Nas’s classic line, “Never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of Death”, wasn’t meant to be taken literally, or intended as advice for best sleep practices.
However, when Dick Gregory said, “sleep deprivation is the number one killer in America”, we believe he meant it as a firm warning in the hopes that you hear it and practice better sleeping habits.
You can find different extremes of sleeping habits in our society, both currently and in the past, which can add to the wonder of what’s the best way to approach sleep.
We haven’t found any list that has sleep deprivation as the number one cause of death in America. We have seen supporting evidence from many sources that paint sleep deprivation, to be the gateway to serious conditions like heart disease, diabetes and cancer.
These hold the top spots of causes of death in America.
An article published by Popular Science 150 sheds light on some interesting facts about sleep deprivation: “Disrupting your sleep cycle upsets your autonomic nervous system. You make slightly more proinflammatory molecules and you’re more stressed overall. This all adds up to a 24% increase in heart attacks on the Monday after DST goes into effect. One study also found that the fall change, in which we get an hour more of sleep, produced a 21% decrease in heart attacks on the Tuesday after”.
“I know now, that our sleep quality, is more important than our diet and exercise combined. What it does for our health, and also, literally our physical appearance,” Shawn Stevenson says in the below video He also discusses how much more fat you lose when you have healthy sleeping habits.
Some studies compare sleep deprivation to a level of impairment that’s equivalent to being legally drunk. Imagine the dangers of driving and dosing off at the wheel, having the same potentially fatal outcome as someone who was intoxicated by alcohol.
Is sleep deprivation one of the major causes of death in America?
Even though we don’t see sleep deprivation on the list of top causes of death in America, we’ve learned enough to know that it affects the top five that are on the list.
Words by Kaba Abdul-Fattah.
