Tips For Sleep Deprived America
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. And welcome to HOUSE CALL. I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta. So here's the question. How did you sleep last night? Well if you're like the majority of Americans, probably not very well. And probably not long enough either. You know what? It's costing us, from health-related problems like diabetes and heart disease to loss of productivity and auto accidents.</s>GUPTA (voice-over): We live in a world where day and night no longer matter. You can work, play, eat, pretty much do anything we want around the clock. What we don't do enough of is sleep.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I would say that I average about six hours of sleep.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: About four to six hours maybe.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Probably get four or five hours.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Four or five hours.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm tired every day. Every night I'm tired.</s>GUPTA: As a society, we are chronically sleep-deprived, researchers say. Most of us need seven and a half to eight hours of sleep, but we're only getting an average of about six and a half during the week, a little more on weekends. This shortfall doesn't go away. In fact, it builds. Researchers call this our sleep debt.</s>DAVID DINGES, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA: Day after day, living on reduced amounts of sleep, you become more and more impaired, more dependent on caffeine, have more difficulty concentrating, at greater risk for falling asleep, more difficulty remembering, but you think you're doing fine. The facility is set up to control those factors that typically influence sleep/wake behavior.</s>GUPTA: David Dinges runs the sleep and chronobiology lab at the University of Pennsylvania. His lab deprives healthy people of sleep to see how they do.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The baby cried and upset her...</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Mother.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: George could not believe his son stole a...</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Quarter.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Blue, red, green.</s>GUPTA: Stay up for 24 hours, like this test subject, and you're likely to perform as well as someone who's had a couple of drinks. Here's something else. Experiments show for the vast majority of people, sleeping six hours a night for a week will result in mental lapses and sleepiness, as severe as if you'd stayed up all night long. Long-term, lack of sleep can have serious consequences on our health.</s>DINGES: The less you sleep, the more likely you are to die of all causes, or to have a heart attack or a stroke or to have diabetes or to have weight gain.</s>GUPTA: Eye-opening problems that should make us all want to get a good night's sleep.</s>GUPTA: All right, so as you can see, not getting enough sleep can be serious. So the question is, are you getting enough? Well, take this quiz with us. If you use weekends to catch up on sleep and fight to stay away during long meetings, you probably need more sleep. Check. Also if it takes 30 minutes to either fall asleep and you wake up groggy you might actually be sleep deprived, as well, and possibly might want to see your doctor. Or you can listen to our guest, Mark Rosekind. He's a sleep specialist. He's a former NASA scientist, and he's president of Alertness Solutions, which sounds like a very interesting place to work. Thanks for joining us.</s>DR. MARK ROSEKIND, SLEEP SPECIALIST: My pleasure.</s>GUPTA: Doctor, why is sleep so important? Some people -- you know, my father always used to tell me that you can sleep when you're dead. A lot of people think of it as a waste of time. What do you think?</s>ROSEKIND: You know, sleep is so basic for us as humans. It is as a basic need as food, water, air. We just need it for our survival. And the other part is if you lose sleep you pay for it. And that means you're going to pay with impaired performance, safety, health, mood, the quality of your life. So it is a basic need for us, and if you don't get what you need, you will pay.</s>GUPTA: You know, it's interesting and we're going to talk a lot about why we actually sleep during the show. But we are figuring out what happens if we don't sleep, and we received a lot of e-mails on this particular topic. Let's start from Don in Oregon, who writes this: "Does sleep deprivation over an extended period of time contribute to high blood pressure or diabetes and if so, why?" And Dr. Rosekind, we've heard a bit about this in the piece, obviously. But why does it actually cause long-term health problems?</s>ROSEKIND: Yes, we're still figuring that one out. It is clear that when you lose sleep it can reduce your immune function. So you know when our parents were telling you if you don't sleep you're going to get sick, that seems to be true. What we're now understanding is it can also disrupt all other aspects of what's going on in our body, like metabolism. So you know, even a little bit of sleep loss can affect your metabolism, make you look like you have diabetes, for example. So we're just learning what the effects are. We don't really fully understand what the mechanisms are yet.</s>GUPTA: It's really amazing. One of the things we talk a lot about in the piece, is someone who doesn't sleep enough could actually put on weight, which people find fascinating. Someone else battling the elusiveness of sleep is Chris in Maryland. He writes this: "I keep waking up in the middle of the night and cannot get back to sleep. I've tried various sleep medications and nothing works. How can I enjoy at least six hours of sleep without waking up?" And Dr. Rosekind, and this sounds like a classic case of insomnia, the most common sleeping disorder. A lot of people complain about this. He's tried the pills already. He's tried good sleep hygiene. What advice do you have for him?</s>ROSEKIND: You know, one thing is you can actually train yourself to wake up in the middle of the night. We do this to ourselves. We do it to our babies and things like that. So for example a couple of very specific things. Don't become a clock watcher. One of the problems is people wake up in the middle of the night and, because of digital clocks you're over there watching the minutes go by. A second thing is give yourself something to do. Pick a relaxation skill or some technique where you're tensing and relaxing muscles, using positive imagery, deep breathing. Don't just lay there worrying about the fact you can't get back to sleep. And the third thing is, we have something we call the 30-minute toss and turn rule. If you can't fall asleep in 30 minutes, you might as well get out of bed rather than just staying in bed and struggling through it. The other thing is I would just suggest that different sleep medications help you in different ways. So even though Chris has tried some stuff it might be interesting to talk to his doctor, because there may be one that could help him with maintaining sleep, and he might have been trying ones that were just more helpful, say, in trying to get to sleep.</s>GUPTA: The whole idea of actually getting out of bed when you can't sleep is a really good one. I do that myself sometimes, and all of a sudden I feel a lot sleepier. It works out pretty well for me. We are talking to Dr. Mark Rosekind. More of your questions answered, coming up on HOUSE CALL. Stay with us.</s>KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Drowsy driving. We've all done it, but at what cost?</s>TOM CALLAGHY, GOT IN ACCIDENT FROM DRIVING TIRED: My kids had a mother one day and not the next.</s>PHILLIPS: The devastating effects of sleeplessness just ahead. Plus we head to the city of brotherly love, where some residents are swapping their cheesesteaks for working out. First, take today's quiz. Before the light bulb was invented, how many hours did people sleep? That answer coming up.