Think about the world for a moment; think about our fast-paced environment, the way we ourselves work, those soldiers who have to stay up all night guarding a hostile environment. Now consider American sleep habits in general: People try to sleep on a daily basis with five hours or less of sleep per night. Society pushes for a sleep-free workplace; in fact, depriving yourself of sleep is one of the worst things you can do. Loss of sleep affects everyone; it will dull concentration and eat away at the logic of even the most intelligent individual. When looking at “normal” sleep efforts, scientists recommend about seven and a half to eight hours of sleep per night. There are anomalies in these rules, but they are only anomalies. In the book Dreamland by David Randall, the secrets of sleep are explored through interviews with scientists specializing in the field. Randall notes that younger people, adolescents, actually need more sleep, with that number estimated to be around eight and a half to nine hours per night. Before natural light forced people to go to bed after dark, this new source of light radically changed the way the world slept. Instead of a single period of sleeping all night, everyone would wake up in the middle of the night for about an hour. This period has been described as the most peaceful time we have ever experienced. Some also claim that women are more fertile during this time. When people don't get these numbers, they contribute to what is called sleep debt (Randall, Ch 1). The normal answer for how to pay off this debt is to go to bed earlier, because it turns out that's not always possible. This is due to busy schedules, or sometimes a more biological reason. Lots of p...... middle of paper ......use of how time flow works. This makes sleep even more urgent, because when it is lost, fear results. Fortunately, sleep is automatically compensated by the brain. Normal sleep cycles occur every ninety minutes. When a person is sleep deprived, their brain adjusts these cycles to accommodate much more REM sleep, as if to compensate for the missed time. The ability to catch up on sleep helps the body's natural clock called the circadian rhythm. This internal sleep timer can easily be disabled by adding unnatural lights or quickly crossing multiple time zones. When this happens, the brain becomes confused because it does not have the ability to adapt to the differences in lighting. When in this state of confusion, the body tries to stick to the old schedule..