more quickly; deterioration in physical performance; higher accumulation of lactate; impaired mental ability; increased heart rate; and a lower volume of oxygen that can be used while exercising.
Even short-term sleep loss, however, can impede glucose metabolism in certain areas of the brain, especially those connected to alertness and visual processing.
Plus, we need sleep to restore muscles exhausted during workouts.
2. It helps us deal with stress and helps us grow
Our bodies use sleep to release certain hormones, Dr. Davé says, including those essential for growth and development. If we wake in the middle of the night, those functions are disrupted.
One example is cortisol. For people with normal sleep patterns, this stress hormone peaks around 4 a.m. We're blissfully unaware because we snooze through it.
But, Dr. Davé says, "If you're awake longer than you should be for a few days, that puts your body under stress, which leads to higher levels of cortisol."
This, in turn, leads to higher blood pressure, more sugar in the blood (not a good thing for diabetics) and an increased appetite.
Researchers at the University of Chicago found that sleep-deprived subjects were hungry because their levels of leptin – the hormone that tells the brain when you've eaten enough – were low. Subjects were limited to four hours of sleep per night. After six days, they showed signs of developing diabetes.
3. It helps us remember
When you pull an all-nighter to study, you're storing information in short-term memory, Dr. Davé says. For long-term retention, you need to learn a little every day.
"During sleep, your brain will process a lot and turn it into long-term memory," he says. "Memory is a function of what we think sleep does."
At the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers gave 400 subjects a series of letters to type with their left hands. For those who learned the sequence in the morning and were tested 12 hours later, performance stayed pretty much the same.
But those who learned it late in the day and were tested again after a night's sleep improved their performance by 20 to 30 percent.
4. It is imperative for safe driving
Drinking and driving have long been known to be incompatible. But a 2006 study by the National Sleep Foundation and Virginia Tech Transportation Institute uncovered information equally as sobering: 80 percent of crashes and 65 percent of near-crashes involved some sort of "driver inattention." In most cases, that inattention was drowsy driving.
Every year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, sleep-related car accidents number 200,000 and kill 1,500 people.
The sleep foundation calls drowsy driving "a silent killer." Like alcohol, it impairs response time and judgment and decreases awareness. But, unlike alcohol, no tests can determine whether a person drifted off into what's called a micro-sleep. Within two seconds while driving a car at 60 mph, you could drift into another lane. Within four seconds, you could be off the road.
5. It keeps us from being crabby
Think how much better you feel after a good night's sleep.
"You can see a night-and-day difference if sleep problems are dealt with," Dr. Davé says. "It's a 100 percent turnaround."
Well, it seems there are some benefits of a good night's sleep, what do you think?
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Comment by Louie
Climate Forum
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randomthoughts
Phil's Wellness Tips
Comment by katyzzz
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You're looking PRETTY good, Louie, or is that you 100 years ago?
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Genyration
Driving without sleep is much much worse than driving drunk or high. TRUST me!
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