Sleep is an essential component of an individual‘s health and well being. Sleep is a biological system that ensures the body rebuilds itself. The duration of sleep is important in the promotion of attention send other cognitive processes. The period where one is awake takes a toll on the physical and the cognitive ability. Through sleep, physiological changes within the individual work in the repair. Scientific research indicates that sleep also increases mortality. There is a sufficient duration, continuity and intensity of sleep affects an individual. Insomnia is a disease that is associated with sleep deprivation. The lack of sleep proves to have a destructive to the human body. The cultural incentive requires that a man should work for between ten to eighteen work hours a day. Sleep deprivation has adverse effects on the human psyche because it alters with alertness and performance.
Sufficient duration as a factor increases the sleep loss. Human beings are required to have a minimum of six to eight hours of sleep. However, the sleep rates are affected by the age, the cultural factor and occupation. The need for sleep decreases with age. In older adults, the sleep wake regulation reduces. This increases the chance of the insomnia. The interindividual differences in sleep indicate the stability between individuals. Different individuals exhibit interindividual variation in circadian rhythmicity. These are chronotypes. The differences in chronotypes exhibit homeostatic sleep regulation. This responds in the creation of sleep fragmentations. The sleep times are affected by individual convenience. Individuals indicate the neurobehavioral responses that result to total sleep deprivation. According to Dinges et al. (2013),inter individual differences in ‘morningness–eveningness’ are believed to manifest into extreme cases classified as primary circadian rhythm sleep disorders , with altered phase relationships of the biological clock to the light–dark cycle, including alterations in sleep timing.
Cognitive performance is reduced in the event of sleep deprivation. Primary cognitive capabilities include simple alertness; vigilance and attention are affected by reduced sleeping rates (Weber et al. 2014). A well rested person experiences subtle fluctuating alertness throughout the day. This corresponds to the normal circadian cycle that involves slight reduction in the early hours of the afternoon. According to Dinges et al.(2013), examples of such cognitive performance measures that have historically been reported to display circadian variation include the following: search-and-detection tasks and simple and choice reaction time tasks, sorting, logical reasoning, memory access, and real-world tasks such as meter reading accuracy and school performance. The continuous ability to remain awake extends up to 16 hours a day.
Moreover, the homeostatic process in the body is set off by the alertness of the body. The drive to sleep that increases the exponential during wakefulness, beyond the habitual bedtime into the night and the subsequent day, decreases during sleep (Dinges et al 2013). Biologically, the body has an internal clock which controls the timing of both sleep and wakefulness. Beyond the sleep clock, the vigilance reduces. This results in a slump in the individual’s ability to work. Interrupted sleep patterns incline to a performance decline in a person. In the cases where there is total sleep deprivation, the psychomotor abilities are poor. Lowered sleep in adults reduces the cognitive protection against sleep loss. The regulation systems of sleep-wake cause the fragile and vulnerable disruption which leads to increase in age. According to Dinges et al (2013), even short-duration, work-paced tasks that precisely measure variability in performance can be used to demonstrate circadian variation. It is likely that the modulatory effects the circadian system has on speed and accuracy make many tasks sensitive to process, more so than any unique aspect of task demand.
Memory consolidation is affected by the replenishing neutral processes. The changes in sleep quality affect the homeostatic and circadian control of propensity accompanied health aging the sleep quality (Spencer et al 2014). The forms of memory consolidation are dependent on neutral process that occurs during the sleep. It often degrades during the normal declines in sleep duration and quality. The poor sleep pattern renders the memory into a state of sleep inertia. In this sleep state the deterioration of memory capacity. Neurobehavioral outputs involved in dynamic circadian variation are alertness performance, sleep and sleeplessness. The effect of chronic sleep restriction creates a deficit in the stimuli used to sustain wakefulness. According to Dinges et al (2013), sleep deprivation affects a wide range of cognitive domains (including attention, working memory, abstraction, and decision making) and results in decreases in both the encoding of new information and memory consolidation. Typically, response speed and accuracy to a series of repetitive stimuli are analyzed, although the sensitivity of the performance metric used to track circadian variation depends on whether the task is work-paced versus subject-paced, on speed versus accuracy trade-offs in performance metrics. On the rate and number of responses acquired during the task, on whether the task metrics reflect performance variability or mean performance, and on the overall technical precision of the measurement.
Finally, the effects of sleep loss on cognitive capacities such as the elementary loss of alertness, vigilance and attention, generally form the foundation for more complex cognitive degradation. The neurobehavioral effects of chronic sleep restriction are less severe than those observed after acute total sleep deprivation. However, the former can reach levels of deficit equivalent to total sleep loss when the sleep restriction is severe enough, that is, the consecutive days of restricted sleep continue long enough (Dinges et al 2013).Moreover, the cognitive processes are crippled. These include the reduction of sensory perception, emotion and long term memory. The effects on the cognitive processes work in the reduction of mental flexibility, planning and sequencing abstract concept formation as well as decision making.
In conclusion, sleep deprivation is an impending problem in actively working adults. Sleep, as an important factor, should be considered as a healthy way to rebuild the body. Moreover, sleep increases performance and alertness. It enables the body to function properly.
References
Goel, N., Basner, M., Rao, H., & Dinges, D. F. (2013). Circadian Rhythms, Sleep Deprivation, and Human Performance. CHRONOBIOLOGY: BIOLOGICAL TIMING IN HEALTH AND DIESEASE, 119, 155-190. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3582029/
Killgore, W. D., & Weber, M. (2014). Sleep Deprivation and Cognitive Performance. In Sleep
Deprivation and Disease (pp. 209-229). Springer New York
Pace-Schott, E. F., & Spencer, R. M. (2014). Sleep Loss in Older Adults: Effects on Waking
Performance and Sleep-Dependent Memory Consolidation with Healthy Aging and
Insomnia. In Sleep Deprivation and Disease (pp. 185-197). Springer New York. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-9087-6_14
