Sleep Deprivation

"I’m soooo tired," is the comment I get lately from my friends, family, and acquaintances. Did you know that 1 in 6 Americans is actually suffering from sleep deprivation? Yes, a lot of us are not getting enough rest to function normally from day-to-day. By sleep deprivation, I mean 5 hours or less of sleep each night.

Want a scary statistic? Regular sleep loss can accelerate the risk of a whole lot of health problems like heart disease and diabetes.

Recent studies have shown that people who slept 5 or less hours had two to three times more heart attacks than the general population. A bigger shock is that sleep loss has a link with obesity. (I know this one will wake you all up). The body’s metabolism is upset and it interferes with your body’s ability to process carbohydrates.

Your public safety is also at risk. A study showed that people who were kept awake for 17 of 19 hours were less alert than some people who were considered legally drunk. Why, our neighbor to the north, New Jersey, has just passed a law making it a criminal act if you cause a fatal auto accident after not sleeping for more than a 24-hour period. Even the feds are looking into similar legislation. How many of you out there have actually driven late at night so tired that you nearly fell asleep while driving? I bet a lot of you have done that.

Is your sleep deprivation caused by any of these common factors?

Spending way too much time on the computer wasting precious sleep time; watching too much TV at night; partying more than one night a week; or refusing to go to bed because you think sleeping is a waste of time?

Safer Sleeping Pills
Now we have the drug makers trying to help us solve our sleeping problems. We can take sleeping pills to help us fall asleep. They’re considered "safer" sleeping pills like Seprocor, which they say is less likely to cause dependence, hangover and rebound insomnia when you stop using them. The drug companies want you to feel refreshed rather than lethargic when you wake up, so they’re trying to develop a drug that will do just that.

Another drug company is developing a short-cycle insomnia pill called Indoplan. This little pill will put you to sleep and will be cleared out of your body within 5 to 8 hours, without that hangover feeling.

Since the drug companies have these new items to put us to sleep, they also have new items to keep us awake, called "wake agents." Popping one of these babies in the morning will perk you up without the jitters of caffeine. So you take a pill to go to sleep and you take another pill to stay awake. What a concept! And they say this is non-habit-forming! I beg to disagree, because I see trouble on the horizon.

Did you know that exercise can be a great sleep enhancer? My clients tell me that the first thing they notice after first starting to work out with me is the ease of going to sleep, the soundness of their sleep, and the feeling of being refreshed when they wake up. It seems that exercise cures a lot of society’s ills. Now, only if we could get everybody to do it, we wouldn’t need to take pills.

Summer Diseases
Now I’m going to change the subject. We all love being outdoors during these summer days. We need to be on the alert about things that could, unknowingly, hurt us. It’s obvious that we’ve had a very lengthy wet spring and summer, too. Have you noticed that the mosquitoes are really bad this year? You can’t get away from them, even in the daytime. Just when you thought that the worst thing you could get in the summer was a bee sting or a bad sunburn, we have to be very aware of West Nile disease and Lyme disease.

Since SARS has receded lately and monkeypox was just a blip on the health screen, our U.S. health officials are warning us to take precautions to prevent these insect-borne diseases. Lyme disease reports are up due to the wet weather. And the hardest hit areas for these two diseases are the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.

So take your precautionary measures. Wear long pants, sleeves, and a hat, spray yourself with DEET, and make sure you empty containers that collect stagnant water. These can be breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

Cholesterol Test Kits
Do you know about these new home cholesterol test kits? Well, according to Consumer Reports, they tested a total of five of these home kits and the results were: don’t bother. All the kits required you to draw a large amount of blood (well, that’s not going to happen with me) and none saved you much money. Kit costs ranged from $14 to $30. The kits did not provide you with all the information that’s really important, like the HDL (good cholesterol) and LDL (bad cholesterol). Your home kit is not covered by your insurance but a $30 test you have done in your doctor’s office is.

Snoring
And another interesting tidbit from Consumer Reports was about those "snore sprays." Just this past weekend, I had friends from Virginia, Phil and Don, stay at the house. They both said they were loud snorers. So I put them in the upstairs guest room. Neither had tried Breathe Right Snore Strips, nor the new item, the Breathe Right Snore Relief Spray.

The strip has the approval of the FDA, but the snore spray doesn’t. The strip pulls the nostrils apart, widening the nasal passages. The spray claims to reduce the loudness and frequency of snoring by lubricating the throat tissues with a blend of natural oils and astringents. Consumer Reports spoke to sleep experts who were somewhat skeptical of throat sprays and had doubts about them working on a snoring problem.

And Phil and Don? Yes, they do snore, but it wasn’t very loud! I’ve been told I snore, too, but that’s hard to believe!

See you at the beach.