Sleep debt, even moderate sleep debt, can interfere with your stamina, judgment, coordination, mood, and immune system. (It can also affect our weight, which can indirectly affect your energy as well).
See, when you’re sleep deprived it seems like there’s a big fog that permeates your brain. It’s almost like being drunk. In fact, it’s exactly like being drunk. Studies show that people with sleep loss respond physically and mentally as if their blood alcohol level were .05, which is actually the legal limit for driving in many countries. Being even a little sleep deprived is equivalent to drinking two glasses of wine. And although drinking a couple of glasses of vino might be a nice way to end a night, it’s not exactly the first thing you’d think of doing if you were trying to boost your energy.
Statistic support the drug-like effect of even minor sleep deprivation. According to the National Highway Safety Administration, driver fatigue is the cause of more than 100,000 motor vehicle accidents, 71,000 injuries, and 1,500 deaths a year. And guess what day of the year has the highest number of car accidents? It’s the day after we spring forward for daylight savings time, when most of us have lost an hour of sleep time. Just one hour less sleep can make that big a difference.
ERASE YOUR DEBT TO BOOST YOUR ENERGY
That’s what I mean by sleep debt. And by the interest that comes due when you incur it. The sleep deprived are at higher risk for depression, hypertension, stroke, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity. Studies also find that short sleepers are more likely to be sedentary, to smoke, and to drink to excess.
No wonder William Dement, M.D., Ph.D., stated at a congressional hearing, “We are not healthy unless our sleep is healthy”. It was Dement, a Stanford professor and pioneer in sleep research, who coined the term “Sleep debt”, which he cleverly (and accurately) says awakens what he calls “nature’s loan shark”. As Dement explains, the body keeps careful tabs on just how much sleep it’s owed and ultimately, just like a real loan shark, it demands payment.
Every time you ignore your body’s demand for payment, the sleep loan shark goes behind your back and grabs payment from your energy stores. Meanwhile, like inveterate gamblers, we continue to ring up the charges. To complicate matters, we’re lousy judges of how much we owe. Several studies have shown that subjects overreport the amount of sleep they get and underreport the effect that it has on them (much like calories, come to think of it).
While you can make up sleep debt – to a point – it’s a pay-as-you-go system, so building up a reserve of sleep won’t avoid future debt.
Which brings me back to the solution: Go to bed an hour early. For whatever reason, “sleeping in” just doesn’t work, not when it comes to paying back sleep debt and getting back on a “sleep budget”. Going to sleep earlier does. We’re pretty hard-wired to wake at the same time, and in any case, even if you manage to sneak in a couple of extra hours on the weekend, the fact is that during the week most of us are on a schedule that doesn’t allow that kind of flexibility. If you need to wake up at 6:00 a.m. to take the kids to school, you’re going to wake up at 6:00 a.m. – sleep debt be damned. We’ve got a lot more options when it comes to retiring early.
When it comes to sleep – and its effect on energy = the choice is clear: pay me now or pay me later. Either way, if you owe the sleep loan shark, you’re going to pay up in lost energy. You might as well wipe the slate clean and then do your level best to keep it that way.
The Hard Number on Sleep Deprivation
Each year more than 50 million Americans suffer chronic, long-term sleep disorders, and 20 million more experience occasional sleeping problems.
More than two-thirds of women frequently experience sleep problems, and more than one-third of adults suffer from insomnia every single night. (Daytime sleepiness, anyone?) The National Sleep Foundation tells us that 75 percent of adults experience, it, with a third of those saying they have actually fallen asleep at work or come darn close to it.
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