Sleep Dep Kicking in...

I'm officially exhausted right now. I desperately need to catch some sleep but I still have some stuff to do...

Actually, I just found out that there is something called sleep debt. Sigh... Some people have student loans, I have a huge sleep debt. If one would have to pay off the sleep debt with money, I would be filing for bankruptcy right about now :P

Sleep debt can be tested through the use of a sleep latency test. This test measures how easily someone can fall asleep. When this test is done several times during the day, it is called a multiple sleep latency test (MSLT).

However, one need not go to a sleep clinic; a home process exists: it involves relaxing quietly, alone for a short amount of time--if the feeling of sleep comes fairly easily, one is considered to have sleep debt.

Hmmm.... If I close my eyes now, I will be asleep in like 2 minutes. I never have trouble falling asleep. My problem is that I fall asleep to easily. As soon as my head hits the pillow, I'm gone. I usually wake up in the morning to discover all the lights in the room are still on and the TV is playing with the volume cranked up to the max. So yeah... I'd say I have a sleep debt big time!

Accumulating 50 to 60 hours of sleep debt is not good for health. Some people, after accumulating this much sleep debt, are susceptible to sudden dropping into short periods of microsleep. This can happen during repetitive activities such as driving, especially when the individual has had a recent relief of a stressful situation.

I used to get these all the time last semester - mostly in Dr. Gutierez's database class. So did other students actually. :P But we figured that it was simply a collective boredom induced narcolepsy... hehe

Tags: sleep debt, sleep dep, sleep depravation, tired, exhausted, sleep, sleepy