Sleep Deprivation: A Common Obstacle to Mental Performance

It all too common that our lives get so busy, that our schedules start to burst at the seams. Juggling a work life, a social life, and personal health can be difficult and sometimes there just isn’t enough time in the day to get to everything we planned. We all want to be the best versions of ourselves and in order to do that, we usually have to make sacrifices to get there. Sleep is often the easiest thing to bump out of our schedules in order to balance meeting deadlines and spending time with our family and friends. It might seem like the easiest option, to bump out portions of sleep from our schedules but, interfering with your sleep can have significant impacts on your life in more ways than one! The Irving Medical Center of Columbia University identifies sleep deprivation as a common problem amongst the general population. Although it might feel like coffee or morning caffeine helps us feel alert and awake, there are some underlying consequences of sleep deprivation on our brains that can’t be remedied with caffeine alone. Sleep is an important practice that keeps the human body healthy and interfering with it can have significant impacts on many parts of our daily lives. This leaves a lot of room for questions to be asked about the importance of sleep and sleep deprivation.

What is sleep deprivation?

Sleep deprivation is generally classified as not getting enough sleep per night. The University of Columbia identifies that most adults need between seven and eight hours a night in order to maintain good health. The amount of sleep that each person needs varies, so it is important to look out for the initial signs of sleep deprivation before greater health issues ensue. Consistent drowsiness, inability to concentrate and reduced physical strength are some of the easier symptoms of sleep deprivation to spot. These are among the smaller effects that stem from not getting enough sleep one night. But there are also much more serious effects from not getting enough sleep over a long period of time. 

How does Sleep deprivation impact the brain?

            Multiple researchers have investigated sleep deprivation and the effects that it can have on the body. Most recently, Stepan, Fenn & Altmann (2019) investigated how sleep deprivation affected our ability to complete procedural tasks. These are tasks that require multiple steps to be accomplished in a specific order before the task is completed. For example, baking cookies and following a recipe would be considered a procedural task. These tasks also require some use of memory in order to remember what steps have already been completed. These researchers conducted their experiment using 200 undergraduate university students who were between 18 and 25 years old. They gave these individuals a long set of procedural tasks in the evening of day one, and then again in the morning of day 2. While doing these tasks they would create interruptions which would make participants use their memory to resume the steps of the task. During the gap between day 1 and day 2, a random selection of half the participants were allowed to go home to sleep and the other half stayed the night and did not sleep. When the procedural tasks were attempted again on day 2, the researchers found that the sleep deprived participants performed significantly worse overall when compared to the sleeping group. Furthermore, they found that the sleep deprived group would make significantly more errors, compared to their counterparts, when interruptions were included in the task that would interfere in completing the steps of each procedural task. The researchers found that the number of errors increased much more in the sleep deprived group than the sleeping group after the interruptions especially. Although the number of errors in these tasks went up for both groups after they were interrupted during their tasks, the sleep deprivation group made significantly more errors than their sleep group counterparts. This allowed the researchers to conclude not only that sleep deprivation had an impact on procedural task performance, but also that memory was affected in some respect by sleep deprivation.

What can be done about sleep deprivation?

Balancing work life, social life and personal health can be difficult, but when contemplating the consequences of sleep deprivation, it is important to acknowledge the hindered mental state that will be experienced. As previously mentioned, when sleep deprivation occurs, there is a significant impact on our ability to complete procedural tasks. For many of us, every single day is filled with a variety of procedural tasks! Everything from cooking breakfast and dinner to tasks we complete at work for a livelihood would be negatively impacted. Hindered memory and less ability to perform these procedural tasks has a strong negative impact on our lives through its small impact on many facets of our day. Consciously putting ourselves in these situations, where we sleep poorly, has consequences on every aspect of our lives, not just our health. Therefore, sleep should be acknowledged as a very important aspect of our lives.      

It is far too simple however, to say sleeping more is the end all be all solution of sleep deprivation. Whether choosing to stay out late with friends, struggling to fall asleep on the odd occasion or even cases of insomnia, sleep is not always an easy thing to obtain more of. In balancing all of the responsibilities of life and our own well being, sleep will fall to the wayside from time to time. What we should focus on, is identifying the importance of sleep and understanding its consequences. Holding sleep in a higher regard would allow for the serious consequences of regular sleep deprivation to be more effectively combated. Consciously thinking about how much sleep we should get each night would serve as a catalyst for preventing serious and regular sleep deprivation. As previously investigated by Stepan, Fenn & Altmann (2019), one night has been shown to have significant effects on mental performance and memory. Multiple nights of similar behaviour would only exasperate the issue. Therefore, on the nights when we have the most control over when we sleep, we should consciously weigh the consequences of not sleeping well. One good night sleep can mean breaking the cycle before the consequences of sleep deprivation get significantly worse.

What should I do about this?

Current research only emphasizes the importance of getting a good night sleep before important days of work or school. The research has shown that not getting enough sleep will hinder your memory and ability to complete procedural tasks. Putting importance on sleep and consciously weighing the consequences of sleep deprivation is would allow for a better balance between our work life, social life and personal health. This being said, there are two key questions that should be considered when in a situation to control how much sleep you get. First, how much sleep do I need to feel my best? This depends on the individual and understanding how much sleep you need minimum could help you stay healthy. Second, what will happen if I don’t get enough? Asking this would allow for better planning of your schedule to occur and therefore help balance the aspects of your life. Both of these questions stem from acknowledging sleep as an important aspect of our day. Asking these questions allows us to think about our sleep in a more meaningful way. We all want to reach our own goals in life. Working on getting a healthy amount of sleep would only make you better equipped to reach them.

Stepan, M. E., Fenn, K. M., Altmann, E. M., Stepan, M. E., Fenn, K. M., & Altmann, E. M. (2019). Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Procedural Errors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(10), 1828-1833.

Columbia University Irving Medical Center. (2015, September). Sleep Deprivation. Retrieved November 21, 2019, from http://www.columbianeurology.org/neurology/staywell/document.php?id=42069.