Mystery remains

Iread the other day that sleep scientist Matt Walker says being deprived of sleep has worse effects on us than we realize. I’ve learned interrupting sleep with frequent visits to the water closet (far more elegant than bathroom) can leave me feeling groggy and listless the next day.

Walker believes it can actually be dangerous to miss sleep, affecting our health, relationships and productivity. In an article by Isabelle Roughol, he warns that even a small amount of lost sleep can affect us badly. Heart attacks increase by a whopping 24 percent on the spring day after Daylight Saving begins as more than a billion people lose an hour’s sleep. Conversely, in the fall when we regain that lost hour, the number of heart attacks decrease.

I might be inclined to say Walker was dreaming if these results hadn’t been determined through a controlled experiment.

Studies have found that children and teenagers are among the most sleep-deprived people in the U.S., considering more than 70 percent of high schoolers get less than the recommended amounts.

I’m no sleep scientist, but I’ve gotta believe we aging folks in general don’t fare that well either when it comes to sawing enough logs. So many I know can fall asleep only to awaken in the predawn hours and begin thinking or worrying, which can make it all but impossible to return to slumber. The inevitable aches and pains of aging also keep a lot of us from sleeping through the night.

One report found over half a million people are abusing the prescribed sleep aid Ambien and other sedatives. Over 38 million prescriptions for zolpidem (Ambien generic) were written between 2006 and 2011. I’m betting that’s increased significantly in the past eight years.

The first federal study to focus on use of sleeping pills found nearly nine million Americans in search of effectively shutting down each day were using pills to get there. Sleep disorders, including insomnia, affect about half of us.

In “The Science of Sleep,” Connecticut psychiatrist Charles Atkins said significant advances have been made into reasons behind our need to spend a third of our lives with our heads on a pillow in an unconscious state. For instance, the most recent discoveries have linked inadequate sleep to Alzheimer’s disease, heart attacks, obesity, hypertension, lung disease and cancer.

“As a psychiatrist,” Atkins said, “I am acutely aware of the relationship between disturbed sleep and major mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. More and more, science can explain that link.” The average adult American gets less than seven hours a night, more than an hour less than our 20th century ancestors.

If that’s not enough to catch your

attention, he said sleep deprivation and its effect on our health may go so far as to be the greatest health crisis of the 21st century.

“We’re tired,” he said, also referring to thousands of motor vehicle crashes caused by dozing off behind the wheel. I’ve lost track of the times I’ve been driving dangerously drowsy only to hold a blink just a moment too long and suddenly jolt myself back into consciousness. Bless those noisy rumble strips carved into the highway margins and centerlines.

Although medical technology has made great strides since the days Sigmund Freud was analyzing dreams in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (we can now measure brainwaves and chemical activity as we sleep), even those advances will pale in comparison with what we will learn in years ahead, Atkins said.

Another related article said most of us tend to think the two distinct phases of sleep (non-REM and dream-state REM) are when our minds and bodies shut down to repair and restore our brains. Yet this isn’t actually what’s happening. Even when we are asleep, our minds are still active, processing the information we’ve gathered during waking hours, restoring what we might have lost while awake, and strengthening us by repairing cells.

We still are far from discovering what’s behind programming our bodies to sleep for hours daily, although scientists offer many reasons we require sleep. We’ve even learned over the decades that staying awake for a sustained period of about 11 days will likely cause death.

In the first seven months of life, infants require 14 to 15 hours of sleep daily, which prompts this nonscientist to wonder (on a purely spiritual level and considering all matter is energy) if our newly arrived must initially stay closely connected with the energy frequency in which they were created and from which we emerged.

With as many questions as answers to the mysteries of sleep, I’ve become a fan of Patrick Fuller, an associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. He told Business Insider he’s been steadily seeking the answer to why we sleep.

“You’d think I’d have an answer for that, right?” he said. “I’ve been doing this for a while and I can’t answer that question.” After much research, there still appears to be no definitive answer.