Sleepy savings

There is no point in postponing holidays until the weekend.

The natural desire for a modern city dweller living in the fast pace of life to sleep off on the weekend is self-deception, and quite dangerous at that. It will still be impossible to force an organism accustomed to chronic lack of sleep to compensate for the hours stolen from sleep by work, traffic jams, household chores or TV. This disappointing conclusion, Science Daily reports, was reached by American researchers from the Center for Sleep and Circadian Rhythm Biology at Northwestern University (Illinois), studying the relationship between the lack of proper rest and the occurrence of psychological and physiological pathologies. It is clear that, proving the importance of the discovery, neuroscientists tried to explain the occurrence of many serious health problems among residents of industrialized countries by reducing sleep. “We believe that when the human body is deprived of adequate sleep over a long period of time, it predisposes the body to changes in the function of many physiological systems,” said Aaron Laposky, one of the study’s authors and a researcher at the Sleep Center.

Professor Laposki recalled that in the USA, for example, a gradual reduction in the hours allocated for rest was accompanied by an increase in the body mass index of the country's residents. Previously, this phenomenon was attributed solely to poor nutrition and a sedentary lifestyle. Now, it is possible that there will be other explanations. Indeed, according to scientists, over the past forty years, nighttime sleep in the United States has decreased by an average of an hour, and today Americans spend no more than six hours a day in bed. A similar phenomenon is observed in most other countries with predominantly urban populations. For example, in Russia, according to the Moscow City Sleeping Center, over the last century the total sleep time during the night has decreased by more than 20%. In large cities, people who sleep no more than four to five hours are no longer “white owls”, and they themselves, it seems to them, do not feel the need for additional rest.

American researchers who conducted experiments on rats actually proved that the mammalian body quickly adapts to a new daily rhythm. In just a week, rats that were deprived of sleep for 20 hours a day adapted to this regime. If in the first days the body tried to compensate for the reduced time for rest with deeper sleep, as evidenced by sensors installed to record brain activity, then at the end of the experiment, none of the animals even tried to catch up and sleep longer, although the conditions fully allowed this. Professor Fred Turek, who led the study, considers this evidence that mammals are, in principle, able to regulate their body's need for sleep in situations where sleep is either simply impossible, or wakefulness is the main condition for survival.

However, scientists are still concerned about a person’s desire to voluntarily drive his body into a stressful situation, which, in essence, is prolonged physical activity with short breaks for sleep. Chronic lack of sleep, Turek is convinced, can cause irritability and decreased performance. In fact, this is confirmed by other studies - for example, a sociological survey among European office workers, in which more than 20 thousand people were involved, showed that almost every fourth seeks to snatch an hour of sleep right at their desk. However, scientists believe that a reduction in sleep provokes more serious problems than involuntary yawns during the working day - pathological changes in the psyche and even disruptions in the circulatory system.

Fedor SEREBRYANSKY