For many of us sleep is one of life’s greatest pleasures. For others, it represents a nightly struggle; because we as Americans push our schedules to the brink, we suffer the consequences of sleep deprivation. Despite spending one-third of our lives in slumber, scientists still aren’t certain what sleep is exactly and why we must do it every night. What is clear: Sleep impacts virtually every aspect of our lives, from our mood to the of our functioning of our organs.
The one-third of our lives that we spend sleeping, is far from being “unproductive,” it plays a direct role in how full, energetic, and successful the other two-thirds of our lives can be; but also, how we live interferes with our different sleep patterns. The different changes in structure and tasks of our brains during development have a great impact on our sleeping patterns. Per the Division of Sleep
While maybe having a lamp or tv on during the night delays the phase of our internal clocks and thus leads us to prefer later sleeping times; waking up to light in the middle of the night has unpredictable effects and causes our internal clocks to be at rest and makes it a lot more difficult to return to sleep. Products with high amounts of caffeine in them also decreases a persons quality of sleep because it blocks out a chemical called adenosine. Adenosine builds up in the brain during wakefulness, and the receptors are temporarily blocked by caffeine, and because of this the nerve receptors cannot sense adenosine in the presence of caffeine, they maintain their activity and we stay awake. Thus is sleep does occur after the intake of caffeine, the quantity of slow wave sleep and REM sleep will decrease, while the number of awakenings will increase. ( Healthy sleep par 10) Your sleep environment can also have a significant influence on
Caffeine raises your blood pressure when you drink/eat it, raising your blood pressure in general is not a good thing but imagine drinking and/or eating caffeine daily, and your blood pressure constantly rising. Another negative aspect is that caffeine can have a disruptive effect on your sleep. The most obvious effect of the caffeine is that it can make it hard for you to fall asleep. It can help you stay awake during the day but can also make you stay awake during the night when you are trying to fall asleep. You can also have withdraws from caffeine, going back to the story “Java Man” the author Malcolm Gladwell considered it a drug and remember you can get addicted to drugs (you can really get addicted to anything). There are plenty more negative ways caffeine can disrupt your lifestyle but you know what they say for every negative thing you can say there can be some
When most people think of sleep, they think of it as a relaxed but yet not a very important part of our daily lives. What most people don’t understand is although we are not up and moving around and getting tasks completed, our brains are still very active. Without sleep our bodies do not function correctly on a daily basis, and our mental state is at risk.
Sleep is one of our basic needs to survive and to function in day to day operations, but not everyone needs the same amount of sleep. Some people can survive on very little sleep, i.e. five hours a night, and some people need a lot of sleep, to the extend that they are sleeping up to 10 to sometimes 15 hours a night (Nature, 2005). According to Wilson (2005) the general rule states that most people need from seven to eight hours of sleep. The deprivation of sleep in our society in continually increasing with the demands in society increasing work loads, the myth that a few hours of sleep is only necessary to function properly and that sleep is sometimes considered as killing time (Nature, 2005). Sometimes sleep deprivation is also caused by other situations like sleep disorders, i.e. sleep apnea, chronic insomnia or medical conditions such as stress (Wilson, 2005).
Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard, . "Why do we sleep anyway?" Healthy Sleep. WGBH Educational Foundation, 2008. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.
The brain is the most important organ in the body and without it life would not exist. In a metaphorical sense, the brain can be thought of as a master computer. Functions of the brain include physical behavior, emotion, learning capability and memory. Since the beginning of scientific exploration, the brain has been a significant area of interest and its complexity still puzzles scientists today. New research methods and advances in technology have allowed humans to understand more about the brain within the past 10 years than in the preceding centuries (Brain Basics, 2013.) Research on the role of sleep in brain functionality shows surprising promise. The amount and quality of sleep an individual receives effects learning ability and the risk of developing brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Sleep is a behavior universal to all people, yet it remains largely a mystery. Chronic sleep deprivation has become rampant throughout western society, for a number of reasons. The aim of this research is to investigate the effects of sleep deprivation, with major objectives being to identify what sleep is, and the reasons for sleep. An emphasis is also placed on the effect, symptoms, causes and ways to combat sleep deprivation. These areas are of particular interest to those seeking to investigate sleep deprivation, or individuals who suffer from sleep deprivation by investigating the symptoms, causes and strategies to combat sleep deprivation.
Caffeine on this energy drink blocks the effects of adenosine, a brain chemical that helps you sleep which is why too much can lead to insomnia.
Sleeping is something that is an essential part of human nature and is a must in order for one to be a functional human being. Sleep is an idea that is accompanied by many wives’ tales, including the idea that one needs seven to eight hours of sleep each night and alcohol helps one fall asleep and sleep more soundly. One myth about sleep is that during sleep, one is in a state of nothingness. In truth, however, it has been discovered that during sleep the brain is active, variations in heartbeat and breathing occur, and the eyes and ears are active throughout the time of sleep. These activities during a person’s sleep are important because they help that person be more aware, awake, and alert during sleep.
Each night, the average person spends approximately 7-9 hours giving their bodies a restful vacation in the land of dreams. Considering this, we spend 1/3 (or 25 years) of our entire lives engaging in this idle activity. Although these numbers can appear as a waste of time in our every day lives, sleeping and/or napping is the energy that helps fuel our bodies to function correctly. Sleep is a necessary function in our every day routine in order to make our brains function at the most efficient level. As we sleep, the brain helps us to recuperate and regain strength by “restoring and repairing the brain tissue” (Myers, 2010, p 99). Without this reviving process, we would all eventually deteriorate. By impairing the sleep deprived mentally and physically, it can potentially cause serious harm. We must fade our conscious mind, and let our mind relax within subconscious state.
Stimulants raise the level of nervous activity in the body increasing things such as: heart rate and breathing rate. Take cocaine as an example, it floods the brain with dopamine causing wakefulness. But after the effects of the drug wear off one of cocaine’s side effects is disrupted REM sleep. A recent study in the long term effects of cocaine actually show that prolonged use can disrupt the user's circadian rhythm. The drug does this by messing with the genes that encode the user’s circadian rhythm. A common misinterpretation of cocaine and sleep’s relationship is that after heavy cocaine use, the users usually “crash” which is very similar to passing out. The users then say they feel well rested, but this is where the misinterpretation takes place. This is because cocaine users commonly display delusional confidence. Probably the greatest distributor of sleep out of all the drugs whether illegal or not, is caffeine. “Fifty-four percent of Americans over the age of eighteen drink coffee everyday,” (“National Coffee Drinking Trends,” 2010). With more than half of the adults in America drinking coffee it is safe to say coffee runs the country. But coffee if drank at the wrong time is the enemy of sleep. Caffeine is not easily broken down in the body. “The half life of caffeine in healthy adults is 5.7 hours. This means if you consume 200mg of caffeine at mid-day, you would still have 100mg in you at around 5.45pm,” (“The Half Life of Coffee,” 2016). This is a problem considering many Americans work a “nine to five job” and have caffeine intake throughout that time. The correct time to cut off caffeine should be before 2 o’clock, which for most is not the case, even a small amount could have harmful effects on
As side from that, excess caffeine can also overstimulate the central nervous system, disrupting sleeping patterns. High amounts of caffeine produce negative effect on sleep onset and quality. However, there are large individual differences in the effects of caffeine on sleep. Many people consume coffee during the evening and have no problems falling asleep, while others find that the mild stimulation of caffeine consumed shortly before a bed time delays the time to fall asleep.
Important public policy issues have arisen in our modern 24-hour society, where it is crucial to weigh the value of sleep versus wakefulness. Scientific knowledge about sleep is currently insufficient to resolve the political and academic debates raging about how much and when people should sleep. These issues affect almost everybody, from the shift worker to the international traveler, from the physician to the policy maker, from the anthropologist to the student preparing for an exam.
However, green tea may bring us undesirable outcomes due to some constituents. Caffeine is one of those substances that is diuretic and reduces the fatigue sensation but the consequences of overconsumption are well proved that it will decrease sleeping duration and worsen sleeping quality by inducing sleeplessness (Suzuki et al., 2012). A study found out that tea intake of university students was significantly linked to sleeping quality (Cheng et al., 2012). However, the types of tea were not investigated. The effect of green tea consumption on sleep quality is still not well documented.
Preview: The potential effects are related to the main ingredient in coffee – caffeine. Caffeine is a drug that stimulates the central nervous system that increases alertness and energy, but it is also very addictive.
In my daily life, I do not regard sleep with high importance. I am aware that I do not sleep enough and it is a trend I have been aiming to alter for some time now. I first tried coffee about three years ago when I was fourteen years old. Since then, I have made this form of caffeine my solution to suppress my need for sleep. I enjoy being busy and constantly occupied which is why I indulge in stimulants. I have always been a procrastinator which I know is the cause for my lack of sleep. As a high school student, I often find myself pulling all-nighters that are