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Sleep, the little death.

    For some time, I've been interested in the effects of sleep. The obvious reason for this is the fact that until very recently, I didn't do it. Sleep was something I only did for very short periods and I was always exhausted. But thanks to generalape, I read a wonderful book which taught me all about the effects of sleep and how to do something about my ever increasing and distressing insomnia. Now, it's true that self-help books tend to be over simplistic and overoptimistic, but this book is exceptional in that it's written by a one of the few sleep scientists in the world. The more I read, the more I believed. To be honest, it's only the true insomniac that realises the true power of sleep. But there's so much more to it than tiredness. Poor sleep can be the root cause of many common and life threatening illnesses, including high blood preassure and heart conditions,  and not to give sleep importance now seems like pure folly to me.

    My own experience is of exhaustion (through a long term inability to sleep more than three or four hours a night, the rest of the time spent fretting about the fact that I was awake), and persistent and ever increasing low mood. After learning a little about sleep, I learnt to recognise that even an hour less sleep than my body requires leads my mood to drop and my motivation to slump.

    And now today's news suggests there's a link between lack of sleep and obesity. Sleep's amazing. Time for bed.

Posted on Tuesday, December 7, 2004 at 09:15PM by Registered Commentersisterphonetica in | Comments4 Comments | References222 References

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