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Is Lack of Sleep a Public Health Crisis? (washingtonpost.com)
According to The Washington Post, "a growing number of scientists, not normally known for being advocates, are bringing evangelical zeal to the message that lack of sleep is an escalating public health crisis that deserves as much attention as the obesity epidemic." "We're competing against moneyed interests, with technology and gaming and all that. It's so addictive and so hard to compete with," said Orfeu Buxton, a sleep researcher at Pennsylvania State University. "We've had this natural experiment with the Internet that swamped everything else." From the report: The sleep research community, formerly balkanized into separate sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea, has begun to coalesce around the concept of "sleep health" -- which for most adults means getting at least seven hours a night. But time in the sack has been steadily decreasing. In 1942, a Gallup poll found that adults slept an average of 7.9 hours per night. In 2013, the average adult had sheared more than an hour off that number. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that a third of adults fail to get the recommended seven hours. In the blink of an eye, in evolutionary terms, humans have radically altered a fundamental biological necessity -- with repercussions we are still only beginning to understand.
For years, animal studies have shown that learning activities are reactivated during sleep, a critical part of how lasting memories are formed. More recently, Princeton postdoctoral researcher Monika Schonauer asked 32 people to sleep in the lab after they had been asked to memorize 100 pictures of houses or faces. By analyzing their patterns of electrical brain activity, she found she could effectively read their minds, predicting which images they had been studying while awake -- because they were replaying them. [...] Sleep problems have long been recognized as a symptom of psychiatric and neurological disorders, ranging from depression to Alzheimer's. But increasingly, researchers are exploring the two-way street between disrupted sleep and disease. And researchers who started out interested in cognitive functions such as memory or brain development are finding themselves focused on sleep because it is so fundamental.
For years, animal studies have shown that learning activities are reactivated during sleep, a critical part of how lasting memories are formed. More recently, Princeton postdoctoral researcher Monika Schonauer asked 32 people to sleep in the lab after they had been asked to memorize 100 pictures of houses or faces. By analyzing their patterns of electrical brain activity, she found she could effectively read their minds, predicting which images they had been studying while awake -- because they were replaying them. [...] Sleep problems have long been recognized as a symptom of psychiatric and neurological disorders, ranging from depression to Alzheimer's. But increasingly, researchers are exploring the two-way street between disrupted sleep and disease. And researchers who started out interested in cognitive functions such as memory or brain development are finding themselves focused on sleep because it is so fundamental.
This article put me to sleep
That's all very interesting, but was 1942 a typical year, comparable to, say, the norm for the last five centuries?
Mind you, I grew up at a time when the "norm" (theoretically) was eight hours a night. And I generally get seven to eight these days. Or six, if the weather is bad and my dog is in panic mode due to thunder. Or five some nights, because, you know, I'm getting older and older people need less sleep, and....
But asserting that eight hours is the norm and " In the blink of an eye, in evolutionary terms, humans have radically altered a fundamental biological necessity" based on a 1942 survey seems a bit of a stretch....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
"a growing number of scientists"..."are bringing evangelical zeal to the message"
I think the new church of science has become well established. Research that cannot be duplicated, constant misrepresentation of facts or evidence, outright deception and money pandering.
I am a big fan of science, but it has become more of a religion of late than the search for truth about our world.
Just another reason to get rid of daylight "saving" time. (and, no, that doesn't mean go on it year 'round)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The study is so boring banal you'll be asleep before the end. Truly, a magnificent public serv....zzzzzzzzz
It would be nice to get 8 hours of sleep at night. I'm in my mid 30's and I'm lucky to get 4 or 5 most of the time. Stress and just not being able sleep when I'm tired really sucks. Feeling tired all the time sucks too.
Then lack of sheep could be a public health crisis, yes.
lack of sleep is an escalating public health crisis that deserves as much attention as the obesity epidemic
Healthy at any size!
Rested at any sleep!
Then what are things going to be such as an outbreak of polio? If you can fix a 'disease' by changing your habits and lifestyle, it's not really a 'disease', it's slow, assisted suicide.
A public health issue is something the CDC can fix with strategic quarantine, a vaccine or antibiotics/antivirals. Changing behaviors is not the job of the government.
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Remember how the Romans built that lead lined water supply system that played a part in their decline and fall?
A lot of people lose sleep because they think political bogey men and women are personally gunning for them amid a grand web of conspiracy theories and evil minions. Other people think the world may not be around in the morning because it's a few degrees warmer or colder than whatever "normal" is. Still others need to win arguments on the Internet no matter the cost.
Well guess what: There are real problems to lose sleep over like not making ends meet, or worrying over very ill relatives. Don't let fearmongering, rumors and gossip and anonymous user-driven nonsense deprive you of any further sleep.
In my country, I'm more affected by the decision, taken 2 years ago, to delay 'mature audience' entertainment until 9 PM or later. That means a movie frequently doesn't finish until 11:30 or midnight. I'm irked that a children's novel remade as Scrooged (1988), starts at that time because it has 2 seconds of naked nipples. If children aren't tough enough to survive that, they shouldn't be watching Terminator 2 (1991), which started 30 minutes earlier and supposedly contains 270 acts of abuse. I have to decide if I want to stay awake that long because I sleep a fixed number of hours and will thus awake much later in the morning, losing 'me' time. Thankfully, I'm on an afternoon shift.
Working hours: 50+ hours a week in white-collar jobs is now the norm. No vacay time to catch up.
Electronic connectivity: workers are expected to respond to emails outside of working hours. Yeah, 50 years ago, people had home phones, but calling someone outside of work was seen as more intrusive, and there had to be a damned good reason.
Overscheduling: if you're running around with your sprogeny in the evening, taking them to extracurricular bullshit activities, you still need time for yourself and to make love to your spouse. Sleep suffers.
If "YOU" aren't getting enough sleep, then "YOU" fix it. It affects me ZERO.
Sounds important. Let's check with the man that has his finger on the nuclear and twitter button....(reference, and here)
Alzheimers huh? Well that does explain a few things.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Now that's funny.
you got work, you got family requirements, other stuff you must do, etc.
add some of that important me-time/down-time (even if it is just only an hour), and there is little time left to sleep.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Because memories are integrated with other memories during your “write buffer to hard-drive” stage, sleep is also very important for creativity. The next time you recall a certain memory after you slept, it might be altered with some new information that your brain thought to be fitting to attach to that memory."
From this long, excellent article: http://timdettmers.com/2015/07...
Smoke some pot, drink less, chill out, sleep for 9hrs easy.
Stupid govt and people who thinks pot is bad, "just do it"
No amount of RF can stop you sleeping after a few spliffs.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I've noticed that I struggle to get enough sleep. I have to force myself to go back to bed for a couple of hours more. There seems to be two things: the human brain, and the human mind. They constantly struggle with each other to control sleep time. The human brain needs a certain amount of time to reset its biochemistry. The human mind demands the waking state because it craves input (think of a young child fighting desperately to stay awake (search youtube). Our technology and the growing pace of society - the amount of input that is possible - skew our sleep time in favor of the mind more and more. In the past there was far less input possible and the brain won out for sleep time. No longer. We have to realize this and consciously force sleep time for the biochemistry to complete its rejuvenation - there are no parents to force it for us.
E Proelio Veritas.
I can't speak for other countries but we do know that over the past 10 years in the United States there has been an alarming increase in diagnosed depression and anxiety disorders. Suicide rates have also gone up. We also know that due to deteriorating work conditions largely due to The Great Recession people are sleeping less and less able to take care of their health due to increased "employee productivity".
We'll make great pets
We have destroyed the night. LEDs have made it worse. Our bodies and most of nature is adapted to a day night cycle. Now with bright outdoor lighting in cities, LCD screens on our phones and televisions our bodies are chemically out of sync. With modern LEDs people seem to prefer very white or bluish lighting which renders more accurate colours. That is exactly the kind of light one shouldn't be exposed to after sundown. Yellow/reddish light is much healthier (ie the old sodium vapour street lights).
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783
In pre-modern times, people slept differently, and it seemed to be the natural thing. How could you get sound, deep sleep anyway, when sharing your bed with your entire family plus a number of critters of various sizes biting you and making you quite uncomfortable?
I moved into a place where there is this crazy hum 24/7. I don't know if some neighbor is running off a diesel genset or what but I can't find it on the property and it happens even when the power is out. During the day I rarely notice it (although sometimes it is more intense than others) but it's really destroying my ability to sleep through a night, which is definitely having a noticeable effect on my ability to function during the day. Since it's not very loud and I moved in after it did, I have no recourse but to move, but producing noise like that ought to be illegal. Noise pollution is real, and has real effects on health.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
it's been shown in more than one study that a major flag for a long, healthy life is people who can still sleep in their old age. The meme of the tired granpa is because grandpa is unable to get REM sleep and it's killing him.
You're not watching a suicide, you're watching somebody slowly waste away while you make fun of them.
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it's just hyperbole in the article. The scientists are still scientists.
Go watch this for some context and stop attacking science. You're undermining people's belief in science with what are right wing talking points used to cut funding (and therefore taxes) to scientific research.
I don't think you're doing it on purpose and that's what makes it so awful. It's become insidious propaganda that folks are completely unaware of.
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Having worked for a Baby Bell back in the mid-nineties, and having heard stories from before that time, how many of *you* slashdotters have heard the infamous phrase "whatever it takes", meaning no sleep, no life, and no, you're never going to be given "comp time"?
But we don't need unions. I have no idea why our grandparents and great grandparents objected to jobs that required 12 and 16 hour days, with no benefits. Back then was the *real* "gig economy".
Are you going to stop fucking male donkeys in the ass? Just asking a question.