27.01.2015

After refusing to switch to summer and winter time, it would seem that there was less stress for people caused by the change of clocks, but bad habits, which we often cannot refuse, as well as other factors such as study or work, still take away precious minutes of sleep from us. Many people are rather irresponsible about their daily routine, often do not get enough sleep, put off the necessary rest for the weekend, while they do not think that sleep has great value for the human body and its health. Recent studies in this area have shown that lack of sleep is associated with the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Many eminent scientists and doctors also emphasize that sleepiness during the day leads to negative consequences in all areas, which leads to a deterioration in the quality of life and well-being in general.

The importance of a good night's sleep

Each age group different sleep needs. Babies and toddlers need quality long-term sleep the most, preschool and school age you also need to get good sleep to feel normal. Until a person reaches adolescence, his need for sleep is at least 10 hours a day. Adults over 18 should spend seven to nine hours in bed.

After a full and long sleep, a person is more active physically and mentally, his performance increases significantly. With a lack of sleep, we become more alert and irritable, it is more difficult for us to carry out our daily activities and duties, to communicate with others. In addition, the lack of sleep can accumulate and eventually result in a real depression or a serious illness.

Consequences of a lack of sleep

People who do not get enough sleep for a long time suffer from such consequences as:

• low productivity;
• irritability;
• memory impairment;
• reduced physical responsibility;
• increases the risk of obesity and other metabolic problems, such as diabetes.

In addition, some researchers believe that lack of sleep and changing its regimen may be one of the causes of cancer. After all, when a person goes to bed late and gets up in the middle of the day, he receives less sunlight, and, therefore, melatonin, which, in turn, can increase the production of estrogen, a catalyst for breast cancer in some women.

Benefits of keeping a sleep schedule

• increasing mindfulness;
• reducing the impact of everyday stress;
• mood improvement;
• keeping a sleep schedule, it is easier to maintain a healthy weight;
• having a good night's sleep, a person feels fresh and renewed.

How sleep affects Alzheimer's (and vice versa)

People who have long suffered from Alzheimer's disease have trouble sleeping. Early on, they may sleep more than usual and wake up completely disoriented. As the disease progresses, patients may sleep more frequently daytime and stay awake at night. Some people with Alzheimer's get confused, lost, or even lose their memory late in the day or early evening during a flare-up.

These negative phenomena lead to stress and anxiety of patients and their caregivers. One of the most common problems in the care of Alzheimer's patients is their nocturnal awakenings and wanderings, as well as non-standard wake and sleep schedules. But at the same time, nurses or nurses caring for the sick must recognize that their own sleep is no less important, because sometimes it is more difficult to follow sick old people than small children, and it takes a lot of physical and mental strength.

Most important advice, which can be given to people seeking to improve their sleep pattern is to follow simple rules that almost everyone knows:

• exercise regularly, however, you should not train or run three hours before bedtime;
• make it a habit to do some relaxing activities before bed, such as taking a bath or listening to relaxing music;
• sleep in a quiet, dark and preferably cool room;
• stick to a strict schedule for going to bed and getting up, even on weekends;
• Avoid drinking caffeine in the evening.

These simple rules almost everyone knows, but to know is not to follow, unfortunately. Try to follow our advice for at least a short period, and soon you will see a positive result, you will feel better and more active.

AT recent decades people are making more and more efforts to increase the duration and quality of life. quality food, healthy lifestyle life, work on emotional and psychological difficulties. They talk about it from TV screens, in videos on the Internet, they write in social networks, books and specialized websites. A special place in the value system of a person concerned about his health is occupied by a quality one. Regardless of whether a “lark” person or an “owl”, a sleeper or not, each of the people needs rest and time to recuperate. If this basic physiological need is neglected, unpleasant health consequences will follow.

Sleep is a necessary rest for the human body.

Barely born, a person sleeps most of the time, with breaks for food and going to the toilet. Long sleep is necessary for his physical and mental development. The baby is not yet strong enough to stay awake for more than an hour. Gradually, he grows up and it takes less and less time to rest.

However, even an adult is recommended to sleep at least eight hours a day. During this time, spent energy resources are restored, immunity is strengthened, muscles relax, and the nervous system gets rest. All processes in the human body slow down, and in the morning he gets up with renewed vigor.

In addition to the required amount of sleep, you need to pay attention to its quality and consistency. The habit of going to bed late or doing it at different times negatively affects well-being. In the morning, a person may feel lethargic, uncollected, and take a long time to recover.

Those who go to bed around ten o'clock in the evening wake up much more vigorous and rested. And sleep in a well-ventilated dark room until at least six in the morning.

The right habits in the schedule of the day contribute not only to physical health but also better appearance and good mood.

And lack of sleep are interconnected and come out of one another. Often life problems, troubles unsettle a person so much that he cannot fall asleep, even if he is very tired.

Obsessive thoughts, severe fatigue, irritability make him nervous, emotionally unstable. AT different periods life and depending on the characteristics of the psyche, life experience, self-confidence, relationships with loved ones, people suffer from insomnia for various reasons.

These can be problems or workload in school or at work, difficulties in relationships with the team, friends or family. Own mistakes, miscalculations also often prevent a person from falling asleep. Feelings of guilt, conscience, fears - all this overtakes in the evening and does not allow you to relax.

Some people during stressful situations exacerbate bad habits: smoking, overeating, drinking. All this only exacerbates the problem. First of all, you should try to establish your daily routine: do all the procedures at about the same time.

Before going to bed, it is good to take a walk in the fresh air. Less use of smartphones and computers, avoid conflicts, eat right, not forgetting about regular meals. You can please yourself by spending time and money on your favorite activities, hobbies, going for a massage, going to the cinema with friends, going out into nature, buying clothes or equipment. You need to try to distract yourself from the causes of stress as much as possible.

If these measures do not help, you should contact a psychotherapist or neurologist. They will conduct therapy, if necessary, prescribe sedatives or sleeping pills. Sometimes the cause-and-effect relationships change, and lack of sleep becomes a cause of stress.

If you neglect the needs of the body for rest for any reason for a long time, then everything will end in a stressful state in which it will be difficult to fall asleep. So there is a kind of vicious circle.

Young people often successfully combine a hectic vacation and study or work during the day. Walking and having fun at midnight, it is enough for them to drink a mug of coffee or energy drinks to feel like themselves again. full of strength for the morning. However, such a mockery of the body, as a rule, does not last long.

Even the most persistent and healthy boys and girls begin to get sick more often after a while. They notice that it becomes harder for them to concentrate and keep up with everything. But life situation it happens that a student needs to earn his living and minimal expenses, and there is practically no time left for sleep.

Then young people are forced to adapt, to sleep in fits and starts: on the road, in the back desks at lectures, at lunchtime. By the end of the institute, it becomes a little easier to observe the regime of work and rest.

However, the habit of constantly working for some remains for life. The man seems to have adapted well enough, and he uses his resources without respite. Namely, he studies and works at any free time. But to live at such a pace without certain consequences for the body is not long.

Consequences of chronic sleep deprivation

Excessive load, overwork and lack of sleep always have unpleasant consequences. Some of them are eliminated during the normalization of the regime. The appearance worsened during sleepless nights improves, the skin becomes less pale, puffiness of the face and bruises under the eyes disappear.

Drowsiness, irritability, dizziness, decreased mental capacity and concentration often accompany sleep deprivation and disappear when a person begins to sleep normally. But if sleep is neglected for long weeks and months, chronic sleep deprivation develops.

It has severe, not always avoidable consequences for human health. These include problems with the cardiovascular system, pressure disorders, strokes, vegetative-vascular dystonia, visual impairment, obsessive states, hallucinations and fainting.

Syndrome develops gradually chronic fatigue, which is characterized by muscle pain, disorientation in space, fever, chills. Sleep deficiency exacerbates all existing diseases, reduces immunity. A person gets sick more often and for a longer time.

Among psychological consequences- protracted, lack of joy in life, problems in relationships with the opposite sex, lack of sexual desire. To avoid these problems, you need to adjust the sleep and rest regimen in time already at the first signals of exhaustion of the body and nervous system, take care of yourself.

Take the test This test will help you find out how well you sleep and if you have any sleep disorders.

Shutterstock photo materials used

It is no secret to anyone that sleep is very important for the body.

It is during sleep that our body begins to actively recover.

Sleep helps us not only feel better, but also look good.

Experts say that women should sleep an odd number of hours, and men an even number.

So, for example, a woman needs seven or nine hours of sleep, while a man needs six to eight. At the same time, it is interesting that women who need to take an hour more time to sleep than the strong half of humanity, where it is easier for men to endure lack of sleep. Apparently, wise nature has arranged everything so that snatches of sleep are quite acceptable for a woman who is forced to jump up at night to crying children. Women should go to bed earlier than men and get up later.

It is difficult for the beautiful half of humanity to adapt to getting up and going to bed at inconvenient times. However, it is important to note that it is easy to endure lack of sleep with your abilities, you should not abuse it. During sleep, the body conducts self-diagnosis and eliminates problems that have arisen in its work. And if you do not give the body enough time to sleep, then you may well pay for this with unimportant well-being.

You should also not forget that, according to the discovery of American scientists, 24% of women who allocate two hours less sleep for sleep are overweight. This is explained very simply - the less you sleep, the more time you have to eat.

If, for example, you had dinner at 19-20 hours, then by about midnight you will want to eat again and head to the refrigerator, which, of course, will not affect your figure. in the best way.

Scientists are sounding the alarm: over the past fifty years, the number of women aged 20 to 45 who sleep less than seven hours a night has increased by 37%.

It is lack of sleep that experts explain the constantly growing number of women suffering from gynecological diseases.

The number of women suffering from such diseases is increasing several times every year.

The fact is that the female sex glands regulate their work in accordance with the modes of sleep and wakefulness. If your daily schedule is violated, then menstruation begins to come later than the due date, which in turn entails various gynecological problems.

It should also be noted that insomnia can be caused by a deficiency in the body of the most important female hormone - estrogen, which plays the role of a natural sleeping pill. Deficiency of these hormones can be caused by ovarian dysfunction or overwork.

The need to get enough sleep is also evidenced by the fact that the reaction of drivers suffering from constant lack of sleep worsens ten to twelve times.

You should be especially careful on the road in the afternoon, as our The biological clock arranged in such a way that we want to sleep during this period.

Experts also argue that lack of sleep can cause a disease such as dyslexia.

With dyslexia, the work of one hemisphere of the brain is ahead of the work of the other, which leads to the fact that we begin to slur our thoughts, confuse letters in words, and make sentences incorrectly.

Some people are born with this trait, others begin to show signs of dyslexia after a stroke or brain injury, but it turns out that lack of sleep can also lead to such a disorder.

Therefore, if you notice that others are looking at you with bewilderment when you start talking, it's time to send to bed. In order to put your thoughts in order, 20-30 minutes of sleep will be enough for you.

And finally, it must be said that lack of sleep negatively affects our memory. During sleep, our brain processes the information received during the night, “arranging” it into “cells”. If you allocate little time for sleep, then the brain simply does not have time to cope with its task, which leads to the fact that we not only cannot learn new information, but we also forget the old one, since the brain “blocks access to it”.

The process of sleep is no less important for a person than, for example, regular meals. And yet, how many times have we sacrificed sleep due to lack of time! What consequences can this lead to and how to improve the quality of sleep? AnySports asked the experts.

No other type of rest, except for sleep, will allow us to relieve tension and fatigue, get rid of heavy and intrusive thoughts, gather strength. At the same time, how much important processes happens in the body at night! The process of synthesis and decay is going on in the body: skin and hair cells are actively dividing, various hormones are formed, etc. Yes, and "sleep only with half an eye" - during sleep he needs to sort out a lot of information.

How many hours do you need to sleep to sleep

The genius Einstein slept 4 hours a day, and this did not prevent him from leaving a noticeable mark on science. But how many people are able to withstand such a rhythm? Renders only 1%. By the way, according to WHO recommendations, the average person needs to sleep about 7-8 hours. During this time, in 95% of people, the body is completely restored.

“How many hours a person needs to sleep in order to get enough sleep is an individual indicator,” says Yuri Poteshkin, PhD, endocrinologist. - This largely depends on the characteristics of the central nervous system, the person's response to external stimuli, on the method of analyzing the information entering the brain, on the convenience of a sleeping place, etc. On average, the time range is from 6 to 10 hours. More than 10 hours of sleep is simply useless, less than 6 is fraught with lack of sleep.

It is believed that with proper organization of sleep, you can "sleep" in one and a half to two hours. This is true, but with a small caveat. “In order to partially recover, one sleep cycle is enough for a person, and this is 80-90 minutes, which includes one phase of REM sleep and one slow wave,” says Olga Yakob, professor, doctor of medical sciences, general practitioner. - For a long time such a rest is not enough, but you can provide yourself with 3-4 hours of vigor. However, if you go to bed at two and wake up cheerfully at six, this technique will not help.

Remember that if you do not get enough sleep, then:

• Get up and eat more. Short-term sleep disturbance leads to the abuse of high-calorie, high-carbohydrate foods;
• You have a high chance of getting into an accident. One sleepless night can negatively affect visual coordination, which, in particular, is important when driving;
• You don't look your best. “In one study, participants who experienced sleep deprivation were outwardly more depressed and less attractive,” says Olga Yakob. The problem only gets worse with time! So, accelerated skin aging, researchers at the Royal Karolinska Institute in Sweden, is associated with a chronic lack of sleep”;
• You risk catching a cold. At night, the body produces proteins - cytokines, which are necessary for the regulation of stress and for the synthesis of antibodies that fight infections;
• Get more. When there is a shortage healthy sleep the centers of the brain responsible for emotions become 60% more receptive. The brain reverts to a more primitive pattern of activity when it cannot relate emotions to the situation.

Healthy sleep rules

Human biorhythms are sufficiently regulated by the change of day and night. For a long time we lived in harmony both with nature and with our own organism: we got up at dawn, went to bed at sunset. But modern style life, with its ability to stay awake as long as you like, knocks our circadian rhythms. The duration and quality of sleep is declining, and this trend is only gaining momentum in recent years. What you need to consider in order to sleep truly sound and healthy?

— . It is better to plan all important things before 17:00. After this time, just do your routine. Otherwise, the stress hormone cortisol, which should decrease during the day, will jump in the evening, and this will make it difficult for you to fall asleep;

— Have dinner. At night, your body needs nutrients to produce skin cells and hormones. So lean meat or fish with a salad of non-starchy vegetables - a couple of hours before bedtime.

Is alcohol okay before bed? “Alcohol causes a sharp jump in blood sugar,” says Olga Yakob. “And this, in turn, increases the production of insulin, which contributes to a decrease in the quality of sleep.”

- Follow the rules. There is an opinion that if you want to sleep, you need to go to bed before 12 o'clock at night. To what extent is it true? "I have not met scientific literature any recommendations when it is better to go to bed in order to get enough sleep, - Yuriy Poteshkin comments. - With a late going to bed, as a rule, the time of awakening remains the same. That's why required norm a person does not gain sleep.

On this topic:

But there is another opinion: for the period from 12 am to 4 am, there is an active synthesis of the hormone melatonin, the strongest antioxidant that takes Active participation in the processes of restoration of the body, in the synthesis of a number of hormones and in the breakdown of fats. It is also responsible for the quality of sleep. With a lack of melatonin, many begin to sleep intermittently and anxiously, or even suffer from insomnia.

- Move away. Working devices make our sleep intermittent and disturbing. Getting on the closed eyes, the light from the screens gives signals about the beginning of awakening. As a result, various organ systems are activated: nervous, endocrine, digestive. And the synthesis of valuable melatonin stops.

- Organize your bed properly. Silence, darkness, room temperature of about 18-20 degrees, a comfortable mattress and pillow, fresh bed linen - that's what you need for a healthy and sound sleep.

- Don't force yourself to fall asleep. If you do not feel like sleeping 10-15 minutes after you lay down, do not torture yourself. Get up and do some simple household chores. After 20-30 minutes, try to fall asleep again.

How to calculate the time and wake up cheerful in the morning

Immediately make a reservation, it is impossible to compensate for the lack of sleep in any way! “If for you 8 is the number of hours you need to sleep to recover, and you sleep for 6 hours, in order to feel rested you need to compensate for the missing hours next time,” explains Yuri Poteshkin . – Therefore, next night you should sleep 10 hours. If you missed 36 hours of sleep, then within 9 days you need to sleep 4 hours more than your norm. Agree, few people can afford such a regime. In fact, we can sleep an hour longer, so those 36 hours will make up for more than a month. If you chronically do not get enough sleep, then you provide yourself with a long period of recovery.

But even if you sleep the prescribed norm, in the morning you can feel, to put it mildly, uncomfortable. What will help you cheer up?

— Get into the right sleep phase. Normal sleep consists of two phases: slow and fast, the duration of the first is about 70 minutes, the second - 10-15. “The body rests and gains strength during the first phase. The maximum feeling of cheerfulness is achieved if you wake up during the phase of REM sleep, when the work of the brain is activated, ”comments Olga Yakob.

How to catch the beginning of REM sleep? Either special applications for mobile phones or trackers that are put on your hand will help you with this and wake you up in right time and in the right phase of sleep. The accuracy of such devices is usually much higher, because they judge the beginning of the fast phase based on your physiological indicators, and not on the movements of the bed, as applications do.

You can also try changing your wake up time by 15-20 minutes up or down. If after waking up you feel sleepy and rested, it means that you woke up in the right phase of sleep and will approximately know how much sleep you need.

— Smart alarm clock. A gadget with imitation of dawn will help you wake up more smoothly and without excess stress. Getting on the closed eyes, the light rays gradually bring the body out of the phase of slow sleep into fast sleep.

— Proper drinks. Regular or green tea in the morning can be much more effective than a cup of coffee. Theoretically, coffee will also help to cheer up, but not always. “If you are a “coffee addict”, then the sensitivity to caffeine decreases over time, after about 3 weeks of its regular use, says Olga Yakob. – Therefore, coffee as a stimulant may not always work. But the effect of such herbal preparations as ginseng, eleutherococcus or Chinese magnolia vine is similar to caffeine.

For Randy Gardner, a perfectly normal 17-year-old schoolboy, the mental arithmetic task is not difficult at all. The neurologist asked him to subtract a seven from 100, then another, and so on. But Gardner only got to 65 and fell silent. The questioner waited a moment, and then wondered why the questioner did not count further. "And what should I count?" - asked the young man. He already forgot what he was asked about.

Gardner had never experienced mental problems. And now? The neurologist writes: “Face without expression, indistinct speech, devoid of intonation; you have to encourage him to speak in order to get at least some answer. What happened to the handsome young man from San Diego, California? Everything is very simple: he wants to sleep, as, probably, no one has ever wanted to. After all, Gardner has been awake for the 11th day in a row, he has not slept for 250 hours. He needs to endure just one more night, and he will reach the goal: he will fall into the Guinness Book of Records as the longest sleeper in the world. Perhaps after the fifth subtracted seven, fatigue turned him off. short term memory as happens with people in a state of senile dementia. Or maybe he just fell asleep for a split second. This is too short a period of time for the interlocutor to notice anything, but sufficient to erase the arithmetic problem from memory.

This was in 1965. Somnology as a science was still in its infancy. No one knew then that experimental animals die from prolonged sleep deprivation. It never occurred to anyone that the brain, exhausted to the extreme, provides itself with the necessary unconsciousness with the help of microsleep. Accordingly, no one guessed that without observing the electrical activity of the brain, it was impossible to truly determine whether a person fell asleep or not. Therefore, from the point of view of today's science, what Gardner did on himself is not a pure experiment. How big was it inner need in a dream at the moment when he forgot the arithmetic problem remains unknown. However, this story tells eloquently about what happens to a monstrously sleepy person.

The records of Gardner's condition were then kept by neurologist John Ross of the Naval Hospital in San Diego. Together with colleagues, he undertook to observe the experiment that the young man started. Already on the second day of sleep deprivation, the psychiatrist noticed young man signs of extreme fatigue: Gardner had difficulty focusing his eyes on one object and recognizing things by touch. On the third day the patient fell into melancholy, on the fourth he first had memory lapses and an inability to concentrate. Further, the young man had problems with sensory perception, he mistook the traffic sign for a person, and himself for a famous football player. However, we are not talking about psychotic hallucinations - Gardner quickly and independently notices his mistake. In the following days, the symptoms worsen. The young man's speech slows down. He cannot remember the names of the simplest objects. The lapses in memory are more and more pronounced.

But he still set a hitherto unsurpassed world record. After 264 hours, that is, exactly 11 days, Gardner gives a legendary press conference at 5 in the morning, which William Dement recalls in his book Sleep and Health: “Standing at the console lined with microphones, Randy resembled the President of the United States. He performed impeccably, never once stumbled or fell into unintelligible muttering. After the press conference, Randy went to bed."

He slept for almost 15 hours, after which he woke up vigorous and practically healthy. The next night, Gardner did not go to bed and the next morning he even went to school. In the next few days, the young man went to bed early and slept longer than usual. But soon everything was back to normal. The fact that the effects of sleep deprivation are reversible was confirmed almost two decades later by Allen Rechtshaffen. In his rats, too, sleep deprivation did not cause long-term harmful effects if they were released from the experimental apparatus in time and allowed to sleep.

Somnologist Dement most of the time personally watched the young man, helping him to keep cheerful in the second half of the night, when the need for sleep is especially noticeable. To distract themselves, they played basketball and other games. AT last night Gardner beat the professor at pinball a few more times.

The real problems with wakefulness began on the third night. From this point on, Gardner increasingly became irritable, moody and absent-minded, or, conversely, fell into apathy and practically did not respond to attempts to communicate. Sometimes the young man resembled a somnambulist, writes Dement. Today, the scientist suggests that at such moments his overworked ward, especially if he closed his eyes for a second, actually slept. Without these sleep attacks, which could be recognized on an EEG, Gardner probably would not have been able to go so long without real sleep.

However, Dement, unlike neurologist John Ross, argues that Gardner did not at any point show symptoms of true psychosis: "His short-term mistakes and misconceptions can easily be attributed to extreme fatigue." Therefore, to this day, it is believed that sleep deprivation does not cause serious mental problems.

Modern experiments, in which sleep deprivation has been more precisely controlled, are setting in a more disturbing mood. Among Israeli soldiers who were deprived of sleep for four days, some (a relatively small percentage) suffered from the so-called "sleep deprivation psychosis" on nights when the need for sleep is especially great. During the day, mental disorders disappeared, and the soldiers did an excellent job with their duties. This picture is supported by other experiments in which people with extreme sleep deprivation showed obvious psychotic disorders, such as hallucinations, persecution mania, extreme aggressiveness or deep depression. All these phenomena, at least in a weakened form, were observed in a 17-year-old student from San Diego.

But regardless of the outcome of a purely academic discussion, whether to recognize mental illness what sleep deprivation does to people, no serious doctor today would agree to an eleven-day experiment of this kind. Four days are now considered the extreme limit of what is acceptable during sleep deprivation in humans. Further, the health risk becomes too great.

Humans are not experimental animals. It would never occur to anyone to check on people how long they are able to live without sleep and what will happen to them. And so it is clear that such an experiment would have catastrophic results. In order not to doubt this, it is enough to look at studies that meticulously record the state of people who have not slept for only two or three days in a row.

They, like Randy Gardner, violated the reliability of sensory perception, performance falls, memory deteriorates, the ability to concentrate and judge. The even mood disappears, the mood deteriorates. No wonder sleep disorders are one of the possible causes clinical depression. All these symptoms are associated, according to experts, with the growing need for sleep. Their collection is simply called sleep deprivation syndrome. It also includes the growing risk at the most inopportune moment in broad daylight - and even more so at night - to fall asleep for a few seconds. Such an attack can be noticeably longer than a microsleep, and it is quite enough to, for example, while driving, lose control of the car.

However, sleep deprivation does not have to be one-time. It can build up gradually, in the form of a night after night deficit. In people who long time do not get enough sleep, that is, they suffer from a chronic lack of sleep, in the end, the same symptoms appear that those who have not slept in a row for a day or two.

At first, these people do not notice that their performance has decreased. Tests in which researchers compared results achieved with self-assessment of the subjects showed a frightening discrepancy. Overworked people consider themselves still quite alert when their results are no longer up to standard. In this - and not only in this - they are like drunks: after 17 hours without sleep, we cope with the tests as poorly as with 0.5 ppm of alcohol in the blood. A person who gets up in the morning at 7 o'clock, already around midnight, gets behind the wheel "drunk". After a day of sleep deprivation, our reaction rate drops to the values ​​that a sleepy person shows with 1 ppm of alcohol in the blood.

It is only when a huge sleep deficit has accumulated over many days that people begin to realize that something is wrong with them. And most can't pinpoint the exact reason. They say something vague like “I’m kind of lethargic”, “I’m somehow unwell”, “I’m under a lot of stress right now” or “I’m completely twisted”. Almost no one realizes that they simply do not sleep enough.

AT best case overworked people from some point experience physical ailment, headaches and even a slight rise in temperature. They think they've caught a cold and go to bed for a day or two. If during this time they manage to get enough sleep, their working capacity returns to normal. in full. AT worst case the problem turns into a danger to life for themselves and those around them - both because of the increased frequency of bouts of second sleep, often leading to accidents on the road, and because of the reduced ability to make the right decisions.

People with severe sleep deprivation are more likely to make mistakes, they are unbearably irritable, and even during the day they often fall asleep for a moment. Professional chauffeurs who, due to untreated sleep disorders, suffer from so-called daytime sleepiness, are legally deprived of the right to practice their work. Monstrous behavior sometimes observed in soldiers in war - brutal war crimes, attacks on own units or massacres civilian population- from the point of view of specialists, it is also partly due to the growing lack of sleep from day to day.

During a study carried out in american army in 2002, elite formations were tested before and after a three-day combat exercise. A frightening drop in performance caused by sleep deprivation has been shown. Some soldiers slept only an hour in 73 hours of training. When tested for the ability to make quick decisions after the maneuvers, they made an average of 15 mistakes, and before the start of the exercise - only one or two. “The results were worse than if they were drunk”, said study leader Harris Lieberman.

Soldiers are not the only ones affected by sleep deprivation syndrome. “Chronic sleep deprivation is common and has many different reasons. Among them are medical (for example, persistent pain or sleep disorders), unfavourable conditions labor (such as working long hours or night shifts), as well as social or domestic responsibilities," says David Dinges, one of the world's leading experts on sleep deprivation, associate University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where his no less venerable colleague Hans Van Dongen also works.

In 2003, they published the impressive results of an interesting experiment: 48 young healthy people with a completely normal, average need for sleep slept for 2 weeks, some only 4, some 6, some 8 hours. During wakefulness, they passed every two hours tests for attention, memory and reaction speed. Only those who slept for 8 hours showed high results. In the other groups, performance continued to deteriorate until the last day of the experiment, with those who slept for 4 hours, about twice as fast as with the 6-hour sleep regimen.

Two weeks later, the working capacity of those who slept for 4 hours was in the same deplorable state as that of those who did not sleep for two days in a row. Those who lived in the 6-hour sleep mode reached the state of people who did not sleep for a day. The researchers noted in the subjects "progressive neurocognitive dysfunction of systems responsible for long-term attention span and working memory."

Therefore, overbusy managers or TV presenters who say that 4 hours of sleep is enough for them are most likely mistaken. This mistake is natural, the same Dinges and Van Dongen found out: apparently, the subjective fatigue that we feel when we don’t get enough sleep for several days in a row lags far behind the decline in our mental abilities.

Analyzing the test, in which the subjects themselves assessed the degree of their drowsiness, the scientists received completely unexpected results. Approximately on the fifth day, subjects who did not get enough sleep every night stopped feeling the increase in fatigue compared to the previous night. The homeostatic component of sleep regulation reached saturation in them and did not rise further. It even seemed that their body was accustomed to a reduced amount of sleep. Indeed, after two weeks, although they were still not allowed to sleep, they no longer complained of serious drowsiness. Those experimental subjects who had to stay awake for two days in a row felt incomparably worse.

The conclusion turns out to be frightening: from lack of sleep we become stupid - and we don’t even notice it. In recent years, more and more experiments have been carried out, confirming that not only the body, but also the intellect needs sleep to function properly. Now neuroscientists see one of critical tasks sleep is to help the nervous system process the impressions received during the day. This process takes time for the brain. If this time is not enough for him, our reason obviously suffers.

It has long been known that people who do not get enough sleep for a long time are mentally retarded, do not study so well, and remember worse. Some scientists have even suggested keeping people awake after a traumatic event so that they quickly forget the experience and their psyche does not suffer. Sleep deprivation is especially harmful for schoolchildren. Those who suffer from sleep disorders tend to study worse than average. If this problem is corrected, academic performance usually improves. Two studies conducted in the United States in 2005 and 2006 clearly showed that children who have severely disturbed sleep due to severe bouts of snoring very often deviate from the norm of behavior. Overwork is manifested in them by hyperactivity, inability to concentrate, and sometimes aggression. A surprising number are even diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). After successful snoring therapy, children's behavior improves significantly.

In the first study, doctors at the University of Michigan removed tonsils from 22 children with ADHD - the most common cause snoring in children. A year later, the diagnosis of ADHD remained only in half of the operated patients. The second study, conducted by New York doctors, compared the results of 42 children whose tonsils were removed due to snoring with the same control group where this operation was performed for other indications. Before surgery, children with sleep disorders were significantly more likely to have deviant behavior. Three months later, test scores in the ex-snorers group improved significantly and approached those in the control group.

Thomas Alva Edison invented the electric light bulb back in 1879. However, electric light did not penetrate into the homes of ordinary citizens immediately. Therefore, back in 1910, people went to bed early and spent an average of 9 hours a day in bed. Now, according to a survey, the average German sleeps only 7 hours and 8 minutes. He goes to bed at 10:47 pm, falls asleep after a while, and wakes up between 6 and half past seven. Before going to bed, he either spends watching TV, or continues his daytime activities by electric light.

Chronobiologist Anna Würtz-Justice, head of the Basel Sleep Laboratory, where I had my somogram, believes that this trend often leads to health problems in the end: “Modern people sleep an hour less on average than 20 years ago. Perhaps many of the so-called "diseases of civilization" are the long-term consequences of such a development. Indeed, a growing body of evidence indicates that chronic sleep deprivation leads to metabolic disorders. Obviously, the body needs a long night's rest so that the continuous chain of signals of finely balanced hormones has time to complete its work.

Sleep deprivation affects carbohydrate metabolism and the hormonal system in the same way as normal aging processes, Carina Spiegel and Eva Van Kauter from Chicago found out in 1999. In their experiment, four healthy young people slept only 4 hours for six days in a row. As a result, their blood test looked as bad as it usually happens in people in a pre-infarction state or on the outskirts of diabetes. "Lack of sleep appears to increase the severity of chronic age-related diseases", the researchers concluded. In other words: who sleeps little, ages faster.

Neurotransmitters such as insulin, leptin, and ghrelin, as well as hormones thyroid gland and the adrenal cortex, constantly provide a balanced level of internal energy adapted to the needs of the body, in which our organs can work optimally. During sleep, growth hormone launches a program of complex renewal of the body. New cells are born in the body and it expends considerable energy on this. And since we do not eat at this time, fat is burned first of all from energy reserves on the abdomen, buttocks and thighs. Therefore, synthetic growth hormone, which promotes weight loss and rejuvenation, has gained notoriety as a popular dope in power sports.

Perhaps athletes, instead of doping, should simply sleep more and deeper. After all, if the time for complex process nocturnal metabolism is not enough, or if we sleep too irregularly, the whole system can go wrong. “Many studies now confirm that Sleep deprivation and metabolic disorders are linked" says Wurtz-Justice. A smiling, energetic woman, a native of New Zealand, makes a frighteningly serious face. And she is right: her words mean that, for example, obesity, diabetes or cardiovascular diseases are becoming more common, partly because we are sleeping less and more erratically.

In recent years, the combination of three diseases, which doctors call the metabolic syndrome, has become especially frequent. Patients are overweight, have dramatically elevated serum lipids and blood pressure, and are prone to diabetes. Can it be considered coincidental that this trend appeared at the same time as the general reduction in sleep time?

Most probably not. In Holland, a group of neuroscientists led by Rud Buijs from the Amsterdam Institute of Neuroscience has been investigating the causes of the metabolic syndrome for several years. They were able to find compelling evidence that what is common to all the various manifestations of this disease, which affects a quarter of the population in the United States, is a failure in the control of metabolism by the biological clock. Buys' conclusion in short reads: who sleeps badly and always at different times, the body's internal rhythms fail, and this can lead to metabolic disorders.

Concerning excess weight, now no one doubts its direct connection with lack of sleep. In recent years, many scientists have shown in a variety of experiments that people who sleep very little or poorly are more likely to be obese than others * .

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* This is just one of many factors, and by no means the most important: if a person sleeps little, but moves a lot, then he will, on the contrary, lose weight.

Shahrad Taheri of Stanford University in California has shown, for example, that body mass index (BMI, body weight divided by height squared) in people who sleep less than 8 hours a night increases in direct proportion to sleep deprivation. Hormones that regulate appetite are likely to play a decisive role in this: in people who sleep too little, the levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin are increased in the blood, and the amount of leptin, which restrains appetite, is reduced.

This is not surprising, since the body during sleep suppresses the secretion of ghrelin and increases - leptin, so that hunger does not wake us up at night. If a person does not get enough sleep, too much ghrelin is produced, which prompts them to eat more than they need. Emmanuel Migno, leader of the Stanford Research Group, agrees: “Our study demonstrates a significant link between sleep and metabolic hormones. AT developed countries, where chronic sleep deprivation is common and food is readily available,” the observed effects “play a critical role in the widespread prevalence of obesity.”

Chronobiologist Rud Buijs has discovered a direct link between the central internal clock in the hypothalamus and a nearby area of ​​the brain called the nucleus arcuatus (semicircular nucleus), which is responsible for regulating appetite. “It turns out that circulating hormones act on the suprachiasmatic nuclei, and changes in them, in turn, immediately modify the activity of the nucleus arcuatus,” he told colleagues at a neuroscience conference in 2006.

This worrying trend is also affecting children: Canadian researchers at Laval University in Sainte-Foy found in 2006 that children aged 5-10 years old who slept just 8-10 hours a day were 3.5 times more likely to be overweight. than their peers who received 12-13 hours of sleep at this age.

That same year, the results of the largest sleep and overweight survey to date were presented at the San Diego convention. The very amount of data processed makes us treat them with special attention: Sanjay Patel, a physician at the University of Cleveland, and colleagues analyzed data from 68,000 nurses who were surveyed about sleep duration and weight every two years from 1986 to 2000. Moreover, due to the huge number of respondents, it was possible to take into account the impact on weight of the individual amount of sleep, since other significant factors in the groups identified on this basis did not differ - be it height, age, sports activity, or the quantity and quality of food.

Women who slept five hours or less a day already weighed an average of 2.5 kg more by the beginning of the survey than those who slept seven hours. Ten years later, the difference in weight has increased to 3.25 kg. “These numbers don't seem particularly large, but they're talking about the average,” explains Patel. Some women recovered significantly more during the survey. In particular, those nurses who slept only five hours were three times more likely to put on 15 kg. And even with six hours of sleep remained increased risk very strong weight gain.

Long-term lack of sleep affects not only metabolism and energy. Endocrinologist Eva Van Kauter proved back in 1992 that with sleep deprivation, the human body produces significantly less growth hormone. It means that lack of sleep reduces for the entire system internal organs possibility of night regeneration. Such a reduction can lead to diseases at almost all levels. If organs do not have the time and material to replace old or diseased cells with new ones, they will inevitably perform worse and their resistance to disease will decrease.

The same phenomena underlie the ancient folk wisdom that the sick person is most useful sleep. Probably everyone has experienced this for themselves: you go to bed sick, sleep unusually deep and long, and wake up healthy. It is not for nothing that during an illness or during the recovery period after surgery, our need for sleep is much higher than usual. The body needs additional time, and possibly an additional amount of growth hormone for renewal. Sleep is the sacred duty of the patient!

There is a lot of evidence for these words. The rats that Allen Rechtshaffen kept awake soon developed sores that wouldn't heal. And that growth hormone, produced by the body only in the phase of deep sleep, plays a decisive role in this, was proved in 2005 by the group American researchers under the guidance of dermatologist Ladan Mostagimi. In their experiments, the skin of rats was slightly damaged, and each time they woke them up during the BS, and in deep sleep they were not disturbed - and the wounds healed at the same rate as in normally sleeping animals.

One of critical systems of the body, fueled by sleep every night, is the immune system. Physiologists have always believed that lack of sleep weakens resistance to disease - and vice versa, that we sleep so much during infectious diseases like the flu because the immune system is working with special stress at this time. It was believed that during sleep it kills and removes pathogens and produces healing neurotransmitters and antibodies, and also activates lymphocytes.

“Oddly enough, there is very little experimental evidence for this assumption,” says Jan Born, a neuroscientist and hormone specialist from Lübeck. True, people whom doctors deliberately infected with ARI viruses fell ill more often and got sick more severely if they slept little. Experimental rats Allen Rechtshaffen, despite extreme lack of sleep, fell ill with infectious diseases no more than animals from the control group.

Perhaps this is simply due to the fact that the animals were not examined properly. In any case, Rechtshaffen's employee Carol Everson later repeated his experiments and got exactly the opposite result: the immune system of animals that looked healthy at first glance was significantly weakened after 14 days without sleep. Already on the fifth day, the immune defense in Everson rats was unable to control microbial attacks. The researcher came to the following conclusion: "Prolonged sleep deprivation after a few days leads to infection of normally sterile internal tissues with pathogenic bacteria." If the experiment dragged on, the bacteria continued to multiply and the rats eventually died.

One of the most hard evidence that sleep supports work immune system, received a team of researchers from Lübeck, led by Jan Born. In 2003, Tanya Lange and her colleagues vaccinated 19 test subjects against hepatitis. Some of the vaccinated had the opportunity to sleep normally after that, others agreed to stay awake at night and the next day. After 4 weeks, those who slept normally had almost twice as many antibodies to pathogens in their blood as the rest. While the function of sleep in the direct resistance to infection is not yet clear, "the result of the experiment shows the importance of sleep for the development of long-term immune defenses," the researchers wrote. On the other hand, now none of the experts doubt that lack of sleep leads to illness also because it opens the green light to pathogens of infectious diseases.

Each of us sometimes uncontrollably "stick together" eyes. We all know that there is only one reasonable solution in this case: sleep. But reason rarely triumphs. Blind-eyed people drive around in cars. But eyelids that drop by themselves are an undoubted sign of drowsiness, which, as the pioneer of somnology Dement rightly noted, "is the last - and by no means the first - step on the way to falling asleep." When we close our eyes, we are not really in control of ourselves anymore. As a result, many drivers wake up in a ditch - while others do not wake up.

“Should it be a crime to drive while asleep? Undoubtedly! demands Eileen Rosen, a Philadelphia somnologist. In the United States, about 100,000 fatigue-related accidents occur each year, with 71,000 injured and 1,500 dead. The material damage is estimated at billions of dollars. In Germany, the numbers look no better: according to a survey by the Association of German Insurance Companies, overwork is the cause of 24% of fatal crashes on Bavaria's roads. If you count total number 5361 deaths on German roads in 2005, it turns out that falling asleep at the wheel claimed the lives of 1287 people.

But still many people thoughtlessly go on vacation by car in the evening of the last working day- the time at which attacks of drowsiness occur most often. Indeed, often before the holidays, people are forced to work especially intensively and therefore sleep less than usual. Imperceptibly, they accumulate a significant sleep deficit. And then the usual afternoon decrease in activity is quite enough for the driver to become dangerously sleepy.

What to do in such cases, found out in 1997 by Louise Rayner and Jim Horn from the University of Lowborrow in the UK. They checked various ways resistance to sleep and found the optimal combination: you need to drive to the nearest parking lot, drink two cups of coffee or another drink with a high caffeine content, and then lie down for a quarter of an hour. When tested in a driving simulator, this worked better than either of the two tools separately. Since the invigorating properties of caffeine appear only after half an hour, it is possible to fall asleep without problems. And after a short nap, caffeine also does its job, and driving for at least the next two hours is not much of a risk.

Such an experiment finally proved that caffeine - effective remedy exhilaration, which correct application can bring great benefit. Coffee enhances the arousal system in the brain, producing the same effect as interesting, distracting, strenuous work or sports. It is no coincidence that William Dement, helping Randy Gardner to hold out, entertained him with a game of basketball and pinball.

But by forcing the switch of sleep centers to remain unnaturally long in the “wake” position, we are at great risk: the lack of sleep becomes more and more from this. Along with it, there is a growing danger of making a dangerous mistake the next day, and especially on the night that follows. In addition, with chronic sleep deprivation, as described above, people become stupid, fat and sick.

All this together, it would seem, should make everyone carefully monitor enough sleep. But how do we know exactly how much sleep we are missing? How much sleep exactly does a person need? Somnologists have been looking for answers to these questions for many years.

Thomas Wehr, psychobiologist from the American National Institute health in Bethesda, asked in the early 1990s. the question of what would happen if people were given the opportunity to sleep for 14 hours a day. This would correspond to the natural situation that our ancestors experienced every winter for thousands of years. Would people begin to sleep for seven, eight or nine hours in a row, as in recent centuries, or would they return to the forgotten “winter hibernation”?

Ver selected 24 people for the study, who spent four months sleeping in the sleep laboratory. During the day they were allowed to get up at 10 o'clock and do whatever they wanted. They were to spend the next 14 hours in bed in a darkened room. Apparently, at first, the test subjects made up for a significant deficit and arranged for themselves real course sleep therapy. On average, they slept more than 12 hours a day. This was a clear indication that they had previously - without noticing it - significantly lacked sleep.“Now no one knows what it means to be truly cheerful,” says Ver. It must be assumed that most people accumulate over time no less sleep deficit than his volunteers.

But sleep therapy was working. Gradually, the subjects began to sleep less and after about four weeks they reached the no longer changing value of 8 hours and 15 minutes. Everything indicates that this is the natural average human need for sleep, at least in the darker season. In summer, when daylight hours are longer, we probably need a little less sleep than in winter.

The results obtained by Ver are in good agreement with what somnologists have long considered the approximate daily need of a person for sleep - 8 hours. If 100 years ago people spent 9 hours in bed, it can be assumed that the majority slept anyway only 8 of them.

But it would be a big mistake, against which the reader must be warned, to try to force yourself to sleep for exactly 8 hours. For some this may be too little, but for others it may be too much. The need for sleep varies from person to person. “If we are healthy and nothing prevents us from sleeping as much as we want, the body will automatically take required amount sleep," says Claudio Basetti, director of the neurological department at the University Hospital Zurich, sleep specialist. Our job is to provide the right conditions. The need for sleep is partly genetic, and also depends on many other factors. Any number between 5 and 10 hours is considered normal.

Therefore, those who sleep for a long time should not be ashamed of this, much less allow themselves to be called lazy. In the same way, people who cannot stay in bed for a long time should not pay attention to accusations of restlessness or excessive careerism. A person cannot do anything with his individual need for sleep.

However, those who claim that they get enough sleep in less than 5 hours, or that they have hardly slept at all for a long time, are usually mistaken. Famous sleepless people, such as Napoleon, who allegedly made do with four hours, or the inventor of the electric light bulb, Thomas Edison, who aspired to do without sleep at all, deceived themselves. Napoleon, apparently, suffered from a sleep disorder and therefore often fell asleep during the day. Edison, they say, also slept often and a lot during the daytime hours.

Somnologists are constantly inviting people into the sleep lab who claim they don't get much sleep. At the same time, with amazing regularity, it turns out that patients fall asleep perfectly at night, and sometimes sleep deeply for several hours in a row. But they themselves stubbornly assert the opposite, and this is not surprising: when we are half asleep, we lose the sense of time. The time spent awake seems incredibly long to us, and the hours spent in a dream, on the contrary, fly by unnoticed. In principle, a person does not register periods of sleep lasting less than 20 minutes. Interestingly, people who sleep poorly tend to underestimate the length of their sleep, and healthy sleepers usually report completely correct data on how much they sleep.

There are only three reliably documented cases of extremely short sleep in the specialized literature: two men who got less than three hours of sleep per night, and Miss M, a 70-year-old former nurse from London, who actually slept for only one hour a night. Cases where people regularly sleep for a very long time, more than ten hours, are much more common, but also make up an extremely small percentage of the total.

Short sleep is not always unhealthy. And for someone who already gets enough sleep, extra hours of napping, according to the latest data, will not bring any particular benefit. Only if you feel regular lack of sleep, manifested, for example, in daytime sleepiness on weekdays and prolonged sleep on weekends, you need to find out, by experimenting on yourself, what your personal need for sleep is and compare with the amount of sleep that you really manage to get.

To do this, during a vacation or vacation, you can arrange yourself a sleep treatment, staying in bed every morning until there is not the slightest desire to sleep further, and in the evening still try to fall asleep at the usual time. A few days later, it is established - like the test subjects of Thomas Vera - more or less constant time sleep, in which a person feels vigorous during the day, and easily falls asleep in the evening.

As a result, not only the state of health becomes better than before the holiday, but there is also clarity regarding the individual need for sleep. Those who want to maintain health and performance for a long time are advised to adhere to the data obtained. If it is impossible to conduct such an experiment on working days, it is worth keeping a sleep diary, marking all the hours of both night and night. daytime sleep to calculate the required sleep time at the end of the week. People whose required daily sleep time is 8 hours should get approximately 56 hours of sleep per week. If on working days they manage to sleep only for 7 hours, it is desirable to somehow get 5 hours. This can be achieved by arranging for yourself, for example, four half-hour "quiet hours" per week, ten hours of sleep on Saturday and nine hours on Sunday.

Those who would like to sleep longer should think about what time is best for them to go to bed. After all, one practically does not manage to wake up in the morning later than usual, and the other - to fall asleep early in the evening. Blame for this morning hours that go to different people at different rates, depending on which variant of the clock genes we inherited from our parents. Although the biological clock adjusts itself according to daylight, so that in the end its day is almost always 24 hours, the time it shows is usually slightly behind or slightly ahead of the actual time.

Therefore, chronobiologists divide people into types, borrowing their names from the world of birds: people who prefer a nocturnal lifestyle are called owls, and early risers are called larks. Pronounced owls fall asleep later than normal people because their biological time somewhat behind the real. In the morning, they can sleep for a very long time, especially in a darkened room, when the internal clock does not receive a signal from daylight to speed up. When they finally wake up, they often still feel lethargic until noon, but in the evening they remain active and efficient for an unusually long time. At night, the chronobiological component of general drowsiness rises so slowly that they can easily fall asleep only in the very late hours of the night - at least if they had a good night's sleep in the morning and did not gain unusually high need in a dream.

Larks, on the other hand, get tired early and get up before dawn because their internal clock runs faster than usual. The opportunity to lie in bed longer does not give them any pleasure. As a rule, they still cannot sleep at this time and are annoyed that they missed the morning hours, when their working capacity is especially great, to no avail. If larks need to sleep longer, they should go to bed earlier in the evening. Provided that their body really needs sleep, they will easily fall asleep at this time. It is better for owls to get up later in the morning.

Recently, the number of people with pronounced extreme chronotypes has been increasing, said Munich chronobiologist Till Renneberg. At the same time, real owls that go to bed around four in the morning are much more common than pronounced larks, which are already waking up at this time. These are the results of a large-scale survey in which 400 thousand people participated.

Obviously, most people are now in the grip of a dangerous trend: as they go out into the daylight less and less, the genetically determined pace of their body clock becomes critical. “Even on cloudy days, the street is many times brighter than in well-lit offices. But since we work indoors, our rhythms get out of sync with outside world”, Renneberg warns. Previously, people were much more likely to work outdoors. Therefore, extremely pronounced owls and larks were rare exceptions. “For most people, the following rule is true: the less daylight they receive, the later their internal clock adjusts to real day. If we were all farmers and didn’t spend so much time in the twilight of workrooms, a much smaller number of people would go to bed in the morning, but there would also be fewer people whose eyes are already glued together at eight in the evening.

The fact is that for our consciousness, electric light, despite its weakness, is a sign of the day, while the chronobiological system perceives it as twilight at best. As a result, the physiological clock lacks that set signal that chronobiologists in all languages ​​call German word Zeitgebers are external determinants of time. Because of this, the internal day and night are consistent with the real light and dark time days even worse than it is laid down by nature. Sleep disturbances can result.

It is not difficult to determine your own chronotype on your own. To do this, you only need to calculate at what time on free days, for example, by the end of the vacation, when the sleep deficit is minimal, the middle of sleep falls. If you sleep, for example, from midnight to eight in the morning, then the middle of sleep comes at four. According to research by chronobiologists, this is the case for most people, and this chronotype is considered average.

There are also many intermediate types - more or less temperate owls or larks. Extreme owls - that's about one in twentieth - do not reach mid-sleep until half past seven in the morning or later. Expressed larks - people whose biological clock without a set signal passes the daily circle in less than 24 hours - are especially rare: only 2% of the respondents found such people. Their mid-sleep time is 2:00 a.m., whether they follow a work schedule or choose their sleep time freely. This is not surprising, since they usually get up in the morning by themselves, long before the alarm goes off.

Most Germans lean towards the "owl" type. This is why they love long-haul westbound flights, such as from Germany to New York, because thanks to the difference in time zones, they finally feel energized in the morning and eat breakfast with appetite, as only early risers usually do. AT ordinary life they are controlled by two oppositely directed time meters: “In the evening, sleep is reduced by the biological clock, and in the morning by the alarm clock,” says chronobiologist Til Renneberg. The later our chronotype is, the worse those and other hours are consistent with each other.

This is serious problem for very a large number people, insists Renneberg, who invented for her special term“social jet lag”: “It can have very serious consequences for performance and health and is comparable to jet lag on long-haul flights, only it accompanies us all our lives.” People suffering from it go to bed the later, the slower their biological clock goes. On the other hand, the alarm clock is not at all interested in their chronotype and reduces the duration of sleep the more, the more pronounced the “owlness”. A survey conducted by Renneberg gave frightening results: "Almost two-thirds of people suffer from lack of sleep during the working week." And only a few manage to make up for the lack of sleep over the weekend.

In winter, the wake-up call is heard too early for the vast majority. In summer, when we get more light in general and the sun floods the room early in the morning, many people become closer to the "larks" and generally need less sleep.

Almost all chronobiologists criticize the hours of work we have adopted on the basis of the data obtained. Contrary to the saying "he who gets up early, God gives him", larks are "rare birds in modern society”, notes Renneberg. Specialists demand changes in this area: work and study should start later, and a long break is needed in the middle of the day, allowing you to sleep or go out into the fresh air. Employers will also benefit from this: the number of errors and accidents at work associated with lack of sleep will be reduced, and a number of diseases that cause great economic damage will be less likely to occur.

Lack of sleep in pronounced owls reaches such values ​​during the working week that on free days they are able to sleep for 12 hours in a row and often stay in bed until one in the afternoon. The middle of sleep shifts in them, thus, from 3-4 am on weekdays to the time after 7 am. But people with a normal chronotype also suffer from too early start weekday: they also have to get up earlier than the body requires during the week, and therefore on weekends they sleep about an hour longer than on work days.

Larks face the opposite problem: since their family and circle of friends are often dominated by owls, morning people have to stay awake too long on weekends. Who will leave the guests before midnight, because it's time to sleep, or refuse to go with his wife or husband to a late movie session? As a rule, early risers make up for their lack of sleep on weekdays quite easily.

With particular force, the social jet lag hits teenagers and young people. Their biorhythms in effect age features significantly behind real time. At the same time, it does not matter at all whether young people are lovers of discos or homebodies. They are subject to a biological, hormonally driven program of nocturnal activity and stay awake well after midnight, because they simply cannot do otherwise. True, parents and teachers have a different opinion. They say that young people do not go to bed on time because they are crazy about discos. The latest data from biorhythm research is in favor of young "owls": at the age of about 20, people are active at night, because - for reasons unknown to science - they are so programmed by nature.

If a schoolboy who falls asleep late at night needs to cram formulas in the morning or foreign words, he will do it very badly - both because of the colossal lack of sleep, and because of the biological clock, which still shows the time of sleep. “At eight o'clock, schoolchildren listen to the teacher in the middle of their subjective night,” says Til Renneberg. “It doesn’t bring much benefit to teaching.” Therefore, the start of lessons in the upper grades should be postponed to 9 a.m. A survey conducted in Munich showed that children and adolescents become more and more "owls" as they grow older. This phenomenon reaches extreme degrees among school graduates and junior students.

And only with the end of adolescence does this tendency suddenly reverse, and all people become closer to the lark type. This shift in sleep patterns is a systematic process common to all of us, and is probably due to hormonal changes.

Thus, the Munich chronobiologists discovered a reliable method for determining the end of adolescence for each individual. The change in the pace of the internal clock is the first "biological marker of the end of adolescence," Renneberg says. “Women reach their breaking point at 19.5 years, and men at 20.5.” As in all other maturation processes, women are ahead of men here. Over the years, all people gradually approach the "larks".

Of course, genetic conditioning also plays a role, superimposed on the biological characteristics of maturation. Therefore, there is some truth in the saying "who was an owl, that owl will remain" - this is due to the inherited pace of the internal clock.

Strictly speaking, this rhythm can only be compared among peers. Even extreme owls become as close to larks in old age as, perhaps, only in early childhood. And pronounced larks at the end of adolescence enter a phase of unexpected nocturnal activity.

These results suggest that in vain in many families the custom of a common breakfast at 8 or 9 a.m. is sacredly observed. By this time, grandparents must have been hungry for a long time and, having nothing to do, managed to set the table for the whole family and go for fresh buns. Mom - a real lark - also just returned from a morning run. But the father is a typical owl - and teenage children are in great need of more sleep. If you wake them up now, a family breakfast will only bring quarrels and a spoiled mood.

What to do if the biological rhythms of members of the same family diverge too far, or if a person wants to change his chronotype in order to still get enough sleep? Here it is very important to go out into the daylight at the right moments so that the center of time measurement in diencephalon received corrective signals.

People prone to nocturnal activity are advised not to draw the curtains in the evening, so that the first rays of the sun penetrate into the bedroom, hastening the internal clock, which is still showing the night. For the same reason, it is desirable for owls to go outside as early as possible during the day, for example, go to work on foot or go for a run before breakfast. In the evening, on the contrary, it is better to avoid bright light so that the internal clock, already tuned in to the onset of darkness, does not receive a signal to slow down. For example, sitting in the summer after work on the terrace of a cafe, it is better to wear sunglasses. Expressive larks have the opposite program: they need to slow down their biological clock, and for this, go out more in the evening and wear sunglasses in the morning.

The strongest effect of daylight on the internal clock can be supported by a successful schedule of bodily signals emanating from the so-called peripheral clocks in individual organs. The time when we eat and exercise is important here. Owls should try, contrary to the inner feeling, not to eat too late in the evening and be physically active. Larks are advised to do the opposite.

But do not set yourself unattainable goals from the very beginning. It is important not to rearrange the internal clock as soon as possible, but to develop regular monotonous signals that change biorhythms in long term, while not disrupting their work. The most important thing is, if possible, to go out at the same time, have breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as play sports; moreover, this schedule should very gradually shift towards the desired chronotype.

The effort invested in such a long-term lifestyle change will pay off doubly: after all, with social jet lag, not only chronic sleep deprivation will disappear. At the same time, the need for unhealthy habits will decrease. “The stronger the social jet lag, the more people grab on to stimulants, and the more smokers among them,” Til Renneberg discovered.

Thus, for many of us, more and better sleep will benefit on many levels. And if you already have a suspicion that you are suffering from sleep disorders, you should not put it off indefinitely. Chronic lack of sleep is very important to recognize in time - and effectively eliminate.