1. You can "make up" sleep you miss: Actually, as the NSF states, you can't "cheat" on sleep. As you repeatedly don't get enough sleep it builds up as a debt within your body - A deficiency per say that you need to fill. Your body has the natural response to "make up" sleep after your first moment of sleep deprivation, but as it builds up, you body doesn't trigger that response any longer so you don't actually make-up sleep.
Look at this study from Fred W. Turek, professor of neurobiology and physiology and director of Northwestern's Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology.
"In the study, the researchers kept animals awake for 20 hours per day followed by a four-hour sleep opportunity, over five consecutive days. The team monitored brain wave and muscle activity patterns in order to precisely quantify sleep-wake patterns.
After the first day of sleep loss, animals compensated by increasing their intensity, or depth, of sleep, which is indicative of a homeostatic response. However, on the subsequent days of sleep loss, the animals failed to generate this compensatory response and did not sleep any more deeply or any longer than they did under non-sleep deprived conditions (baseline measurements). At the end of the study, the animals were given three full days to sleep as much as they wanted. Amazingly, they recovered virtually none of the sleep that was lost during the five-day sleep deprivation period."
2. Sleep deprivation is not related to disease: Well actually it is very strongly related to several health issues and can result in early death (as mentioned before!!). Some of the correlated health issues are: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and depression.
The American Cancer Society reported that people who sleep 6 hours or less per night (had death rates 1.8 times higher than those who sleep normal hours), or who sleep 9 hours or more, had a death rate 30 percent higher than those who regularly slept 7 to 8 hours.
3. Sleeping is a waste of time: While it may look like we aren't doing much as we sleep, we actually are! Scientists haven't agreed on why sleep is necessary but they do have lots of theories and lots of proof that without sleep we die. Here are some theories of why sleep is important:
- It lets our brain recharge
- It helps us adapt
- It allows our body to conserve energy
- It restores our body
- It polishes our brains so unimportant info is removed and important info is organized
- It maintains our body's rhythms such as Circadian
Much love!
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