World Sleep Day (WSD) is an annual, global call to action about the importance of healthy sleep. The focus of WSD is to bring cognizance to the many burdens of sleep problems, as well as the importance of healthy sleep. WSD publicly displays efforts being taken toward prevention and management of sleep disorders. Created and hosted by World Sleep Society, World Sleep Day is an internationally recognized awareness event bringing researchers, health professionals and patients together to recognize sleep and its important impact on our health.
SLEEP FACTS
- Three elements of good quality sleep are:
- Duration: The length of sleep should be sufficient for the sleeper to be rested and alert the following day.
- Continuity: Sleep periods should be seamless without fragmentation.
- Depth: Sleep should be deep enough to be restorative.
- Better understanding of sleep conditions and more research into the area will help reduce the burden of sleep disorders on society.
- While sporadic changes in sleep and dreaming are normal, and sleep naturally responds to environmental fluctuation, extreme factors and traumatic experiences can lead to severe changes in sleep patterns, including altered dream content or more nightmares.
- It is shown that sleep supports the formation of emotional episodic memories throughout all the stages that compose memory processing. On the contrary, sleep loss deteriorates both the encoding of emotional information and the emotional memory consolidation processes.
- The medical benefits to youth conferred by physical activity, balanced nutrition, and quality sleep have been increasingly encouraged by medical and mental health providers.
- Sleep plays a critical role in emotional processing.
- Sleep problems constitute a global epidemic that threatens health and quality of life for up to 45% of the world’s population.
- Most sleep disorders are preventable or treatable, yet less than one-third of sufferers seek professional help.
FACTS ABOUT REGULAR SLEEP AND HEALTH
- A more stable rise-time correlated with better self-report sleep quality and higher weekday sleep efficiency.
- Regular sleepers have better mood and psychomotor performance, and increased time in REM and slow-wave sleep.
- Sleep regularity is independent of sleep duration.
- Irregular sleepers have delayed sleep timing and more daytime sleep.
- Sleep regularity is positively associated with academic performance.
- We also found that sleep regularity is positively correlated with academic performance.
- Good sleep is essential to good health.
- Sleep health indicates how well an individual or population is doing.
- Sleep is critical to health.
- Sleep is a biological requirement for human life, alongside food, water, and air.
- Because sleep is involved with many physiologic systems, insufficient sleep duration and poor sleep quality have been associated with several adverse health outcomes… mortality, weight gain and obesity, diabetes and metabolism, inflammation, cardiovascular disease, neurocognitive functioning, mental health.
- Reduced sleep duration has been shown to cause impairments in working memory, executive function, processing speed, and cognitive throughput.
- Short sleep duration is associated with poor mental health.
FOR MORE INFO VISIT www.worldsleepday.org.
Advertisement