You would think that everyone knows about the importance of sleep and therefore most people would be achieving 7-8 hours. However, as you probably also know, it’s not easy to do.
In 2016, The University of Adelaide reported that more than 1 in 3 Australian have some type of sleep deprivation that adversely affected their daytime activity.
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The Importance of Sleep
Harvard Medical indicates that lack of sleep has a direct link to chronic disease. They also indicate that performance is detrimentally affected with concern that this has a negative impact on our society. The following are some studies involving the importance of sleep and the repercussions of sleep deprivation:
- Sleep deprivation increases the formation of false memory
- A study published in JAMA Internal Medicine discovered that people who got less than 7 hours of sleep per night were roughly 3 times more likely to develop a cold compared to those who got 8 or more hours of sleep
- A study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University tested 153 men and women to investigate the susceptibility of contracting the common cold based on how much sleep the participant gained. It found that participants who slept less than 7 hours per night were three times as likely to contract the cold
- Impaired decision making following 49 hours of sleep deprivation
- The Journal of Neuroscience reports that sleep loss can heighten pain