Importance of sleep

i feel for you. my youngest is working on 4 new teeth and is up every 2-3 hours at night. i get more than 5 hours at night, but not more than 3 or 4 in a stretch. hope you catch up and are back into the swing of things soon!

Studies in army recruits as well as regular civilian volunteers living under non-distracting conditions for several weeks have shown that everyone needs pretty much the same amount of sleep, and the range is much smaller than 7-9 hours a night. It's more like 7:45 to 8:15 hours a night. They also showed that every hour of sleep deprivation that was accumulated needs to be paid back hour for hour. These studies lasted only 2 weeks, so there is no information on what a lifestyle of chronic sleep deprivation brings, except extreme fatigue and so forth.

The bottom line, and I am speaking as someone who is used to MAJOR sleep deprivation taking 36 hour hospital shifts every 72 hours during the worst months of my residency... Is that if you get 5 hours of sleep a night for only one week, you have 7* (8-5) or 21 hours of sleep to catch up on. So do not feel bad about sleeping in on the weekends, your body will thank you for it. The practice of not sleeping in and getting up on the weekends at the same time as you do during the week assumes that you are not sleep deprived. I have been known to sleep for nearly 24 hours straight when I get 2 days off in a row.

My source for the Army Recruit studies is from a book called, "The Promise of Sleep," an excellent and easily understandable read on the topic, written by one of the men who "discovered" REM sleep when he worked in a sleep lab as a medical student. He subsequently spent his entire professional career doing sleep research like the studies I mentioned above. It is a powerful book and has changed the way I look at sleep, sleep deprivation, sleep defecit and insomnia.

Edited by AdventureBear 2005-03-05 11:39 PM

I am no expert on this topic but I know I can't function at all with sleep deprivation, workouts or anything else....I need to make it up and soon...if you can make it up, do so....naps are great...little point suffering through it....

Does anyone have any ideas regarding what effect cat/power/afternoon naps have on the sleep deprivation cycle? Can you have a sleep during the day to counteract what you might have missed during the night?

Because I work in the afternoon into the evening I am able to get a nap in pretty much whenever I want and I find that it is very helpful for me. I was working out at night for about 1.5 hours. I would get home around 2-2:30 a.m. and sometimes couldn't fall asleep until 4. It was hurting my training and just my life completely. I maintained this schedule for over a year. Last week I made a switch and no more workouts after my job, it is straight home and into bed. I am still adjusting to getting more sleep but my workouts have improved. I am still going to take a 1/2 nap this week when I can because I am so use to them I can't stop them immediately.

Mike

I do think that there are times when you are in major "sleep debt" that an afternoon cat nap is good because you fall asleep almost instantly, and feel somewhat refreshed upon wakening. However, the time it takes to fall asleep directly correlates with how much sleep debt you have. The book I mentioned actually outliines sleep debt "tests", which involve trying to fall asleep four times throughout the day and timing how quickly it takes you to fall asleep by holding a spoon in your hand over a plate. The moment you fall asleep, the spoon falls to the plate, waking you up, then you check your stopwatch! Impractical for most of us!

I think the important thing to keep in mind is that we all still need around 8 hours of sleep per night, and the lost sleep still needs to be made up. The ability to actually take a cat nap/power nap, if you have the opportunity, implies serious sleep debt already.

My schedule in december involved a lot of night shifts, adn I found if I slept four hours upon getting home in the morning, and 3-4 hours right before going in at night, I was reasonably alert while awake and had the daylight hours to be very productive, including workouts (at that time just weights).