#health #sleep

#health   #sleep  

Originally shared by Allison Sekuler

Sleep: Why We Need It, and Why Society Won't Let Us Have It

Elizabeth Kolbert has a wonderful piece in The New Yorker  on the science of sleeplessness (http://goo.gl/0aL88), which describes, among other things, her own adventures in a sleep clinic (which, from personal experience, I can tell you gives you the worst night of sleep in your life!), along with a brief history of sleep patterns, and a description of how our modern school and work lives disrupt our natural (and historical) sleep patterns.

In her article, Kolbert describes how it used to be common to sleep in chunks throughout the day/night - taking naps, waking up and doing things in the middle of the night before going back to sleep again (she notes that Benjamin Franklin is reported to have enjoyed spending time in between his first and second bouts of night sleep reading naked in a chair.... ). With our current 9-5 workday, the old-fashioned approach to sleep simply isn't appreciated by most employers (or co-workers, or teachers) anymore, despite research showing that sleep deprivation can lead to decreased cognitive function (e.g., http://goo.gl/4DHqm and  http://goo.gl/ZE2W5). And the effects of sleep deprivation aren't limited to humans - even honeybees have difficulty navigating back to their hive after a sleepless night (http://goo.gl/xr2Er). 

But honeybees and other animals don't have to face the artificial locked-in-the-same-time approach we humans do. Animals typically arise when their circadian rhythms tell them to. We arise (or try to) when the alarm goes off.  And tomorrow, the first workday after the switch to Daylight Savings Time, many of us will have an even harder time getting up than usual. Although it's just one hour of sleep lost, it affects the health and function of many people, whether just through increased cyber-loafing (http://goo.gl/bNtYB) of by increased incidence of acute myocardial infarction (http://goo.gl/zNJWj). One might even ask: Is it time to end Daylight Savings Time?  http://goo.gl/dYHIY

Lynn Hasher and her colleagues have made a compelling case over the years that not only to different people have different best times of day (TOD), but also that how well you perform on a variety of perceptual and cognitive tasks depends on the time of day when you perform that task relative to your peak TOD, and the effect can be amplified as we get older (when performance normally starts to decline, e.g., http://goo.gl/RNnY5).  

You can check your own score on a Morningness-Eveningness Scale, similar to the one used by Hasher and colleagues in their work, here: http://goo.gl/YSzG7. I scored, as expected, squarely in the Eveningness category. Indeed, my own visit to the Sleep Centre several years ago led to the insightful diagnosis that I was "a night person, living in a day person's world." Yeah, super helpful :)

So wouldn't it be great for all us night people - and everyone else - if we could arrange our work (and school) schedules around our peak TODs rather than being ruled by a common clock? Think how much more productive we'd all be if we were awake.

   #daylightsavingstime   #ScienceSunday  (curated by me, Robby Bowles , Rajini Rao , Chad Haney and Buddhini Samarasinghe )

Illustration by Nishant Choksi, from the New Yorker article:   UP ALL NIGHT: The science of sleeplessness,   by Elizabeth Kolbert,  http://goo.gl/0aL88