Saturday, March 6, 2021

Health Note- Sleep Depravation

Beloved,
 I wish above all things that thou mayest... be in health...
3 John 1:2
 
"The effects of acute sleep deprivation—which is more akin to pulling an all-nighter than to getting just a few hours of sleep every night for weeks at a time (that’s chronic sleep deprivation)—generally kick in after 16 to 18 hours of being awake and get progressively worse with each proceeding hour. Your mind, heart, endocrine system, and immune system are all affected,
malfunctioning in ways both subtle and severe
.

The consequences of chronic sleep deprivation are far worse than one sleepless night. But the decision to pull an all-nighter just once can leave some serious damage in its wake. 

The first signal that your body is overtired will be a sluggish mind. Your reaction time will begin lagging around hour 18; after a full night without sleep, it will nearly triple—which, for context, is about the same as being legally drunk. Your ability to form memories will start deteriorating, and after a while, your capacity to create any new memories at all will shut off entirely. 

 “It’s almost as though without sleep, the memory inbox of the brain shuts down,” Matthew Walker, a UC-Berkeley professor and author of Why We Sleep, told Business Insider. “So those new incoming informational emails are just bounced.” 

Stay up longer than 24 hours and your brain, now in panic mode, will soon take over and force sleep upon you. “You’re basically going to have microsleeps,” Feinsilver says. Though you will appear to be awake—walking, talking, eyes open—your brain will quite literally put itself to sleep for ten to 20 seconds at a time.

During these microsleeps, you can’t process what you’re seeing

around you. “We say during sleep you are cortically blind—your brain does not process visual information,” Feinsilver says. “Your brain goes on on autopilot. So, if you’re driving, you might realize that you missed your exit and don’t remember the last ten minutes. And that’s really scary stuff, because it means you’ve been asleep for moments when you really should be awake.” 

Stay up for longer than 35 hours and your emotional mind will start behaving irrationally. When you’re up for that long, the emotion-emitting amygdala becomes 60 percent more reactive to negative stimuli or experience, while also limiting communication with the part of the brain that regulates emotion and contextualizes experiences. In other words, you’re more reactive and judgmental to the people and events around you, and your brain loses its natural ability to run things through a filter or any internal voice of reason.

Stay up for longer than 48 hours and you’re looking at behavior that mimics psychosis—incoherent rambling, disconnection from reality, prone to outbursts. Push yourself longer than a few days without sleep, and the effects can be lethal. The exact ways in which sleep deprivation can cause you to die aren’t entirely understood, but researchers believe it has to do with your mind losing its ability to control life-giving processes and the total disruption of your system that results." PocketWorthy