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The Dangers of Being Really, Really Tired
Posted by
timothy
on Sat May 16, 2009 05:50 PM
from the especially-if-you-have-a-bike-car-or-zamboni dept.
from the especially-if-you-have-a-bike-car-or-zamboni dept.
Sleepy Dog Millionare writes "Brian Palmer, writing for Slate, asks 'Can you die from lack of sleep?' and shockingly, the answer may very well be Yes, you can. Palmer points to 'ground breaking experiments' in the area of sleep research. It turns out that sleep deprivation can actually be deadly in rats. The obvious conclusion is that it is probably deadly in all mammals. So the next time you think you need to pull multiple all-night hack-a-thons, ask yourself if it's worth risking your life for."
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If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Funny)
I wouldn't be able to get a first post.
Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Insightful)
I really wish people would take the dangers of even small amounts of sleep deprivation more seriously.
Even missing an hours sleep could be enough to kill some poor sod who happens to be crossing the road at the same time as you miss the red lights.
In the modern world it seems to be macho to go without sleep. In reality, depriving yourself of sleep makes you less productive.
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Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Interesting)
It may, depending on what you're doing. Being deprived of sleep (or stoned) is the only way I can even contemplate boring tasks -- decorating for example. If I'm capable of doing something... anything that's even vaguely interesting then boring tasks are going to be put off.
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Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was younger I'd sometimes go as much as a week without sleep. It does make a difference in how you solve problems. With massive sleep deprivation problems requiring critical thinking become harder but problems requiring creative leaps get easier. You end up in something close to a waking dream state. I wouldn't suggest it for average problems but if you get really stuck on something that is very complex it can help.
Of course most problems of this nature can be solved by just relaxing in a quiet place for a while and letting your mind wander. There is something to different states of mind but it's best not to abuse these. With practice you can slip into the right state of mind at will without needing to force it with drugs, lack of sleep, etc.
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Take with one hand, give with the other (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Interesting)
Wierd.. I've only once stayed awake for a whole week.. After 3 days, I started getting auditory hallucinations, after 5, that included visual. Most of the work I was on at that point was next to useless, and there was no guarantee that what went into my head actually made it intact to the paper I was writing on.
Once I'd had sleep after it, and pieced together what I was trying to do and made sense of it all, I salvaged most of it, but hey.. Not a good way to work.
The stresses on the system left me feeling not in such a good way for some time..
Personally, I'd not recommend it for any problem that you wouldn't try to solve by popping a tab of acid.
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Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Interesting)
I've wondered how much the side effects of sleep deprivation change between different people. I would guess that I'm more sensitive to these side-effects than most - I start getting minor auditory hallucinations after being awake for 16+ hours (not much more than a normal day), and visual effects about 20+ hours in. But then I don't think I could survive more than a couple of days, I hit a really hard brick wall at about 40 hours and can't stay awake. By that stage I've already gone through the temperature changes that they describe in the article.
Although it is a hellish way to work there is something to be said for not having to pick up context repeatedly in a problem. A 24-hr stretch in the office seems to produce about as much work as a standard 40-hr week.
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Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, I agree with the other response to this post. I used to be a druggie myself, until one day I finally quit and began putting my life back together. The most I ever did was pot, but even that is enough to harm you. You may say it is safe, it doesn't kill you or cause cancer, but the truth is altering your state of mind isn't good.
I have found being in a clear state of mind these past five years has accelerated my learning and retention more so than doing drugs ever did. I mean, looking back at it now I wish I didn't waste so much time on smoking pot and seeking the next drag, I could have been doing a lot more useful stuff.
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Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Funny)
In the modern world it seems to be macho to go without sleep.
Stop talking like a pussy, boy!
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Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Funny)
Sleep deprivation also causes you to miss jokes, and often also miss the whooshing noise that occurs after you miss them.
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Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Insightful)
> In reality, depriving yourself of sleep makes you less productive.
In reality, there's more to life than being 'at optimal productivity level' all the time. Work to live, not the other way round. If you have an awesome party on your birthday but are a little less productive the day after, then the world can just suck it up. I'm not saying you should drive while (severely) sleep deprived, it's just that there are many things in life that are worth a little sleep deprivation. Just make sure you understand the consequences of sleep deprivation and use that knowledge to act responsibly.
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Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think the parent is talking about parties, but people who stay up all night to get a project done. Working more productively means you can spend less time working.
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Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:If I were sleep deprived (Score:5, Funny)
There's a whole new meaning to being dead tired...
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Ah...... (Score:5, Funny)
But did they feed the rats Jolt?
It keeps me alive!
Now if I can just do something about those damned bats...
Re:Ah...... (Score:5, Funny)
Too much Red Bull gives you Wings, And a halo.
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Hack-a-thons? No. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not the voluntary all-night hack-a-thons that society needs to worry about. It's the insistence by employers that their staff work all night, because of deadline screwups by management, or by the requirement that staff have to do on-call, rather than employing people specifically for night shifts.
I wouldn't lose any sleep at all, if it wasn't for idiotic decisions by my employer.
Re:Hack-a-thons? No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, there are some Really, Really good reasons for certain individuals to be 'on-call'. However, the result of on-call actions should have the commensurate benefit of having additional time off to recover from those over night sessions.
If THAT happened more often, people would be far more willing to do on-call.
SRSLY.
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Re:Hack-a-thons? No. (Score:5, Funny)
Lalalalala, I can't hear you, lalalalalala!
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Re:Hack-a-thons? No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm. The real problem is, that you can not go somewhere else when stuff like that happens. Usually they all are that way. And usually they can just reject you and not care, while you can not do the same.
That's why unions came up. Unfortunately it turned out being something not exactly as good as intended. ^^
Try a lightweight Hollywood model. That is, when everybody is self-employed, and you can have multiple "bosses"/clients and can always hire your own employees/businesses. Lightweight would mean, to do it, but to group with those bosses/clients/employees/businesses in a kind of "company" that lets you cut down on the administration and tax work, while still being just as free in everything else. Then you could easily say "no" to one boss/client, and choose to do work for the other one.
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Re:Hack-a-thons? No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Only because the Republican administrations since Reagan did everything they can to destroy labor unions.
The only reason the US has a middle class at all is because of organized labor. If the industrialists in the first few decades of the 20th century had gotten their way, workers in the US would be about where workers in Mexico currently find themselves. We'd probably all be trying to sneak into Canada.
You really have to be ignorant of US history not to realize the importance of the labor movement. By the way, since the all-out attack on unions started, real income of American middle and lower-class workers has declined at a steady rate. If it hadn't been the ready availability of easy credit, our standard of living would have plummeted. Now that the bill's coming due you're going to see very clearly what damage anti-union policies have done.
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Lack of sleep IS dangerous (Score:5, Funny)
According to a reliable source [memory-alpha.org], a lack of REM sleep in a group of people will cause them to go crazy and start murdering each other...
Re:Lack of sleep IS dangerous (Score:5, Informative)
Death from too much work/too little sleep is so popular in Japan, that they have a nice name for it here - karoshi.
Which, surprisingly, translates literally to "death from too much work".
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Re:Lack of sleep IS dangerous (Score:5, Funny)
I'm never going to understand Asian tastes...
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Re:Lack of sleep IS dangerous (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, they call it "death from overwork," but I've rarely seen Japanese salarymen work in the way that I would consider "work." I have decided that the Japanese concept of work has little to do with measurable results and a lot to do with how awful the process was and how long it took.
When the culture puts a lot of value on suffering for your employer, it's no wonder that some people push themselves to suffer so much that it literally kills them. When you live on cigarettes, One Cup single-serving sake, and vending-machine coffee; when you are getting a couple hours of sleep a night, tops; when you are spending 3 hours of your waking day running after trains and then being crammed into them with the other exhausted, smelly people; when you continue this lifestyle for years on end; yeah, you're going to die. And you probably won't even have that many results to show for it.
So much of the "work" that Japanese companies have people do is just kind of meaningless activity. All it does is exhaust people and turn bright, energetic college kids into the dead shells you see riding the train (full disclosure: I'm a university teacher in Japan).
There seems to be a growing movement in Japanese society, however, that is realizing this and pushing back. The economic downturn is helping, too. It used to be that once you landed a job, you were set for life. However, if you ever got fired or downsized, you were screwed for life; no one would ever hire you again. You were damaged goods. Now, the latter is still true, but the former isn't. People get laid off all the time now. Last year a few major companies hired a bunch of new college graduates, those people turned down other offers, and then the companies came back and retracted their offers and paid them about $5k to go away. These people are now both never employed and damaged goods. Hiring only happens once a year here, so they were basically paid $5k to live on for the next year of their lives, after which they got to do the whole grueling interviewing and testing process again, this time with a lingering question about their CV: "Why was this person cut at the last minute by the other company?"
So all of this is building up what I--and any other Western person, who is used to crap like this--can only call a healthy cynicism about employers, and a rejection of their bullshit in favor of an easier life with fewer problems. Temp agencies are taking over as they have done in the US, etc., with all of the bullshit, but all of the benefits as well. I did IT temp work before becoming an academic, and although the lack of security really was pretty scary, the pay was good and the hours were great. I wasn't a salary slave like I am now. Oh, and guess what? Tenure is getting harder to get, so I'm on a year contract anyway! Nothing has changed. Security is dead. Fuck the companies and live your life!
I am hopeful that we here in Japan will see less karoshi as the new generation takes over--the new generation who sees that it's possible to live without being a slave to a company--and that the difficult economic conditions force companies to cut out nonessential make-work activities, increasing efficiency, and evaluating people on what they get done, not how late they stay.
Sleep and lifestyle are important, folks. Don't forget that quality of life is the only thing you should be worried about, because you only get one. If you're having fun staying up all night working (because you might be!) then great! But if you don't like it, don't do it.
I sleep at least 8 hours a night. I am one of the most productive people I know. I'm not interested in dying for my job.
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Rats make for lousy test subjects (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Rats make for lousy test subjects (Score:5, Insightful)
Calorie restriction, or caloric restriction (CR), is a dietary regimen thought to improve health and slow the aging process in some animals
CR is a case where animal models are even less applicable than usual. Humans are tuned up for obvious evolutionary reasons to live about twice as long as one would normally expect for a mammal, well beyond our effective reproductive lifespan.
The average mammal lives about a billion heartbeats. Humans live twice that--way off the scale. Ergo, assuming that life extension techniques that work on other animals will work on us is problematic to say the least.
One of the mechanisms that has been optimized by evolutionary selection in humans to extend our lives is our extreme resistantance to cancer, which is why animal models for cancer (both causes and cures) have been so problematic over the past few decades.
Rats are nocturnal social scavengers, which may make them a better model for sleep research than cancer research, but given how weird the human brain is compared to most other animals it is again quite problematic to simply extrapolate any conclusions from them to us.
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"Shockingly"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who thinks this is shocking.
We need water. Would you be shocked to find a lack of water can be deadly?
Why would anyone be shocked to find lack of sleep can kill?
Re:"Shockingly"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
It would certainly be a lot more helpful to have specifics about what sleep provides that we require versus, say, a rest while conscious.
Water is a good example, where it's thoroughly understood just how our body uses it, i.e. what role hydration plays in our continued functioning.
What is it specifically that requires us to lose consciousness to get what we need from sleep? Can it be artificially supplemented?
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Re:"Shockingly"?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the biggest thing you need sooner or later is REM sleep, not just a lie down. Lack of REM sleep (which, as we'll see is possible while technically still getting some sleep) can result in actual brain damage, or in the very long run even death. (Ironically, it's also produced _by_ certain kinds of brain damage.) Also, while we still lack the complete picture, it's proven that at least one type of memory isn't updated without REM.
REM sleep also doesn't come instantly. In most people you need at least 90 minutes from falling asleep to having your first REM period. Anything under about half an hour is a sign of narcolepsy. Your longest REM episodes happen after several hours.
On the average over a whole night, about a quarter of the time will be REM. It's safe to assume that in the long run those two hours or so of REM a day are what your body actually needs.
But again, you don't get them in one big chunk. You get them interleaved with periods of non-REM sleep. So what it boils down to is that to get your normal quota of REM sleep, you'll actually need those 8 hours a night. You might get by with just 7, but anything less (unless you're over 70) is putting stress on your brain in the long run. You might not outright die, but you won't be very smart or attentive after months of getting significantly less.
But if you know how to get that REM while awake instead, I'm listening.
Because otherwise, no, you can't get your daily sleep by laying down on the couch for half an hour. You need to actually sleep. Not even from having the occasional half an hour nap. You just don't reach REM that fast, unless you're narcoleptic.
Which also brings us to: if whatever project or job actually makes you ask yourself if you could get by with just a lie down now and then, well, ask yourself if it's worth the problems in the longer run. Again, even if you don't outright reach the death point, you _will_ lose neurons, and that tends to be fairly permanent. You might also get other problems too.
And if you're the employer, well, ask yourself if you want to be an evil fuck. We're not talking just greedy, or just pushing them a little harder, but actual long term damage. If actual harm to some people is a perfectly acceptable trade off for a few more bucks in your (or the company's) pocket, that's comfortably in the zone I'd call outright evil.
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Re:"Shockingly"?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Gotta say that was a very long post that repeated a lot of conventional wisdom but said almost nothing to answer OP's question...
"What is it specifically that requires us to lose consciousness to get what we need from sleep?"
From a neurobiological perspective that will not be answered satisfactorily until we know at a basic biochemical level what happens during sleep to "recharge" the brain to its normal function.
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Re:"Shockingly"?? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm on first name basis with my sleep doctor. And why not? I put his kids through college. According to him, REM sleep is pretty much garbage sleep - you don't need it at all. In fact there are some drugs that suppress that stage of sleep, and they seem to have no effect on overall well being. Sleep doctors have quantified four different stages of sleep based on EEG readouts, and it turns out what you must have is a few hours of stage 4 sleep, though what that means beyond being the deepest kind of sleep I'm not sure. I can tell you from personal experience lack of stage 4 sleep causes all sorts of problems, from hypertension to memory loss to anxiety attacks.
It's a bit off topic, but if you're suffering from anxiety attacks make sure you get a sleep study done before you go on an SSRI. You could save yourself a whole lot of heartache.
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Re:"Shockingly"?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lovely dreams, dramatic nightmares, improved performance, elevated mood, enhanced creativity and better health.
If someone tells you they only sleep 6 hours per night, you can bet their either lying or deteriorating.
After I got married and my daughter got beyond infancy, I started knocking off a little earlier in the evening and getting at least eight hours of sleep per night. I have found, to my great delight, that I have much more energy than I did when I was 25 and staying out 'til "last call" every night. I also learned that I can be more productive between 6am and 9am than I used to be all day.
But one of the best benefits to longer sleep is the growth of my dream life. Because I reliably remember my dreams now, I've learned to have lucid dreams and have come to really look forward to even the most horrific nightmares. For some reason, I've found that when I have one of those crazy, terrifying dreams where I practically wake up screaming, clasping the bedpost or pillow, I have particularly good days afterward.
Maybe this is because I make a living in the arts and imagination, lucidity and other right-brain activities are my stock in trade, but I've got non-artist friends who saw the change in me and have started getting a little more sleep and they've seen dramatic improvements too.
I think the key to this change, though, may have been getting married and having a happy marriage. I don't have the need to be out late every night in a desperate search for pussy. I used to be always looking for "something" without really knowing what (or who) it was. Now, most everything I'm looking for in life is either at home or in my head.
If your job requires you to give up sleep, you have to be aware that you're paying a very high price and you might not notice that price until your body (or mind) complains to you in an unpleasant way. Lost sleep is not something you can easily retrieve.
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Re:"Shockingly"?? (Score:5, Informative)
The next question is, what does REM sleep bring? It's commonly believed to be the required / most beneficial part of a person's sleep, but what specifically occurs during that period to, for example, update the type of memory you mention?
No, the most essential type of sleep is slow-wave sleep, which is even mentioned [nytimes.com] in TFA.
I've done some computational modelling of the cerebral cortex, and my hypothesis [bigpond.net.au] (page 7/139) is that slow-wave sleep is used to re-strengthen competitive connections between cortical columns, restoring the ability to think clearly.
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World Record (Score:5, Informative)
Depends what you're doing (Score:5, Interesting)
Years ago I was working on a project to export data from a fancy survey instrument. After working at my office all day, I started work on the survey project in my basement around 5pm on a Friday night and worked on it for a while and had a wonderful time and everything was coming together nicely. After a while I suddenly felt sick; thought I might have to lie down or something. I then noticed that it was about 7pm on Sunday night. I hadn't noticed until then. That's why I was suddenly sick.
It's one of the strangest things that ever happened to me. I subsequently felt much better after having a meal and a nap.
I guess that if something is sufficiently interesting and so on, you won't notice that you haven't had any sleep for quite some period of time.
Re:Depends what you're doing (Score:5, Funny)
After working at my office all day, I started work on the survey project in my basement around 5pm on a Friday night and worked on it for a while and had a wonderful time
You make slashdot proud.
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This is news? (Score:5, Informative)
That article about "ground breaking experiments" is from 1997. I'm trying to remember when I read the story about Rechtschaffen's experiments the first time, and it is entirely possible that it was a /. story then too, which would make this a dup. This story is hardly news.
It's coming to something when.. (Score:5, Informative)
It's coming to something when even the submitters can't be bothered RTFA. All night hackathons are not going to kill you:
So unless you work 32 days straight, you're not going to die.
Sorta (Score:5, Informative)
Sorta. After 32 days the damage got to be deadly. It doesn't mean you can't get smaller doses of damage long before that. Keep doing it often enough, and it might just add up.
And the darndest thing is that your cells have Telomeres [wikipedia.org], i.e., maximum division counters. So even damage that can be repaired, only goes so far. E.g., old age and death by old age, are simply a matter of more and more of your cells reaching the limit, and thus more and more damage can't be repaired. So, anyway, that which doesn't kill you, usually shortens your life instead of making you stronger.
Sorta if you will, like saying that you need a whole 0.45% alcohol in your blood to have a 50-50 chance of death. Yeah, but much smaller doses, if done often enough, can kill you just the same.
And to answer to your objection from a different message too, yes, 1 or 2 nights you can recover from. (Though if done for work reason, it may still be interesting to remember the study where the students who were allowed to have a good 8 hour sleep solved a problem actually faster than those who pulled all nighters. You're a lot less smart when very tired.) After about 3 you start getting permanent brain damage.
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you will die from one night of not sleeping (Score:5, Insightful)
If you die from 1 all-nighter then you probably died from something else (very poor health). I think most of science and engineering have been built on all-nighters so sorry, not going to stop.
pain sensitivity (Score:5, Interesting)
I once went 9 days without sleep. After 22 hours of sleep I woke up in severe pain, as an injury I had suffered halfway through, which seemed very mild in my sensory-depressed state, was in fact something that required medical attention. If it had been only a tiny bit worse, I could have developed life-threatening complications after several days of ignoring and aggravating it. Impaired motor control, pain sensitivity, awareness, and judgment, all at the same time, is a dangerous combination.
Sleep deprivation is very serious (Score:5, Interesting)
In my early thirties I started snoring a lot, and very heavily. Two years later I started experiencing symptoms such as forgetting where I was going as I driving down the road, getting into my vehicle and not remembering how to start it, forgetting my own phone number, the inability to perform my job at any level of competency, etc.... I thought I had suffered a major stroke.
I went to the doctor and he said I was a ringer for sleep apnea and referred me to a sleep clinic.
Long story short I was waking 50 times an hour because that's how often my breathing was being interrupted and my body would rouse me due to low oxygen levels in my blood. To me it seemed as if I was awake all night long and never went to sleep.
After being fitted with a cpap mask and sleep machine to pump air into my mouth and nose while I slept it took me three weeks of normal sleep to recover my mental faculties.
Sleep deprivation will kill you, and it will also seriously degrade your mental capabilities. It's nothing to mess around with. In addition to the mental problems the probability of a stroke or heart attack is greatly amplified.
Re:Sleep deprivation is very serious (Score:5, Interesting)
For the previous couple years, my performance at work was falling off, and I was constantly flirting with burn-out. I was getting poor performance reviews and couldn't figure out why. I thought one of my problems was that my hearing was going, so I got fitted with hearing aids (I also suffer from mild hearing loss - more on that near the end of this story.)
My work performance improved slightly, but something else was going on. For some time, my wife had complained about my snoring. It was so bad that we were sleeping in separate rooms.
Sure, I was always tired, but I thought that was normal. It sneaks up on you. A parallel example would be that you can't specify a date when your eyesight got bad enough that you first needed glasses. You might be able to recall the date you got your first set of glasses though.
I had received as a gift an MP3 player that could also record 4 hours of sound in one take. About 2 years after receiving my hearing aids, I decided to record myself at night. That recording was extremely enlightening. Life changing enlightening. Based on that recording alone, I was convinced I had a breathing problem while trying to sleep. It was extremely uncomfortable listening to myself struggling to breath. If my wife had made such a recording years before, I would have acted in it then. Unfortunately, all she did was complain about it, and wake me up when I was snoring.
A week later I spent the night in a sleep lab and was diagnosed with sleep apnea. After another night in the lab, I had a prescription for a CPAP machine (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, Pressure=8cm water). This is essentially a low pressure blower that (in my case) gently inflates my lungs without any effort on my part. I have to exhale against the pressure, but its less than blowing up a balloon. I find the experience relaxing. Humans are much stronger at exhaling than they are inhaling.
After a month of using the machine, I started feeling a lot better (you don't recover from the long term sleep debt in one night - 2 to 6 weeks seems to be common). For about the next week, I was really angry about how I had been treated at work (I suspect this is a common effect following treatment for a wide range of medical disorders such as waking from a coma.)
About that time, I lost my job due to poor performance. (The performance issues were real, but the reasons they cited for my release were bogus - they gave me a problem that could not be resolved within the framework I was allowed to work in.)
I wonder at the obituaries in the newspapers. The cause of death is often given as natural causes, but I suspect many are really breathing issues related to snoring.
After starting CPAP therapy, I found that perhaps 5-10% of the people about me use CPAPs, and found about others second hand. Two people I know have started CPAP therapy in the last year. CPAP machines may be much more common than the general population is aware.
I'll likely continue using the CPAP for the rest of my life. Surgical options don't always work, can not be undone, and are often not permanent anyway. CPAP therapy always works, and can be easily adjusted.
I still wear hearing aids, but I find that I don't need them all the time like I used to. The hearing loss is real. I frequently wear them turned off (the sound of my own typing drives me up the wall) and turn them on when needed. I suspect my brain is still recovering from years of sleep apnea, but it is improving.
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Not much of a threat (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't this is something that happens often under circumstances people normally experience.
First if it was we would already know and not need to be doing the research now, to find out if can be lethal.
Second nature probably has its methods of preventing you from killing yourself in this fashion no matter how dumb you are about trying to stay up.
You usually cannot hold your breath until you die. You might be able to do it with some contrivance like a plastic bag tied around your neck or noose, but if you just sit there in your chair and attempt to hold your breath you will pass out before you die and start breathing automatically when that happens.
I suspect you can't keep yourself awake long enough to die either without getting pretty darn creative.
You bet your life (Score:5, Interesting)
Shenanigans! (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me be the first to call shenanigans on this.
Any studies on the harmfulness of sleep deprivation are so horribly confounded as to be practically useless.
The problem lies in the fact that in order to deprive rats of sleep you have to apply some kind of aversive stimulus to disrupt their sleep. Not only that, but the more tired an animal gets, the stronger the aversive stimuli needed to keep them awake. These aversive stimuli cause stress, and we already know that chronic, unavoidable stressors can kill.
So how can they make the attribution to lack of sleep rather than to stress? There's no simple way to separate them.
One of the articles even states that one of the physiological results of lack of sleep is an increase of cortisol and TSH - *BOTH* of which are known effects of stress. I would rather say that the physiological results they are seeing have been caused by the stressors they are applying to keep the animals awake than the lack of sleep.
Shenanigans I say, shenanigans.
Sleep Apnea (Score:5, Informative)
One just has to look at anyone with untreated sleep apnea to see just how dangerous it is. You can easily identify such people just by looking for the signs... darkened eye sockets, labored breathing, swelling of the legs and body, disorientation, lethargy and bruising.
And it's not just difficulty sleeping either, the body ends up literally consuming more energy trying to sleep than it does while conscious. The lack of oxygen in the circulatory system fools the body into overproduction of red blood cells to compensate. This, in turn, leads to a dangerous shift in blood pressure to the point that the heart may cease to function under the load (chronic-conjestive lung and heart failure).
In many cases, those suffering from it are often discovered with blood oxygen levels lower than that of a cadaver.
One thing to remember though, is that the act of sleeping isn't just merely closing the eyes for a few winks, the body *needs* to rest lying down to recover from the negative effects of being upright all day. Blood that is left to pool in the legs for too long can eventually lead to dangerous blood clots.
At the very least, if you can't afford to sleep regularly, try taking a brief nap lying down once every few hours to help maintain normal circulation.
My sleep story, how about yours? (Score:5, Funny)
I had a night job at a factory one time. 11pm to 7am. This meant that I slept about every two days.
I had a beekeeping hobby during the off factory hours. Can't put those little critters off. Once I was so sleepy I gathered a swarm into a box on the top of a 10' ladder. Then took a good nap up there with the idea or waiting for the bees to move to my box. Woke up a couple of hours later to an unpleasant dream which turned out to be reality. I had slept through a few bee stings. The swarm had moved, not into the box, but over and into my bee netting, clothes, hair, face, etc.
It was just annoying because swarms are fairly placid. So I carefully pulled my bee covered bee netting off and put that in the box. Went and took a proper nap in a bed.
You folks do anything interesting while sleep deprived? Leave out anything that could get you into trouble.
Re:It can do it to cats (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure about which experiment you are referencing... but the 'Who would do this comment' nearly made me snarf a nose-full of green-tea.
I thought this was a joke first time I heard it referenced on an NPR gameshow: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty [wikipedia.org]
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