Shelby Harris Quotes

So, sleep deprivation, and sometimes an insomnia, which is a little bit of a different form, but just getting a lack of sleep, can lead to a number of different decrements.

Workplace accidents with people who are sleep deprived or people who work shifts and they don't get the right amount of sleep during the day or at night.

So there's a few different ways that we treat insomnia. The first thing that we always do is we look at the cause.

We try not using medications initially, and we use something called behavioral therapy for insomnia. This changes behaviors people do in bed, none of the tossing and turning.

So when it comes to circadian rhythms, it's a clock that's basically programmed in our body. So if you think back to times when people lived on farms and we didn't have electricity.

We haven't really - it's harder for us to set those rhythms. So it's really important to keep a steady bedtime and wake time to really lock in those rhythms.

Now circadian rhythms become very interesting and problematic for patients because when you become a teenager, your rhythms actually tend to naturally shift.

So the deeper stages of sleep are really those times of quiescence, you're really restoring your body and we have a few different stages of sleep.

And you cycle throughout so that you do about five to six cycles throughout the night. And we spend more time in REM later on in the night than we do earlier on.

So people only focus on getting the really deep sleep, but in reality, we spend almost 60% of the night in the stage two sleep.

Really if it's an hour or two after you've fallen asleep because you're in such a deep sleep at that point.

We actually don't know the function of sleep all that well yet, but sleep is a time of quiescence in the brain.

Decrements in attention and concentration, being able to learn more efficiently, that's just not as good. Also, there are motor vehicle accidents, workplace accidents, we see that a lot.

In general, there are patients with insomnia who - many patients with insomnia will actually over report the lack of sleep that they are getting.

There are some that are - REM Behavior Disorder, we'll see some court documented cases. And they really need to have a thorough evaluation with a sleep specialist.