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It's no surprise that a night without enough Zzzs can lead to a groggy morning. But bleary eyes and gaping yawns aren't the only things that can happen when your body needs more shut-eye.
Indeed, there are more nightmarish side effects to sleep deprivation.
If a person is deprived of sleep, it can lead to
"tremendous emotional problems," said Dr. Steven Feinsilver, the director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. "Sleep deprivation has been used as a form of torture," he said.
There isn't a clear definition of exactly how long a person must go without sleep, or how little sleep a person has to get to be considered sleep-deprived, and different people need different amounts of sleep, so there may be no universal definition of "sleep deprivation." Rather, a person is considered sleep-deprived if they get less sleep than they need to feel awake and alert, researchers say.
But still,
research over the years has shown that people can be physically and psychologically damaged from not getting enough sleep, said David Dinges, a professor of psychology and the director of the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania.
In fact, the damage is so apparent that it is unethical to coercively deprive someone of sleep, Dinges said. In the studies of sleep deprivation that Dinges and his colleagues conduct in their lab, healthy volunteers are placed in medically safe environments and constantly monitored.
But studying sleep deprivation is important, according to these researchers and others who study the condition. They say that learning what happens in people who are deprived of sleep can help researchers better understand the function of sleep and its importance for both physical and emotional health.
Comment: And while the U.S. is busy exposing people to more sources of dangerous and cancer-causing radioactive waste the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission is claiming radiation good for you!