If you are a student, you know that the final looms above the sky and that prediction requires endless whole nights. For those lucky enough to be in the “real world,” tomorrow will be just another day when most of us sacrifice sleep to do our jobs. When we launched the world`s largest sleep study, an interesting fact that keeps popping up is that lack of sleep can affect your brain just as much as alcohol. Methods Effects on performance were studied in the same subjects over a period of 28 hours of sleep deprivation and, after measurement, alcohol doses of up to about 0.1% blood alcohol level (BAC). There were 39 subjects, 30 employees from the transportation industry and nine from the military. Let`s say you play it safe and avoid driving after a sleepless night, it`s still as bad as showing up to school or work after a few drinks. Think about the last time you stayed up all night to finish a trimester job. You probably dragged yourself to school the next day and had a hard time understanding what your teacher was talking about. In the professional world, there was probably a time when one of us sacrificed sleep to prepare a presentation and could barely find enough words to form a sentence. “We know you`re at 0.08 percent blood alcohol levels after 5 p.m.,” he said, the legal standard for drunk driving.
“After 24 hours, you`re at 0.1%.” It took about 18 hours of waking up to get cognitive impairment as severe as significant intoxication (0.1% legally drunk in most places). It`s the equivalent of waking up at 7:00 a.m. and staying awake until 1:00 a.m., which many of us often do. The quantity and quality of sleep at night before alcohol and sleep deprivation These findings reinforce the evidence that the harmful effects of sleep deprivation are an important factor in the performance of the speed and accuracy required for safety – including driving. It`s not entirely clear how the effects get worse after 24 hours, Ojile said, except they do. The brain begins to stop in trance-like microsleeps, periods of 15 to 30 seconds that occur without the person noticing. Eventually, not sleeping leads to death. Alcohol weakening is fairly easy to measure with blood alcohol measurements, but sleep deprivation is more difficult to define, especially with hindsight. Since most people are reluctant to admit that they drove drowsy, experts believe that sleepy driving accidents are often wrongly attributed to other factors. At least 50% of American adults admit to driving drowsy. A staggering 20 percent of people fell asleep at the wheel last year, and one in 25 drivers say they have fallen asleep at the wheel in the past month. At the beginning and end of each test session, subjects were asked to estimate their own fatigue by moving a cursor along a line on the screen that matched their current state of fatigue.
A demographic questionnaire on age, education level, health, recent work and recent sleep history was given to all subjects before the first test session. These included the Epworth Sleepiness Scale10-11 and three global questions on problems falling asleep, sleeping and sleeping. The risk of sleep apnea was defined as the concomitant occurrence of loud snoring, excessive nocturnal exercise, a break to breathe, difficulty maintaining sleep, and difficulty staying awake.12 None of the subjects showed signs of sleep apnea based on the results of their questionnaire. Before each test day, the subjects were also asked about their sleep from the previous night and their intake of food and medication since waking up. Sleepy driving is responsible for a significant percentage of road accidents, but it doesn`t receive as much attention as drunk driving. In recent years, experts have called for increased attention to the problem of driving while sleeping or getting tired. Most states set their DUI limits at a blood alcohol level of 0.08% for people over the age of 21. All recent and DUI limits are between 0% and 0.02%. The average legal limit for commercial drivers is a blood alcohol level of 0.04%. If you skip a day`s sleep, you will no longer be able to legally drive a car. The overall impact of the results of this study is clear.
They show that the effects of moderate wakefulness phases on performance cannot be ignored.
