Sleeping Disorders

Introduction

This work purpose is to show how sleeping disorders affect you in your daily life, but it mainly focuses in school matters. “The more hours of sleep you take, the better your daily life (health, attention, relationships, mood, etc.) and grades will be.”
Sleep is defined as “a period of rest for the body and mind, during which consciousness is in partial or complete abeyance andthe body functions partially suspended.” Sleep divides into two big phases, NREM sleep and REM sleep.
NREM stands for “non-rapid eye movement” and is divided in 4. Rapid Eye Movement (REM), is the fifth stage of the cycle of sleep. Dreaming has been proven to help solve many problems we couldn’t focus on during the day. We dream an average of 2 hours per night.
Sleeping disorders have beenproblems since past decades. Many of the nowadays students, have a common one called: Delayed sleep syndrome. This disorder is caused by the change of our inner “clock”, which is modified by the changes in our hormones (puberty). This means that we teenagers want to sleep late at night and wake late in the morning. This is a big issue, because we don’t get the sufficient sleep we need (which is anaverage of nine to nine and half hours of daily sleep), what causes problems in relationships, school and mood later in the day. Sleep is as needed as food and water for human beings. During sleep, the body repairs cells, releases hormones like growth hormones, strengthens your immune system and it’s the time when the brain regenerates and rests.
The purposes of the research are to show teenagers thereal importance they must give to their resting time and how having a good and appropriate time of sleep can change your life in many aspects (health, school, relations etc.)
Literature Review
Sleep is a cycle of NREM and REM sleep. These two main kinds of sleep are sub-divided into stages. NREM has four different stages; meanwhile REM has just one, the fifth stage of the cycle. In NREM thefirst two stages you are basically still conscious, you are light sleep, and contractions of our muscles can be seen. In stages three and four, the brain waves slow down and we enter into deep sleep, there is no muscle activity at this point of the cycle. REM, is characterized by dreaming and rapid eye movement. No other muscles move during this stage. NREM and REMsleep repeat throughout the night. REM periods are longer when a new cycle begins.
Sleep deprivation has very serious effects on your health, mentally and physically. Not having the adequate time of rest can provoke depression, heart disease, hypertension, irritability, slower reaction time, slurred speech and impairs our ability to think. The Immune system, our mood and emotions aren’t the onlythings damaged. Without adequate rest, the brain’s ability to function rapidly deteriorates. The brain is worrier trying to keep the body awake, and as a consequence, concentration levels drop and memory becomes impaired. Weight gain is another problem cause by sleep deprivation. If you don’t sleep enough time for your body to rest completely, hormones are affected in two different ways sometimesthe body overproduces them or the other way around. That is the reason sleep deprivation causes weight gain, because the body overproduces ghrelin (hormone that stimulates appetite), and your body levels of leptin fall (hormone that affects our feelings of fullness and satisfaction) so we never feel satisfied.
Total sleep deprivation has been proven to be fatal, in a study made with lab ratswhere scientists were forced to stay awake, and died after two weeks.
With the age, people become more likely to suffer from some kind of sleep disorder. Statistics show that 50% of people over 64 years old suffer from a sleep disorder. Hormonal and physical changes during aging increase our probabilities of suffering sleep disorders. Sleep disorder or sleep deprivation is known as “a general lack...