Causes Of Sleep Deprivation

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Sleep Deprivation or sleep debt is the state of lacking needed sleep for one’s body to fully function. A lot of people experience sleep deprivation and this experience may vary for different reasons. It can be of different causes like their surroundings, their medications, and their health, mentally or physically. It was said by Smith (2016) that the frequent causes of this are voluntary behaviour, in which the person pushes their body to still consume energy since they don’t know they need to sleep and consuming caffeine also hinders them from their slumber, and commitments they have to do such as school or work related activities causing them to set aside their resting period just to finish their responsibilities. Other common factors are…show more content…
But still, about 40 percent of adults suffer from insomnia. With this increasing percentage, the Center for Disease Control has called lack of sleep a public health epidemic. As reported by the National Sleep Foundation, newborns (0-3 months) need 14-17 hours of sleep. For infants (4-11 months), 12-15 hours of sleep is needed while 11-14 hours for toddlers (1-2 years old). Preschoolers aged 3-5 years old and school ages (6-13 years old) are required to sleep for 10-13 hours. For teenagers (14-17 years old), they need 8-10 hours of sleep, young adults (18-25 years old) for 7-9 hours and older adults (aged 65 and above years old) for 7-8 hours. However, with the required sleep presented, many people still tend to neglect sleep not knowing how it can affect the human body. Sleep deprivation can cause more issues like weight gain, weakened immune system, hypertension, high blood pressure, loss of memory, stroke, heart diseases and many other serious problems. With all of these different kinds of diseases, it is really important to make sleep a priority…show more content…
Generally, cognitive performance becomes continuously worse when the amount of time on task is extended regardless of the kind of task given. This is the classic “fatigue” effect that is aggravated by inadequate sleep. However, performance tasks that measure speed of cognitive “throughput,” memory, and other aspects related to attention have been found to be sensitive to sleep deprivation. Moreover, two contradicting factors that can hide the effects of sleep loss on many cognitive tasks are the intersubject variability and intrasubject variability. It is considered to be intersubject confound when a sleep deprived person’s performance may be better than the performance of a person who is not sleep deprived. On the other hand, intrasubject confound happens when a sleep deprived person still continues to improve on a repeated task due to the effects of learning. Another problem with many research reports on the cognitive effects of sleep deprivation tackles the nature of the dependent variables selected for analyses. Effects of sleep loss on cognitive performance are sometimes missed because to less sensitive metrics or data analyses used. This happens due to failure in understanding that sleep deprivation increases the variability within and between the subjects’
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