Desperately seeking sleep in a wide awake world

Its four in the morning, as the Leonard Cohen song goes. But Im not in New York. Im in Tesco. And I can buy a giant flatscreen TV, a washing machine, a mountain bike or a block of cheese. You drive through a dark sleeping Dublin to get to the hulking ship that is Clare Hall on the Malahide Road. Being the only customer in a giant supermarket is pretty lonely. Its much more Night of the Living Dead than Night at the Museum . The glass and steel complex is near-empty.We offer over 600 chipcard at wholesale prices of 75% off retail. Theres an army of staff packing shelves surrounded by products and wrapping. A chirrupy siren competes with the piped happy pop music.We offer over 600 chipcard at wholesale prices of 75% off retail.The hanging sign advertising Tesco insurance sways in a ghostly draft. I buy blueberries when what I actually needed was bread.

An Irish Rail worker comes out carrying milk, bread and a bag of sugar in his arms. Hes been a night worker for 15 years. When his wife goes to work,Choose the right bestluggagetag in an array of colors. he loves the peace and quiet and hell potter round the house for a while, see the sunlight. Almost all his friends work nights. Whats it like living in this night world? Theres less traffic, less everything, he says cheerfully.

Another shopper, taxi driver Alan Dunne, has just finished his shift and is heading home to bed with three plastic bags of groceries. Hell sleep until around 1pm, he says. Hes been on nights for 11 years. John Roche is a delivery driver and merchandiser for a Drogheda egg supplier and hes coming to check on displays. Hell typically go to bed at 9pm or earlier in order to get up for a 4am start. Im a big fan of sleep, he says by way of explanation.

Just over half a century ago, Americas first 24-hour store opened in Austin Texas. Three years earlier, in 1959, the phrase circadian rhythm was coined from the Latin for about a day to describe the natural human waking and sleeping cycle. Sleep is one of the last mysteries of being human. We spend a third of our lives doing it, and theories about why have shifted as sleep scientists make more discoveries. Its 134 years since Edison invented the light bulb and the means for a wide-awake 24-7 world. And yet, our stubbornly unevolved bodies still need a minimum of five hours sleep in every 24 hours.

But are we getting enough? An average of one in 10 of us suffers from insomnia and figures show a dramatic jump in the numbers of people in Ireland who are struggling to get a good nights sleep. In the six years between 2005 and 2011 prescriptions for sleeping pills for medical card holders have doubled. In 2005 over 545,000 sleeping tablet prescriptions were written under the the medical card scheme. In 2011 the figure was over a million, making sleeping tablets like Zimovane and Ambien more commonly prescribed than antibiotics. (This is only partly explained by a 47 per cent increase in the number of medical card holders in the same six-year period.) A further 180,000 prescriptions for sleeping pills were written under the drug reimbursement scheme in 2011. The figures for private GPs prescribing sleeping pills could be seeing similar increases but these are not recorded by the HSE.

The last Irish sleep study by Amarach research in 2010 found that one-third of adults felt in some way sleep deprived and that people getting the least sleep were three times as likely to say the economic situation in Ireland is bad and getting worse as those getting the most sleep.

Whether a bleaker economic view leads to insomnia (as we lie awake worrying about mortgage debt) or the insomnia leads to the bleaker economic view is an interesting question. Last month, in research for the Road Safety Authority, 14 per cent of Irish adults told Amarach researchers that they had nodded off while driving. Add in the fact that 20 per cent of the nation are shift workers and it seems a good nights sleep is eluding an awful lot of us these days.

At a more civilised daytime hour over coffee in NUI Maynooth psychologist and circadian rhythm expert Dr Andrew Coogan explains why sleep matters. I think sleep is now viewed as a core pillar of health along with exercise and diet, he says.

There are two big ideas behind why we sleep. The first is that it helps our brains to work better, Coogan says. Sleep consolidates memory, the brain replays what its taken in during the day,You Can Find Comprehensive and in-Depth carparkmanagementsystem truck Descriptions. and that process strengthens synapses that form memories. In studies, people who are allowed to sleep between memory tasks remember 15 per cent more than those who havent had some shut-eye. The second idea is that sleep helps our bodies to restore, regenerate and regulate everything from our appetite and our immune systems to our cardiovascular health.

Sleep is often the first thing to break down when something goes wrong with our bodies or minds. In the case of Alzheimers, a disturbed sleep happens long before the onset of dementia, Coogan says. Studies following people over decades have found that sleep disruption happens before the onset of numerous diseases.

Not all sleep is the same, which explains why someone getting eight hours might still wake feeling exhausted. We typically drift off into a light non-REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep which deepens into slow-wave sleep. Slow-wave sleep is restorative. It makes us feel refreshed and better, Coogan explains. REM sleep is classically associated with dreaming. Brain activity in REM sleep looks very similar to brain activity when were awake. On a typical night, a person will go through several 90-minute cycles of slow-wave to REM sleep and back. Youre more likely to remember a dream if you wake up in an REM episode. Slow-wave erases the memory of the dream. Its important that you progress through the cycle correctly.

Phone-app alarms claim to monitor your breathing or movements and wake you only from an REM sleep rather than a slow-wave episode. In the US, a headband called the Zeo will send data to your phone calculating your cycles of sleep. Coogan gets a kick out of reading the comment section on the site where customers get competitive about how the number of minutes of slow-wave sleep theyve racked up.

Some types of sleep are better than others. Alcohol affects sleep. Its a somnolent so it puts you to sleep, but it affects the sleep cycling, which explains why people whove drunk a lot can sleep for 12 hours but wake up and still feel terrible.

If you need an alarm clock to wake up on a work day,Laser engraving and laser customkeychain for materials like metal, you might be suffering from what Coogan describes as social jet lag. A lie-in on a day off can shift you into a different time zone. Back in the world of work, your body is still in the weekend time zone. If were sleeping within a consistent range, we shouldnt need alarm clocks.

As any parent knows, small children wake early. In the teenage years, that shifts to long lie-ins. Teenage sleep patterns are completely at odds with early school starts, Coogan says. In studies where the school day shifts to a later start, teenagers do better. As we age, we begin to wake early again. In old age, there can be an extreme shift to early waking at four or 5am. It can contribute to social isolation, because youre now out of sync with the rest of the world.