SLEEP DEPRIVATION IS DOWNRIGHT DANGEROUS
Last week I read a Washington Post online article warning that our general lack of sleep is escalating into a health emergency. I think we seniors need to especially pay attention to getting enough sleep, what with insomnia due to anxiety or restless legs or arthritis pain or needing to use the bathroom more frequently. Last June I wrote a post giving recommendations on how to get better sleep, Nothing Like a Good Night’s Sleep.
However, the Washington Post piece was more on the dangers of not getting enough sleep. Here are excerpts from the article by Carolyn Y. Johnson Go to bed! Brain researchers warn that lack of sleep is a public health crisis:
In the screen-lit bustle of modern life, sleep is expendable. There are television shows to binge-watch, work emails to answer, social media posts to scroll through. We’ll catch up on shut-eye later, so the thinking goes — right after we click down one last digital rabbit hole.
Brain research, which has pushed back hard against this nonchalant attitude, is now expanding rapidly, reaching beyond the laboratory and delving into exactly how sleep works in disease and in normal cognitive functions such as memory. The growing consensus is that casual disregard for sleep is wrongheaded — even dangerous.
An alarming new line of research suggests poor sleep may increase the risk of Alzheimer’s, as even a single night of sleep deprivation boosts brain levels of the proteins that form toxic clumps in Alzheimer’s patients. All-nighters push anxiety to clinical levels, and even modest sleep reductions are linked to increased feelings of social isolation and loneliness.
“It used to be popular for people to say, ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ The ironic thing is, not sleeping enough may get you there sooner,” said Daniel Buysse, a professor of sleep medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.
Meanwhile, 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.”
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.
“When you are asleep, it’s the most idiotic of all things: You’re not finding food, not finding a mate. Worse still, you’re vulnerable to predation,” said Matthew Walker, a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “If there was a chance to shave even 10 percent to 20 percent off that time, Mother Nature would have weeded it out through the process of evolution millions of years ago.”
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 Schönauer 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, including depression and 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.
Insomnia, for example, is both a risk factor for depression and a complaint of people with depression. Adults over 50 with lots of insomnia symptoms were more likely to fall than those without, according to one study. Studies have linked pain to poor sleep, showing that older people with sleep problems are more likely to develop pain, and vice versa.
“A lot of medical approaches have ignored sleep,” said Ken Paller, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University. “People think about [poor sleep] as one of the complaints someone with depression or other disorders might have, rather than a critical part of the whole etiology of the disease, which is a new idea.”
While interest in sleep is soaring, many sleep researchers worry that the risks of too little sleep still are not taken seriously.
——————————————————————————————————————-
Hopefully, tonight you’ll make certain you get a good night’s sleep of 7 or more hours, and tomorrow night, and the next night and the next and … .