January 20, 2008
Wide Awake
Are you getting enough sleep? Take the Tiredness Test
Dr. Eve Van Cauter, a sleep researcher and professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, says that many people today, especially in the United States, take pride in not getting much sleep. "Sleeping as little as possible is viewed as a badge of honor here," Cauter says....Van Cauter notes that the National Cancer Society surveyed more than a million Americans in 1960 and found that people said they got an average of eight-and-a-half hours of sleep.
This was, of course, in a time period when television stations went off the air by midnight, and there were few late-night diversions, like online shopping....Van Cauter says most surveys today put the average sleep time of Americans at six or seven hours...
"The data is limited, but they strongly suggest that over the past four or five decades, sleep duration has decreased by one and a half to two hours," she says. .....Van Cauter believes we are in a period now very similar to where we were with smoking 20 years ago. She envisions a time 20 years from now, when knowledge, research and even litigation (perhaps lawsuits against sleep-deprived drivers who cause accidents) will combine to change public perception so that lack of sleep is finally seen as dangerous, not something to be proud of.....
In light of this research, all of us here at Dakota are hitting the sack.
Photo note: Budapest -back window
Posted by Dakota at January 20, 2008 08:04 PM