The process of “shutting off” at frequent and regular intervals, for all living things, is as crucial an element to our survival as are nutrition and hydration.
Sleep deprivation, in any of the ways in which it can manifest, can be detrimental in ways that are both acute, with a sudden onset primarily affecting our short-term health, or chronic, occurring over a longer stretch of time and affecting our overall long-term safety.
Sleep deprivation can range from the minor exhaustion one experiences after pulling an “all-nighter” for a school project, which can be cured with a simple nap, to detrimental insomnia related diseases for which there is no known cure.
In between these two extremes are multitudes of ways in which not getting enough sleep can hurt us. Although our sleep requirements are specific to people individually, there are general range requirements for different stages of life.
For example, according to the National Sleep Foundation, on average, infants need up to 17 hours of sleep in one consecutive session, as compared to the average middle aged adult requiring half of that amount in order to function properly, and although our individual time requirements may differ, the consequences of being negative in our sleep “accounts” are pretty uniform (our sleep hours are logged in our bodies in a kind of bank account, in which a deficit needs to be replenished in some way, at some point).
Short term sleep deprivation can have detrimental consequences such as falling asleep behind the wheel, (and actually sleep deprivation has been the culprit in countless accidents resulting in injuries or deaths during incidents when the operators of cars, planes, trains, boats, etc. have either fallen asleep unexpectedly or were not thinking and reacting quickly due to exhaustion), whereas long term sleep deprivation has more subtle (but no less severe) consequences such as immunosuppression, mental depression, cardiovascular abnormalities, and even chronic, systemic multi-organ failure.
In fact, there exist conditions of insomnia that can actually be fatal and for which there is no known treatment. When one hears the word “starvation,” generally it is associated with deprivation of food and / or water, however, the body can and will fail to function when starved of sleep as assuredly as it would if starved of nutrients and water, hence the reason that sleep deprivation is included in many disturbing methods of torture.
Fatal Familial Insomnia
One of the most severe and debilitating manifestations of insomnia is “Fatal Familial Insomnia,” which is an extremely rare hereditary disease that, although officially caused its first fatality in 1836 in Venice, Italy, was not officially named and diagnosed until 1986, when doctors revealed the culprit as a prion, (prions are neither bacteria nor virus, rather they are a type of mutated infectious protein that becomes pathogenic, similar to the prion that causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob, otherwise known as Mad Cow Disease).
The first known victim of this disease succumbed to premature senility at the age of 45, and proceeded to suffer from a slew of febrile, epileptic-like episodes that eventually led to his death and were later attributed to the fact that his body simply stopped sleeping.
As terrifying as FFI sounds (and is), there are other manifestations of insomnia that are far more common and are more tangible, realistic ways that the dangers of not sleeping should be of concern to the average person.
The primary risk that comes from not getting enough sleep is the ensuing cognitive impairment and the consequences that delayed thinking and slowed reaction times that result from sleep diminished cognition.
The bottom line is, that sleep is a crucial element to our health and safety, and great benefits to our overall wellbeing can be attributed to getting enough quality sleep in our lives.
