R&R: “Why There’s No Such Thing as a Good Night’s Sleep”

Why There’s No Such Thing as a Good Night’s Sleep
Click title for rest of article at LiveScience.com…

Meredith F. Small, LiveScience’s Human Nature Columnist
28 September 2007

For new parents, transatlantic travelers and people who stay up watching late-night TV, life is all about getting enough sleep.

No one really knows why human and other animals sleep, or why, after losing sleep night after night, we become crazed. We bumble around, grumpy and complaining, and then lie down for a good sleep but end up wide awake.

And now, Francesco Cappuccio at the University of Warwick Medical School in Coventry, Canada, claims that too little sleep will also kill us.

Cappuccio and colleagues at the University College, London, gathered sleep data on 10,308 civil servants in the late 1980s and then again in the early 1990s. Of course, some of those government employees had died in the meantime, and so the researchers could factors out such variables as smoking, exercise, obesity and blood pressure and concentrate on how sleep might send us into the Big Sleep.