Sleep deprivation is common for Americans, but it’s not healthy

I’m not lazy, just a good sleeper. What I mean by that is I work hard, but I have the ability to fall asleep pretty much anywhere, anytime. Always have. If given the opportunity, without guilt, I could easily sleep nine or 10 hours a night. Not that I necessarily want to, mind you, I just know that I could without much of an issue. And I like naps more than my 85-year-old grandpa. I don’t have as much time for them as I would like these days, but I could take a nap at 10 a.m. just as easily as I could at 7 p.m. On the floor, half of a couch or a bed of flowers, doesn’t matter.

College friends used to kid me about taking a quick power nap before we went out at night. Some of them no doubt did the same thing, but I was the one who caught flak for my “old man nappy time.” It was a joke, sure, but I was usually one of the few who wasn’t yawning at last call.

Perhaps part of it was the natural order of procrastination, but I could routinely do my best studying late at night. A number of times I can recall printing out a paper or an essay in college while my alarm clock for the dreaded 8 a.m. English class was going off. Those papers typically ended up with an “A” at the top, but I always needed some serious recovery time afterward. I couldn’t press through very easily and feel normal without it.

Anyway, my point of all this is that I wish I didn’t like sleeping so much. I wish I could be one of those bionic humans, like my cousin’s husband or people I randomly hear about, who can survive on 4-5 hours of shuteye a night and be good to go. I could (and still can) pull this off in short stints, when cramming for finals or out a little too late, but it quickly caught (and still catches) up to me.

Which is why I was surprised recently when a new venture with a travel magazine I’m starting kept me up for a span of 47 out of 48 hours to meet a deadline. Basically, from Monday-Friday, I never slept more than five hours a night and had one epic session of two all-nighters wedged up against each other with a useless morning siesta in between. And the funny thing is, I wasn’t really tired during that entire stretch.

Maybe it was the nerves or anxious energy created from a big deadline with a new project. Maybe it was my body giving it one last college try, to see if it was still capable of pulling off such a rally. Or perhaps it was the red cape I was wearing around in my condo, I’m not sure. But what I do know is I wasn’t even that bad afterward. Sure, I slept soundly on Friday night when my work was all done, but it wasn’t like a marathon crash session where you wake up fully clothed with drool on your pillow, wondering what day it is.

One of my pet peeves as a writer is when people misuse the word “ironic,” and maybe it isn’t irony in its truest form, but when I woke up on Saturday and went to check my e-mail, the first story I saw on yahoo’s main page was one about sleep patterns, and what a deficiency in good sleep can do to your body, titled “Sleep: A Necessity, Not a Luxury,” from the HealthDay Reporter.

“For healthy people, there’s a big temptation to voluntarily restrict sleep, to stay up an hour or two or get up an hour or two earlier,” Dr. Greg Belenky, director of the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University Spokane, said in the article. “But you’re really reducing your productivity and exposing yourself to risk,” Belenky added.

The article states that an estimated 40 million people in America struggle with some sort of sleep disorder, and millions of others are directly affected by our hectic schedules, which make us view sleep as time wasted.

While doctors suggest humans need 7-8 hours of sleep, the amount of rest necessary can — and obviously does — vary from one person to the next. It’s when your sleep patterns dip to six hours per night or less that you can begin to notice a change in behavior.

“The performance effects are seen immediately,” Belenky told the HealthDay Reporter. “You short-change yourself of sleep, and you see the effects immediately. You can make a bad decision. You can miss something. Have a moment’s inattention, and you’re off the road.”

If short-changing yourself of sleep can force you off the road, I must have been riding a dirt bike through the mountains last week. Makes me want to go back and re-edit some pages to see what I may have missed. Though I felt productive and didn’t have a particularly difficult time concentrating, it also makes me wonder if I would’ve been better off sleeping in blocks of time.

According to the story, the longer-term effects of sleep deprivation can directly involve a person’s health, as experts have linked lack of sleep to such issues as weight gain, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart problems, depression and substance abuse.

Basically, the hormone that stimulates appetite increases the less you sleep, and the body has a tougher time regulating glucose, which can cause the aforementioned heart and blood pressure issues. Not good.

When I look at my own experience last week, I am surprised I could pull it off, considering my love affair with the pillow. And while it was on the extreme side, I realize there is the mother of four in the suburbs who survives — maybe even thrives — off of five hours of sleep, or the stock broker who is at his computer checking the price of the Japanese yen at 3 a.m. In fact, it’s rare when one of my friends isn’t complaining about being tired. It’s pretty easy to recognize as a common theme among Americans, and it’s one we should pay closer attention to.

“It’s sort of part of the culture,” Belenky said in the article. “People pride themselves on getting little sleep. You’ll hear people bragging, ‘I only need six hours a night.’ So there’s a macho element here.”

Macho element? Not for me. I wish I lived in Spain or Italy, where daytime siestas are encouraged, expected even, as the towns shut down for several hours during the afternoon. People generally are more friendly, stress levels are down, wine is being toasted and the attitude is that if not today, it’ll get done tomorrow.

Would be nice, wouldn’t it? Makes me kind of tired just thinking about it. It might be nappy time.

Trent Modglin
Publisher
The Real Chicago
Trent@TheRealChicago.org

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