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These two recent research summaries support two premises in this nonprofit Website.
The fist is that unhealthy self-neglect is widespread in America, which
stems from ignorance, reality distortion ("I'm not at risk of health
problems"), and shame {"I'm not worth taking care of").
The second premise is that a high percentage of personal and social
problems in U.S. kids and adults come from early-childhood parental
neglect, abandonment, and abuse ("trauma"). See my comments after these
summaries. The links and hilights in this article are mine -
Peter Gerlach, MSW
Americans Skip Sleep
for Work, Leisure
By Kathleen
Fackelmann,
USA Today - 08-30-07,
via AOL Health News
(Aug. 30, 2007) - Americans who
log long hours on the job find the time for leisure and other activities by
cutting down on sleep, a study reports today.
"We only have 24 hours in a
day," says Mathias Basner, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine.
His study of 47,731 Americans found that people who worked more simply got
up earlier or went to bed later -- a practice that puts them at risk of
sleep deprivation. Time spent at
work is the single biggest determinant of how much sleep Americans got on a
typical day, according to the study in the Sept. 1 issue of the
journal Sleep. But travel time,
including time sitting in traffic on the way to work, comes in second place,
Basner says.
"You could argue there's a
hidden cost to living in suburbia," says Gregory Belenky, director of the
Sleep and
Performance Research Center at Washington State University in Spokane.
People who live in sprawling urban areas often make a long workday even
longer when they try to run errands on clogged roads, he says.
Basner says sleep deprivation has
been linked to a number of serious health problems, including obesity.
People who are chronically
sleep-deprived also can experience attention lapses, memory loss and other
difficulties that can impair performance on the job, says James Walsh,
executive director of the sleep medicine and research center at St. Luke's
Hospital in St. Louis.
And fatigue can add an element
of danger to an already stressful commute. "If you're only sleeping five
hours a night, you're at risk of falling asleep at the wheel," Walsh says.
The
National Sleep Foundation
estimates that sleep-deprived drivers cause more than 100,000 automobile
crashes a year and more than 1,500 deaths.
Basner's team analyzed the
results of a federal survey conducted in 2003 through 2005. People were
asked to account for their time over a 24-hour period. The survey suggests
that people who cut back on sleep on weekdays often try to sleep in on
Saturday and Sunday. But people who
cut back on sleep night after night might never catch up, Walsh says.
Surveys suggest Americans get about
6½ hours of sleep a night -- about an hour less than the average in the
1950s, he says. Today, many adults extend their workdays by using
cellphones to check e-mail messages.
A second study in Sleep suggests that teens who use cellphones after lights
out can have daytime sleepiness. The teens in this study lived in Europe,
but teens in the USA also use cellphones to text-message and chat with
friends at all hours, says Amy Wolfson of the National Sleep Foundation.
"We're living in a 24/7 culture,
and teens are mimicking adults," she says.
Says Walsh: "People feel that sleep is negotiable." Yet studies suggest that
most adults need from seven to eight hours of sleep a night, and teens need
nine hours or more in order to do their best during the day, he says.
Copyright 2007 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
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