Get enough sleep can reduce the risk of a range of more and less serious diseases, explains Professor Torbjörn Åkerstedt, who researched sleep for three decades.
Previous sleep research was mainly about how sleep is regulated, circadian and working hours significance and how lack of sleep affects us in the short term. Torbjörn Åkerstedt is one of the Swedish researchers who contributed most to the knowledge of particular importance to working hours sleep and fatigue safety risk. While research continues on these issues can sleep researchers now ahead and insert sleep in a holistic approach to health and lifestyle.
Only now we begin to understand that sleep is a base for long-term health and why it is so, he says
Torbjörn Åkerstedt is professor and director of the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University. His research focuses on stress, sleep and recovery. He also leads Stockholm Stress Center, an interdisciplinary center for research on work-related stress and health that formed the 2009th Centre was funded by a grant of 50 million over ten years from the FAS. Stockholm Stress Center consists of collaborating research groups from the Stress Research Institute and Department of Psychology at Stockholm University and the Department of Clinical Neuroscience and Department of Public Health Sciences at Karolinska Institutet.
Thanks to the interdisciplinary cooperation within the research center, we may combine such as immunology, stress research, sleep measurements and techniques which depict brain function. This gives us a whole new spin on the subject. When you order together research from different disciplines look suddenly new patterns, he says.
It has never been so much fun that now researching sleep!
For example, studies that gave explanations for the importance of sleep for the emotional balance. Imaging technique that shows activity in different parts of the brain has helped researchers understand why people become more emotionally unstable and easily swings between different emotions when you sleep poorly. Normally held areas in the brain which is the center of strong emotional reactions under the control of other more analytical and planning areas in the front of the brain.
The studies show that sleep deprivation fatigue the controlling areas that lose grip of the brain. Suddenly you lose the emotional balance and can start over react in different ways.
Studies show that sleep deprivation fatigue the controlling areas that lose grip of the brain. Suddenly you lose the emotional balance and can start over react in different ways, says Torbjörn Åkerstedt.
Sleep repairs
Recent research has shown that for short and / or disturbed sleep can eventually contribute to including dyslipidemia, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression and chronic fatigue syndrome. Torbjörn Åkerstedt and his employees work in a variety of studies to try to explain why stress and poor sleep makes us sick. An important aim is to prevent such problems.
When we are active during the day we use energy and other resources built up in the body. During the activity is thus degradation, catabolic processes in the body's cells. Degradation needs to be balanced with the reconstruction, anabolic processes that renew the body's resources. This recovery is very largely dependent upon our sleeping enough. Sleep is necessary for many of the reconstruction process. You could say that the body repairs itself while we sleep and pulse, andningsfekvensen, body temperature and blood pressure. During the sleep phase called deep sleep also increases the secretion of growth hormone significantly while the secretion of the stress hormone cortisol decreases.
Today we can demonstrate clear long-term effects of sleep disorders on the anabolic systems, says Torbjörn Åkerstedt.
Sleep, Stress and 24-hour society
It is precisely the reduced recovery of the body's various systems that are likely to be the root cause of the sleep disorder has so many negative effects. The lack of recovery explains among other things the connection between sleep disorders and stress. In Stockholm Stress Center, several studies on stress, sleep and recovery. The main hypothesis is that stress does not cause disease unless disturbed sleep out. Meanwhile, as we know, stress often make it harder to sleep.
Sleep is disturbed that it is hard to stop thinking about work when you are sleeping. They dwell on things that have happened and things will happen. It leads to a physiological revving up to counteract sleep, says Torbjörn Åkerstedt.
The problems with stresstörd sleep is greatest in human occupations - such as teachers and health care professions. Getting involved in other people at work makes you wound up.
Problems with stresstörd sleep is greatest in human occupations - such as teachers and health care professions. Getting involved in other people at work makes you wound up. There is also a gender difference that makes women get more sleep problems than men. Among physicians, the example twice as many women as men who have sleep disorders.
Something else that helps many people today receive too little restorative sleep is the community known as the 24-hour society. The boundaries between work / activity and rest blurring more and more when we get used to be reachable around the clock and when to socialize, be entertained and make a lot more at night when our body really need sleep. If you are active late into the night, making the biological circadian rhythm of sleep is shortened.
You may not notice it myself, but late habits leads to less sleep. Often you might not feel any major problems of the day, but our studies have shown that even small variations in sleep duration and quality of sleep affects the function the next day. If you put too late, it will lead to is worse mood and running slower the next day. Disturbed sleep systematically for longer, also the longer-term health effects. An important lifestyle factor
Research indicates that most people need to sleep about 7 hours a night to avoid fatigue and adverse health effects. According to a national survey by the Swedish Council on Technology Assessment was performed by the Swedes sleep an average of 6 hours and 51 minutes per night during the workweek. On weekends, sleep about an hour longer.Most successful thus basically get the sleep they need, but the variations are large. Sleep disturbance and fatigue are a major and growing public health problem. Between 1993 and 2003 almost doubled the number of people in Sweden who had trouble sleeping, according to Statistics Sweden's Surveys of Living Conditions. Among young women, there was a threefold increase. Now, the growth stalled and sleep disturbances stabilized at a significantly higher level than 20 years ago. The SBU survey mentioned previously reported 11.5 percent of the population sleep disorders.
Torbjörn Åkerstedt think it is high time that we really start to see the sleep habits as a key lifestyle factor in itself, in addition to nutrition, physical activity, smoking / abstinence and alcohol use. He suggests the need for greater awareness of the importance of sleep, both among employers, policymakers and health care people in each of us as individuals.
- Interest in the issues of sleep, stress and fatigue has increased in recent years and it is pleasing. But still sleep undervalued as a lifestyle factor, perhaps because it is free? We need changes in attitudes and knowledge and even there, I hope that our research can contribute.
