More than seven years of noting observations and trying to correlate the causes of severe eye strain and poor vision, led me to the root cause: The lack of uninterrupted deep sleep for seven to eight hours every night. The funny part is, that if you ask anyone if they are getting enough sleep, they'll immediately say "yes", even though they are actually getting only around four or six hours of bad sleep. Even I said "Yes" to the first doctor who asked if I was getting sufficient sleep (when my eye strain was at its severest and I was getting only 4 hours sleep).
There are bodily repair processes that do not get completed if deep sleep is interrupted before 8 hours, and the debt accumulates over the years. I've confirmed this multiple times. There's a huge difference between "resting" and "8 hours uninterrupted sleep". I have good reason to say it's the lack of sleep and lack of proper nutrition that end up giving people weak vision and a lot of other health issues. Six hours or four hours sleep is not enough. The people who have been insisting for all these decades about seven to eight hours, were always correct.
Did these affect you?
- Children being woken up early for school.
- Children being told to stay awake late or wake up early to study during exams.
- Children staying up late to watch TV or play video games etc.
- Adults being forced to work late due to deadlines.
- Having to use an alarm clock to wake and not be late for work or to cook breakfast.
- Doctors being woken up for emergency cases.
- Family members of patients being woken up during a hospital stay.
- Taxi drivers and auto-rickshaw drivers losing sleep to make ends meet.
- Phone calls and extraneous noises when sleeping.
- Health issues that cause people to wake up once or more at night.
- Improperly cooked food or adulterants or burnt particles in food affecting the digestive system and causing sleep loss.
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| Sleep Requirements researched by the National Sleep Foundation. |
Is there anything we can do to change the culture of sleep loss?
- Insist on properly cooked, unadulterated, un-burnt, healthy food and water at home, canteens and restaurants.
- Allow for flexible work cultures and work-from-home options.
- Allow schools, colleges and offices to begin at 11am for some people (night-birds) and at 9am for other people (larks).
- Spread awareness of this at school level and get a buy-in from parents and employers.
- Arrange for better work shifts and recruit more people to handle workload.
We need to create ways to make this happen in a cut-throat rat-race. We've been through centuries of brainwashing about the heroics of equating hard-work with not sleeping. "How many people's health are you permanently willing to ruin in order to make a living?". Losing sleep even occasionally is not good. Don't allow people to nudge you into it. Don't nudge children into it.
There's no heroism in losing sleep.
Healing eye strain: https://nrecursions.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-real-cure-for-eye-strain.html
