First, death ensued as quickly from total sleep deprivation as it did from total food deprivation. Second, rats lost their lives almost as quickly from selective REM-sleep deprivation as they did following total sleep deprivation. A total absence of NREM sleep still proved fatal, it just took longer to inflict the same mortal consequence—forty-five days, on average.
In this fast-paced, information-overloaded modern world, one of the few times that we stop our persistent informational consumption and inwardly reflect is when our heads hit the pillow. There is no worse time to consciously do this. Little wonder that sleep becomes nearly impossible to initiate or maintain when the spinning cogs of our emotional minds start churning, anxiously worrying about things we did today, things that we forgot to do, things that we must face in the coming days, and even those far in the future.
The less sleep an individual obtains, or the worse the quality of sleep, the more damaged the capstone telomeres of that individual’s chromosomes. These are the findings of a collection of studies that have recently been reported in thousands of adults in their forties, fifties, and sixties by numerous independent research teams around the world.
A large European study of almost 25,000 individuals demonstrated that sleeping six hours or less was associated with a 40 percent increased risk of developing cancer, relative to those sleeping seven hours a night or more.
short sleep (of the type that many adults in first-world countries commonly and routinely report) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control within the brain, increase food consumption (especially of high-calorie foods), decrease feelings of food satisfaction after eating, and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.
Although weight loss occurred under both conditions, the type of weight loss came from very different sources. When given just five and a half hours of sleep oppurtunity, more than 70 percent of the pounds lost came from lean body mass—muscle, not fat.
Adults forty-five years or older who sleep fewer than six hours a night are 200 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke during their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven to eight hours a night.
The leading causes of disease and death in developed nations—diseases that are crippling health-care systems, such as heart disease, obesity, dementia, diabetes, and cancer—all have recognized causal links to a lack of sleep.
Inadequate sleep and the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease interact in a vicious cycle. Without sufficient sleep, amyloid plaques build up in the brain, especially in deep-sleep-generating regions, attacking and degrading them. The loss of deep NREM sleep caused by this assault therefore lessens the ability to remove amyloid from the brain at night, resulting in greater amyloid deposition. More amyloid, less deep sleep, less deep sleep, more amyloid, and so on and so forth.
Depression is not, as you may think, just about the excess presence of negative feelings. Major depression has as much to do with absence of positive emotions, a feature described as anhedonia: the inability to gain pleasure from normally pleasurable experiences, such as food, socializing, or sex.
There is no major psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. This is true of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder
insufficient sleep during childhood significantly predicts early onset of drug and alcohol use in that same child during their later adolescent years, even when controlling for other high-risk traits, such as anxiety, attention deficits, and parental history of drug use.
With a full night of plentiful sleep, we have a balanced mix between our emotional gas pedal (amygdala) and brake (prefrontal cortex). Without sleep, however, the strong coupling between these two brain regions is lost. We cannot rein in our atavistic impulses—too much emotional gas pedal (amygdala) and not enough regulatory brake (prefrontal cortex).
I would like to argue that there are no accidents caused by fatigue, microsleeps, or falling asleep. None whatsoever. They are crashes. The Oxford English Dictionary defines accidents as unexpected events that happen by chance or without apparent cause. Drowsy-driving deaths are neither chance, nor without cause. They are predictable and the direct result of not obtaining sufficient sleep. As such, they are unnecessary and preventable.
After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours.