Various Topics

Various Topics: Thanksgiving, Architecture, Sleep Deprivation!

By: Jonathan Smith

To start off this blog post, I'd like to mention that what's been on my mind recently is the Thanksgiving Break I just enjoyed. I realized, that although it may seem a bit infantile, I reevaluated what I was thankful for. I'd like to just take the first portion of this blog post to list out a few of the ones that stood out to me. I realized how thankful I am for the distance apart from my girlfriend and I. It has in many ways been a strength to our relationship. I am thankful for education, knowledge, and the opportunity to attend SIU. It has been a great experience spending my college days here and I know it will soon be a memory of the past considering I'll be finished here in August of next year! I'm also thankful for the challenges architecture has put forth for me. As much as I hate portions of architecture school, I love other portions of architecture in general that much more.

In light of this mushy spill of thankfulness, I'd like to segway to an interesting segment I found on Sleep Deprivation! Seeing as most architecture students (that have any ounce or procrastination in them),  will experience this throughout their career, you might be interested in the effects in can have on individuals.

"A study in the Oct. 1 issue of the journal Sleep recorded the bedtimes and wake times of kids ages 9 to 16. The children who went to bed late and got up late were 1.5 times more likely to become obese than those who went to bed early and got up early. They were also almost twice as likely to be physically inactive and 2.9 times more likely to sit in front of the TV and computer or play video games for hours.

“It is widely accepted that the sleep patterns of adolescents are fundamentally different from children and adults, and that it is normal for adolescents to stay up very late and sleep in late in the morning,” says the study’s co-author Carol Maher. “Scientists have realized in recent years that children who get less sleep tend to do worse on a variety of health outcomes, including the risk of being overweight and obese.”

Maher says mornings are more conducive to physical activity for young people than nights, which offer prime-time TV programming and social networking opportunities. This relationship between time of day and available activities might explain why more sedentary and screen-based behaviors were observed with later bedtimes, she said.

Psychologist Saul Rothenberg of the Sleep Disorders Center says the negative effects of sleep deprivation among teens go even further.

“Chronic sleep deprivation is a risk factor for the development of depression, leading to difficulties with family, teacher, and fellow student relationships,” he says. “Loss of sleep in teenagers leads to difficulty with memory and concentration, and changes in motor responses and reaction time affect athletic performance.”

That impaired reaction time also presents dangers for teens behind the wheel, increasing the risk for fatigue-related motor vehicle accidents, he says.

Cutting back on sleep by even one hour can make it tough to focus the next day and can slow your response time, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, which equates the hazards of drunk driving with those of drowsy driving. Like alcohol, a lack of sleep makes it harder to react quickly enough to a suddenly braking car, a sharp curve in the road, or other potentially dangerous situations."

We aren't the Only Ones: http://www.longislandpress.com/2012/04/19/sleep-deprivation-among-students-at-all-time-high/

Interesting / Entertaining Blog Post on Sleep Deprivation in Architecture Students: http://www.architizer.com/en_us/blog/dyn/13615/just-how-bad-is-sleep-deprivation/#.ULmesIPO3Og