Why sleep disorders are killing you.

The natural question that precedes this is ‘why do we sleep?’

Think about that for a minute — do you really know why you sleep? To understand how little you know about sleep, I’ve chosen to allude to some excerpts from Dr.Matthew Walker’s book ‘Why We Sleep’ as described by Dr.Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal.

        One of the professors at Edinburgh Medical School, where I was taught from 1970–76, was a world expert on sleep, but I remember hearing little about sleep at medical school. We were taught about sleeping pills, and I remember routinely prescribing them for patients undergoing surgery the next day — with no understanding of the damage I was doing. In my 25 years at The BMJ I remember publishing little on sleep, although we did publish an ABC of Sleep Disorders, with the emphasis on the disorders. Generally, like most doctors, I thought little about sleep. Now I read in Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams that: “ [The] silent sleep loss epidemic is the greatest public health challenge we face in the twenty-first century in developed nations.”

        His core argument about the public health challenge is that we all need at least seven and preferably eight hours sleep a night because sleep is vital for many functions of the brain and body, including memory, problem solving, attention, immune function, growth, and the effective and efficient functioning of most of our organs. Lack of sleep leads to dementia, raised blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, cancer, road traffic and other injuries, and proneness to infection — in other words to all the commonest causes of morbidity and mortality. Yet many people in the developed world are not getting seven to eight hours sleep a night, and crucially he shows that you cannot catch up on lost sleep — sleeping late at the weekend will not undo the damage done during the week. Worse, we have a culture that almost sees sleep as for wimps, and we admire people like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (both of whom succumbed to dementia, points out Walker) who supposedly slept only four or five hours. Walker shows that people who can sleep so little and not suffer long-term damage are vanishingly rare.

        All of biology is ultimately about evolution, and humans have evolved over two million years to sleep eight hours a night. Walker presents evidence from hunter-gatherers of how they sleep eight hours a night, although often in two parts. Sleep is clearly important, and it is also extraordinary: Walker mimics a paediatrician talking to parents of a new born baby: “From this moment forth, and for the rest of your child’s entire life, he will repeatedly and routinely lapse into a state of apparent coma. It might even resemble death at times. And while his body lies still his mind will often be filled with stunning, bizarre hallucinations. This state will consume one-third of his life and I have absolutely no idea why he’ll do it, or what it is for. Good luck!” Walker makes us think that this bizarre state must have some vital function and teases the medical profession for paying little attention to the importance of sleep.

        Sleep is the third pillar of good health, alongside diet and exercise….actually sleep is more than a pillar; it is the foundation on which the other two health bastions sit. Take away the bedrock of sleep, or weaken it just a little, and careful eating or physical exercise become less than effective.”

        Take the sculpture metaphor for explaining how REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and NREM (non-REM) sleep are essential for memory: NREM, which predominates at the beginning of sleep, moves the great clumps of clay (the day’s learnings) into memory and then REM sleep, which predominates later, refines and shapes the clay to make the memories.

        Ingenious experiments have shown that dreams have therapeutic, problem solving, and creative functions.

        People must convinced of the importance of sleep and should make sure that they do all they can to get eight hours’ sleep a night, but there are many forces — including work habits and requirements, electric light, noise, electronic gadgets, alcohol, caffeine, mass entertainment, and a culture that doesn’t grasp the importance of sleep — that work against getting eight hours sleep every night.

Now that we’ve glimpsed the importance of sleep to the human body, let’s take a look numbers from some of the most recent surveys. CDC (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention) Survey’s show that ~ 50% of the population sleep for less than seven hours a day, the highest concentration of this phenomenon being in urban, well developed and prospering areas.

Sleep disorders are a group of conditions that effect the ability to sleep well on a regular basis. The next question that naturally follows is:

What can be done?

Get professional help. Most sleep disorders are brushed under the carpet, remaining untreated until they morph into a morbid reality that can’t be ignored. The amount of time and money invested in fixing yourself earlier on is exponentially lesser than trying to fix a chronic condition later on. I’ll say it again — Get professional help.

One of the foremost resources to counter sleep disorders is a pioneering field called ‘Practical Psychology’. It is revolutionary in the sense of it’s diagnosis and intervention mechanisms. The method attempts to diagnose and treat from the root cause, it involves no internal medication or chemical side effects, and shows fast results due to it’s efficient underlying mechanisms. The method is available at multiple outlets & practiced by leading doctors, psychologists and clinicians. The method was created by Dr.A S Hareesh and is currently provided to medical and wellness established by The Preventia Group of Companies, through Preventia Wellness. Know more? contact info@thepreventia.com