![]() Some animal studies show a direct link between sleep deprivation and death. Have you ever been so tired and sleep deprived that you felt like you might actually die? Well, what if we told you that within that feeling lies a grain of truth: You can die from not sleeping. You can barely think - much less focus, communicate effectively, or get things done. Don’t let your surgeon be Patrick, although he seems like a nice guy he’s not entirely in the right mindset for surgery.It’s a terrible - and for many of us, terribly familiar - feeling. Our society needs to accept sleep rather than demonize those of us who just want to perform at our best. ![]() Their shifts can be 12-28 hours long, that’s more than enough to have a BAC above the legal range. I suppose the moral of the story is you could either drink a strawberry daiquiri or stay awake for 18+ hours, which is worse? Should we allow people who are that tired to drive and do other crucial things in our daily life, or should sleep deprivation be equivalent to being drunk? For example, surgeons work extremely long shifts and they are performing potentially dangerous procedures on their patient. But we should also have a similar mindset when it comes to doing things while being tired, its the same thing. Why do I include these two quotes from the CDC? Simple, get some sleep or your essentially drunk, we all disagree with drunk driving and doing important things while under the influence. “Being awake for 24 hours is equal to having a blood alcohol content of 0.10%”- the CDC “Being awake for at least 18 hours is the same as someone having blood alcohol content of 0.05%”-the CDC Lets diverge a little bit into some serious material, I might be reaching here but stick with me. Although you might not feel like you have the time to sleep, it will be better for you in the long run if you close your eyes and get some rest. You’ll be more productive, have better quality work, and be much happier doing so. Sleep because it will make you far better at doing those things in your day to day life that you never seem to have enough time to do. But take this into consideration, don’t sleep just because its good for you, although that is a pretty good reason to do just that. There never seems to be enough time in our day to do everything that we need to. Its hard to get enough sleep when we live in a world that prioritizes productivity and working long hours. Some of these things are repeats that we talked about already but some are new. If those things don’t sound bad enough, here’s a couple more shown in the figure below. Your skin quality goes down fine lines, wrinkles, uneven skin color, looseness of skin, etc.Rates of accidents goes up, this goes along with lack of focus/thinking straight.You are more likely to gain weight… sad.Not sleeping lowers testosterone and other sex hormones by up to 15%. Sex drive is negatively impacted by a lack of sleep. This one might sound strange, but just bear with me.This one we’ve already talked about so it shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone. Your memory is impacted and you cannot recall things.When you’re tired all you can think about is sleep and not doing that homework that’s due tomorrow. It is hard to think straight, we’ve all dealt with this one.Lack of sleep is associated with increased risk for developing cancer.You are at higher risks for heart disease and strokes. You get sick much easier when you don’t sleep, your immune system is weakened leading to more illness.We can’t really look at what happens when we don’t sleep at all because we would die without sleeping eventually. Now lets look at what happens when we don’t sleep, or more specifically when we are sleep deprived. REM seems to increase the activity of the pathway listed above. The MAPK pathway is especially important in the hippocampus where long term memory is formed. The Calcium/cAMP/MAPK/CRE pathway is necessary for memory consolidation. Since we already know that we might ask the question, “what happens if we don’t sleep?”īefore we jump into that, lets briefly discuss what we already know. We already know that sleep is crucial for memory formation, specifically long term memory consolidation. I’ll admit it, some of us get more than others, but at the end of the day our favorite activity is more than willing to greet us with open arms when we’ve had enough. What’s something that we all have in common, well we sleep.
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