Body on Fire by Monica Aggarwal

Author:Monica Aggarwal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Healthy Living

CONSIDER 5

Glutathione is an effective antioxidant and increases with more sleep.

Sleep Debt and Performance

Impaired performance can affect your personal safety, as well as efficiency at work or play. As we sleep less and become more sleep deprived, our diminished alertness translates into more workplace errors and higher numbers of auto accidents in which drivers fall asleep at the wheel.12

Studies have looked at daytime alertness in the workplace as well. David Dinges, PhD, head of the Sleep and Chronology Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, divided dozens of people into three groups for a two-week period: those who slept for four hours, six hours, and eight hours. He did psychomotor testing, which involved subjects performing simple tasks, such as pressing the space bar of a computer when they noted a certain symbol on the computer. He found that those people who slept eight hours had no difficulty with their psychomotor testing, whereas both the four-hour and six-hour sleep groups showed significant declines in their psychomotor performance over the two-week period.13

At the halfway point of the study, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. They had trouble with basic math questions and cognitive skills. By the end of the study, performance reduced significantly. A New York Times article about the study read, “Six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight—the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.”14,15 It was noted that seven hours was not enough sleep, and cognitive testing was impaired even at that level of sleep. This sleep deprivation is what Dr. Rao believed affected her son’s behavior. In fact, older studies show that if we reduce our sleep for even one night by 1.3 to 1.5 hours, our daytime alertness is decreased by 32 percent.16 (See Consider 6.)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.