THE CONSEQUENCES OF SKIMPING
Despite how great we feel after a night’s rest–and putting
aside what we now know about sleep’s importance–we stubbornly refuse to swallow
our medicine, pushing off bedtime and thinking that feeling a little drowsy
during the day is an annoying but harmless consequence. It’s not. Nearly 40% of
adults have nodded off unintentionally during the day in the past month, and 5%
have done so while driving. Insomnia or interrupted sleep nearly doubles the
chances that workers will call in sick. And half of Americans say their uneven
sleep makes it harder to concentrate on tasks.
Those poor sleep habits are trickling down to the next
generation: 45% of teens don’t sleep the recommended nine hours on school
nights, leading 25% of them to report falling asleep in class at least once a
week, according to a National Sleep Foundation survey. It’s a serious enough
problem that the American Academy of Pediatrics recently endorsed the idea of
starting middle and high schools later to allow for more adolescent shut-eye.
Health experts have been concerned about our sleep-deprived
ways for some time, but the new insights about the role sleep plays in our
overall health have brought an urgency to the message. Sleep, the experts are
recognizing, is the only time the brain has to catch its breath. If it doesn’t,
it may drown in its own biological debris–everything from toxic free radicals
produced by hard-working fuel cells to spent molecules that have outlived their
usefulness.
“We all want to push the system, to get the most out of our
lives, and sleep gets in the way,” says Dr. Sigrid Veasey, a leading sleep
researcher and a professor of medicine at Perelman School of Medicine at the
University of Pennsylvania. “But we need to know how far we can really push
that system and get away with it.”
Veasey is learning that brain cells that don’t get their
needed break every night are like overworked employees on consecutive double
shifts–eventually, they collapse. Working with mice, she found that neurons
that fire constantly to keep the brain alert spew out toxic free radicals as a
by-product of making energy. During sleep, they produce antioxidants that mop
up these potential poisons. But even after short periods of sleep loss, “the
cells are working hard but cannot make enough antioxidants, so they
progressively build up free radicals and some of the neurons die off.” Once
those brain cells are gone, they’re gone for good.
After several weeks of restricted sleep, says Veasey, the
mice she studied–whose brains are considered a good proxy for human brains in
lab research–“are more likely to be sleepy when they are supposed to be active
and have more difficulty consolidating [the benefits of] sleep during their
sleep period.”
It’s the same thing that happens in aging brains, she says,
as nerve cells get less efficient at clearing away their garbage. “The real
question is: What are we doing to our brains if we don’t get enough sleep? If
we chronically sleep-deprive ourselves, are we really aging our brains?” she
asks. Ultimately, the research suggests, it’s possible that a sleep-deprived
brain belonging to a teen or a 20-year-old will start to look like that of a
much older person.
“Chronic sleep restriction is a stress on the body,” says
Dr. Peter Liu, professor of medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center and L.A.
Biomedical Research Institute. And the cause of that sleep deprivation doesn’t
always originate in family strife, financial concerns or job-related problems.
The way we live now–checking our phones every minute, hyperscheduling our days
or our kids’ days, not taking time to relax without a screen in front of our
faces–contributes to a regular flow of stress hormones like cortisol, and all
that artificial light and screen time is disrupting our internal clocks. Simply
put, our bodies don’t know when to go to sleep naturally anymore.
This is why researchers hope their new discoveries will
change once and for all the way we think about–and prioritize–those 40 winks.
http://time.com/3326565/the-power-of-sleep/
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