Dr. David Bardsley

Well, sleep deprivation is huge, absolutely huge.

We are a sleep-deprived nation.

And adults, with rare exception, need seven to nine hours sleep a night.

And I know all kinds of people, I'm sure you do as well, that say they get by just fine on five or six hours sleep.

And they're absolutely correct.

That's what they're doing.

They're getting by.

They are not performing at their cognitive best.

One of the simplest things there is to do in psychology is to test that cognitive decrease

That occurs with sleep deprivation.

If you have just one night of disturbed sleep, you will have a measurable decrease in your cognitive ability the next day.

And the military have done the best studies I've ever seen.

The military studies are fantastic.

And they show that if you take a group of military personnel of mixed ages and you deprive them of sleep, first of all, you give them a cognitive test.

And then you deprive them of sleep for 24 hours and then you retest them.

They will have a decrease of 30 percent in those test scores.

Now, most of us are never deprived of sleep for 24 hours straight.

But those same military studies show if you take that same group of personnel of mixed ages, you administer the cognitive test and now you deprive them of sleep.

so that they get six or less hours sleep for five consecutive nights, and then you retest them, now they have a decrease of 60% in those test scores.

It's one of the simplest things that we can do to make sure that we're functioning at 100% of our cognitive ability.