Are You a Sleep Deprived Zombie?

By: Royane Real Click author's name for more of his/her articles

Are you getting enough sleep? Or do you just drag yourself through your days, drinking down lots of coffee to keep going, until you fall into bed again late at night, exhaused?

If this describes you, you’re not alone. Many people living in modern industrial societies suffer from a chronic, and worsening sleep deficit.

Most of us today live a life that our bodies weren’t designed for. We eat a lot of artificial foods that our bodies don’t recognize, and we don’t pay attention to our body rhythms. In particular, we override our body’s need for sleep.

Until just a few decades ago, most people lived very different lives than we do. The majority of people lived in small villages or on farms, not in big cities. There were no electric lights. There weren’t any faxes or e-mails.

There was no Internet, and no television. Once the sun went down, most of the day’s activities came to an end.

People worked very hard physically, and only a very small minority had what we would call “white collar” jobs. And most people, on average, slept nine to nine and a half hours each night.

For most of us today, an average of nine hours sleep each night is an impossible dream. In our very busy schedules, something has to give, and quite often the choice many of us are making is to cut back on our hours of sleep.

Unfortunately, this new pattern of sleeplessness goes against our body’s needs in most cases.

Sure, there’s a few of us who only need five or six hours of sleep each night, but those people are in a minority. Most of us require seven, eight, or even more hours of good quality sleep every night in order to function at our best intellectually, physically and emotionally.

In sleep deprivation experiments conducted on volunteers, it has been found that even a few days of sleep loss produce a marked negative effect on a person’s mental abilities. It becomes much harder to focus mentally and to process information. Decisions take longer to make, and are of poorer quality. Learning and remembering new information becomes more difficult, and it becomes harder to recall information that was previously learned.

Creativity declines, while mistakes increase.

A person who hasn’t had enough restorative sleep will have difficulty handling technical machinery. In addition, lack of sleep causes emotional impairment and difficulty with mental processing. As people become more sleep deprived, they may experience more depression and mood swings.

If you add to these examples the many hundreds of thousands of other accidents every year caused by sleep deprivation, it becomes clear that cutting back on our sleep may not really be the solution for greater productivity we are looking for.

If you are studying for important exams, you will be better off getting sufficient sleep the night before, rather than spending the whole night desperately trying to cram more information into your head. Your brain uses its sleeping hours to process the information of the day and to consolidate new memories. Cutting back on sleep in order to study instead will interfere with this process.

If you want to be more creative and productive in your life, you may find that getting more sleep each night is the missing ingredient you need to function better!

Article Source: ABC Article Directory

About The Author: This article is taken from the new downloadable book by Royane Real titled "How to Be Smarter - Use Your Brain to Learn Faster, Remember Better, and Be More Creative". To learn more about how you can improve your brain power, download it today at www.lulu.com/real