Why we sleep

I've recently read an amazing book called "Why we sleep" by Matthew Walker, PhD. and I truly believe that everyone should read it and that the summary down below is just not enough to describe how important sleep is for us.

Sleep is not the absence of wakefulness. It is far more than that. Matthew Paul Walker is a British neuroscientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, Dr Walker was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He has published more than 100 scientific research studies and focussed his work on the impact of sleep on human health.

Sleep: the good, the bad and the ugly

Sleep benefits

What if scientists discovered through 17,000 scientific reports a revolutionary treatment that makes you live longer, enhance your memory, make you more creative and attractive. That will keep you slim and lower food craving. Protecting you from cancer and dementia. Warding off colds and flu. Lowering your risk of heart attack and stroke, not to mention diabetes. Will make you feel happier, less depressed, stressed and anxious. Would you be in It is called SLEEP.

Whilst a bit stretched, nothing about this claim is inaccurate. What's more? This treatment is free obviously.

Through many research studies, sleep scientists have discovered that sleep, by significant margins, improves our ability to learn, retain information, make logical decisions. It recalibrates our mood, allowing us to navigate the next day with cool-headed composure. It dilutes painful memories, inspires creativity and creates new connexions. Sleep also restock our immune system, regulate appetite, maintain a healthy microbiome within the gut, fine-tune our balance or insulin, glucose and hormones. Sleep also lowers blood pressure whilst keeping our heart in good conditions.

Am I getting enough sleep?

As a rule of thumb, we should ask ourselves: "Can I function optimally without caffeine before noon". If your answer is "no", then you are medicating yourself out of chronic sleep deprivation.

If you did not wake up before your alarm clock, you are likely not getting enough sleep either.

The national sleep debt

100 years ago, less than 2% of the population ins the US slept less than 6 hours a night. Now almost 30% do so. Importantly many of these individuals report not wanting or needing sleep. The World Health Organization declared the lack of societal sleep a global health pandemic.

A study across four large companies found that insufficient sleep cost almost $2,000 per employee per year in lost productivity. A standardised way to appreciate it would be to look at GDP — and so it's almost 2% of most countries GDP. Amounting most nations military budget and almost double the GDP percentage devoted to education.

Under-slept employees are not only less productive, but less creative, less motivated, less happy, and lazier, not to mention more unethical.

Is sleeping 7 hours enough?

Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep.

This is such an important issue that the World Health Organisation has recently declared sleep loss pandemic throughout industrialised nations.

Routinely sleeping less than 6 or 7 hours a night demolishes your immune system, double your risk of cancer, increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked, setting you on a path towards cardiovascular diseases, stroke and heart failure. Sleep is also a key determining factor for whether or not you'll develop Alzheimer's disease.

Inadequate sleep for just 1 week disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be qualified pre-diabetic. You'll crave more food, of the wrong type whilst suppressing a hormone that signals food satisfaction.

Sleep disruption is also now known to contributes to all major psychiatric conditions like depression and anxiety. Poor sleep is one of the most under-appreciated factors contributing to cognitive and medical-ill health.

Can lack of sleep kill you?

Yes, it can on at least 2 very strong link count:

• first, there is a very rare genetic disorder starting with progressive insomnia, from which basic brain function will start failing after a couple of months.
• Second, drowsy driving is the first cause of death in the US. Sadly it not only kills the sleep-deprived drivers but also others involved in the accident.

About drowsy driving

Vehicle accident caused by drowsy driving exceeds those caused by alcohol and drugs combined.

What's making things worst is that when experiencing micro-sleep, or falling asleep the driver does not break at all.

After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours.

80% of truck drivers in the US are overweight, and 50% clinically obese. This place these drivers at a far higher risk of sleep apnea which causes chronic and severe sleep deprivation. As a result, these drivers are 2 to 5 times more likely to be involved in a traffic accident and take on average 4.5 other lives with them.

The cocktail of sleep loss and alcohol is not additive but instead multiplicative. The relationship between decreasing hours of sleep and increased mortality risk of an accident is also not linear but exponential.

Death aside, lack of sleep has worrying short term effect as well as long term once. Even though like most epidemiology studies, the direct link is hard to confirm, the amount of evidence is overwhelming.

Sleep deprivation and the body

Insufficient sleep proves ruinous to all major physiological systems of the human body: cardiovascular, metabolic, immune, reproductive, even altering your most fundamental self — your DNA.

In fact, the leading causes of diseases and death in developed nations, diseases crippling health care systems, such as heart diseases, dementia, obesity, diabetes and cancer — all have recognised causal links to a lack of sleep.

The sympathetic nervous system

The sympathetic nervous system will mobilise in an evolutionary "fight or flight" response within the body. It can generate activity in a lot of the body physiological divisions such as respiration, immune system, stress chemicals, blood pressure and heart rate. Normally deployed for a short amount of time, it is left "on" under lack of sleep. From this point, it becomes deeply maladaptive and triggers a domino effect.

Leaving the sympathetic nervous system "on" will start by removing a default resting break that normally prevents your heart from accelerating. With that comes the hypertensive state or blood pressure at the same time as a chronic increase in a stress hormone called cortisol. Cortisol constricts blood vessels triggering an even greater increase in blood pressure. Making things worst, growth hormone — a great healer of the body — which normally surges at night, is shut off. So you can no longer repair these fracturing vessels effectively. Vessels will rupture and heart attack and strokes will be the most common casualties in the explosive aftermath.

The 1.5 billion people experiment

Each year, 1.5 billion people are forced to reduce their sleep by 1 hour for a single night. Otherwise known as the daylight saving time, we have observed concerning events. This seemingly trivial sleep reduction comes with a frightening spike in heart attacks the following day. It also works both ways, when we gain 1 hour of sleep in the Autumn, the rate of heart attacks plummet the day after. A similar rise-and-fall relationship can be seen with the number of traffic accidents.

The less you sleep the more you are likely to eat

Inadequate sleep is a perfect recipe for obesity: greater calorie intake, lower calorie expenditure.

Lack of sleep will play on 2 hormones :

• Increase in Ghrelin, which triggers a strong sensation of hunger
• Decrease of Leptin, which signals a sense of feeling full

Also, lacking sleep will increase your cravings of the wrong type of food by 30 to 40%. You'll crave more sweets — like cookies, chocolate, ice cream; heavy-hitting carbohydrates-rich food like bread and pasta, as well as salty snacks like chips and pretzels.

In addition to craving more food — of the wrong type, and having fewer sensations toward feeling full, your body becomes unable to manage those calories, especially the concentration of sugar in your blood.

In healthy individuals, the hormone insulin will trigger the cells of your body to absorb glucose from the bloodstream should increase, as happens after eating a meal. Instructed by insulin, your cells will open special channels on their surface that operate like a drain. If the cells of your body stop responding to insulin, like in a sleep-deprived individual, they cannot effectively absorb glucose from the blood. Should this condition persist, you will transition to a pre-diabetic state and, ultimately, to a full-blown type- 2 diabetes.

Moreover, in an experiment conducted on 2 groups exposed to a low-calorie diet. The first group was given five and a half hours of sleep and the second one full 8 hours of sleep. In the first group, 70% of weight loss came from body-mass — ie muscles, not fat. In the second one though 50% of weight loss came from fat whilst preserving muscles.

So to summarise: short sleep (the type commonly reported by many adults) will increase hunger and appetite, compromise impulse control, increase food consumption and especially of the wrong type, decrease food satisfaction and prevent effective weight loss when dieting.

Sleep makes your gut happier

Sleep's role in the nervous system balance also improves the microbiome which is located in your gut. An excess of circulating cortisol cultivates "bad bacteria". As a result, not enough sleep or stress-related issue will prevent meaningful absorption of all the foo nutriment and cause gastrointestinal problems which we suspect is both ways meaning it will also alter sleep through different biological channels.

Sleep and ou immune system

There is a clear linear relationship between sleep loss and infection rate. It doesn't require many nights of short sleep before the body is rendered immunologically weak and here the issue with cancer becomes relevant.

We all have Natural killer cells targeting malignant (cancerous) tumour cells. A single night of four hours of sleep will sweep away 70% of your killer cells relative to a full eight-hour night. A number of prominent epidemiological studies have reported that nighttime shift work, and the disruption to circadian rhythms and sleep that it causes, increase your odds of developing different forms of cancer considerably.

Sleeping 6 or fewer hours is associated with a 40% increase in the risk of developing cancer. Maintaining high levels of activities for our sympathetic nervous system provoke an unnecessary and sustained inflammation response from the immune system. Cancers are known to take inflammation response to their advantage.

Recent studies on sleep-deprived mice reported a 200% increase in speed and size of cancer growth relative to a well-rested group, and that the tumours were far more aggressive in sleep-deficient animals. This can be partly explained by the fact that in sleep-deprived mice, the M1 cells — one form of macrophages that help fight cancer where diminished, whilst alternative macrophages — M2 cells, were promoting it.

Sleep loss, genes and DNA

Neglect sleep and you will decide to perform a genetic engineering manipulation on yourself each night, tampering with the nucleic alphabet which defines your daily health. Chronic sleep loss will erode your genetic code. Anything that causes a wobble in gene stability can have consequences such as raising your risk of diseases.

Only one week of subtly reduced sleep will distort the activity of over 700 genes. These genes will either diminish or increase in the expression. The genes that were increased included those linked with chronic inflation, cellular stress and cardiovascular-related disease. Amongst those turned down are genes that help maintain a stable metabolism and optimal immune response.

What is sleep?

Sleep is not the absence of wakefulness. It is far more than that.

What triggers sleep?

There are two main distinct systems that determine when you want to sleep:

1. The circadian rhythm — your internal 24h biological clock
2. Adenosine — sleep pressure

Your circadian rhythm is an endogenous mechanism. So long as they are regularly reliably repeated, cues like sunlight, food, exercise, temperature and event social interactions can influence and reset our internal clock.

Adenosine is a chemical released throughout the day. Like counting time elapsed since you woke up. It accumulated and creates sleep pressure — desire to sleep. Only sleep will be able to evacuate and purge adenosine from your brain after a full 8-hour night of sleep.

The part of the brain responsible for this is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

Melatonin does not influence sleep itself but rather act as a placebo. Sunlight is like a brake pedal for Melatonin release.

Sleep from an evolution perspective

Whilst we have known the survival function of eating, drinking and reproducing, until recently and still, science failed us to explain the great biological mystery that is sleep.

From a biological evolution perspective, the necessity of sleep is puzzling because it does not seem to fill any survival function. Whilst in sleep, we do not socialise, gather food, reproduce or protect ourselves from predators.

Yet, as scientists recently discovered though running thousands of studies, there does not seem to be one organ or brain process that isn't optimally enhanced by sleep.

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution

— 1973 essay by the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky.

Why aren't we all on the same clock? Under an evolutionary context, the benefits of such a genetically programmed solution are that as a group we'd only have to be collectively vulnerable for 4 hours instead of 8 hours.

Are you a morning lark or an evening owl?

None of us has the same circadian rhythm, even though they are all around 24h. There are 3 categories you can fall into that are strongly determined by genetic:

• 40% of people are "morning types"
• 30% of people are "evening types"
• 30% of people are somewhere in between

We do not sleep the way nature intended

Distorted by modernity, we have a monophonic sleep, we stay awake longer at night and still wake up too early.

Studying Hunter-gatherer tribes whose way of life have changed little over the thousands of years, like the Gabra in northern Kenya or the San in the Kalahari desert, we discover that they sleep in a biphasic pattern in the hotter summer month, incorporating a 30 to 40 min nap in the mid-afternoon, also achieving at least 7 to 8 hours of bedtime in the early evening around 9 pm, in line with their circadian rhythm.

This biphasic sleep seems to be deeply rooted in our biology, think about your sleepy early afternoon meetings.

A team of researchers from Harvard UNiversity's School of Public Health studied the consequences of abandoning the siesta-like practice in Greece over 23,000 Greek adults. The group that abandoned regular siestas went on to suffer a +37% increase in the risk of death related to earth diseases across a six-year period. Workingmen especially for whom there was a +60% increase of mortality risk.

These napping communities have sometimes been described as "the places where people forget to die".

The 2 types of sleep

There are 2 types of sleep, both of which are critical, with different functions that alternate in 90 minutes of sleep cycles during which they are in a battle for brain domination:

• NREM — Non-Rapid Eye Mouvement.
• REM — Rapid Eye Mouvement.

NREM sleep helps transfer and make safe newly learned information into long-term storage sites of the brain whilst REM sleep dreaming state fuels is creativity.

NREM sleep

Deep slow brainwaves, where all brain cells shift to a unified state like a mantra chant, beautiful neural synchrony. We can think of each wave that ripples across the brain as a courier carrying packets of information between brain centres.

NREM is also responsible to remove unwanted or overlapping copies of information before they can be processed and store in our long-term memory.

NREM sleep (stage 2 — last 2 hours of an 8 nighter) is responsible for overnight motor-skill (muscle memory, which is a misnomer). It is directly correlated with the chance of sports injury with the total amount of sleep time.

REM sleep

Despite being asleep, the brainwave activity during REM sleep bears no resemblance to deep NREM sleep. REM sleep is an almost perfect replica of that seen during wakefulness. Brain cells are back to being desynchronised and fast-frequency waves.

REM sleep is responsible for the integration of newly formes facts and skills acquired and processed by NREM sleep, interconnecting these raw ingredients with past experiences, reinforcing our model and comprehension of our environment.

Facilitating accurate recognition and comprehension allows us to make more intelligent decisions. More specifically it helps us stay coolheaded — a key to Emotional IQ.

You are paralysed when you sleep

REM sleep is associated with dreaming. During REM sleep, a powerful signal is transmitted down the full length of your spinal cord from your brain system, paralysing your entire body, except vital functions such as breathing and heartbeat. Mother nature is preventing you from acting out your dream experience during the very active REM sleep phase.

We misunderstand total sleep time

NREM sleep is dominating more often early in the night whilst REM sleep is dominating at the end of it.

So the trick is that if you go to bed at midnight, but instead of waking up at 8 am which would give you a full 8 hours of sleep, you wake up at 6 am. You'll lose 60 to 90% of all your REM sleep, even though you are losing 25% of your total sleep time.

Sleep changes across your life span

With advanced age, seniors experience :

1. Reduced quantity/quality. Generally speaking. Also, the NREM brainwaves become smaller, less powerful and fewer in number.
2. Reduced sleep efficiency. Sleep efficiency is defined as the percentage of time you were asleep while in bed. In cause is the fragmentation of sleep. The older we get; the more frequently we wake up due to illness, medication and mainly weakened bladder. This lead to a reduction in sleep time and efficiency.
3. Disrupted timing of sleep. This leads to earlier bedtime due to the peak of melatonin instructing earlier start time for sleep.

The extent of brain deterioration in older adults explains 60% of their inability to generate sleep. One identified factor for the other 40% is the accumulation of one sticky and toxic protein: beta-amyloid that is a key cause of Alzheimer's disease.

We don't realise how sleep-deprived you are when you are sleep-deprived

Research studies have shown that people constantly underestimate their degree of fatigue and performance disability.

Chronic sleep restrictions that we impose on ourselves becomes the accepted norm for ourselves. It is called baseline resetting.

Emotional irrationality

A brain-scanning study involving a set of participants revealed that participants under sleep deprivation showed well over a 60% amplification in emotional reactivity compared to the group who had normal sleep the night prior.

Without sleep, our brain reverts to a primitive pattern of uncontrolled reactivity.

**There is no major psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal.**This is true of depression, anxiety, PTSD, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

A healthy individual can experience a neurological pattern of brain activity similar to that observed in many of these psychiatric conditions simply by having their sleep disrupted or blocked.

The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep.

— E. Joseph Cossman

Back in the '60s, a group of researchers selectively deprived a group of young adults from REM sleep and thus dreaming for 1 week. By the third day, participants were expressing signs of psychosis. They became anxious, moody and started to hallucinate. They also became paranoid. REM sleep is what stands between rationality and insanity.

About caffeine

Caffeine is not a vitamin but a psychoactive stimulant, and can essentially mute the signal from Adenosine by blocking the brain receptors to Adenosine, which nevertheless continues to build up.

It will take 5 to 7 hours for your brain to remove only half of the caffeine concentration. Thinking decaf? Think again. One cup of decaf still contains 15 to 30% of a regular coffee dose which is plenty enough to disrupt the adenosine receptors.

About power naps

Brief power naps have become inaccurately assumed to allow to forgo sufficient sleep, night after night. There is no evidence that a drug, a device or anything can replace sleep. Power naps may increase momentarily basic concentration under sleep deprivation, as can caffeine up to a certain dose. But studies have shown neither naps or caffeine can salvage more complex functions of the brain.

The link with Alzheimer's disease

Alzheimer's disease is associated with the buildup of a toxic form of a protein called beta-amyloid, which aggregate in sticky clumps and are poisonous to neurons. Beta-amyloid accumulate in the middle part of the frontal lobe which is essential for the electrical generation of deep NREM sleep.

Despite Alzheimer's disease being associated with memory loss, the hippocampus — the memory reservoir of the brain — is unaffected by amyloid protein.

This is a question that baffled scientist for a long time. Sleep disruption could be the missing factor since amyloid deposits in the frontal regions had the most severe loss of deep sleep, and as a knock-on consequence, failed to consolidate these new memories.

It is actually half the answer because lack of sleep actually causes amyloid to build up in your brain too.

Researchers found out that during deep NREM sleep comes a power cleans of the glymphatic system — a sewage network of cells side by side with neurons that generate the electrical impulse of your brain.

One piece of toxic debris evacuated by the glymphatic system during sleep is amyloid protein, amongst other dangerous metabolic waste elements that have links to Alzheimer's disease.

Inadequate sleep and the pathology of Alzheimer's disease interact in a vicious cycle.

Dreaming as overnight therapy

Concentrations of a key stress-related chemical called noradrenaline — also known as norepinephrine, are completely shut off within your brain when entering a dreaming sleep state. It is actually the only time during your 24h cycle that it will happen.

MRI studies established that key emotion and memory-related structures of the brain are all reactivated during REM sleep. Not only the research suggests that we process emotional memories, but that they are processed in a stress-free state.

The process of REM-sleep dreaming accomplish 2 critical tasks:

1. remember the details of past experiences and integrating them with the existing knowledge base.
2. forget painful emotional memories.

We can, therefore, learn and usefully recall salient life events without being crippled by the emotional charge that those painful experiences originally created.

Dr Rosalind Cartwright at Rush University in Chicago demonstrated that is was only those patient who was expressively dreaming about the painful experiences around the time of the event who went on to gain clinical resolution from their despair.

Patients with PTSD though have a difficult time recovering from horrific trauma experiences. They have excessively high levels of noradrenaline that blocks the ability to entering and maintaining normal REM-sleep dreaming. A repeat attempt of emotional memory stropping will occur on the next night, and the next one and so on, like a broken record.

REM sleep gives us the ability to reset our brain's emotional compass. Without it, individuals are inaccurate in their social and emotional comprehension of the world around them.

Aside from being the stoic guardian of your sanity and emotional well-being, REM sleep also processes intelligent information that inspires creativity and promotes problem-solving through memory association networks.

Insomnia

The 2 most common triggers for chronic insomnia are psychological:

1. emotional concerns → worry
2. emotional distress → anxiety

We live in a fast-paced world overloaded with information. One of the only time we stop from our persistent informational consumption is when our head hit the pillow.

An overactive sympathetic nervous system — our body fight or flight response, is one clear culprit. The raised metabolic rate will result in a higher body temperature, which is meant to drop by a few degrees in order to initiate sleep. Then the higher levels of alertness-promoting hormones such as cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline which in turn raise the heart rate.

This is only part of the response. Insomnia also alters patterns in brain activity linked with the body sympathetic nervous system creating emotional loops. Finally, when insomniac does fall asleep, the quality of sleep is altered and less qualitative.

The perverse effect of modernity.

5 socially engineered key factors that have powerfully changed how much and how well we sleep:

1. Constant electric light and especially LED
2. regularised temperature
3. Caffeine
4. Alcohol
5. punching "time cards"

These can easily be the source of individuals mistaken belief that they are suffering from medical insomnia.

Artificial lights

Be delaying the release of melatonin, artificial evening light makes it less likely that you'll fall asleep at a reasonable time. The feeblest of bedside lamps can have 50% per the melatonin-suppressing influence within the brain.

LED-powered devices such as lamps, screens, laptops or tablets, phone, tv etc. have twice the harmful impact on night-time melatonin suppression because they emit short-wavelength within the blue spectrum which is exactly what the eye is most sensitive about to communicate "daytime" to the suprachiasmatic nucleus.

Alcohol

Alcohol is one of the most powerful suppressors of REM sleep that we know of. Even moderate amounts in the afternoon and/or evening are depriving ourselves of deep REM sleep and makes us suffer from partial amnesia. What surprised scientists are that the partial amnesia effect will also happen to previous days before the alcohol consumption. So if you are a student and you drink reasonably on a Friday night after a hard week of work, then your memory will still be strongly affected. We actually don't know how long it takes for this new memory to be safe.

Ambient temperatures

Thermal environments are perhaps the most under-appreciated factor determining the ease with which you'll fall asleep. Ambient room temperatures, bedding and nightclothes dictate your thermal envelope.

To successfully initiate sleep, your body temperature needs to decrease by about 2 to 3 degree Fahrenheit or about 1 degree Celsius.

Climate-controlled homes thermostats and the use of bedcovers and pyjamas have architected a minimally varying environment in our bedrooms which makes it harder for the brain to receive the instructions within the Hypothalamus that facilitate a naturally timed release of melatonin. Moreover, our skin has difficulties breathing heat out in order to drop the core body temperature and initiate sleep.

A bedroom temperature of around 18.3 degree Celsius is ideal.

Avoid sleeping pills

Sleeping pills do not provide natural sleep, can damage health and increase the risk of life-threatening diseases.

A recent team of leading medical doctors found out that there were no statistically significant differences between the groups taking sleeping pills and the group taking placebos. Only minor improvements in the time it takes to fall asleep and was deemed of "rather small and of questionable clinical importance".

What is concerning is that they also discovered that Ambien-induced sleep caused a 50% weakening (unwiring) of the brain cell connections originally formed during learnings and so it became a memory eraser instead of a memory engraver.

Even more concerning and controversial, in recent years we were able to prove through epidemiological studies, a relationship between sleeping pills use and altered diseases or mortality risk. In fact, examining 10 000 patients taking sleeping pills were 4.6 times more likely to die over the 2.5 year observation period.

One frequent cause of mortality appears to be higher than normal rates of infection. Natural sleep is one of the most powerful boosters of the immune system, helping ward off infection. Another cause was the increased risk of fatal car accidents. There is a likely cause with the non-restorative sleep such drugs introduce.

Then broke the story of cancer. Recent studies confirmed that individuals taking sleeping pills were 30 to 40% more likely to develop cancer within the 2.5 years period of the study than those who were not.

These findings do not prove that sleeping pills cause cancer, but it is equally likely that they do.

Shouldn't the consumer at least be aware?

Consider it took over 40 years for Star Wars movies to $3 billion in revenue, when it took 24 months to amass $4 billion in sales profits for the sleeping pill. Big pharma can be notorious.

Don't take two of these, instead try this

• Reduce caffeine and alcohol
• remove screen technology from the bedroom
• dark, cool, gadget-free bedroom
• establish a regular bed-time and wake-up time even on weekends
• set an alarm for bed-time
• go to bed only when sleepy
• avoid sleeping on the couch early / mid-evening
• never lie awake in bed for a significant time period
• avoid daytime napping if you don't sleep well at night
• reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts and learn to mentally decelerate before bed
• don't oversleep to keep the sleep-pressure well balanced

Other considerations

• Exercise but not 2 hours before bed. Exercises have a bi-directional relationship with sleep
• Reducing food intake to just 800 calories a day for one month makes it harder to fall asleep.
• Avoid going to bed to full or too hungry and shy away from diet towards carbohydrates, especially sugar

Sleep and education

A century ago, schools in the US started at 9 am. As a result, 95% of the children woke-up without alarm clocks. Now the opposite is true, which is an issue with their precious REM-sleep-rich mornings. Controlled sleep laboratory studies show that children with longer total sleep times develop superior IQ.

Equally concerning is that fact that low-income families and children from low-income families are less likely to be taken to school by car and must wake up earlier than the others.

The epidemic of ADHD

ADHD diagnosis has significantly increased over the years, but ADHD symptoms are nearly identical to those caused by a lack of sleep and the fact that pharmaceutical companies are allowed to broadcast prime-time commercials for common ADHD medication is concerning and certainly responsible. Worst, these medications are amphetamine and methylphenidate which are two of the most powerful drugs we know of to prevent sleep and keep our brains wide awake. It is a vicious circle. That is the last thing a child in development needs.

Why did we ever force doctors to learn their profession in such an exhausting sleepless way?

The answer surprisingly originates with the esteemed physician William Stewart Halsted, MD. who also happened to be a helpless drug addict.

Halsted founded the surgical training program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland in May 1889. His influence was considerable as chief of the surgery department.

To him, sleep was a dispensable luxury that detracted from the ability to work and learn. He was difficult to argue with since he practised what he preached. But Halsted had a dirty secret: he was a cocaine addict. It was a sad and apparently accidental habit that started when conducting research. It didn't take long before he experimented on himself.

Halsted imposed a similar unrealistic mentality of sleeplessness upon his residents for the duration of their training which persists in one form or another throughout all US medical schools to this day.

Residents working a thirty-hour-straight shift will commit 36% more serious errors and 460% more diagnostic mistakes in intensive care. One in twenty residents will kill a patient due to a lack of sleep. Medical errors are the third leading cause of death amongst Americans after heart attacks and cancer.

Conclusion

Within 100 years only, human beings have abandoned their biological need for adequate sleep — one that evolution spent millions of years perfecting in the service of life-support functions. As a result, the decimation of sleep throughout our industrialised nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health, life expectancy, others safety, productivity and the education of our children.