Sleeping Beauty

Well there's been quite a few studies so far that have made it clear that not getting enough sleep can reduce your cognitive function (read: your BRAIN, man!), decrease the strength of your immune system, impair performance on a myriad of skills tested, score higher correlation with all kinds of diseases mental and physical, and contribute to making you fat.

Since sleep deprivation's been the cornerstone of my life for the last 18 years or so, I find all this very interesting. My little shoulder angel says, Imagine how different your life might have been if you'd slept more so your brain had worked even better, if you'd had more energy, less fat, and been healthier! My little shoulder devil responds, Yeah, and you wouldn't have got a friggin thing done, either.

So recently, Cheri Mah of Stanford U authored a paper on a study done on six basketball players at Stanford, healthy student males. To make a long story short, they measured these guys for sprinting times and free throw accuracy on their normal sleep schedule, and then on one that included "as much extra sleep as they could get." The abstract is totally unhelpful about how much this is. 15 minutes more? 3 hours? 6 hours? Well anyway... "more." Perhaps the full paper has how much more.

When getting "more" sleep, sprint times were faster, and free throws were more often accurate. The players also said they had increased energy, better mood during playing, and less fatigue.

Wow. Beautiful! Sleep's the best drug since sleep.

I've seen this referenced on a few blogs and websites, including Krista's. I decided to make a note of it here because the last week my body has been demanding a FULL night of sleep. If I don't get it, I have very little warning before my body will just crash in the day, and I end up sleeping on my lunch hour and after work, totally screwing up my schedule and, of course, resulting in my not getting stuff done I had planned.

I understand that at 41 -- I'll be 42 in September -- I'm not a spring chicken, and sleep deprivation and all-nighters and things like that get way more difficult as most people age. But my body's utter DEMAND -- and taking it whether I'm agreeing or not -- for SLEEP accompanies my beginning to work out. And I'm not even working out all that hard! I realize timing can be coincidental. But I don't think it is. I think my body is basically knocking me out flat before I have a chance to stuff sufficient caffeine down my throat to keep us both awake -- me and my body ;-) -- all night so I can "do stuff".

So I'm not getting much done. But I'm sure getting more sleep!