For those of us that chronically do not get those ubiquitous 8 hours of sleep per night, or at least a good solid 7 hours on a nightly basis, or at least the majority of the time, unlike what most of the population thinks, you cannot “catch up” on this missed sleep on the weekends like you may have thought.

I remember this used to be a common thought, especially back in college when you pulled an all nighter studying for exams or finishing that last term paper, that you could deprive yourself of precious sleep during the week and not worry too much about it because you could always build your sleep reserves back up on the weekend, or something like that.

But that thought process, which is not uncommon, nor does it necessarily stray from common sense if you ask me, is nowhere near correct. In fact, if you don’t get your regular sleep, don’t even think that getting more than enough sleep on your longed for weekends will help you pull through by building up your sleep stores again. It’s sort of like once you lose sleep, you don’t get the benefits back, you just have to make sure that from this point forward you get good sleep on a nightly basis if you want to reap it’s rewards body wise and mind wise.

It’s important to note that our bodies respond very profoundly to lack of sleep. When we even go a full 24 hours without sleep, the results are similar to us imbibing a lot of alcohol. Our motor and cognitive skills become greatly impaired. Shoot, I can remember pulling all nighters in college and directly before college, but come to think of it, I always had a little nap in there somewhere along the way.

Try asking someone who works the graveyard shift at the hospital or some other similar job. They become like walking zombies because they are basically fighting their natural circadian rhythm and are also usually not getting the correct amount of quality of sleep that they need to function optimally. I’ve seen this result firsthand in some friends and family of mine.

They openly admit that working this shift has definitely not been good for their health. So, ladies and gents, remember when it comes to sleep consistency is best. As long as we are getting that good, quality sleep every night then that is what is going to make us function at our best levels, on a physical and mental plain.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Alternative & Herbal Health News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.