Nursing and Sleep Deprivation
Date: May 21, 2017
“Oh! I am so tired that I dream, and I want to sleep even when I close my eyes!” This would be a very typical state of our LVN nursing students while attending the LVN program. And it is true for most typical nursing students. They hardly have enough time to sleep and restore between a morning job, a night-time LVN class, and home with family and kids, with preparations for exams and homework assignments.
But what happens during those hours of sleep? And why do we need sleep? If we are supposed to spend eight hours a day asleep, nearly one-third of one’s life is spent in bed! Some people say they have adjusted to only five hours of sleep a day or even less. But did their bodies truly change?
Scientific research shows that only 3% of the population can survive and work efficiently with only 6 hours of sleep, but not less. An average human is supposed to sleep eight hours. So, why is sleep so important? Many scientific experiments have been done studying sleep, its quality, and the body’s response to lack of sleep.
The most apparent result of sleep deprivation, according to research, is a vast detrimental effect on one’s cognitive function. Clearly, after being prevented from sleeping for more than 24 hours, the subjects of the experiments showed a significant slowing in their information processing abilities.
Their responses to questions were delayed, their vision clarity deteriorated, and their speech was much slower. In many cases, they experienced somewhat similar aphasia, a phenomenon when you cannot say what you want to say or cannot come up with the right words to express thought.
The effects of sleep deprivation were especially noticeable in memory formation and learning. A student, such as our LVN student and LVN certification, was given some facts to memorize and then asked to regurgitate the information.
When the percent of information retrieved in well-rested students versus in the sleep-deprived students were compared, the results were astonishing: the sleep-deprived student could remember fewer facts and much fewer details. Something happens when we sleep, which allows the brain to restore the recently formed neuronal connections and make those connections stronger and more long-lasting.
We discover many essential functions of sleep toward restoration and regeneration of the body, but one of the most exciting findings is sleep’s effects on the aging process. We know that laboratory rats prevented from sleeping aged much faster and a poor diet of natural causes much sooner than their control counterparts.
In humans, we can see that sleep deprivation raises the most dangerous, age-promoting hormone, cortisol. This hormone, produced in the adrenal cortex, promotes oxidative damage in all the brain tissues, inducing inflammatory processes that promote chronic diseases and aging. Moreover, this hormone has been linked to brain function’s age-related deterioration, such as the one seen in Alzheimer’s dementia patients. And interestingly, as we age, the portion of the night we spend in deep restorative sleep becomes smaller and smaller. Perhaps, this also contributes to age-related chronic diseases and deterioration of organ systems?
We now know that many on-the-job human errors happen due to sleep deprivation. Occasionally, these errors can be pretty devastating, such as in the Chernobyl incident. Or a sleep-deprived doctor giving the wrong order or a wrong prescription is simply dangerous to patients.
We cannot allow such errors to happen in medicine or patient care. We educate our nursing students while attending an LVN college about the importance of quality sleep in maximizing human potential and minimizing mistakes.
