https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5073-6954
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John A Lesku, Dangers of sleeping, and not sleeping enough, in war, Sleep, Volume 48, Issue 2, February 2025, zsae298, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsae298
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Few behaviors are as dangerous as sleep [1]. While awake, the senses send information to the brain for processing to elicit a behavioral response. While asleep, the links in the neurological chain of information processing break so sleep functions can play out uninterrupted by wakefulness [2]. It is this attenuated awareness of the local environment, and reduced responsiveness to changing circumstances, that characterizes sleep from humans to honey bees, and finches to flatworms [3]. And yet, the daily persistence of sleep, despite this vulnerability, indicates that the functions sleep serves are inescapable.
Indeed, sleep is essential [4]. People need 8 hours of sleep, on average, to perform their best while awake. When people forgo a single night of sleep, hand-eye coordination deteriorates to the level of someone with a blood alcohol content of 0.08% [5], the threshold for legal intoxication throughout much of the United States and the United Kingdom. In addition to total sleep deprivation, impairments manifest after sleep restriction. Human volunteers sleeping either 4 or 6 hours every night for 2 weeks had progressively diminished alertness and short-term memory, mimicking the poor outcomes showed by participants after two, or one, wholly sleepless night, respectively [6]. The dependency of effective waking performance on the amount of prior sleep has special relevance for those operating in environments that demand sustained concentration, sharp reaction times, deftness, and sound judgment.
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