Night Owl
To Be Or Not To Be? A Night Owl by medimanage.com
“Owls are cool, they can stay up all night”, gushes 6 year old Abhinav. What Abhinav doesn’t yet know is that there is a strange species of humans, known as ‘Night Owl’s‘, who can stay up all night! Abhinav would definitely find them cool too!
‘Night owl’ is a term given to people who have an affinity towards the dark hours and tend to stay up quite late into the night. The owl as a bird stays up all night hunting prey because it’s known to sleep through the day! Humans, who tend to stay awake late into the night, do so without the knowledge of its side effects on their body.
Many of us feel the need to steal those ‘precious’ few hours of the night for:
- Completing pending work
- Reading
- Surfing
- Watching television
- Playing video games
As in our minds, we have perfectly justified reason for doing the above due to which we tend to usually sleep only after the clock hands look alarmingly close to 1 or 2 am! While it may not cause any immediate effect on our body, it is harmful in the long run.
In today’s fast moving world, where all of us are ready to give an arm and leg for that one extra hour, sleep has most definitely taken a backseat. By staying up late we are gaining that one more hour for completing our work, having uninterrupted time (read: no disturbances) and most importantly the feeling of assurance that we have completed something before going to bed.
However the side effects of sleeping late experienced by our body tend to cancel out the ‘high’ of having achieved something by staying up late:
- Tiredness: The body feels tired and lethargic when its usual quota of ‘rest time’ i.e. sleep at night, is not fulfilled. You experience physical and mental fatigue.
- Stress: Staying up late, can cause high levels of stress to be experienced by the body due to the release of Cortisol or the stress hormone.
- Lagging schedule: As you have been up late into the night, you are bound to have a delayed start to your day, thereby effectively lagging behind schedule.
- Weak memory: Lack of sleep causes a weak memoryas a sleep deprived and tired brain is bound to hamper your ability to recall past events.
- Microsleeps: Lack of sleep causes us to experience ‘Microsleeps’, when the brain shuts down for a time period of 10-60 seconds. Microsleep involves a person who’s awake, yet mentally he’s asleep (to put it simple, he’s sleeping with his eyes open) it is one of the main reasons for accidents during the night time.
- Obesity: Yes. Staying up late does cause weight gain, as opposed to the popular myth of weight loss. Lack of sleep releases the ghrelin hormone or the hunger hormone, which results in bing eating, also staying up late can cause metabolic changes in one’s body.
- Attention attention!: Staying up late can cause mental fatigue as a result of which one’s ability to pay attention is severely hampered, resulting in abysmally low attention levels in adults and children alike.
- Delayed healing: White blood cells which act as our body’s defense system help in the healing of wound. A sufficient amount of sleep is needed to regulate the white blood cell count in our body and staying up late affects this process, causing a 20% decrease in the count thereby delaying healing.
- Skin loses glow: Sleep helps in building up tissues and cells of our skin, whilst lack of sleep can cause damage to the cells making the skin appear ragged and de-moisturized. Visible effects are puffy eyes, dark circles and wrinkles.
- Acid reflux: Staying up late can wreak havoc on your digestion. Digestive juices are released when your body is asleep and staying up late can confuse the body’s internal functioning to cause acid reflux the next day.
Adequate Sleep is vital for the human body as it helps maintain the body’s core temperature while regulating the hormones and metabolism. Sleep is important for the proper functioning of the internal mechanisms in our body. To read more about To be or Not to be? A Night owl
About the Author
Medimanage Health Insurance India
Little River Band – The Night Owl (1981)
|
|
LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar (7958) $36.99 Christmas is almost here! With 24 unique gifts, including iconic minifigures, vehicles and accessories from the Star Wars universe, the all-new LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar is the perfect way to set the festive holidays into hyperspeed!… |
|
|
Fisher Price Little People a Christmas Story (White Shipper Box) $32.99 Celebrate a most special day, from long ago and far away! Children will love learning about the Nativity and retelling the story through play. With this charming set of their own, they just might leave your holiday collectible alone…. |
|
|
OK to Wake! Children’s Alarm Clock and Nightlight $26.90 Children’s Alarm Clock features a nightlight that is programmable by the parent. So, parents can decide what time the “Green means GO!” light turns on in the morning. Kids take pride in waking up with the green light. In the evening, OK to Wake! is a comforting nightlight (soft yellow glow) that can be turned on at the tap of a “toe” for a programmable duration (up to two hours). Includes intercha… |
|
|
The Best of Brook Benton: 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection $4.64 A dozen selections, each of which was a Top 15 pop hit, and six of them reached #1 on the R&B charts! Hear these silky-smooth favorites: The Boll Weevil Song; Hotel Happiness; It’s Just a Matter of Time; Rainy Night in Georgia; Kiddio; Lie to Me; Fools Rush In; Baby (You’ve Got What it Takes) (with Dinah Washington), and more…. |
|
|
City to City $4.35 It took Quentin Tarantino’s using “Stuck in the Middle with You,” the 1973 hit of Gerry Rafferty’s former band Stealers Wheel, in Reservoir Dogs to make Rafferty hip again. But City to City, his 1978 solo breakthrough, has long been worth rediscovering–and not just because it contains “Baker Street,” one of the biggest and best singles of the 1970s. Rafferty brilliantly modernizes his Scottish fo… |
|
|
Everready: The Religion $11.98 Open your mind to Everready (The Religion), the 3rd studio release from Strange Music Recording Artist Tech N9NE. Tech N9NE continues to break down barriers and set new industry standards for independent rap artists. Tech N9NE boasts over half a million sales from his first two studio releases. The buzz from the upcoming release Everready (The Religion) has reached a deafening level. The album fe… |
Tags: night owl, night owl evansville, night owl evansville wi, night owl security, night owl support systems
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Telescopes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.