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Module 1.5c

TABLE 1.5-1
Cornell University psychologist James Maas reported that most students suffer the
consequences of sleeping less than they should. To see if you are in that group, answer the
following true-false questions:

True False

1. I need an alarm to wake up at the appropriate time.
2. It’s a struggle for me to get out of bed in the morning.
3. On weekday mornings, I hit the snooze button several times to get
more sleep.
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4. I feel tired, irritable, and stressed out during the week.
5. I have trouble concentrating and remembering.
6. I feel slow with critical thinking, problem solving, and being creative.
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
7. I often fall asleep watching TV.
8. I often fall asleep in boring meetings or lectures or in warm rooms.
9. I often fall asleep after heavy meals.
10. I often fall asleep while relaxing after dinner.
11. I often fall asleep within five minutes of getting into bed.
12. I often feel drowsy while driving.
13. I often sleep extra hours on weekend mornings.
14. I often need a nap to get through the day.
15. I have dark circles around my eyes.

If you answered “true” to three or more items, you probably are not getting enough sleep. To
determine your sleep needs, Maas recommends that you “go to bed 15 minutes earlier than
usual every night for the next week — and continue this practice by adding 15 more minutes
each week — until you wake without an alarm and feel alert all day.” [Sleep Quiz reprinted with
permission from James B. Maas. (2013). Sleep to win! AuthorHouse.]

• enhancing limbic brain responses to the mere sight of food and decreasing corti-
cal responses that help us resist temptation (Benedict et al., 2012; Greer et al., 2013;
St-Onge et al., 2012).
Thus, children and adults who sleep less are heavier than average, and in recent decades
people have been sleeping less and weighing more (Hall et al., 2018; Miller et al., 2018). More-
over, experimental sleep deprivation increases appetite and consumption of junk foods; our
tired brain finds fatty foods more enticing (Fang et al., 2015; Rihm, 2019). So, sleep loss helps
explain the weight gain common among sleep-deprived students (Hull et al., 2007).
When we get sick, we typically sleep more, boosting our immune cells. Sleep deprivation
can suppress the immune cells that battle both viral infections and cancer (Opp & Krueger,
2015). In one study, when researchers exposed volunteers to a cold virus, those who had aver-
aged less than 5 hours sleep a night were 4.5 times more likely to develop a cold than those
who slept more than 7 hours a night (Prather et al., 2015). Sleep’s protective effect may help
explain why people who sleep 7 to 8 hours a night tend to outlive those who are chronically
sleep deprived (Dew et al., 2003; Parthasarathy et al., 2015; Scullin & Bliwise, 2015).
Sleep deprivation slows reactions and increases errors on visual attention tasks simi-
lar to those involved in screening airport baggage, performing surgery, and reading X-rays
(Caldwell, 2012; Lim & Dinges, 2010). When especially drowsy, we may unknowingly expe-
rience a 1- to 6-second microsleep (Koch, 2016). Consider the engineer of a New York–area
commuter train, whose fatigue from sleep apnea caused him to crash the train, injuring more
than 100 people and killing a bystander (McGeehan, 2018). When sleepy frontal lobes con-
front an unexpected situation, misfortune often results.

Sleep: Sleep Loss, Sleep Disorders, and Dreams Module 1.5c 105

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