Think about the world for a moment; think about our fast-paced environment we face, how we work, those soldiers who have to stay up all night guarding a hostile environment. Now consider the sleep habits of the United States in general, people try to last day to day with five or fewer hours of sleep per night. The company is pushing towards a sleepless workplace; in reality, depriving yourself of sleep is one of the worst things you can do. Sleep loss affects everyone; it will cloud the concentration and undermine the logic of even the most intelligent individual. Looking at "normal" sleep efforts, scientists push for about seven and a half to eight hours of sleep per night. There are anomalies in these rules, but they are just that. In David Randall's book Dreamland, the secrets of sleep are explored through interviews with scientists specializing in the field. Randall notes that younger people, teenagers, actually need more sleep, that number has been estimated at eight and a half to nine hours each night. Before natural light had to go to bed when it got dark, this new light source dramatically changed the way the world slept. Instead of sleeping through the night, everyone woke up in the middle of the night for about an hour. This has been described as the most peaceful period experienced. It was also claimed that women were more fertile during this period. When people don't get these numbers they contribute to what is known as sleep debt (Randall, ch. 1). The normal answer on how to pay off debt is to go to bed earlier, but in reality this is not always possible. This is due to too busy schedules or sometimes more biological reasons. Many p...... middle of paper ......use of how the flow of time works. This makes sleep a much more terrible need, because when it is no longer there, fear is created. Fortunately, sleep is automatically compensated for by the brain. Normal sleep cycles change every ninety minutes, when one has been sleep deprived their brain adjusts those cycles to accommodate significantly more REM sleep, as if to compensate for the lost time. The ability to catch up on sleep aids the body's natural clock called the circadian rhythm. This internal sleep timer can easily be deactivated by adding unnatural lights or by rapidly traveling across different time zones. When this happens, the brain gets confused because it doesn't have the ability to adjust to differences in lighting. When in this state of confusion, the body tries to stick to the old program.