Aware is a voluntary organisation based in Ireland which aims to assist people affected by depression, bipolar disorder and related mood conditions. They have monthly lectures to educate people and raise the awareness of mental health. Ms.Breege Leddy a sleep physiologist gave a lecture under the title of “Sleep Well to Live Well” which changed our perspective of sleep.
Sleep deprivation is a very common problem amongst people. In fact Ms.Breege opened a busy clinic specifically for insomnia which shows that this problem is ever increasing. Additionally, there are more than 80 sleep disorders. Sleep deprivation has very bad effects on people’s health such as Leading to premature aging, Poor immune system, risk of diabetes and the recovery of injury becomes longer when we sleep the whole-body repairs, cells regenerate and muscle recuperate. Children that sleep poorly might get growth suppression. Additionally, we noticed that Sleep deprivation cost the economy a huge amount of money as a result of the loss of productivity amongst employees.
One of the Fascinating things that we learned is that sleeping is a complex process that is measured similarly to ECG by measuring the activity of the brain, muscle tone ,eye movement and breathing . Sleeping have different stages which are measured and presented in hypnogram in clinical setting so measuring our sleeping in our smart watches does not give us accurate facts.
We acknowledged that mental health disorders are bidirectly related to Sleep deprivation. Depression alerts the sleep architecture. Sleep disorders can lead to mental health illnesses and mental illness can lead to sleep disorders. Although physician must treat each one of them separately. Insomnia is the most common sleep disorder and it is not caused by a specific thing as any kind of change to life good or bad is going to have an impact on your ability to sleep.
Sleep hygiene can be improved by lowering our caffeine consumption specially at the afternoon as it takes 9 hours for caffeine to leave the body. Light also determines when we should sleep as dim light send signals to increase melatonin level which is the hormone that regulates the sleep–wake cycle. Avoiding smart devices is a huge factor as they impede our production of melatonin. Furthermore, It is very important to go to bed when we need to.
In conclusion, Acknowledging the risks of Sleep deprivation and how it is related to mental health disorders and learning about sleeping complexity changed our perspective next time we go to bed and we hope it changed yours too. Thank you for reading this week’s blog and we hope you enjoyed it and learned something new. See you next week!
Emad Alhamaidan -Eoin O’Connor -Mohammad Sindi -Mohammed Alkaabi -Abdullah Alkulaib
Harbour2Harbour Walk Group 5 