Marijuana Case
Contrary to the fast paced no-time-for-anything way of American life, sleep is the most important thing for someone to have. Especially if they want to continue moving as fast as life demands them to. Sleep allows people to heal their muscles, rest the body, and regenerate for the upcoming day. Without sleep, the body would be on autopilot. Sleep is the glue that holds one day to another, and without it would be devastating to our functionality. It would make us useless. In the National Sleep Foundations, “America’s Sleep-deprived teens nodding off at school, behind the wheel”, and William Dement and Christopher Vaughan’s, “ Sleep debt and the mortgaged mind”, share the consequences of not getting enough sleep, how our bodies deal with this, and helpful tips to getting enough sleep. All the information between the two articles is helpful in understanding the mystery of sleep. By mastering the flow of sleep, it will help to improve your way of living. Sleep has been an overlooked subject of study, and is just now coming out to surface. These articles deeply portray how sleep works, and the different levels of sleep abstinence.
Although we have very busy lives and keep moving non-stop, our bodies are not meant to work like robots. We have to rest and regenerate. We do this by sleeping. Sleeping is one of the most important things we can do, next to eating and drinking. There are many consequences to not getting enough sleep. In Dement and Vaughan’s article, “ Sleep debt and the mortgaged mind”, the third mate of the Exxon Valdez was the perfect example of consequences caused by sleep deprivation. The captain of the ship fell asleep while carrying tons of oil across the sea and caused one of the biggest oil spills of the 1900’s(330-331). Besides just falling asleep behind the wheel of a ship, you can fall asleep and run people over with your car, miss important appointments, have problems thinking in school, and problems catching up on the debt we have “charged” to our analogical accounts (NSF 333-334). Severe consequences occur when sleep is the issue, and we don’t have enough of it.
Even though people sleep in late on the weekends and catch up on sleep the days they are off work, one is still in debt to sleep. Imagine that the mind is a loan shark and, “ the brain keeps an exact accounting of how much sleep it is owed”(334). When people don’t pay back their sleep in full, it will be added onto the next nights 8-9 hours of recommended