Making Time for Sleep

"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."
"Most studies of adults find that the midpoint of their sleep should be somewhere between 2 and 4 a.m., so if your timing is different than that, that may lead to increased health risks."
Daniel Buysse, professor of sleep medicine, University of Pittsburgh

"We're competing against moneyed interests, with technology and gaming and all that. It's so addictive and so hard to complete with."
"We've had this natural experiment with the Internet that swamped everything else."
Orfeu Buxton, sleep researcher, Pennsylvania State University

"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 production." 
"If there was a chance to shave even ten percent to 20 percent of that time, Mother Nature would have weeded it out through the process of evolution millions of years ago."
Matthew Walker, psychology professor, University of California, Berkeley

www.huffpost.com

"Why do we know so little about this really critical function? I always think of growth charts at the pediatrician's office. Physical growth; you study thousands of children. You know exactly that your child is in the 63rd percentile for kids her age."
"Why do we not have that for the brain?"
Tracy Riggins, developmental psychologist, University of Maryland

Dr. Riggins and Rebecca Spencer, a neuroscientist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst have teamed up in an effort to study how memory in preschoolers is affected by naps. A previous study undertaken by Dr. Spencer had found preschoolers taught a memory game had a better performance post-nap than had they been kept awake, then tested. She discovered napping aided the strengthening of complex emotional memories exclusively when combined with a good night's sleep.

For the current study the pair has combined to recruit families while they try to understand brain differences between children who nap and those who no longer do, an experiment taking place in the real world at preschools that offer French lessons, swimming or other enriched opportunities to take place instead of nap time. Unless sleep is proven to be a critical brain process assist, a two-hour nap may appear as a waste of time better used to learn something valuable.

Drs. Riggins and Spencer have set out to prove that napping performs an important function that can be compared to the practise of clearing a desk of clutter to organize and file papers to be retrieved at a later time, on the theory that without clearing the desk disorganized piles of paper can become chaotic, their purpose never realized. "This is the drive some people have [for their children] to be the best and the brightest -- some of these high-income preschoolers are trying to cram so much into the day that they're minimizing nap time", explained Dr. Spencer.

"The idea is they're not napping, so they can learn more. But they may lose the attentiveness to be able to learn more", she emphasized.

Insomnia is considered a risk factor for depression and a complaint at the same time, of people with depression where adults over fifty having insomnia symptoms are recognized to be more likely to fall than those without those symptoms. Pain has been linked to poor sleep in some studies, indicating that older people with sleep problems appear more likely to develop pain, and the reverse is also true.

"A lot of medical approaches have ignored sleep", Ken Paller, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University remarked. "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." An idea that has evoked interest in discovering how to enhance sleep for therapeutic benefit. Some researchers are beginning to examine whether the qualities inherent in sleep's memory consolidation can be enhanced.

Increasingly, scientists are looking at the links between critical sleep for a requisite number of hours nightly and health issues, identifying lack of sleep as a growing public health crisis. To the present, research into sleep disturbance has been studied separately with sleep disorders like insomnia and sleep apnea being treated as research to be studied on a different tracks. The new approach is to combine sleep disorders under the umbrella of adequate night-time sleep to refresh the brain and its cognitive processes.

A Gallup poll established that adults slept an average of 7.9 hours nightly back in 1942. By the year 2013 however, the average adult had taken over an hour off that optimum target and later yet, in 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a third of adults simply do not sleep for a now-universally recommended minimum seven hours.

Rapid-eye-movement sleep (REM) function when the sleeping brain begins to increase its electrical energy through dreams was discovered in the early 1950s, bringing in a hugely significant enquiry stream into the sleeping brain and its function in overall health achievement. Electroencephalography research followed, to reveal that the sleeping mind experiences cycles in active stages of light and deeper sleep, repeated every 90 minutes or so as long as prolonged and deep sleep takes place.

Brain research is in the process of rapid expansion and the issue of precisely how sleep works in disease and in normal cognitive functioning such as memory has become an intriguing and important new direction of study. Within the scientific community a growing awareness of the importance of adequate sleep identifies its lack as dangerous to human health. One new line of research points to poor sleep's possibility of increasing Alzheimer's risk.

It would appear that even one single night of sleep deprivation incrases levels of the proteins that form toxic clumps in Alzheimer's patients, in the brain. One incident of missing one night's sleep increases anxiety to clinical levels according to researchers who expand the issue to observe that even slight sleep reductions are linked to an increase in the feelings of social isolation and loneliness.