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| else but sleeping; it is difficult to pay attention to tasks, especially if they are boring; and your reaction time is somewhat slowed. Monotonous activities such as driving can be risky. So there are some effects, but they usually aren't critical. For most jobs, performance is not affected by one night's lost sleep. However, making crucial judgments or doing creative thinking can be more difficult and, if a job is extremely boring, there is a decrease in performance even after the loss of just two hours of sleep on one night. |
| Regularly missing sleep may be a different story. After several nights without sleep, performance goes down, and you have more trouble concentrating and remembering numbers. In experiments involving sleep deprivation for long periods, it was found that a person's mood deteriorates firstjoy disappearsand the person becomes very sleepy and grim. After about two or three days, most people start having minisleeps, little lapses of attention when the brain goes to sleep for only five or ten seconds and wakes right up again. By about five days, these minisleeps become longer and more numerous. By 10 or 11 days, the minisleeps are so numerous and so mixed with wakefulness that you can't tell whether you are awake or asleep. You can talk and in the middle of talking have two or three slow waves of sleep. You can walk and from one step to the next you might catch a second of sleep. |
| Many adults get less than optimal sleep, and some have a sizable sleep debt. Like gamblers playing with borrowed money, many sleep-deprived persons live in the red of lost sleep, often compromising their responsibilities at their jobs, sometimes using drugs |
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