More and more evidence is emerging that sleep deprivation and sleep apnea is having a massive effect on the way that people live their lives. America’s National Sleep Foundation recently carried out a study on American couples, and found that almost a quarter of their respondents had such a problem with sleep deprivation that it was affecting their sex life, as well as sometimes keeping them from both work and family functions.
First off, that’s an interesting way to rank those three priorities! More seriously, though, this is yet another worrying sign that poor sleep is having a massive effect on the way we all live.
This was fairly robust science, too- this discovery wasn’t the focus of the study (it was actually about variations in sleeping habits across ethnic boundaries), but that actually makes it a little more plausible- there was no agenda to this finding, it was simply something that scientists looking into the way we sleep found to be true for everyone.
The kind of sleep disorders people were likely to suffer from tended to vary across racial lines, with 1 in 10 whites experiencing more straightforward insomnia, and a startlingly high 1 in 7 Blacks having higher incidences of Sleep Apnea. For Hispanic respondents, the main cause of sleep problems was worry about financial, health or relationship issues, and for this group it was almost 3 in 7.
Now, there’s probably a lot that could be said about these results, especially from a sociological or economic point of view, but the main thing to take here is that no matter what one’s ethnic origin, people are experiencing disruptions to the normal, healthy pattern of sleep.
We’re coming to know more and more about the way that lack of sleep can have on our lives. What this study seems to be saying is that we’re all missing out on a lot of fun!
Comments on this entry are closed.