Tired of being tired? Sleep deprivation might be the cause!
Not getting enough sleep can become a bigger problem than what you might think. We had a chat with Marcus de Guingand, director of Third Pillar of Health and expert in Fatigue and Optimal Performance.
Sleep deprivation used to be a matter that only concerned newly born's parents and professionals from very specific fields like health and crime. Nevertheless, over the past decade it has become a wider spread issue. Between 1999 and 2010, the percentage of people in the US those sleeping less than 7 hours a day rose from 34% to 46%, according to the National Sleep Foundation.
Do you often find yourself watching just one more episode in Netflix until is 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. or checking your phone under the blankets a couple of, maybe, hours before actually going to sleep? Well, many distractions of modern society have contributed to make sleep deprivation a bigger problem.
For Marcus de Guingand, director of the organisation Third Pillar of Health, "for some people sleep deprivation becomes the new normal," but lack of sleep has huge negative impacts on physical and mental health and also productivity.
For example, sleeping less than 6 hours a night increases the risk of obesity by 23% versus 7 to 8 hour sleepers. This rises to 50% in 5 hour sleepers and 73% in 4 hour sleepers (US National Health and Examination Survey).
Sleeping 4 to 5 hours a night for a week impairs performance to the same extent as being legally drunk (Harvard University Business Review), 6 hour sleepers are eleven times more likely to make mistakes after 14 days of sleep restriction and this rises to 14 times for 4 hour sleepers (Pennsylvania University).
For de Guingand, "sleep deprivation and stress are closely linked" and therefore he recommended Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia and warned about the danger of taking sleeping pills that contain up to 3 mg of melatonin: "in our whole body there is no more than 1 mg of melatonin at its highest levels."
You can check here his advice to avoid sleep deprivation.
