The Causes of Sleep Deprivation

Despite the fact that deprivation of sleep has negative impacts, individuals still continue to deprive themselves of sleep. Many claim that they can just make it up tomorrow night and sleep the extra two hours they did not get. However, this is only adding more and more to a sleep debt. This debt will continue to grow and grow until it is paid off. William Dement and Christopher Vaughan strongly advocate that people should know the warnings, importance, and consequences that come with sleep deprivation, and therefore, lead to sleep

Executive functions, sometimes also called higher-order functions of the brain refer to working memory, response selection, and inhibition. Insufficient sleep has a detrimental impact on these functions, “tasks that rely on executive processes have been reported to be particularly disrupted by sleep deprivation and this has led to the notion that Executive Functions are particularly sensitive to sleep loss” (Lo, Groeger, Santhi, Arbon, Lazar, Hasan, and Dijk 2). Cognitive performance is undoubtedly a key component for both short-term successes i.e. remembering to pick up the kids from school to accurately meeting the boss’s daily

The brain has to perform calculations on a day to day basis, and not giving it rest causes to accumulate stress. Besides processing calculations in order to carry out daily tasks, the brain also perceives enormous amounts of information, and needs down time to organize all the information. Usually the consolidating of all the information takes place when a person is sleeping, therefore depriving the brain of sleep will cause incognizant brain function and leave one groggy throughout the next day (Sample, 1). Distinct implications of decrease in brain function is displayed when a person experiences drowsiness throughout the day, which causes truncated memory retention rates and loss of

How often do you hear people complain about being tired all the time? Sleep deficiency has been investigated for years, but there has been no single method to explain why people nod their heads asleep in crucial times focus: during an important class lecture or even at the wheel. However, it is clear that without a good night’s rest, sleep-deprived individuals can find it difficult to pay attention, even if they want to stay awake. Thus, it becomes important to examine the underlying mechanisms that explain the negative effects of sleep loss on attention and cognitive performance. Sleep effects can be measured by alertness, which describes the overall state of the cognitive system and can be attributed to two primary components: a circadian system and a sleep homeostasis system (Åkerstedt & Folkard, 1995). The circadian system is composed of an oscillating 24-hour cycle that fluctuates in alertness throughout one day, while the homeostasis system is a gradual decline of alertness as wake time increases throughout the day, only recovering after sleep (Achermann, 2004). Attention is facilitated by alertness and is the behavioral and cognitive process of focusing on one piece of information at a time. Although it is a broad phenomenon, it can be divided into two components: vigilant attention and selective attention. Vigilant attention is a person’s ability to keep concentrating on one task, while selective attention is a person’s ability to focus distinctly on one stimuli to

Day by day, if one were to consistently voluntarily restrict their sleeping hours, he or she would gradually build up what is referred to as “sleep debt”. Sleep debt defines the cumulative effect of reduced sleep hours. (Dinges et al., 1997) The more and more the sleep debt grows from not getting a single good night’s rest, the more moody, irritable, and incoherent a person can get. While there are no limits to the extent of how moody, irritable, and incoherent someone can become, there gets to a certain point where a person’s awareness of how tired or sleepy he or she is goes down. In addition to that, increased sleep debt has also resulted in a decrease in the responsiveness of cognitive brain functions. This phenomena is what is being described and what occurred in the introductory anecdote above. It was not because of the body genuinely feeling less tired and drowsy more so was it that the awareness of the hypothetical person to recognize how tired he/she was has gone down. In reality, it will take more than a few hours to fully recover from sleep deprivation. Based on a study focusing on the effects of cumulative sleep debt, a sample size of 16 adults were chosen and were forced to sleep approximately 5 hours each night, well under the recommended average. (Dinges et al., 1997) The results of this study show that there is

Have you ever been told to “sleep on it” when confronted with a serious decision? The study done by Seeley, C. J., Beninger, R. J., & Smith, C. T. titled “Post Learning Sleep Improves Cognitive-Emotional Decision-Making: Evidence for a ‘Deck B Sleep Effect’ in the Iowa Gambling Task” sets out to answer if sleeping helps improve decision making. For this study, they used the “Iowa Gambling Task (IGT)” on participants. After the IGT, participants had 12 hours of being awake, 12 hours of sleep, or 12 hours of sleep followed by 12 hours of being awake before taking the IGT again. This experiment is important because it would show if we make better decisions after sleeping on it. For important decisions, such as laws, business decisions, and even jury decisions, we want the best results, and sleeping on these decisions may provide better results. The main questions the researchers tried to answer were when starting out do people choose the deck with a more constant chance of winning, when learning more about the game do people change their choices, and does sleeping after the first session improve the participant’s performance in the next session. Their hypothesis, based on their previous experiments, was that initially more participants would choose from decks B and D, but after they learn more about the game they will start to choose more cards from decks C and D. They also hypothesized that sleeping after learning about the game would improve their results for the next

To find out how sleep deprivation affects humans, Dement (1960) connected participants of his study to an electroencephalogram in his sleep laboratory. The participant got woken up any time they showed signs of entering REM sleep. I was found that REM sleep deprivation made test participants more aggressive and suffered from poor concentration than the control group. They also tried to enter REM sleep straight after going to sleep. They made 26 attempts to enter REM sleep by the seventh night. It is to conclude that REM sleep is necessary for proper brain functioning as the brain goes into REM rebound, when deprived of

Sleep is crucial for the stability of one’s mind, body, and temper. When an individual enters a sleep deprivation they tend to have exhaustion, irritability, and an inability to focus that can only be remedied by several nights of healthy sleep. The healthy

Sleep deprivation is associated with considerable social, financial, and health-related costs, in large measure because it produces impaired cognitive performance due to increasing sleep propensity and instability of waking neurobehavioral functions. Cognitive functions particularly affected by sleep loss include psychomotor and cognitive speed, vigilant and executive attention, working memory, and higher cognitive abilities. Chronic sleep-restriction experiments—which model the kind of sleep loss experienced by many individuals with sleep fragmentation and premature sleep curtailment due to disorders and lifestyle—demonstrate that cognitive deficits accumulate to severe levels over time without full awareness by the affected individual. Functional

Sleep deprivation is a phenomena which has been extensively studied on its own, but the effects of sleep deprivation on cognition and working memory in particular have been an area of interest to a lot of researchers. The research done on this topic has collectively found that sleep deprivation has detrimental affects on cognition. Studies such as the experiment conducted by Joo, Yoon, Koo, Kim, and Hong in 2012 outline how sleep deprivation can result in deficits in cognition. The study explored how 24 hours of wakefulness affects cognitive functioning and stress hormones (Joo, Yoon, Koo, Kim, & Hong, 2012). In this study participants underwent electroencephalographic monitoring while performing a test which consisted of responding

Sleep is essential to life, as it can affect how we look, feel and perform on a daily basis. Sleep deprivation can have a major impact on our overall quality of life. On average, we spend a third of our life asleep. Sleep regenerates our brains and bodies, and without it we cannot function effectively. During sleep the body undergoes several physiological and psychological processes; processing information, learning and consolidating memories. New knowledge about the importance of sleep, the health consequences of chronic sleep deprivation, and sleep disorders has suffered in recent years. Chronic sleep loss and untreated sleep disorders have a profound and diverse impact on health, behavior, and quality of life (Robotham, 2011).

Of the many automatic functions that the human mind is hardwired to perform, from blinking, to breathing, sleep is by far one of the most imperative. A process that allows mind and body alike to rest, recuperate, and repair, sleep is something that is truly essential for our continued survival, to an extent, as more than a day or two without it can have adverse and potentially crippling side effects. Without sleep, our brain operates at a far less advanced level, struggling to process and internalise information, and making less intellectually sound decisions as a result, demonstrating why a reasonable amount of sleep per night is something that everyone must strive to achieve, so that one can stay on top of the day to day challenges that life so frequently poses. However, as universal as the idea of sleep may be, there is one aspect of the process that is often

How well did you sleep last night?  It may be affecting your day more than you think.  For thousands of us firefighters our night at work may be hurting our performance, our health, and our way of life.  This is a relatively new issue that needs more focus on since it effects so many individuals in this job.  Sleep deprivation is linked with increased errors in completing various tasks, quick decision-making, and the ability to think critically. Too many work hours often are associated with chronic sleep loss, which may result in decreased ability to think clearly, handle stress and become tough to work with.  This study of the effects of sleep deprivation is important for many reasons. This is important fact is the due to the lack of adequate

Sleep is a necessity in which, its value has been undercut. People of all ages, from college students, to middle-aged adult, have experienced the effect of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation is has poisoned the positive affects sleep has on ones life. In order to challenge the effects of sleep deprivation and study its effect on me, I conducted an experiment designed by James B. Mass. This experiment was created in 1991 to help students determine if they were truly sleep deprived. Out of the 15 questions posed on the sleep quiz, I answered true to two of them. The first true statement was “ I need an alarm clock in order to wake up at the appropriate time. The second true statement was “I often fall asleep after heavy meals or after a low dose of alcohol.” Based on the results of Mass’s sleep assessment, I am not sleep deprived. Although the results were positive, I feel at times I get small doses of drowsiness and small burst of stress displayed throughout the week.

Sleep deprivation has a profound impact on all aspects of a person’s life including mental health and brain function. This paper delves into the effect of sleep on a multitude of diseases along with common problems such as memory loss. It shines a light on the damage done to brain chemicals due to a lack of sleep and its effects on depression along with why sleep deprivation is beginning to ravish the country overall.