Sleep Deprivation

A complete sleep cycle involves five distinct sleep stages, beginning with light sleep, phasing into very deep sleep and concluding with REM (rapid eye movement) sleep - the stage in which you dream.

In a single night, you may go through this sleep cycle several times, giving your body the opportunity to carry the growth, healing and restorative processes that are vital to a healthy waking life.

Most of us need a minimum of seven or eight hours of sleep each night, although you may find that you need as few as five or as many as ten hours.

One mistaken belief shared by many shift workers is that their bodies will naturally "adjust" to fewer hours of sleep. However, if you suffer from insomnia or trouble sleeping, the sleep that you miss creates what is known as a "sleep debt" and this debt will need to be repaid. Shift workers are especially likely to accumulate sleep debt precisely because they are so susceptible to insomnia and related sleep problems.

Many shift workers fight almost constant drowsiness and fatigue, and many are forced to ignore their body's growing sleep debt simply because the demands of their work and personal schedules do not allow time to make it up.

Even more concerning, ignoring your sleep debt creates a slippery slope, as unpaid sleep debt eventually becomes sleep deprivation, a dangerous condition in which the body's continual lack of sleep begins to have severe physical consequences.

Characterized by persistent drowsiness, especially while completing mundane or repetitive tasks (a strong likelihood for many shift workers), falling asleep within five minutes of lying down or experiencing "micro-sleeps" (very brief sleep episodes when you are otherwise awake) are telltale signs of sleep deprivation.

They are also the very symptoms that make sleep deprivation so dangerous. Not only does sleep deprivation exacerbate the effects of certain medications, drugs and alcohol, it also places drivers and heavy equipment operators at a dramatically increased risk of serious, even fatal, injury.

If you experience a constant feeling of drowsiness while awake, or you are having difficulty sleeping as a result of your shift work schedule, it is essential that you take a proactive approach to treating and managing your insomnia before it escalates into a chronic (and potentially physically or psychologically harmful) situation.

So, back to solving the problem. Let's look at managing shift work sleep disorders with artificial sleep aids. >>>