“Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurts minds, great Nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

-William Shakespeare

Over 100 million Americans are simply not getting enough sleep.

“A third of US adults report that they usually get less than the recommended amount of sleep.” Centers for Disease Control And Prevention, Sleep and Sleep Disorders, 2018.

This massive sleep issue is a problem that goes heavily overlooked due to all of the implicating effects sleep deprivation has on everybody, its an issue that needs to be addressed and an issue that needs to be more widely recognized.

Matt Walker explains the mere power sleep has on our lives.

You Shouldnt be getting less than 8 hours of sleep a night.

According to the Centers for Disease Control And Prevention, Sleep and Sleep Disorders- Data and Statistics, 2017. People who receive less than 7 hours of sleep a night have significant increases in heart attacks, Coronary Heart disease, Strokes, Asthma, Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer, Arthritis, Depression, Chronic kidney disease, and diabetes.

Sleep deprivation clearly has implicated physical effects on people’s health. “Sleep deprivation is associated with considerable social, financial, and health-related costs, in large measure because it produces impaired cognitive performance due to increasing sleep propensity and instability of waking neurobehavioral functions.” Durmer, Jeffrey, Neurocognitive Consequences of Sleep Deprivation, Thieme Medical Publishers, New York, 2005.

Jeff Iliff, PHD , performs a Ted talk explaining the benefits of getting constant, good sleep.

School hours don’t make it any easier.

Constantly not getting enough sleep is a big issue that more people need to take seriously, especially when it comes to children. “Sleep disruption in childhood is associated with clearly defined deficits in neurocognition and behaviour.” Cammferman, Danny, Kennedy, Declan, Gold, Michael, Simpson, Carol, Lushington, Kurt, International Journal Of Psychophysiology – Sleep and neurocognitive functioning in children with eczema, Elsevier B.V, 2013. School times in the United States is the biggest reason why many kids across the United States go through Sleep deprivation“With the onset of adolescence, teenagers require 9.2 hr of sleep and experience a delay in the timing of sleep. In the “real world” with early school start times, however, they report less sleep, striking differences between their school-weekend sleep schedules, and significant daytime sleepiness. Prior studies demonstrated that high schoolers with later school starts do not further delay bedtimes but obtain more sleep due to later wake times. This study examined sleep–wake patterns of young adolescents attending urban, public middle schools with early (7:15 a.m.) versus late (8:37 a.m.) start times. Students (N = 205) were assessed at 2 time periods. Students at the late-starting school reported waking up over 1 hr later on school mornings and obtaining 50 min more sleep each night, less sleepiness, and fewer tardies than students at the early school. All students reported similar school-night bedtimes, sleep hygiene practices, and weekend sleep schedules.” Amy R. Wolfson, Noah L. Spaulding, Craig Dandrow & Elizabeth M. Baroni (2007) Middle School Start Times: The Importance of a Good Night’s Sleep for Young Adolescents, Behavioral Sleep Medicine, 5:3, 194-209

Adjusting school times would be extremely beneficial among the youth as sleep is unmistakably taken away by the hours set by school policies. “In a project spearheaded by Dr. Mary A. Carskadon and colleagues, researchers investigated what would happen to sleep and circadian rhythms in a group of young people for whom the transition from junior high to senior high required a change in school starting time from 8:25 am to 7:20 am (Carskadon et al., 1998).

The 25 students completed the study at two time points, in the spring of 9th grade and autumn of 10th grade. The students kept their usual schedules, wore small activity monitors on their wrists, and kept diaries of activities and sleep schedules for two consecutive weeks. At the end, participants came to Carskadon’s sleep lab for assessment of the onset phase of melatonin secretion, an overnight sleep study, and daytime testing with MSLT. The in-lab sleep schedule was fixed to each student’s average school night schedule, based on data from the wrist monitors.Carskadon and colleagues found that in the 10th grade:

On a typical school morning, the students woke up earlier for high school, but only 25 minutes earlier instead of the 65 minutes reflected in the start time change.

Sleep onset times did not change, and averaged about 10:40 pm in both 9th and 10th grade.

The average amount of sleep on school nights fell from 7 hours 9 minutes to 6 hours 50 minutes, which is significant because the students were already accumulating a sleep deficit.

Nearly one-half of the 10th graders showed a reversed sleep pattern on the morning MSLT. This pattern is similar to the sleep disorder narcolepsy, moving immediately into REM sleep before non-REM sleep. The 12 students who showed this pattern did not have narcolepsy, but they did have a mismatch between their school day waking times and their circadian rhythms. Indeed, at 8:30 in the morning, they fell asleep within three minutes.

None of the students made an optimal adjustment to the new schedule; none was sleeping even 8 1/4 hours on school nights. “Even without the pressure of biological changes, if we combine an early school starting time–say 7:30 am, which, with a modest commute, makes 6:15 am a viable rising time–with our knowledge that optimal sleep need is 9 1/4 hours, we are asking that 16-year olds go to bed at 9 pm. Rare is a teenager that will keep such a schedule. School work, sports practices, clubs, volunteer work, and paid employment take precedence. When biological changes are factored in, the ability even to have merely ‘adequate’ sleep is lost,” Carskadon explains.” SleepFoundation.org, Children, Teens & Sleep, Hot Topics, Sleep Timing & Duration- Backgrounder: Later School Start Times.

The bottom line is…

We need sleep, and were not getting enough of it. World wide sleep deprivation is an issue that is frankly not brought to the light. TheSleepCrisis.org is here to bring attention to this issue, were making a call to educate people around the world to understand the importance and impact sleep has on their lives.