Sleep Deprivation: What It Is and Why It Can Ruin Your Life

Like eating, drinking, and breathing, sleeping is a basic human need. Getting enough quality sleep at the right times can help protect your mental health, physical health, quality of life, and safety. Unfortunately, in today's fast-paced world, a good night's sleep has fallen down our list of priorities behind work, chores, social time, and entertainment.Countless people trade sleep for working at night, catching up on emails, scrolling through Facebook and Instagram, or bingeing on movies, and generally end up suffering from Sleep Deprivation - a condition where a person gets less than the needed amount of sleep.Scientific research is revealing how sleep deprivation can lead to an increase in errors at the workplace and decreased productivity. Sleep‌-‌deprived people experience reduced alertness and concentration and also have problems with balance, reflexes, coordination, and reaction time; as a result, they are more prone to accidents and errors that cost both lives and resources.The damage from sleep deprivation can occur in an instant (such as a car crash), or it can harm you over time. For example, ongoing sleep deprivation can raise your risk for some chronic health problems like hypertension, heart attacks, strokes, obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety, decreased brain function, memory loss, weakened immune system, lower fertility rates, and psychiatric disordersDespite the advances in our understanding of the importance of sleep for our mental and physical health, we continue to control our light environment through the simple flip of a switch. We continue using alarm clocks and planned schedules in the misguided belief that we can override our natural sleep needs. In other words, we seem to value our alarm clocks more than our internal clocks. We believe that we can comfortably live our lives outside the 24-hour light-dark cycle, and reverse our days and nights yet it is difficult to change our sleep habits and the "hands" of our "biological clocks" without consequences to our mental health and physical health, quality of life, and safety. Thus, an important challenge of our modern and fluid society is to be able to accommodate the 24-hour light-dark cycle and our sleep requirements in our personal and professional lives. I have written this book for the person who will be committed to doing just that. I hope that the information in it will help the reader gain awareness about how our stubborn and /or unwitting disregard of our sleep needs can ruin our lives.