Z Drug Information

What Does Sleep Do for People?

A number of tasks vital to health and quality of life relate to sleep and these tasks are impaired when people are sleep deprived.

Learning, Memory and Mood

Students who have trouble grasping new information or learning new skills should "sleep on it," and that advice seems well founded. Recent studies reveal that people can learn a task better by sleeping enough. People can also remember better with a good restful sleep after learning the task. Volunteers had to sleep at least six hours to show improvement in learning. Other studies suggest that all the benefits of training for mentally challenging tasks become apparent after a restful sleep, rather than immediately following the training or after sleeping for a short period overnight.
Many well-known artists and scientists claim to have had creative insights while sleeping. Mary Shelley, for example, said the idea for the novel "Frankenstein" came in a dream. Although not proven that dreaming is the driving force behind innovation, one study suggests that sleep is necessary for creative problem solving. In that study, volunteers performed a memory task and then took a test eight hours later. Participants who slept for eight hours immediately after receiving the task and before being tested were much more likely to find a creative way of simplifying the task and had heightened performance compared to those who were awake the entire eight hours before the test.

No one knows exactly what happens during sleep that improves learning, memory and insight. Experts suspect, however, that while people sleep, the body can form or reinforce the pathways of brain cells needed to perform certain tasks. This process may explain why infants need sleep in order to have proper brain development.
Not only is restful sleep required to form new learning and memory pathways in the brain, sleep is also necessary for those pathways to work up to speed. Several studies show that lack of sleep causes thinking processes to slow down. Lack of sleep also makes it harder to focus and pay attention. Lack of sleep can make people more easily confused. Studies also find a lack of sleep leads to faulty decision making and more risk taking. A lack of sleep slows down reaction time, which is particularly significant in driving and other tasks that require quick responses. When people who lack sleep undergo a test by using a driving simulator, these people perform just as poorly as people who are drunk. (See "Crash in Bed, Not on the Road"). The bottom line is: not getting a good sleep can be dangerous!
Even when days are not mentally or physically challenging, people should still get enough sleep to be in a good mood. Most people report being irritable, if not downright unhappy, when lacking sleep. People who chronically suffer from a lack of sleep, either because there is not enough time spent in bed or because of an untreated sleep disorder, are at greater risk of developing depression. One group of people who usually do not get enough sleep is mothers of newborns. Some experts think depression after childbirth (postpartum blues) is, in part, a result of lack of sleep.

The Heart

Sleep gives the heart and vascular system much-needed rest. During non-REM sleep, the heart rate and blood pressure progressively slow as people enter deeper sleep. During REM sleep, the heart rate and blood pressure have boosted spikes of activity. Overall, however, sleep reduces the heart rate and blood pressure by about 10 percent.
If people do not get enough sleep, this nightly dip in blood pressure, which appears to be important for good cardiovascular health, may not occur. According to several studies, if blood pressure does not dip during sleep, people are more likely to experience strokes, chest pain known as angina, an irregular heartbeat and heart attacks. People are also more likely to develop congestive heart failure, a condition in which fluid builds up in the body because the heart is not pumping sufficiently. Insufficient sleep time, an untreated sleep disorder or other factors can result in failure to experience the normal dip in blood pressure during sleep. African Americans, for example, tend not to have as much of a dip in blood pressure during sleep. This difference may help to explain why African Americans are more likely than Caucasians to have serious cardiovascular disease.
A lack of sleep also puts the body under stress and may trigger the release of more adrenaline, cortisol and other stress hormones during the day. These hormones contribute to blood pressure not dipping during sleep, thereby increasing the risk for heart disease. Inadequate sleep may also negatively affect the heart and vascular system by the increased production of certain proteins thought to play a role in heart disease. For example, some studies find that people who chronically do not get enough sleep have higher blood levels of C-reactive protein. Higher levels of this protein may suggest a greater risk of developing hardening of the arteries (atherosclerosis).

Facility that Meets Needs and Budget

The next step seeking treatment is to locate the right treatment facility to meet the needs and budget. Whether an inpatient hospital or residential treatment center specializing in addiction treatment or outpatient treatment, determine which treatment facility can best address the particular addiction situation.

The following step is to contact each of the treatment providers on the list and ask a series of questions. Some people may visit the clinics that seem well-matched in order to see firsthand how these facilities operate and to get a better sense of the kind of care a patient will be receiving at the facility. Ask for literature and inquire about all costs associated with the treatment and various treatment options each may offer. Some residential treatment facilities, for example, offer outpatient treatment, aftercare treatment and other services.

In order to shorten a long list of possible treatment facilities it is best to examine in-depth exactly what the costs of the programs are. Some facilities require an initial assessment first, in order for professional staff to determine the best and personalized program for a patient. In fact, whichever treatment facility ultimately chooses, no treatment can begin without a comprehensive assessment. This assessment involves an interview to learn about patient background, family history, type of substance and duration of abuse and other issues important to the treatment. Some treatment centers require patient detoxification in order to be admitted to the treatment program. This will be determined at the time of the assessment. No one can enter treatment without being free of traces of drugs or alcohol.