This is the name of the lag between the time we are sleeping and the time we should dedicate to this important aspect for our health.
In this regard, the psychiatrist William C. Dement affirms that the hours that we take from our sleep to try to have a more productive day accumulate, and this has an effect on our eyesight and our ability to remember things. Over time, this deficiency in sleep favors diseases such as obesity and heart disease.
In this article How many hours should I sleep? I already talked about how much time we should dedicate to something as important to our health as sleep.
There are two types of sleep debt:
1) Partial sleep deprivation: It occurs when a person gets very little sleep for several days or weeks.
2) Total sleep deprivation: It occurs when the person stays awake for days.
How long can a person go without sleep?
The easy answer to this question is 264 hours (about 11 days). In 1965, Randy Gardner, a 17-year-old student set this apparent world record for a science fair.
Other people have remained you wake up between eight and 10 days in carefully controlled experiments. None of these individuals experienced serious medical, neurological, physiological, or psychiatric problems. However, all of them showed progressive and significant deficits in concentration, motivation, perception and other mental processes.
There are other anecdotal records such as those that describe the soldiers who stay awake for four days in a battle.
National Geographic magazine has reported that the demands of work, social activities, and the availability of new forms of home entertainment around the clock (such as Internet access) have caused people to sleep less now than in the past. Most adults in the U.S. sleep an average of one hour less than the average sleep of 40 years ago.
I leave you with a related video 🙂