You need sleep. I can tell that you haven’t gotten nearly enough sleep lately. You may be thinking, “Wow! Amazing! This paper can read my mind.” No, I’m not psychic; it’s my simple knowledge of university lifestyles and my friend–common knowledge. Despite my amazing abilities, your lack of sleep is a serious issue; it may be the thing causing you to consider whether this inanimate object can actually read your mind. Skimping on shut-eye can cause many side effects including weight gain, heightened risks of heart disease, and a heightened risk of accidents. (Let’s all avoid handling heavy machinery, shall we?)
Sleep is the time when our brains organize the events that have occurred during the day, including those pesky lectures. As we all try to cram the maximum amount of knowledge into our minds in the smallest time possible, the efficiency of the process can be significantly increased by designating a couple of those studying hours to sleeping instead. As engineers, it may often feel like there are never enough hours in a day but the less sleep we get, the more hours it takes our sleep-deprived brains to process and analyse problems that are put in front of us. Getting adequate sleep is critical for regenerating neural connections in our brains, particularly in the temporal lobe of the cerebral cortex which is thought to be responsible for language functions. In one study, where participants were subject to basic verbal tests, it was shown that in a sleep-deprived subject, other, less well-adjusted parts of their brains step in to take over for the temporal lobe, which is left conspicuously inactive. Well, that’s all well and good, but what happens if we need to call out a warning and find that we have forgotten the right words? It is a fact that accidents increase significantly after the daylight savings time-change denies us of a full night’s sleep.
If you can wake up without an alarm clock, you might not need to be reading this article. Congratulations, you are getting enough sleep! For the rest of us, it is a constant struggle. The average adult functions optimally on 7.5 to 9 hours of sleep each night, but everyone is different. The real key is quality over quantity and maintaining consistency. Bad quality sleep, sometimes the result of too much coffee, can leave you waking up feeling worse than when you went to bed, while an erratic sleep schedule leaves your body unsure when you will rest next. If you want to wake up feeling refreshed and ready to face the day, try to go to bed and wake up at a decent hour. Additionally, it would be advisable to keep your sleeping schedule consistent, even on weekends. Our minds and bodies take a long time to adjust to a new sleep schedule; even two days of sleeping in will trick us into thinking that we should still be sleeping in on days thereafter. We follow a biological clock which is usually synched to the sunlight; generally you should feel more awake during times of high light intensity. In fact, during Shakespearean times, people went to bed early with the setting sun, but rose again in the early hours of the morning when the moon was out; the outcome was a very vibrant “night life” that included markets and entertainment. Sleep cycles involving deeper and lighter periods of sleep may have contributed to their ability to maintain this lifestyle. If you want to know how to plan your sleep cycle so that you wake up refreshed and ready to go, check out the sleep calculator at http://sleepyti.me/.
Now, I am beginning to yawn and there are exams to be studied for! Here are a couple of fast facts from the national Sleep Research Project to interest you in the mysteries of sleep:
- Seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol-level of 0.05%.
- The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and the Chernobyl nuclear accident have all been attributed to human errors in which sleep-deprivation played a role.
- As a group, 18 to 24 year-olds deprived of sleep suffer more from impaired performance than older adults.
- Scientists have not been able to explain a 1998 study, which showed that a bright light shone on the backs of human knees can reset the brain’s sleep-wake clock.
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