Your Pillow's Calling Your Name

Is anyone else feeling sleepy right about now?

Mother’s Day weekend in St. Louis was full of life and love – parades, concerts, fundraisers, art shows, brunches – and my bet is that you, like me, lost a little sleep getting ready for at least one such event this weekend. Moms are busy folks, but even so we hate to say no to a good cause. I admit I was up until the wee hours more than one night this week volunteering on various projects for my sons’ schools.

Over the past few days I’ve spoken with plenty of moms who were likewise up late e-mailing, baking, organizing auction items and coordinating other activities. (Somehow the same phenomenon didn’t extend to the dads I queried in the run-up to Mother’s Day.)

One or two nights of less than eight hours’ worth of sleep is nothing to worry much about. Unfortunately, most adults don’t worry much about running up a sleep deficit for longer than a couple of nights - and we should. In fact, many of us fall into the category of “chronic sleep loss,” which means we’ve been getting only four to seven hours of sleep a night. Our brains are no longer functioning optimally, and we’re not doing our bodies any favors, either. Did you know losing weight and getting enough sleep go hand in hand? Or that chronic sleep loss has been linked to hormonal imbalances, high blood pressure and other health problems?

Ever-present tiredness is different from “acute sleep loss,” which means staying up for more than 24 hours in a row. The all-nighter is something our bodies can recover from with one good night’s sleep. But if we’re chronically short-changing ourselves, it takes longer to rest up. In this study at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, which tracked adults over a three-week experiment, researchers found that after a 10-hour night of catch-up sleep, performance was on track for about six hours, but then it deteriorated. The researchers also told Reuters that three good nights of sleep were not enough to recover from chronic sleep loss.

According to the National Sleep Foundation, sometimes chronic sleep loss is the result of problems like insomnia, narcolepsy or other treatable disorders (as it happens, they also strike women more often than men). But often it’s something we do to ourselves.

Author and blogger Arianna Huffington started out the year calling for women to start treating sleep deprivation as a feminist issue. Her challenge is for us all to get a month’s worth of sufficient sleep (that is, seven and a half to eight hours). The rationale for this is that we’re so used to going through our days a little tired that we’ve forgotten what it feels like to be functioning at 100 percent.

If you’re ready to take the plunge into your pillow, check out Prevention.com’s tips for beating common sleep problems. Sweet dreams!

By Amy De La Hunt, Health Blogger for SmartParenting