Tweet

The Health Impact Of Not Having Enough Sleep

Written by: Dr. Paul Lanthois

Article Overview: Most of us are aware that we are less productive, less attentive and more stressed when we are tired. But when does sleep deprivation become really dangerous? Is there any long-term impact of sleep deprivation? Find out where to draw the line.

The Health Impact Of Not Having Enough Sleep

In this world of continually wanting to do more and more in less time, rest is still regarded as a luxury or an interruption to the long list of daily to-dos. If you are not burning the midnight oil trying to beat a deadline many other things can conspire against you in your quest for some elusive slumber. Snoring partners, restless children and your own mind that won't switch off generally ensure that you will join the masses of the sleep deprived. Most of us are aware that we are less productive, less attentive and more stressed when we are tired. But when does sleep deprivation become really dangerous? Is there any long-term impact of sleep deprivation?

The research tends to indicate that it is not the duration of actual work tasks that are increasing the risk of accidents by creating fatigue problems.In fact, it is the length of time awake and the adequacy of sleep that have the biggest impact at the workplace. Two studies (1,2) found that being awake for 17-19 hours brought about deterioration in performance equivalent to having a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05%. After being awake for 24-27 hours, the impairment in performance was the equivalent of a blood alcohol concentration of 0.1%!

Skimp on the shut-eye and you'll not only be sluggish the following day but you maybe more at risk of gaining weight. Prevention magazine reported on the Nurses Health Study (3) which followed 68 000 women for 16 years. They found that women who slept just 5 hours a night were 32% more likely to gain 30-plus pounds during adulthood than those who got 7 hours sleep, even though the light sleepers typically ate less.

You may be wondering how sleep deprivation could possibly cause you to put on weight?

When you sleep your body produces large amounts of growth hormone. Your levels of growth hormone should actually be at their highest during sleep since growth hormone helps the repair of damaged tissue and helps to promote muscle growth during your slumber. Growth hormone gets the energy to do this by stimulating stored fat to be burnt while you are sleeping! The theory is if you don't get enough sleep your body doesn't get the time to do as much tissue repair. As a result your body doesn't require as much energy so you don't burn as much stored fat.

A lot of times work and other circumstances will result in us having to foregoour ideal slumber but knowing whensleep deprivationcan become dangerous will help you know where to draw the line.

References

1) Dawson, D., Reid, K., (1997) Equating the performance impairment associated with sustained wakefulness and alcoholic intoxication, Center for Sleep Research, University of South Australia.

2) Williamson, A. et al (2000) Development of measures of fatigue: using an alcohol comparison to validate the effects of fatigue on performance, Consultant Report CR 189, Australian Transport Safety Bureau, Canberra.

3) Yeager, S., 24 Hours to the Body of Your Dreams, Prevention.com, Dec 11,2006

Related Articles
  Getting a Good Night's Sleep
  You're Getting Sleepy... Sleepy...
  Stressful Childhoods Can Have Lasting Impacts
  How's Your Night Life?
  CREATIVE POWER OF SLEEP

Article Tags: adequacy, adulthood, blood alcohol concentration, burning the midnight oil, deterioration, fatigue, gaining weight, growth hormone, health study, interruption, length of time, light sleepers, midnight oil, muscle growth, nurses health, performance equivalent, prevention magazine, sleep deprivation, term impact, work tasks



Related Forum Posts
Social IMPACT!! Marketing - How it will change your Business - SEO,SEM and more recently SMO have been the catch phrase for those wishing to optimize their sites for the search engines and all will see you gain some level of success, but I am about to introduce you to a new catch phrase SIM or Social Impact Marketing, a system that has been developed at Kooiii tested on Kooiii and proven to be more effective than any of the other 3 systems in use. When we started Kooiii 6 or so weeks ago we were building a site that had nothing as far as SEO,SEM or SMO properties it was lost way back in the depths of most search engines and had an Alexa rating of 3.8 million, it was lucky to get 12 visitors a week and that was mostly my business partner and myself with the odd visitor that somehow found their way to the site by mistake. Our original idea was to build Kooiii as a Search Platform that was capable of spidering some of the most popular social networks, however we realized early on that those coming to Kooiii would also want some form of social interaction with our site if it was going to go anywhere so we implemented a simple to use Micro-Blogging system as the front end of the system we were putting together. Not having money to promote our new baby we had to resort to using all the free avenues we could find in order to attract people to the site, of course this meant utilizing as many of the social networks we belonged to as possible, Not being spammers and not wishing to appear as such we decided that we would simply keep active on the social networks while sharing and posting to our profiles from kooiii, it was at this point we realized we were onto something suddenly within a week we saw our Alexa drop dramatically and our membership start to grow not only on Kooiii but also on the social sites we belonged to, people seemed to be drawn to us like we were magnets and Kooiii went from 4 members (all admins) to over 1500 members quickly. By teaching those that joined Kooiii to also share member posts on the social networks, not only those we were posting but other members posts as well we saw the birth of a completely new way to promote something, see everyone saw the same effects we were seeing not only was Kooiii skyrocketing up Alexa but the members sites and popularity were also soaring and so Social Impact Marketing came into the world of the Internet. So lets re-cap SIM it's a system where members of Kooiii cross promote each others offers using a socially connected Micro-Blogging system creating tremendous buzz about the offers throughout the wider social scene in other words causing Social Impact using Marketing techniques resulting in massive targeted traffic generation to a specific site or page for basically no monitory outlay.
Re: How to finance your independent movie - Hi, The video doesn't come up with its own URL... But it's the very bottom video on the page. Here's the description of it: Financing, Production and Social Impact of Feature Films Host- Carol Atwood - Founder, Spartacus Media Enterprises Panelists: Bill Johnson - Co-Founder and Partner, Inferno Distribution Steven Haft - Producer, Media Consultant Michael Goorjian - Actor, Producer, Writer
Best incentive to offer employees - What's the best incentive to offer employees? Is it more health benefits? More vacation? Health club memberships? Paying for training? Cash / non-cash bonuses & rewards? I'm preparing a new package for my company and would love to get your thoughts! Thank you in advance!
list building - OK.... I think I get it. Reason I'm curious is that I'm working on a Health product site with a friend, it will fit nicely with the client base on arcamax. We're planning to set up an affiliate program to drive sales and looking for low cost alternatives to generate traffic. We will be creating several reports, and a book is already available. We just need to get the puzzle pieces in place for the site - then get the traffic.
Re: Social Networking and You - Thank you Mal The Fact is that these predictions are already being proven true so much so that my partners and i have developed a new system we call Social Impact Marketing , and using this system we have been able to get some amazing results dropping a sites Alexa from 3.8 million right down to 153,752 in just over 7 weeks and increasing it's page views from 52 per week to between 60,000 and 112,000+ per day and unique visitors up from 12 (mostly ourselves) per week to around 600 to 1000 unique visits per day, to prove it's not a fluke we then went on to do the same for 2 other sites. of course basic SEO was still used but the main effect could be traced to SIM, which is a simple system to implement but requires the use of a team comprising of at least 3 - 4 people working in unison. Just how far we are able to push a site using SIM is yet to be established as the sites used in our testing of the system continue to improve daily and until they peak we cannot establish a benchmark however they have already passed the achievable levels using the basic SEO applied to them..


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Ready for a Fresh Image?

Emotional Energy is Our Engine

Why Use an Advertising Agency

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.