Hah! I KNEW Architecture School Ruined My Brain!

[shipperx]

From i09.com:

Sleep Loss Could Be Ruining Your Brain

Excerpt:

Bad news for people who've made a habit of pulling all-nighters. New findings out of the University of Pennsylvania are the first to show that long-term sleep deprivation can lead to the loss of brain cells — possibly resulting in permanent brain damage. {...} Prolonged and persistent disruption to the body's normal circadian rhythms has been linked to everything from breast cancer to liver disease and diabetes. Now, researchers led by UPenn neuroscientist Sigrid Veasey claim they've found the first evidence that long-term sleep deprivation can actually result in a loss of brain cells. Their findings appear in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.


Also:  10 Reasons to Go Back to Bed

Excerpt:

9) Lack of sleep can accumulate over the course of several days
The idea that the negative effects of sleep deprivation can add up over time may not come as a surprise to you (the popular term for this is sleep debt), but few of you have probably realized just how dramatic these cumulative effects can be. In one of the most extensive human sleep deprivation studies ever conducted, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania limited study volunteers to various levels of sleep deprivation for 14 consecutive days (for example, 6 hours in bed per night for two weeks straight). The researchers then compared test participants' cognitive and physiological abilities at the end of this period to those of test participants who had gone one, two, and three nights without sleep.

Their results showed that restricting sleep to six hours per night caused cognitive performance and reaction times to drop so dramatically, that by the end of the 2-week period, these test participants were performing as poorly as subjects who had forgone sleep for two nights in a row.

8) You're a terrible judge of how tired you really are
Here's the scary part about the experiment we just mentioned: Every day, the test participants who were subjected to consecutive nights of decreased sleep were asked to rate their subjective feelings of sleepiness... and their self-assessments were total crap.  While increases in self-rated sleepiness were observed, they were small — and even at the end of the two week testing period, most volunteers believed themselves to be functioning relatively normally, even though their cognitive and physiological abilities were comparable to those of subjects who had gone days without sleeping at all{...}

6) The dangers of microsleep

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine defines a microsleep as an episode, lasting anywhere between a fraction of a second to half a minute, during which external stimuli are not perceived. Your most memorable encounters with microsleeps have probably been while trying in vain to stay awake during a movie or lecture, your head jerking around like some droopy-eyed bobble-head doll; but micro sleeps are most dangerous when we don't notice them at all.{...}

3) It's probably making you fat

Evidence continues to pile up that prolonged periods of partial sleep loss may increase your risk of both obesity and diabetes via a number of different metabolic pathways, including your body's ability to regulate glucose (i.e. the development of insulin resistance), and your brain's ability to keep your hunger and appetite in check.
{...}

1) Because sleep deprivation is torture



From personal experience, I can attest that sleep debt can bring on full-blown panic attacks.  I had one in my thesis year in architorture architecture.  The kind of panic attack that convinces you that your life is ruined and you need to run away RIGHT NOW! (I was convinced that I was going to fail my thesis.  I got an A-, but during that panic attack I was convinced that I was going to fail and that I really, really needed to run away from school.  Seriously.   After I FINALLY was talked into GOING TO SLEEP, for god's sake, I thought about it and realized that I had gone three to four months on 4 - 5 hours of sleep a night.

Do not do this, kiddies.  It. Is. Bad!

Comments

[angearia.livejournal.com]

Wow, what painful irony. You pull all-nighters to get that good grade proving you're smart -- but in the process you're killing off brain cells. Yeesh.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Sucks, huh.

I will say long before I read this post, I was convinced that the years and years of extreme sleep deprivation involved in the culture of architecture school burned something out in my brain. :)

There reaches a point where you become convinced that you can't do that sort of thing any more and, even if you could, you damn well aren't going to. Plus you develop what appears to be the permanent ability to sleep any time any where because sleep is more valuable than gold.

After my panic attack during thesis year, I went into "I don't give a f--- , just as long as I pass" mode and was actually more healthy for it (or at least better rested!:D )