Chapter 9 Chapter 7 Insomnia is harmful to health

Theoretically, one-third of everyone's life is spent in sleep, what a loss!Some energetic business elites sighed.They advocate less sleep, and advocate that it is enough for a person to sleep only four or five hours a day, only in this way can he be full of energy and drive.They use this to create an image of themselves as energetic, shrewd and capable.This pretentiousness may encourage some people to follow suit.But in fact, in today's era of globalized trade and international transoceanic flights, bosses also ask you to forget food and sleep, and in their view, this is normal.As a result, it became a matter of course for employees to work overtime, stay up late, and alternate shifts.Workers who work night shifts sleep an average of less than five hours a day.After returning home from get off work, there is still a lot of unavoidable part-time homework. The TV is always on from morning to night, and I have to watch it if I don’t watch it.In 1910, the average sleep time of human beings was still nine hours, but today it is only seven and a half hours, so that there is more time to bear the pressure brought by work and entertainment.

Others are so desperate for a good night's sleep that they just can't.A new study of 20,000 people in Germany, France, the UK, Italy, Portugal and Denmark found that a quarter of people suffer from poor sleep, and half of them are chronic.Two-thirds of insomniacs have suffered from this kind of torture day after day for more than five years.Only those who have experienced this kind of insomnia can understand what it is like once they have had trouble sleeping for several days.Everyone just feels exhausted and is willing to do anything as long as they can get a good night's sleep.One of the most excruciating and effective punishments for bringing a recalcitrant man to his knees is to deprive him of sleep for a long period of time, and there is a reason for that.

It turns out that sleep deprivation also affects mental efficiency.According to American sleep expert Mark.According to a survey by Mark Rosekind, if the sleep time is continuously shortened, the work efficiency of the brain will drop sharply: people who sleep only six hours on average, work efficiency is 13% lower, and those who sleep five hours are 43% lower. Those who slept only four hours were 62 percent less productive. There have been many studies to date looking at the effect of sleep duration on intelligence.This also creates an illusion that sleep is mainly about maintaining the mental state, but it is relatively secondary for the body.Perhaps unbelievably, none of these studies investigated the effects of sleep deprivation on metabolic regulation and hormone production.This void has only recently been filled.

Three female research workers at the University of Chicago Department of Medicine, Karin.Spiegel (Karine Spiegel), Rachel.Le Puluo (Rachel Leproult) and Eve.Eve van Cauter invited eleven healthy male subjects between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven into the laboratory.For sixteen nights in a row, they slept at different prescribed times.For the first three nights, they get eight hours of sleep, from 11pm to 6am.For the next six nights, they didn't go to bed until one o'clock in the morning, and were woken exactly four hours later, at five o'clock in the morning.After this sleep-deprived phase, they were able to sleep twelve hours for seven nights, from nine in the evening to nine in the morning.

At first, those pipelines fixed on the body may make people feel a little uncomfortable.But only in this way can we scientifically measure accurate sleep time and other physical state data.When they are awake, they can eat, watch TV, work on the computer, play games, or talk to other subjects and researchers, but they cannot sleep, which is strictly monitored.On a few days, they were allowed to leave the lab with an actimeter worn on their wrist to prevent them from finding a park bench or catching up on sleep at the house of an empathetic lover.Therefore, cheating is impossible. On the first few nights, despite the intrusive plumbing, they actually slept an average of seven hours and fourteen minutes.Next, on days of forced sleep deprivation, the average sleep duration was three hours and forty-nine minutes.Then, during the rest period, I can sleep for another nine hours and three minutes.Subjects achieved the expected sleep time.

When the researchers measured blood sugar and insulin responses, they found interesting results.During the sleep-deprived phase, subjects experienced a rapid rise in blood sugar after consuming carbohydrates.However, their insulin response to carbohydrates was 30% lower than when they got enough sleep.Even insulin-independent sugar absorption was reduced by 30%.As a result, the flow of blood sugar into muscle and liver cells is severely delayed.Sugar leaves the bloodstream 40% slower when sleep-deprived than during rest.It can be seen from hormone tests that the sympathetic nervous system is in a hyperactive state for a long time.Concentrations of corticosteroids were also markedly higher on sleep-deprived days, which declined six to seven times slower during the day than normal.

These first-time recorded physical responses and measured data are very consistent with the situation of diabetic patients with insulin resistance!These healthy lads experienced this after only six days of less than four hours of sleep. Imagine how their hormones, blood pressure, fat and sugar metabolism, and blood coagulation system would be affected if they only slept for four hours for many years. What has changed.And most of us do have to live on such a schedule.In addition, if these healthy young people are given a stressful working environment, intentionally creating some tense interpersonal relationships, and a dissatisfied life partner at home, who always vents their depression to her husband after work, what is his situation? You can imagine.

The latest research shows that long-term sleep disturbances in breathing, known as apnea, increase the likelihood of high blood pressure and insulin resistance.Maybe sleep deprivation is the deadly problem of our time?According to a study cited in the fifth issue of Der Spiegel in 2000, 85% of the decision-making class in Germany suffer from insomnia, stomach problems, and arrhythmia; 75% have high blood fat; One person is overweight.It seems that the health defense battle should start from the bed. In this experiment, the subjects' body indexes reached their best state after nine hours of sleep.The eight hours that have long been considered the standard for adequate sleep are not enough for nutrition and health.It is said that great geniuses like Einstein and Edison, who invented the light bulb, like to sleep late.As you can imagine, getting a good night's sleep is an effective solution for some overwhelmed managers.Perhaps, in the future, when the company faces a business crisis or the threat of a merger, the slogan should not be to wait and see, but to sleep well.