Sleep Deprivation

10 Key excerpts on "Sleep Deprivation"

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  Human Fatigue Risk Management

  Improving Safety in the Chemical Processing Industry

  • Susan L. Murray, Matthew S. Thimgan(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  deprivation. Sleep. 2003 ; 26 (2) : 117 – 126. [59] Goel N, et al. Neurocognitive consequences of Sleep Deprivation. Semin Neurol. 2009 ; 29 (4) : 320 – 339. [60] Harrison Y, Horne JA. The impact of Sleep Deprivation on decision making: a review. J Exp Psychol Appl. 2000 ; 6 (3) : 236 – 249. [61] Killgore WD, Balkin TJ, Wesensten NJ. Impaired decision making following 49 h of Sleep Deprivation. J Sleep. Res. 2006 ; 15 (1) : 7 – 13. [62] Yoo SS, et al. The human emotional brain without sleep—a prefrontal amygdala disconnect. Curr Biol. 2007 ; 17 (20) : R877 – R878. [63] van der Helm E, Gujar N, Walker MP. Sleep Deprivation impairs the accurate recognition of human emotions. Sleep. 2010 ; 33 (3) : 335 – 342. [64] Troxel WM, et al. Marital quality and the marital bed: examining the covariation between relationship quality and sleep. Sleep Med. Rev. 2007 ; 11 (5) : 389 – 404. [65] Johnson EO, Roth T, Breslau N. The association of insomnia with anxiety disorders and depression: exploration of the direction of risk. J Psychiatr Res. 2006 ; 40 (8) : 700 – 708. [66] Dinges DF, et al. Cumulative sleepiness, mood disturbance, and psychomotor vigilance performance decrements during a week of sleep restricted to 4-5 hours per night. Sleep. 1997 ; 20 (4) : 267 – 277. [67] Goetzel RZ, et al. Health, absence, disability, and presenteeism cost estimates of certain physical and mental health conditions. affecting U.S. employers. J Occup Environ Med. 2004 ; 46 (4) : 398 – 412. [68] Kucharczyk ER, Morgan K, Hall AP. The occupational impact of sleep quality and insomnia symptoms. Sleep Med Rev. 2012 ; 16 (6) : 547 – 559. [69] Van Dongen HP, et al. Systematic interindividual differences in neurobehavioral impairment from sleep loss: evidence of trait-like differential vulnerability. Sleep. 2004 ; 27 (3) : 423 – 433. [70] Bachmann V, et al. Functional ADA polymorphism increases sleep depth and reduces vigilant attention in

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  Empower

  Improve your sleep, improve your health

  • Katharina Lederle(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Exisle Publishing

    (Publisher)

  But it’s not just shift workers who are affected. Anyone’s productivity and performance can be compromised through inadequate (i.e. insufficient and/or poor) sleep. Of those cognitive functions I mentioned earlier (and there are many more), which do you rely on in your workplace? Most if not all of them. Suppose you received an urgent request to review some data and had to make a decision on how to proceed. How much harder would it be to fully comprehend the situation and make that decision if you’d had only five hours’ sleep for the previous three nights compared to being fully rested? You might need a coffee to wake you up. You might find it difficult to make sense of the information and figure out the best way forward. You might miss a crucial piece of information. Misinterpreting the data, you might make a wrong decision. I think most of us have experienced similar situations when our cognitive performance was sub-optimal due to inadequate sleep.

  Sleep-deprived employees can affect a company’s financial success. Productivity loss resulting from presenteeism (at work but less productive) and absenteeism (not at work) due to sleeping, on average, less than six hours is 2.4 per cent higher than when workers sleep seven to nine hours (the recommended amount of sleep). According to a recent study, that’s about six working days lost per year through insufficient sleep compared to the productivity of workers who get a ‘normal’ amount of sleep. The same study suggests that Sleep Deprivation is costing the British economy £40 billion (1.86 per cent of its GDP) per year and in Germany it is £50 billion (or 1.56 per cent of its GDP). Taking into consideration the costs stemming from sleep-related health issues, it’s easy to see that the implications for the economy go beyond a ‘just sleep-deprived’ individual. They affect the wider society and warrant asking questions about our attitude to work and its sanctity.

  SLEEP AND COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE IN YOUR PERSONAL LIFE

  What about your personal life? To have a successful private life and to fully engage with your family and friends, the same cognitive abilities are needed. There are often problems to solve, sometimes several at the same time, requiring you to split your attention. An example might be when your children accuse each other of starting an argument — you need to be able to pay attention to what each is saying to make a ‘wise’ judgement. Or perhaps a friend wants to discuss with you how best to negotiate a promotion at work. Your willingness and ability to engage in a meaningful way will, among other things, depend on your cognitive processing capabilities. This is fine when you’re well rested, but if you’ve had a few nights of poor sleep, your motivation and ability to concentrate, listen and give sound advice won’t be at a level that’s helpful to your friend. This may put a strain on your friendship if your friend interprets your lack of motivation as a lack of interest in their career. Feeling hurt, they may decide not to turn to you for advice again. Equally, you might withdraw from the friendship as sleep loss is also known to affect mood (I’ll come to this in the next chapter).

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  Sleep and Health

  • Michael A. Grandner(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Introduction

  We live in a society that operates around the clock, often forgetting that sleep is important. In fact, insufficient sleep has become a public health epidemic and is often overlooked as a serious problem [1] . While the National Sleep Foundation recommends adults sleep > 7 h per night [2] , 35% of adults in the United States sleep less [3] . Most people have suffered from sleep loss, either chronic or acute, at some point in their lives whether it be due to a new baby, stress, studying for an exam, or other circumstances. However, many people fail to realize the negative impact sleep loss has on cognitive functioning and how this has far-reaching real-world implications. In fact, insufficient sleep is common in several safety-critical occupations, including medical professionals, military personnel, airline pilots, and truck drivers, just to name a few. Thus, it is important to understand how sleep loss impacts various aspects of cognition.

  The present chapter provides an overview of the effects of sleep loss on several major cognitive domains. First, it is important to discuss the underlying neurobiological mechanisms that regulate sleep and wake, and thus modulate cognitive performance. We must also appreciate that human cognitive capacities are complex, with higher-order processes (e.g., executive functions, decision-making) building upon a foundation of elementary processes (e.g., attention). Therefore, this chapter will offer a discussion of how sleep loss impairs alertness, sustained attention, and vigilance. Additionally, we will discuss the importance of considering how inter-individual differences are related to relative resistance or vulnerability to cognitive impairment. We will then build upon these elementary capacities and focus on the consequences that sleep loss has on several complex executive function domains including working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive control, problem solving, risk-taking, and decision-making.

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  The Natural Sleeper

  A Bedside Guide to Complementary and Alternative Solutions for Better Sleep

  • Julie Wright(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • S&S/Simon Element

    (Publisher)

  UNDERSTANDING SLEEP

  Passage contains an image

  WHY SHOULD WE CARE? THE IMPACT OF Sleep Deprivation

  We intuitively know and feel from our personal experience that sleep is good for us, further validating the scientific advice. Some of the negative consequences of Sleep Deprivation are obvious, while others are initially hidden and insidious. Sleep loss can be the direct cause of some medical or psychological conditions, or it may be correlated but not necessarily the cause. Either way, there is a bidirectional link between sleep and health, which we should not underestimate.

  What we do know is that a lack of sleep leads to poorer mental and physical performance, and a lower ability to concentrate, focus, reason, make good assessments or decisions, and solve problems. Unfortunately, this results in an impaired capacity to learn new things or access memories. Sleep Deprivation weakens our immune system, impacts our fertility, makes us irritable, and causes us to feel down, giving us a negative outlook on the day. It affects our appetite (generally increasing it), our motivation and willpower, and our exercise regime. We are likely to become more accident prone, more lethargic, and less proactive. By not getting enough sleep we are 3 to 5 times more likely to become depressed. Our ability to cope with stress and deal with pressurized situations is diminished. There are also serious long-term medical consequences of Sleep Deprivation, which have been scientifically linked to diseases such as cardiovascular illnesses, obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and some forms of cancer.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF SLEEP

  On the flipside, prioritizing sleep can lead to such positive outcomes and improve your life, setting you up for happiness and success. Quality sleep can help in so many ways, including:

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  An Occupational Therapist's Guide to Sleep and Sleep Problems

  • Andrew Green, Cary Brown(Authors)
  • 0(Publication Date)
  • Jessica Kingsley Publishers

    (Publisher)

  5 THE EFFECTS OF SLEEP AND SLEEP LOSS ON PERFORMANCE Andrew Green and Chris Alford 5.1 Introduction

  The associations between sleep loss and poor health are mentioned in Chapter 3 (see also Möller-Levet et al. 2013); these are long-term consequences, but sleep loss has consequences in the very short term. Although most people will have noticed a difficulty in concentrating, or just staying awake after a bad night, or when experiencing jet lag, we might not always be so aware of how much our performance is impaired by as little as one night’s poor sleep. This chapter therefore emphasizes the importance of sleep by focusing on the psychological and performance deficits that result from Sleep Deprivation. It shows why it is important to take patients’ sleep problems seriously and provides the evidence for advising caution when sleep is impaired – even if an individual does not complain of poor sleep.

  The mechanisms by which sleep deficit affects cognitive function are complex, but Alhola and Polo-Kantola (2007) suggest a broad two-way classification of theories whereby there are ‘general effects on alertness and attention or selective effects on certain brain structures and function’ (p.554). These theories are explored briefly before a more detailed look at some of the key performance areas that are affected by sleep loss: alertness in driving and similar tasks, and cognitive performance in memory and learning. Lastly, implications for clinical practice are considered.

  5.2 Mechanisms

  According to the wake-state instability hypothesis, lapses of attention result from the homeostatic pressure to sleep causing microsleeps* which have the characteristic electroencephalogram (EEG)* activity of sleep. This is in line with the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis (see Chapters 3 and 6 ), which suggests that if the brain is deprived of the chance to go offline in an orderly fashion in night-time sleep, certain parts will go offline in a more haphazard manner as wakefulness persists (Lucassen et al.

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  The Sleep Instinct

  • Ray Meddis(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The problem appears to be one of concentration. Sleep Deprivation undermines our ability to maintain concentration on a task which we could otherwise carry out quite well. This effect is quite marked for boring tasks but may be absent if the task is important or interesting. Wilkinson, of the Applied Psychology Research Unit in Cambridge, is one of the world’s experts at producing monotonous tests for sleep-deprived naval ratings to do. These last from fifteen minutes to an hour and may involve hundreds of simple additions or listening through earphones for a quiet signal which occurs only rarely against a background of cackle. It is difficult to maintain concentration on these tests at the best of times but they are especially difficult to do when sleep deprived. By contrast, he once devised an intellectually challenging battle-game. His sleep-deprived naval ratings were able to play this game for over an hour without showing any impairment due to their ordeal. The interest of the game was enough to help maintain their concentration.

  Experiments of this kind make it clear that Sleep Deprivation does not interfere directly with our ability to see, hear, think, remember or act. It does affect our performance by reducing our ability to concentrate on a task. As a consequence our mind wanders easily from the matter in hand causing us to make errors and to fail to notice that we are doing the wrong thing. Concentration depends upon motivation. If something is important enough or very interesting then we have little trouble in giving it our full attention. On the other hand if a task does not capture our interest then after a few minutes our attention wanders and mistakes are easily made. Sleep Deprivation works by lowering our motivation and, as a consequence, our ability to concentrate is impaired.

  Motivation does not disappear completely, it is merely reduced. It can still be revived by an exciting game or the arrival of a friend whose company is much enjoyed. An emergency can also shake a sleep-deprived soldier from his lethargy. The main difference is that events need to be even more stimulating than usual if they are to maintain attention for more than a few minutes. The more sleep- deprived the individual, the more quickly his motivation sags.

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  Modulation of Sleep by Obesity, Diabetes, Age, and Diet

  • Ronald Ross Watson(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Van Dongen, Maislin, Mullington, & Dinges, 2003 ). Because the probability of attentional lapses increases whenever sleep is reduced below an individual’s optimal range, any behavior that occurs during a sleep-restricted state can be considered as higher risk. Naturally, the magnitude of that risk will depend on the severity of the potential consequences from an attentional failure.

  In summary, high-risk behavior is more likely during periods of prolonged sleep loss because the degradation of simple attention increases the probability of making errors or missing critical information.

  Lack of Awareness of Deficits

  Risk-taking can occur because an individual fails to appreciate the potential hazards associated with their choice or behavior. For example, a person who has consumed several alcoholic beverages may attempt to drive home while intoxicated—an extremely risky activity—simply because the alcohol has affected their ability to judge the severity of their deficits. The behavioral effects of Sleep Deprivation have been frequently compared to those of alcohol intoxication and shown to produce similar levels of psychomotor impairment (Arnedt, Wilde, Munt, & MacLean, 2001 ; Dawson & Reid, 1997 ). In fact, several studies have now shown that the impairment associated with 24  h of total Sleep Deprivation is comparable to a blood alcohol concentration of approximately 0.10, which equals or exceeds the legal limit in all 50 states in the United States (Dawson & Reid, 1997 ; Williamson & Feyer, 2000 ).

  Sleep Deprivation, however, may actually share more in common with alcohol intoxication than simply an impairment of psychomotor responses. Just as an individual who is legally intoxicated may fail to appreciate the severity of their deficits, some evidence also suggests that sleep-deprived individuals may lack a full awareness of their impairments or level of actual sleepiness. For instance, Van Dongen et al. compared two groups of individuals differing in their objective (i.e., response time) vulnerability to sleep loss during 40  h of total Sleep Deprivation (Van Dongen, Maislin, & Dinges, 2004 ). Participants who had been selected to be more vulnerable to sleep loss showed severe increases in the number of attentional lapses during the 40-h vigil, while those selected to be less vulnerable were relatively stable over the same time period. However, despite the obvious differences in objective performance, these two groups reported their subjective sleepiness to be virtually identical on a 7-point sleepiness scale, suggesting that the worst performers were essentially unaware of the true magnitude of their impairment. In other words, an individual’s judgment of his/her level of sleepiness is not a reliable indicator of actual performance capacity. On the other hand, some evidence suggests that sleep-deprived individuals are reasonably able to make accurate judgments about their level of performance impairment for various cognitive capabilities (Baranski, 2007 ; Baranski, Pigeau, & Angus, 1994

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  Sleep Deprivation

  Basic Science, Physiology and Behavior

  • Clete A. Kushida, Clete A. Kushida(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  2 History of Sleep Deprivation

  WILLIAM C. DEMENT, CLETE A. KUSHIDA, AND JUDY CHANG

  Stanford University, Stanford, California, U.S.A.

  I. Introduction

  Why do we sleep? What happens when we sleep? Do we need to sleep? People have pondered such questions about sleep since ancient times. Aristotle addressed the issue of sleep in his essay “On Sleep and Sleeplessness,” in which he wrote that sleep and waking originate in the heart and are regulated by a primary sense organ. He proposed that after food is eaten, evaporation from it rises to the brain, condenses, and sinks down to the heart, causing sleep (1 ).

  Even before Aristotle, it is likely that people realized there were consequences if they did not sleep. In ancient times such consequences may not have been labeled under the single word “sleepy.” Over the years, we have learned that there are wide-ranging complaints about sleep loss and substantial individual differences. The symptoms of sleep loss may include tiredness, nausea, headache, burning eyes, blurred vision, joint pain, and diminished libido. Because of the general misery of these symptoms, it was an almost inevitable assumption that the purpose of sleep was to get rid of a hypnotoxin or fatigue product, which accumulated during wakefulness and, if allowed to continue accumulating, resulted in these symptoms.

  Many people considered sleep to represent a total shutdown of brain function along with marked quiescence of the body; a state of near death. Carried to the extreme, sleep was viewed as a short death and death as a long sleep. The phenomenon of dreaming was sometimes conceptualized along these lines with the notion that some extracorporeal being or soul of the dreamer left the body temporarily at night and left the body permanently at death. There already was a large body of literature on the phenomenon of dreaming, elegantly reviewed by Freud in his influential book “The Interpretation of Dreams” (2

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  The SAGE Handbook of Clinical Neuropsychology

  Clinical Neuropsychological Disorders

  • Gregory J. Boyle, Yaakov Stern, Dan J. Stein, Barbara J. Sahakian, Charles J. Golden, Tatia Mei-Chun Lee, Shen-Hsing Annabel Chen, Gregory J. Boyle, Yaakov Stern, Dan J. Stein, Barbara J. Sahakian, Charles J. Golden, Tatia Mei-Chun Lee, Shen-Hsing Annabel Chen(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  In the context of sleep loss, task demands are often overlooked when assessing neuropsychological dysfunction. For example, preserved performance on executive tasks has been observed on complex tasks after Sleep Deprivation (Chee and Choo, 2004; Tucker et al., 2010), suggesting an interplay between sleep loss and task difficulty. Some authors have proposed that the brain undertakes compensatory activity in response to increasing task difficulty (compensatory adaptation hypothesis; Chee and Choo, 2004; Choo et al., 2005; Drummond et al., 2000; Drummond et al., 2005). This explanation arises primarily from observations of global, rather than specific, brain changes after sleep loss, particularly in the parietal lobes and thalamus (Thomas et al., 2000). Since these regions are associated with the attentional network, this activation may play a compensatory role during low arousal, so that increased task complexity has the effect of temporarily increasing arousal or sustained attention. This model is nevertheless insufficient on its own to explain the cognitive and biological effects of sleep loss and must be viewed as complementary to other accounts.

  Summary and Conclusions

  Underlying features that impact on neuropsychological performance include fragmented sleep, insufficient sleep, shallow sleep and/or circadian misalignment. These disruptions may lead to problematic neuropsychological function and/or can exacerbate neuropsychological dysfunction due to comorbid conditions over the longer term. Some possible mechanisms include problems with metabolic function, blood-gas imbalance, increases in systemic inflammation, poor glymphatic clearance, increased risk of comorbidity and problems in mood. Although sleep disorders are commonplace, they often go undiagnosed and may significantly exacerbate other health disorders. Clearly, it is important for neuropsychologists to screen for sleep disorders. Treatment of an underlying sleep disorder may assist with resolving or minimizing exacerbation of other neuropsychological difficulties and certainly will assist with long-term brain health.

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  Counting Sheep

  The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams (Text Only)

  • Paul Martin(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Flamingo

    (Publisher)

  Sleep Deprivation does disturb many aspects of physiological functioning, however. Breathing is one example. A single night of sleep loss impairs breathing in healthy people, provoking a small but significant reduction in the maximum amount of air that can be exhaled after maximum inhalation. Sleep loss also leads to a substantial blunting of the normal respiratory responses to reduced blood-oxygen levels. After 30 hours without sleep there are marked deteriorations in the strength and endurance of the muscles used for breathing – as revealed, for example, by a reduction in the time for which people can breathe in against a sustained pressure. Such changes could be important in patients with respiratory diseases, who often suffer from chronic sleep loss. Sleep Deprivation also slows the rate of cardiovascular recovery from intense exercise. When someone has been deprived of sleep for 24 hours, their breathing rate and oxygen uptake after a burst of intense exercise remain higher for longer.

  Sleep loss is accompanied by many changes in body chemistry. People who have been kept awake for more than three days have altered liver functions, marked by large increases in the levels of key liver enzymes, changes in various types of fat and a rise in the amount of phosphorus circulating in the blood. Thyroid hormone levels are affected and biochemical changes can be detected at the level of gene activity.

  Glucose metabolism is particularly perturbed by sleep loss. Healthy young men whose sleep was experimentally restricted to four hours a night for six nights became less tolerant to glucose. They took 40 per cent longer than normal to regulate their blood-sugar levels after eating high-carbohydrate food, and their ability to produce insulin fell by nearly a third – a condition resembling the early signs of diabetes. These abnormalities vanished after the men had slept for 12 hours. Fatigue-induced physiological changes like these could contribute to the development of chronic conditions such as diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure, all of which are associated with a shortened lifespan.

  Sleep, immunity and health

  Our foster-nurse of nature is repose.

  William Shakespeare, King Lear (1605–6)

  Some of the most interesting, least well understood, and potentially important consequences of Sleep Deprivation are found within the immune system. In short, lack of sleep can impair the body’s immune defences and thereby make us more susceptible to infection by bacteria, viruses and parasites.

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