Slashdot Mirror
One in Ten Americans Are Chronically Sleep Deprived
WirePosted writes "A CDC research study released this past week indicates that the physical and mental health of many Americans is being adversely affected by a lack of sleep. According to the study, a part of the organization's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, one in ten US citizens are consistently failing to get enough sleep every night. Almost 40% of the people surveyed didn't get enough sleep for more than a week every month. The article notes that this trend can have far-ranging implications for health beyond simple fatigue."
Well, it's 2:30PM here in Iraq and I'm wide awake. While not sleep deprived myself, many of my coworkers here and at my last unit work 16-20 hour days for months on end. I think some of them think they're being hard (and some get paid for evey hour worked), but their lack of sleep is counter-productive. Many will fall asleep in the middle of a conversation with you. I also have to wonder about brain damage as another side effect. The people who have been doing it the most look like they've been lobotimized even right after they've woken up. It's the same sort of look in someone's face who's wasted their mind on alcohol; they look like they were bright once but have killed too many brain cells. The effects I've seen of long-term sleep deprivation here are enough to make me get 8 to 9 hours sleep every night.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Not all people are Maggie Thatcher clones.
(Which is probably just as well.)
Dude, my experience is even more eerily on-topic. I just got back from a sleep lab where I had a CPAP titration at a sleep lab to treat Sleep Apnea, pull up slashdot, and here this is.
If you feel chronically tired, are a little overweight and don't get a lot of exercise (queue predictable slashdot demographics joke) and you are told you snore by a significant other (queue another predictable slashdot demographics joke), you should look into it. All reports are that using the CPAP vastly improves quality of life. Plus, you can make believe you are a jet fighter pilot!
Who only gets one month? I get 6 weeks and you can back it up 3 years! One of the reasons I live in the EU now. The lifestyle is great.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
I don't have anything to do with any on the companies. I'm just a patient. For the longest time, I had chronic fatigue, I just felt exhausted all the time. Unless something forced me awake, I would easily sleep 12-14 hours a day. My Doctor thought it was just symptoms of depression, but eventually he suggested having a sleep study done. It turns out I had undiagnosed , severe sleep apnea, that probably manifested in highschool (I had horrible problems getting up to go school, and was late all the time). This means that I stop breathing in my sleep, over 30 times an hour. I've been using a CPAP machine for the last few years since then, and it makes an enormous difference in quality of life.
This isn't the only disorder they can find, there are many others. They hook you up to an Electro-encephalogram and other stuff to monitor you, and the results can be extremely informative to your doctor for making recommendations.
I have sleep apnea which went untreated for 10 years. I would tell my doctor that I was falling asleep in the middle of the day, and while driving, despite getting 8-10 hours of sleep (and feeling like total shit when I regained consciousness) and he had no clue what the problem was. I finally found my own diagnosis after doing one simple Google search on "sleep disorder." The first result was an article about sleep apnea that listed every one of the symptoms that I told my doctor about. At my last appointment before switching to a new doc, I told him about all this...
Anyway, I went to a local hospital sleep clinic, where I was scheduled to "sleep" for 4 hours without a CPAP, and then four hours with one -- all the while being hooked up to an EKG. After the first 45 minutes, the nurse came in and said she had decided to switch me to the CPAP early because in 45 minutes I had stopped breathing 70 times.
The next day, I felt like a completely different person. I have now had a CPAP for about 5 years, and I feel like "normal" person again.
Now, my sleep deprivation is due to the Internets, just like the rest of you bastards.
Actually, I think there's a pretty good case to be made that killing people does lead to mental damage. PTSD is rarely caused by revulsion or shock by one's own acts. It's generally caused by events that scare the crap out of you. In other words, it's nearly being killed by others that damages you, not killing them instead. Humans are generally better adapted to inflicting horrors on others than having them inflicted on themselves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion