The Joy of Sleep
Cannot be told, it only ought to be enjoyed first hand.
Anyone who still ends up saying that liking to sleep will surely turn one into a begging pauper doesn’t know where it’s at! Growing up I really didn’t care to realize the benefits of sleep. Inspired by a teacher who once told the class that in order to succeed you should try to sleep less and then make effective use of the time that you are up and about.
Nowhere are the effects of sleep felt better and well deserved than when coupled with a good bit of exercise and timed sustained times for going to sleep and getting up. Until recently I hadn’t thought too much about this. The main problem with life as a student is that once you allow yourself to spend more and more time doing assignments and cut out into recreation time, sleep is altered automatically.
Now for the past few weeks I have tried to get sustained sleep where it’s been defragmented quite a bit and has allowed me to be able to keep 6-8 hours reserved without fail.
On most nights I hadn’t paid much attention to the recent research that has gone into the subject since taking Psychology classes a few years ago.
Today I had a chance to go through old files I had saved of links that showed clear correlation between the number of hours people sleep and their quality of life and getting common diseases like influenza. These were done over long periods and were peer reviewed and properly reflected variations in data and other things which would affect the results.
I obviously don’t want to sleep beyond the normal boundaries, but student life if such that you sometimes have to go on a few hours less of sleep. To tie everything together: A major study among hospital workers who were on call 24 hours and went with small amounts of sleep consecutive days were at risk of botching at procedures like surgeries and other major aspects of the medical professions, when tested in lab settings they exhibited similar or worse reflexes and motor skills than that of people who were impaired with alcohol at 4 times the allowed medical limit.
Enough said; it’s time to go to bed.
Written on 9:43am, Saturday September 3, 2011
Uploaded 11:00pm, Friday January 13, 2012
