Lead author Dr. Daniel Cohen of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston said in a telephone interview, “Insufficient sleep over multiple sleep-wake cycles causes performance to deteriorate much faster for every additional hour we spend awake, particularly during the biological night.”
The researchers found that while most participants caught up on acute sleep loss with a single night of 10 hours sleep, those with chronic sleep loss showed deteriorating performance for each hour spent awake.
Cohen added that people may not realize that they have a chronic sleep debt because it slowly builds over weeks. “We can falsely feel like we’ve recovered quickly from chronic sleep loss because recent sleep makes us feel relatively restored early the next day,” he said, “People may be largely unaware that they are chronically sleep-deprived. It’s when they stay up and try to pull an all-nighter that they are much more vulnerable to sudden sleepiness, inattentiveness and…potentially accidents and errors.”
About EQUITIES:
Since 1951, EQUITIES Magazine has been a leading media company providing business editorial content designed to serve the needs of business leaders, professionals, institutional investors and retail investors. We are focused on business and the business of making money, not on lifestyle subjects. We publish original reporting in print and on our website, as well as select content at www.nasdaq.com. For 28 years we have hosted our own branded investor conferences that connect public company CEO’s with our loyal readers in the investment community.
Sign up for a free one-year subscription to EQUITIES Magazine
