+ Alex sent me an excerpt from an article in In the Sun I read this article about an interesting little pill called “Modafinil”. It’s supposed have the capacity to help a person stay awake for up to 40 hours without any side effects. I’ve no reason to stay awake that long but some of the side effects of under-sleeping have me thinking I aught to sleep more than my average of 6.5 hours a night.

Studies have found that people who sleep six hours or less a night have an increased risk of high blood pressure, heart attacks and stroke. Just one bad night’s sleep can have a dramatic effect on memory, alertness, concentration and judgment, and chronic sleep deprivation can lead to anxiety and depression.

More worrisome, “when we’re really sleep deprived, at some point in time we start to micro sleep,” says Coren. “No matter what we’re doing, our brain goes into a sleep state, and it can remain there anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute.”

“Now suppose that you’re tooling down the road in your car at 50 kilometres an hour and you have one of these small little micro sleeps, and it’s the 10-second kind. What that means is that your car will travel more than the length of a football field while you’re asleep.”

In fact, Coren’s team has found that traffic accidents in Canada jump seven per cent on the Monday after the switch to daylight savings time and people lose an hour’s worth of sleep.