No time to sleep

After a hasty meal has been gobbled down, the dishes have been cleaned, the trash taken out, the laundry taken care of and countless menial tasks completed before we end each day, how many hours does that leave for dreaming?

Does your waking life feel more like the dream?
Americans average 6.9 hours on weeknights, according to the National Sleep Foundation. That means most of us are walking around in a sleepless haze, where we struggle to move from one responsibility to the other. According to the Gallup Poll 43% of Americans between the ages of 13 and 64 say they rarely or never, get a good night’s sleep on weeknights, while 63% of Americans report their sleep needs are not being met during the week. While the more than a quarter who say their schedules do not allow for adequate sleep, when asked to evaluate the day after getting inadequate sleep, more than eight in ten (85%) said that it affects their mood; almost three-quarters (72%) said it affects their family life or home responsibilities, and about two-thirds (68%) said it affects their social life. Meaning that in addition to our own suffering from sleeplessness we may be the cause of suffering for those around us.

You may have lived this way so long, that you think you have trained your body to run on less sleep.
However, studies have shown that people who are sleep deprived are not a great judge of how sleeplessness affects them. In a recent study, people who had been deprived of more than 6 hours of sleep for 14 days reported that, they did not think sleepiness was affecting them, when in fact their cognitive performance had, to put it bluntly, tanked.

It can be exhausting to keep pushing your body around when given no chance to fully recharge.
Did you know that over time, sleep deprivation can be responsible for high blood pressure, heart attack, heart failure, stroke, obesity, psychiatric problems, including depression and other mood disorders, attention deficit disorder (ADD), mental impairment, fetal and childhood growth retardation, injury from accidents, disruption of bed partner’s sleep quality, and poor quality of life?

Perhaps, we all ought to snuggle deep within our covers and drift off to dreamland, instead of struggling to cross one more thing, off the never ending list.

Dr. Fred Scofield at Atlas Chiropratic http://www.atlaschiropracticphoenix.com can help you on your journey, to break away from the hazy masses of the sleepless.

Dare to be different
In the words of Marcel Proust, “If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time”.

Sources: Eyes Wide Open: Americans, Sleep and Stress
How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With? at The New York Times
Sleep Habits: More Important Than You Think on Web MD

Don’t forget to join us for Part 3 where we will take a hard look at the affects of job stress in our modern world.Or look back at Part 1 where we have discussed what can happen when we don’t take the time to eat right.