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Earlier this year, news of an alarming epidemic made headlines across Australia. This affliction was affecting nearly half of Australians, and had caused 17% of adults to miss work in the past month. In severe cases, it could lead to heart disease, diabetes, depression and even death.
The name of this condition? Sleep deprivation.
According to a recent survey, 33 to 45% of Australians regularly have trouble getting enough sleep. We might struggle to fall asleep, wake up during the night, wake up too early, or start our day feeling tired. Many experts blame modern inventions such as electric lights, smartphones and the internet for disrupting our natural sleep cycles.
We are all familiar with the effects of sleep deprivation. Without enough sleep, we tend to be slower to react, and we make more mistakes. We become more irritable, less empathetic, and have less control over our impulses. A study by the Adelaide Centre for Sleep Research showed that even moderate sleep loss — remaining awake for 17 hours — can have the same effect on hand-eye coordination as having a blood alcohol concentration of over 0.05.
Above all else, though, sleep loss makes us sleepy. We become vulnerable to falling asleep at inconvenient or even dangerous times. Alarmingly, research by the Sleep Health Foundation found that almost 20% of adults have fallen asleep while driving.
So why is sleep loss so detrimental? Why do we need sleep at all? While this might seem like a basic question, it is a topic of ongoing debate among scientists. Sleep researcher Allan Hobson once quipped that the only known function of sleep is to cure sleepiness. Yet, in the same way that eating serves a greater purpose than relieving hunger, sleep must have some other function that justifies its use of our time.