'Arrogance' of ignoring need for sleep

By James Gallagher
Health and science reporter,
BBC News
About Interested in Humanities and Sciences
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12 May 2014
Society has become "supremely arrogant" in ignoring the importance of sleep, lea
ding researchers have told the BBC's Day of the Body Clock.
Scientists from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Manchester and Surrey universities w
arn cutting sleep is leading to "serious health problems".
They say people and governments need to take the problem seriously.
Cancer, heart disease, type-2 diabetes, infections and obesity have all been lin
ked to reduced sleep.
The body clock drives huge changes in the human body.
It alters alertness, mood, physical strength and even the risk of a heart attack
in a daily rhythm
It stems from our evolutionary past when we were active in the day and resting a
t night.
But scientists have warned that modern life and 24-hour society mean many people
are now "living against" their body clocks with damaging consequences for healt
h and wellbeing.
Prof Russell Foster, at the University of Oxford, said people were getting betwe
en one and two hours less sleep a night than 60 years ago.
He said: "We are the supremely arrogant species; we feel we can abandon four bil
lion years of evolution and ignore the fact that we have evolved under a light-d
ark cycle.
"What we do as a species, perhaps uniquely, is override the clock. And long-term
acting against the clock can lead to serious health problems."
He says this is an issue affecting the whole of society, not just shift workers.
Prof Foster said that this was an acute problem in teenagers and he had met chil
dren who sleep by popping their parent's sleeping tablets in the evening and the
n downing three Red Bulls in the morning.
Blue light
Emerging evidence suggests modern technology is now keeping us up later into the
night and cutting sleep.
"Light is the most powerful synchroniser of your internal biological clock," Pro
f Charles Czeisler, from Harvard University, told the BBC Day of the Body Clock.
He said energy efficient light bulbs as well as smartphones, tablets and compute
rs had high levels of light in the blue end of the spectrum which is "right in t
he sweet spot" for disrupting the body clock.
"Light exposure, especially short wavelength blue-ish light in the evening, will
reset our circadian rhythms to a later hour, postponing the release of the slee
p-promoting hormone melatonin and making it more difficult for us to get up in t
he morning.
"It's a big concern that we're being exposed to much more light, sleeping less a
nd, as a consequence, may suffer from many chronic diseases."
Pioneering genetic research is now uncovering how living life against the clock
is damaging our health.
About 10% of human DNA has a 24-hour pattern of activity, which is behind all th
e behavioural and physiological changes in the body.
But studies have shown rhythm can be disrupted by short sleep durations or shift
work.
Dr Simon Archer, who conducted the studies at the University of Surrey, said the
re was a "large impact" on how the body ran.
"These are all fundamental biological pathways that can be underlying links to s
ome of the negative health outcomes that we see such as cardiovascular disease,
diabetes, obesity and potentially cancer in people who don't get enough sleep or
do shift work," he said.
Experiments show people can become pre-diabetic after a few weeks of shift work.
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Dr Akhilesh Reddy, from the University of Cambridge, said the body clock influen
ces every biological process in the human body and the health consequences of li
ving against the clock were "pretty clear cut", particularly in breast cancer.
He said: "Try to live more rhythmically, in tune with the environment and not ha
ve too much bright light before bedtime because it will affect the clock and sle
ep."
Prof Andrew Loudon, from the University of Manchester, said: "The problems cause
d by living against the body clock may be less sexy than the countless 'this or
that causes cancer stories' it is none-the-less a major problem for society."
"You might not notice any short-term changes in your health following circadian
disruption, but over a long period of time, the consequences could be quite seve
re.
"Governments need to take this seriously, starting perhaps with reviewing the he
alth consequences of shift work, and society and legislators needs to take this
on board."
5 comments in 2 conversations
3 comments. Expand & Discuss
* Member
I think this article has a point.
I've met countless people who say things like "I only need 4 hours of sleep" and
stuff like that. It doesn't work - physiologically you need 8 hours of good sle
ep in a 24 hour day and your life will go extremely better if you do that.
This is my own theory but I think bad sleep is a societal effect more than a cau
se because we spend so much time on promoting the self and getting all worried a
nd neurotic about things that at the end don't matter that much. If we could lea
rn to just relax and enjoy life, good sleep would come along with it.
Eagle AverroAuthorreplied yesterday
In reply to: markpup #1
Balance, and understanding that many body functions as self repair, healing, ar
e automated and linked to the sleep cycle!