Each of us knows that lack of sleep is harmful to health. The lack of "sleepy hours" affects the concentration, mood, physiological parameters of the body. American scientists have found that lack of sleep at night is the most harmful. You can stay awake for a long time, but sleep at night is a must. If you do not get enough sleep chronically, then the response time to an external factor or factors is more than doubled.
Sleep helps the body to recover - in particular, the balance of nerve cells is balanced, the work of neurons is reorganized, and long-term memory is improved. All this only works normally if a person sleeps at least seven hours a day. In any case, the American Academy of Medicine says so. If not, the body can go astray.
However, few of us can sleep for 7 hours or more. As a result, the body is very tired, does not have time to rest and the consequences are manifested. In particular, labor productivity is greatly reduced. Those people who do not get enough sleep, become less able to concentrate attention, misjudge the course of various events. This can lead to problems with relationships with friends or at work.
Whatever it was, but previously, scientists did not understand very well what exactly is a problem for a person = lack of sleep or too long wakefulness. Whatever the cause of the problem, it leads to the fact that people become more distracted, make mistakes, misinterpret those or other actions of friends and acquaintances. Sometimes this leads to significant conflicts, the causes of which are very minor, and they themselves flare up because of the emotional instability of chronically not getting enough sleep.
Earlier, biologists have found that sleep is not just beautiful pictures or the assimilation of information obtained during the day. At night, during sleep, the body restores the metabolic equilibrium of neurons, optimizes the structure of synapses, and the formation of long-term memory occurs. All these processes are performed only when sleep lasts more than 7 hours. That is why national and international health organizations
indicate just such a duration of healthy sleep.
Naturally, many people fail to sleep for 7 hours, because there are too many responsibilities for a modern person. Some work not for 8 hours, as is customary, but for 12-14-18 hours. Having come home from work, the person starts working again. As a result, not fully rested person is more difficult to concentrate, it is difficult to analyze external factors objectively, the work that could be done in an hour in a normal situation, stretches for several hours.
In order to understand what influences a person more - lack of sleep at night or too much time spent in active mode (with sleep, for example, in the daytime) scientists from Harvard Medical School decided
to conduct an experiment . A team of experts led by Elizabeth B. Klerman conducted a series of experiments involving volunteers aged 25-26. They were asked to sleep at night for 7-9 hours before the experiment.
Next, the volunteers organized an artificial "ecosystem" in a room with electric lighting. The duration of the day volunteers was about 20 hours. To live in this mode was supposed to be about 32 days.
Participants in the experiment were divided into two groups. The first for a month slept for 4.67 hours and remained active 15.33 hours. The second one slept for about 6.77 hours, and was awake for about 13 hours. The light in the room was turned off only when the "night" came. The mode of the day, chosen by scientists, was to demonstrate the effect of the duration of activity on a person’s well-being and the state of his body.
For all 32 days, volunteers were tested for attentiveness and concentration. As it turned out, the lack of sleep approximately doubles the reaction time to external factors and increases as much as five times inattention. At the same time, the participants in the experiment themselves felt that everything was fine, and they worked as well as always.
Experts found out that the subjects'
circadian rhythms remained the same, so even when people woke up “during the day” (and in fact it was night), they could not normally concentrate on the tasks. Perhaps 32 days is too short a time to modify circadian rhythms. But in general, they did not change, not going on artificially defined conditions.
Previous experiments of the same specialists showed that if a person gets enough sleep, having spent at rest about 10 hours, then even a very long period of wakefulness (20 hours or more) does not affect or has almost no effect on working capacity.
So once again scientists have proven that not getting enough sleep is bad for your health.