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Americans Skip Sleep
for Work, Leisure
By Kathleen
Fackelmann,
USA Today - 08-30-07
via AOL Health News, Nation News
|
 The Web address of this article is
http://sfhelp.org/research/01_ltl_sleep2&3.htm
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Introduction
These two recent research summaries lend support to several basic
premises in this nonprofit Website. The first report below suggests that
some (or many?) American adults aren't getting enough sleep - largely
because of work hours, including commuting. The report quotes several
authorities saying that chronic sleep deprivation poses significant
health risks and social dangers (e.g. dozing off while driving).
The second report below proposes that young kids who get too little
sleep are prone to obesity and
depression in later years. An apparent link between
and sleep deprivation is mentioned. One au-thority recommended that
parents whose kids have sleep problems should persistently seek medical
advice. I propose such parents
would profit more by hiring a competent therapist to assess their
If it's functional enough, then seek medical counsel.
Neither report speculates on
(a) why American adults would sacrifice their sleep and health
for work, or (b) why some young kids can't sleep well. Both can be said
to be symptoms of adult self-neglect
and possibly parental neglect and/or
ignorance. It's likely that
stress in low-nurturance
homes would hinder healthy sleep of all family members.
The links and hilights in
this article are mine - -
Peter Gerlach, MSW
+ + +
(Aug. 30, 2007) - Americans who
log long hours on the job find the time for leisure and other activities by
cutting down on sleep, a study reports today.
"We only have 24 hours in a
day," says Mathias Basner, a researcher at the
University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine.
His study of 47,731 Americans found that people who worked more simply got
up earlier or went to bed later -- a practice that puts them at risk of
sleep deprivation. Time spent at
work is the single biggest determinant of how much sleep Americans got on a
typical day, according to the study in the Sept. 1 issue of the
journal Sleep. But travel time,
including time sitting in traffic on the way to work, comes in second place,
Basner says.
"You could argue there's a
hidden cost to living in suburbia," says Gregory Belenky, director of the
Sleep and
Performance Research Center at Washington State University in Spokane.
People who live in spraw-ling urban areas often make a long workday even
longer when they try to run errands on clogged roads, he says.
Basner says sleep deprivation has
been linked to a number of serious health problems, including
obesity.
People who are chronically
sleep-deprived also can experience attention lapses, memory loss and other
difficulties that can impair performance on the job, says James Walsh,
executive director of the sleep medicine and research center at St. Luke's
Hospital in St. Louis.
And fatigue can add an element
of danger to an already stressful commute. "If you're only sleeping five
hours a night, you're at risk of falling asleep at the wheel," Walsh says.
The
National Sleep Foundation
estimates that sleep-deprived drivers cause more than 100,000 automo-bile
crashes a year and more than 1,500 deaths.
Basner's team analyzed the
results of a federal survey conducted in 2003 through 2005. People were
asked to account for their time over a 24-hour period. The survey suggests
that people who cut back on sleep on weekdays often try to sleep in on
Saturday and Sunday. But people who
cut back on sleep night after night might never catch up, Walsh says.
Surveys suggest Americans get about
6½ hours of sleep a night -- about an hour less than the average in the
1950s, he says. Today, many adults extend their workdays by using
cellphones to check e-mail messages.
A second study in Sleep suggests that teens who use cellphones after lights
out can have daytime sleepiness. The teens in this study lived in Europe,
but teens in the USA also use cellphones to text-message and chat with
friends at all hours, says Amy Wolfson of the National Sleep Foundation.
"We're living in a 24/7 culture,
and teens are mimicking adults," she says.
Says Walsh: "People feel that sleep is negotiable." Yet studies suggest that
most adults need from seven to eight hours of sleep a night, and teens need
nine hours or more in order to do their best during the day, he says.
Copyright 2007 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
+ + +
Too little childhood sleep tied to later problems
By Will Dunham, Reuters News - 4-07-2008
Getting too little sleep
doubles a young child's risk of being overweight and raises the chances of later
anxiety and depression, researchers said on Monday.
Several studies published in the journal
Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine add heft to the notion that
getting enough sleep has wide-ranging health benefits.
Previous studies have shown that older children and adults who get too little
sleep are more likely to weigh too much. Researchers led by Dr. Elsie Taveras of
Harvard Medical School demonstrated that this is also the case in very young
kids.
In a study involving 915 children in Massachusetts, they found that those who
slept less than 12 hours a day in the first two years of life were twice as
likely to be overweight at age 3 than children who slept longer.
Very young children need more sleep and those in this study slept an average of
12.3 hours per day.
"There are consequences to children not sleeping well, even at this age,"
Taveras said in a telephone interview.
"It's going to be important to help parents learn how to improve the quality of
their children's sleep."
Television tended to make matters worse,
with children who watched two or more hours daily by age 2 more likely to be
overweight at age 3, the researchers said. Taveras said getting enough sleep is
becoming harder with televisions, computers and video games in kids' bedrooms.
The researchers said previous studies in adults and older children have shown
that restricting sleep changes certain hormone levels, possibly stimulating
hunger and weight gain.
EMOTIONAL FALLOUT
Another team of researchers led by Alice Gregory of the
University of London examined the long-term
emotional fallout from too little sleep in childhood. They gathered sleep data
on 2,076 Dutch children ages 4 to 16, and then questioned them as adults years
later about various emotional and behavioral symptoms.
The children who slept less than others
reported more anxiety, depression and aggressive behavior as adults, the
researchers said.
Researchers led by Valerie Sung of Royal
Children's Hospital in Parkville, Australia found that
children with
commonly
had sleep problems. Among 239 Australian children ages 5 to 18 years with
ADHD in the study, 73 percent had sleep problems. Their most common problems
were difficulty falling asleep, resisting going to bed and tiredness upon
waking, Sung said.
Compared to other children with ADHD but no sleep problems, these children were
more likely to have poorer quality of life and daily functioning, as well as
poorer school attendance.
Sung offered advice to families of children with ADHD. "If you are worried about
your child's sleep, ask your doctor for help, and if help is not forthcoming,
keep asking and seek help from a specialist sleep clinic at your closest
children's hospital," Sung said by e-mail.
(Editing by Maggie Fox)
+ + +
Copyright © 2008 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Reuters shall not be
liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in
reliance thereon.
Copyright © 2008 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
For more perspective, see...
-
this UCLA
research report on how family environment affects children's health and
welfare,
-
this
commentary on the U.S.
re/divorce epidemic,
-
these
related articles on human change and "hitting
bottom,"
-
this slide presentation introducing normal
personality subselves and "false-self" wounds. If
you have trouble viewing the slides, see
-
this introduction to
inner-family therapy ("parts work"), and/or...
-
this article on how "depression"
in kids and adults - often treated with drugs - is really normal
- perhaps amplified by (undiagnosed) false-self
.
-
The
guidebook
by Peter K. Gerlach, MSW; for
assessing and reducing false-self wounds:
Who's *Really* Running Your Life?
(Xlibris.com, 2000; 2nd ed.):
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October 06, 2008
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