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Getting too little sleep can have serious health consequences (2013)

theatlantic.com

1–10 of 74 posts

Re: Getting too little sleep can have serious health consequences (2013)

#4
Psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia are more likely to manifest in those already susceptible to them, if they are subject to sleep deprivation. This remains one of the few known correlations in long-term effects of sleep deprivation.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-a-lack-of-slee... http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/Sleep-and-m...

Re: Getting too little sleep can have serious health consequences (2013)

#5
I once, involuntary, went without sleep for around 72 hours. I was at a music festival and we were either pulling through the night or I couldn't sleep because of the noise. When the time came to go home, I really felt pretty good. At that time I had been awake for around 60 hours. My body was tired and my thinking was a bit sluggish, but nothing too bad...

Until I got home and tried to sleep. By then I was feeling dead-tired, but I simply couldn't sleep. This wasn't your average "Oh I can't sleep, guess I'll do something else and try again later" case of 'insomnia'. I was so extremely tired; all I wanted was to sleep. I started having hallucinations much like the early stages of a mushroom trip (minus the fun). My eyes couldn't focus, I couldn't think.

Finally I managed to fall asleep (while constantly suppressing panic attacks; something I've suffered from in the past and know how to deal with now). I had lucid dream after lucid dream during that sleep. It was very unsettling as I got the feeling (during lucid dreaming) that I wasn't getting any "real" sleep and I'd go insane.

All in all the lucid dreaming aspect was pretty cool, and in retrospect perhaps worth the unsettling experience of being awake so long. But I'll never ever want to repeat that experience.

Re: Getting too little sleep can have serious health consequences (2013)

#8

"Spending 25% more time sleeping increases your life expectancy by 25%." Awesome.

But that extra time spent sleeping is time spent not being awake to do things. So the overall number of useful hours is the same either way?

Depends. Are you spending that extra time commuting to work? Maybe putting in extra hours at work?

Re: Getting too little sleep can have serious health consequences (2013)

#9

"Spending 25% more time sleeping increases your life expectancy by 25%." Awesome.

But that extra time spent sleeping is time spent not being awake to do things. So the overall number of useful hours is the same either way?

But you're in better physical and mental shape to use those hours, so you use them more efficiently :)

Re: Getting too little sleep can have serious health consequences (2013)

#10

"Spending 25% more time sleeping increases your life expectancy by 25%." Awesome.

But that extra time spent sleeping is time spent not being awake to do things. So the overall number of useful hours is the same either way?

Let's assume you spend 30% of your time sleeping (7.2 hours a day), and your expected lifetime to be T. Then your "useful time" is 0.7T. So you decide to sleep 25% more (9 hours), so you sleep through 37,5% of a day and your life expectancy is now T'=1.25T, so your useful time is 0.625T'=0.625 x 1.25T=0.781T. Your useful time grown around 12%.

Note that if you take your working hours into account and you are only interested in your free time after work, then this free time will hoard up more at the end of your life when you will be retired but you will lose free time before that.

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