Results: Sleep Deprivation leads to mental sluggishness

Besides harried work schedules and our obsessions with our smart phones, sleep disorders are prevalent, with 50-70 million American adults experiencing one. Sleep apnea and insomnia are two of the most common examples. The issue has gotten so serious that the CDC has dubbed insufficient sleep a public health problem. 1 in 3 adults don't get enough sleep, a CDC report last year found. Do you suffer from sleep deprivation?

1 in 3 US adults don't get enough sleep, which affects their health and cognition. Do you feel you get enough sleep?

When the brain is sleep deprived, information isn't encoded by neurons as it should be, which is why our reaction time is slowed. It's like when a sleepy driver misses the fact that a person has stepped into the road. "The very act of seeing the pedestrian slows down in the driver's overtired brain," Fried said. "It takes longer for his brain to register what he's perceiving." The next phase is to come to understand the mechanism completely. "Slow, sleep-like waves disrupted the patients' brain activity and performance of tasks," Fried said in a press release. "This phenomenon suggests that select regions of the patients' brains were dozing, causing mental lapses, while the rest of the brain was awake and running as usual." Fried likened sleep deprivation to being drunk. "Yet no legal or medical standards exist for identifying overtired drivers on the road the same way we target drunk drivers," he said. Do you consider dangerous to drive when you didn't sleep enough?

On a societal level, sleep deprivation accounts for lost productivity, medical errors, and car and industrial accidents. One study showed that medical students doing their residency, which sometimes includes as long as 30-hour shifts, are more prone to mistakes. Do you have enough time to sleep as much as you need?

Do you consider sleeping properly as an important step to staying healthy?