Are You Sleep Deprived?

Do you often feel like a walking zombie during the day? If you are not getting enough sleep, chances are you are not functioning at full capacity, which can be detrimental to your health and dangerous to yourself and others around you , not to mention it can lessen the quality of everything you do, and how you enjoy or don't enjoy your day to day existence.

Judgment in a sleep deprived person can be seriously lowered, particularly in situations where both good physical and mental function is required. Take driving for example. Suffering from sleep deprivation is very similar to being drunk. An overly tired individual will perform at a much lower driving skill level and their efficiency can be influenced by such an amount that they react much the way a person over the legal limit for alcohol consumption does. Now that's a scary thought. Over 100, 000 accidents per year are caused by people dozing off at the wheel.

Dozing off for just a few seconds, while driving, can be fatal. Imagine something like sitting in commute traffic or while on a long driving trip and losing focus for merely a few moments, and what could happen if you did.

When suffering from sleep deprivation, a person may take risks they would not consider with a more alert mind.

A person with sleep deprivation may lack energy and not be able to function at full capacity, when they need to. Dragging through a day like that feels as if you are a ball and chain through mud.

It can make you unable to fully focus and affect your short term memory of given event or situation. If you have ever felt so tired that everything just seems to blur together, then you know how lack of sleep can make your mind react.

Moods are influenced too, often making people irritable and impatient and hard to reason with. Look at how cranky an overly tired child gets, and nothing but getting them to bed and rest will alleviate those horrible moods.

Physical symptoms can include things like pasty skin, sore and achy muscles, and those muscles and other body parts are not getting the sleep necessary to rejuvenate themselves. Headaches are also common in sleep deprived people. These just get more agitated the more you continue to be sleep deprived.

Psychologically lack of enough sleep can cause increased stress, anxiety and can also feed into conditions like depression. These can be cyclical, like a dog chasing its' own tail. You are worrying, so you don't sleep, so you worry some more and don't sleep. It starts feeding on itself until you are exhausted.

There is even some concern that lack of sleep may cause weight gain in some individuals. Hormone levels which control your appetite can change from sleep deprivation.

How much sleep do you need?

The rules are not hard and fast or set in stone, but every person needs enough sleep to enable their minds, emotions and bodies to function properly.

After infancy a growing child's sleep needs vary. Daytime sleep from napping may range from no nap, to 3 or so hours of sleep in children under 5 years of age and 10 to 13 hours of nighttime sleep.

Older children 6 to 8 years of age need less, but still need a fair amount, ranging from 9 to 12 hours of sleep per night.

Even as a teenager, most can easily sleep 9 or 10 hours each night.

If a child is often overly hyper or cranky, particularly at bedtime when they should be winding down, has difficulty being woken up in the morning, falls asleep while riding in the car, and so forth, then chances are he or she needs more sleep and on a regular basis. Lack of sleep can affect school work, the ability to learn and absorb what they learn and also lower concentration in class.

An adult obviously needs less sleep. Ideally 7 to 9 hours is probably the best, but people do vary in their sleep needs, but we do each have a daily individual sleep requirement and not meeting that requirement, can make us react in any or all of the previously mentioned ways.

Much of modern society is seriously sleep deprived on an ongoing basis.

Sleep deprivation can be caused by a large variety of factors, and can include anything from stress, overwork, constant travel, medications, worry, diet, noise, and so forth. Stimulants like caffeine, and even excess sugar can keep you from relaxing enough to get suffiencient and continous sleep. Even alcohol, which is considered a depressant, can change your sleep cycles enough to make what sleep you do get, inefficient.

Anything that disrupts sleep and normal rhythms of sleep, on a continual basis, can create a vicious cycle of stress and no sleep, that takes on a life of it's own. That can make it hard for you to function properly and in the best ways you can, which makes functioning normally, day to day, difficult.

The best treatments of course, would be to remove the things that are causing the sleep disturbances, but since much of what happens is caused externally, that isn't always that easy. If you are stressing about bills, your child is sick, you have exams coming up, you've lost a loved one, someone hurt you in some way , work is overwhelming you, you are sick, and so forth, those are often beyond our control. If you have a bunch of things eating at you at once, it can really set sleep deprivation in motion.

Exercise earlier in the day, help some, or eating or drinking something to help you relax, not long before bedtime might help.

There are both over the counter and prescription medications, but those can be habit forming or lose some of their kick after awhile, plus things like grogginess the next morning can be detrimental when trying to function the following day. They can also disrupt normal sleep patterns.

There are the timeless classics that many people swear by, like herbal teas with no caffeine or a cup of warm milk.

Putting work out of sight, and sleeping in a space not cluttered with things that need to be done, right in front of you, may be a good idea too. Make your surroundings conducive to sleep.

Calming music, white noise, like a fan running or prerecorded white noise tapes, help to block out external noises and create a monotonous rhythm that can help you unwind.

If you can get a good backrub, foot or hand massage, those can help too.

Relaxing and allowing yourself to zone out in a nice warm bath, reading a good book or writing in a journal to release some of what is in your mind.

Make a list of things that need to be done, then set it aside and let it rest for awhile, so you can too.

If you are emotionally overwhelmed, seek counseling from a therapist, minister/priest/pastor and so forth or even talk to a friend or family member to let out some of what is making you stress and worry. If it is something really bad like a death or serious illness or a something you cant share, find other ways to get some of it out or put it aside, if you can, just for awhile, and get some sleep. You may be able to handle it better with a little more sleep. It may not make it go away, but it may help you function better.

Sleep deprivation has been used as a vehicle for obtaining information, as part of a technique in torture, so that tidbit alone shows how important good sleep is to function optimally. Whatever you need to do, get some rest and try to make what rest you do get, the best possible.