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Unbelievable facts about sleep

Sleeping is one of my favourite pastimes, so I’ve rounded up a few of the most unbelievable facts about sleeping for everyone’s enjoyment…

1. Think you want to have kids? Well maybe this will put you off: A new baby will result in around 400-750 hours of lost sleep for the parents in the first year alone.

2. You think that staying up all night after a long day is tough? If your anything like me your asleep five minutes after sitting on the couch. So its quite remarkable that the word record for the longest period without sleep is a staggering 18 days, 12 hours and 490 minutes during a rocking chair marathon. The exhausted winner reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses.

3. For many years British Ministry of Defence researchers have used a system that resents a soldier’s body clock so that they can go without sleep for up to 36 hours. The system involves tiny optical fibres that are embedded inside a pair of goggles. The fibres project a ring of bright light with the same spectrum as a sunrise around the soldier’s retina fooling then in to believing they have just woken up.

4. How often have you forgotten to do something when you’re tired? You’re not the only one. The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska, the challenger space shuttle disaster and the Chernobyl nuclear accident have all been blamed on human error due to sleep deprivation.

5. How long do you sleep for? The NHS recommend at least 8 hours sleep a night, but on average we sleep up to three hours less that other primates including, chimps, rhesus monkeys and baboons who all sleep for ten hours.

6. If you snore you can keep your partner wide awake for hours, but what you may not realise is that ten percent of snorers suffer from sleep apnoea, a disorder that causes the sufferer to stop breathing up to 300 times a night, significantly increasing the chance of a heart attack or stroke.

7. Put the mouse down, and step away from the keyboard… According to research, 18 to 24 years olds kept awake for long periods are actually far more impaired than older people kept awake for the same length of time. Experts claim this is down to the internet’s 24/7 accessibility.

Sleeptight.

Tags: sleeping, Unbelievable facts