Sleep Bulimia

Do you suffer from sleep bulimia? Cognitive neuroscientist Robert Stickgold has equated sleep deficiency to an eating disorder. Sleep bulimics is a new term that describes a culture of individuals who purge on sleep during the weekdays and binge on the weekends; who try to compensate for sleep deprivation during the week by catching additional winks on the weekend. Not so fast. According to the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research, sleep deprivation is one of society’s most detrimental epidemics. You can make up for acute sleep deprivation once in a while. Not so with chronic sleep deprivation, which can seriously affect your health. Sleep deprivation is expensive, too. In the US, sleep deprivation accounts for over 16 billion dollars in medical costs and over 50 billion dollars in lost productivity—annually.