Trump Brags About Not Sleeping Much: Here Are 6 Catastrophes Caused by Sleep Deprivation

[riversedge]

Trump Brags About Not Sleeping Much: Here Are 6 Catastrophes Caused by Sleep Deprivation
Bill Clinton once said America would be a lot better off if our leaders slept more.

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/trump-brags-about-not-sleeping-much-here-are-6-catastrophes-caused-sleep-deprivation


By Larry Schwartz / AlterNet



January 18, 2017

President-elect Donald J. Trump regularly boasts he’s the biggest winner, makes the biggest deals, and appoints the best people, and recently he claimed he’ll be the biggest job creator god ever created. He also brags that he does all these amazing things on next to no sleep. This 70-year-old pre-adolescent made numerous boasts on the campaign trail last year about his sleeping habits, saying he sometimes gets as little as an hour’s sleep a night. Most nights, Trump says he gets by on just three or four hours of sleep, which is half of the amount sleep experts recommend. “I have a great temperament for success,” he told the Chicago Tribune at an event in Illinois last November. “You know, I’m not a big sleeper, I like three hours, four hours, I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on.”

Some evidence of the rare truth of this particular brag is evident in the tweets he churns out, many with time signatures in the wee hours. In one case, after a GOP election debate moderated by Megyn Kelly, he tweeted out 30 messages between 2:30 and 4:30am, according to the Washington Post. Daniel Barron, a Yale University neurologist, even gives Trump’s nocturnal habit a name: Trump syndrome. The symptoms are, “a ravenous late-night craving for stimulation that results in a sometimes sporadic, often slender sleep schedule.”

Of course, Trump is not alone in being sleep-deprived. A report prepared by the Centers for Disease Control, based on the responses of nearly 75,000 people, found that 35 percent of them got less than the optimal seven hours of sleep a night, almost 30 percent got less than six hours and an astounding 38 percent reported that they unintentionally fell asleep during the day at least once in the past month. Only a tiny percentage, about 1 to 3 percent of all people, known as “short sleepers,” get by just fine on very few hours of sleep, with little health or cognitive consequence while awake.

The evidence might suggest, however, that Trump is no short sleeper, and the consequences of his sleeplessness are grave. Sleep deprivation has many symptoms, and the president-elect displays most of them. Sleep-deprived individuals, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, are impulsive, have difficulty adapting to new situations, are snappish, exhibit poor judgment, have trouble listening to and processing information, experience a lack of concentration and focus, are prone to imagining things, and get distracted easily. The sleep-deprived’s ability to learn new information can drop by up to 40 percent. Moreover, the lack of sufficient REM sleep can lead to the inability to recognize happiness or sadness in others—in other words, a lack of empathy. Sound familiar? That’s not all. A study in 2013 found that a lack of sleep results in increased activity in the part of the brain that prefers junk food over healthy foods, a description that fits the Big Mac-loving Trump. “The Quarter Pounder. It’s great stuff,” he once told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.....................................

[milestogo]

1. That's why he can't sit through an intelligence briefing

or read anything longer than a page.

[Blue_Tires]

2. kick

Not a good bellwether for me either, since I've been a bad sleeper most of my life...

[erpowers]

3. Is He Actually Telling the Truth

I realize that on occasion he going on tweet storms at around 3 or 4 in the morning, but it is possible that on other days he is getting a full eight hours of sleep. Even with his foolish behavior I do not believe Trump, on a daily basis gets only 3 to 4 hours of sleep.

[Ilsa]

5. He has maintained this assertion for many years, claimed

It is almost impossible to be successful in business without sacrificing sleep. My guess is that he uses a stimulat all day and into the night. His brain doesn't shut down for REM sleep for very long, I bet.

[JI7]

9. but he hasn't been successful in business

[Ilsa]

10. You and I and the banks know that. He still is

Trying to convince everyone else he is.

[Ilsa]

4. With ADHD kids, the first thing I did as a parent

was to make certain they got enough sleep at night. We established clear, predictable nightime/bedtime routines to help them settle in to sleep better. When warm baths weren't enough, we used medication (Rx) for our oldest. His ADHD was twice as bad if he didn't sleep enough.

I don't think 8h hours a night will help trump's narcissistic personality disorder, though.

[July]

6. Or: he lies about this, just as he lies about everything else.

Why take his word for anything?

Most likely, he thinks claiming to sleep very few hours makes him look strong or superhuman. Appearances have an outsized importance to him (ratings, finger size, dick size, stacks of blank papers at his press conference, gilded tacky apartment . . . ), so why should we believe him?

[Mosby]

7. it explains all that makeup around his eyes

To cover the dark rings.

[smirkymonkey]

8. However, if he has spent most of his adult life sleeping very little, it would explain a lot.

Or maybe not. Maybe he just really is a stupid, narcissistic asshole.