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Sleep Deprivation
    Good morning, everyone. Welcome to today’s lecture. Now tell me, do you have a good night’s sleep last night? How are you feeling now? I’m always on the lookout for ways to transform my life and that of my students. Sometimes we all go to great lengths to find the newest skill, habit or capability to change our life. But if we looked a little closer to home we would find one very simple, often overlooked thing we can do to make us happier, increase our performance and improve our focus and attention. That thing is completely within our control and is something we do every night. That thing is sleep. But, in today’s lecture, I will focus on the opposite of it: What sleep deprivation will do to us.
    After a bad night of sleep, we all typically feel distracted and off our mental game. But do you really know all the ways a lack of sleep interferes with your cognitive performance? Most of my patients are surprised to learn just how broadly it affects their ability to think at their best.
    It’s difficult to identify a cognitive skill that isn’t affected by sleep and compromised by sleep deprivation. That’s how pervasive the effects of insufficient sleep are on the brain.
    Sleep deprivation can literally disrupt levels of chemicals in the brain that affect thought, mood, and energy; leave key areas of the brain in an "always on" state of activation; activate genes that interfere with optimal brain activity.
    We’ve still got much to learn about the full effects of poor and insufficient sleep on cognitive performance and health. But as you’re about to see, what we know already offers many compelling reasons to make getting plenty of sleep a top priority.
    First of all, you can’t focus well.
    Attention is especially sensitive to the effects of sleep deprivation. You know this through experience when you have trouble focusing on tasks after a night of poor sleep. Unfortunately, "a night of poor sleep" is often a series of nights of poor sleep, leading to chronic sleep debt and continually compromised attention.
    New research suggests that as many as 75％ of people with ADHD may have a chronic, underlying sleep problem stemming from a disruption to their circadian rhythms.
    Attention is about focus and concentration—your ability to stay with tasks long enough to make meaningful progress. For most of us, focus is key to both our performance and our sense of purpose, in and away from work. Sleep deprivation makes focus harder to achieve.
    Secondly, your reaction time slows down.
    Attention isn’t only about focusing on big, thought-intensive tasks. It’s also about focusing on—and making sense of—what’s important right now. Remember those sluggish brain cells that result from being sleep deprived? Scientists in that recent study found that sleep deprivation slowed down neural cells’ ability to absorb visual information and translate that visual data into conscious thought. Research shows reaction times are dulled as much by sleeplessness as they are by alcohol.
    Thirdly, you have trouble making and storing memories.
    We have a brand-new research showing just how important sleep during middle age can be to memory and cognitive health in later years. A new study found that disrupted sleep during middle age, including insomnia, is connected to cognitive decline or cognitive problems.
    We know sleep is deeply critical to memory in all its phases—from acquiring memories, to storing them, to recalling them. All phases of memory are complex and involve multiple areas of the brain that are affected by lack of sleep. So from tonight on, have nights of good sleep.
    That’s all for today’s lecture. Thank you.