Additional wakefulness: A study on self-violation chronic sleep restriction and its effect on medical students

Abstract

Sleep is a physiological process essential for life. Good quality and adequate amount of sleep is important in order to have better cognitive performance and to avoid health problems and psychiatric disorders. The amount of sleep clocked in is also very important and is positively correlated with alertness and psychomotor vigilance [1]. Its quality is strongly related to psychological and physical health and other measures of well-being [2]. Sleep is also believed to have facilitating role in learning and memory process [3, 4].

Sleep deprivation experiments conducted on humans have shown that sleep deprivation causes impairment of performance, vigilance, attention, concentration and memory [5]. Individuals that report poor sleep quality and other sleep-related disturbances may be at higher risk for depression and other psychiatric disorders throughout their lifetime