Tuesday, January 28, 2003
Daily demands got you down and you can't seem to get your nightly allotment of sleep? A recent medical study [CNN, January 28th 2003] shows that for women, getting significantly less than eight hours of sleep a night is associated with a one-third increase in risk of developing heart disease. Early results seem to show the same applied for male test subjects. But another surprising discovery: sleeping more than eight hours (9 or more) per night also increases your risk of heart disease by nearly an equal emount.
According to Dr. Najib Ayas, a sleep disorders specialist who was at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston during the study, "people should start thinking of adequate sleep not as a luxury but more as a component of a healthy lifestyle." What about dreaming? Isn't that a healthy part of the daily sleep cycle too? I think we're at risk of worse than heart disease when we don't make conditions conducive to dreaming. I don't necessarily mean dreaming as in hopes and goals, but the real REM-sleep stuff; somehow a night without dreams is an unfinished night.
