SLEEP AND WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT IT

In our lifetime, approximately 200,000 hours are devoted to sleeping. Dr. Carlos H. Schenck has studied those hours in many of us and has come to some remarkable conclusions. His and other’s research has begun to decode, for the first time, much of this mystery. Aristotle, about 350BC, first tried to understand this part of our lives. He decided then that it must have something to do with digestion. Many others had thought about and written about this segment of our aliveness, but no one really took a detailed look until recently, when Dr Schenk began.

He says that among American adults, aged 15 to 65, at least 4 percent sleepwalk, at least 2 percent have sleep terrors, 10% have restless legs syndrome, and another 2% have sleep-related violence and 10 percent have sleep-related eating disorder. We’re talking here about a total of 8 million that become violent and 16 million that sleep walk.

That’s a lot of activity for something that we all think of as the quiet time in our lives.
But, according the good doctor, there is help avaiable for some of us if the condition can be found and diagnosed. It should not involved drugs to keep us tied down to our beds either.

There are of course many that have excessive sleepiness throughout their lives. Even in the daytime they can fall asleep, while they are in the middle of an activity. They suffer from a condition called “hypersomnia”. It is often caused by depression, it has been found. There is also a related one called “narcolepsy” where a person has no control over falling asleep. This is a bit different than the former but it can be very dangerous as you can imagine. Many of these sufferers can fall asleep while driving their car down the highway. 
So, the good doctor will continue his studies of us, as his life’s work, and we can only hope he will find find some common answers to this strange human jigsaw puzzle we call sleep.