THE DANGER OF ‘SLEEP DEBT’

SETTING aside the extreme cases of sleep deprivation, how do you know whether you’re routinely getting enough sleep?

While a clinical sleep assessment is needed to thoroughly discover the answer, an easy rule of thumb is to ask yourself these two simple questions.

First, after waking up in the morning, could you fall back to sleep at 10am or 11am?

If the answer is yes, you are probably not getting the sufficient quantity and/or quality of sleep.

Second, can you function optimally without caffeine before noon?

If the answer is no, then you are likely to be self-medicating your state of chronic sleep deprivation. You should take both of these signs seriously. They are usually due to not giving yourself adequate time for sleep — at least eight or nine hours in bed.

When you don’t get enough sleep, you then carry that outstanding sleepiness throughout the following day.

Like a loan in arrears, this sleep debt will continue to accumulate. You cannot hide from it.

The debt will roll over into the next payment cycle — and the next, and the next — causing a prolonged, chronic and potentially dangerous sleep deprivation.

This results in a feeling of chronic fatigue, manifesting in many forms of mental and physical ailments that are now rife throughout industrialised nations.

Other questions that can reveal signs of insufficient sleep are: if you didn’t set an alarm clock, would you sleep past that time? (If so, you need more sleep than you are getting.)

And: do you find yourself at your computer screen reading and then re-reading (and perhaps re-reading again) the same sentence? (This is often a sign of a fatigued brain.)