San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System

Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

Chapter II: Review of Related Literature and Studies

Related Literature

This section of the second chapter is composed of statements and evidences from different

books, journals, and sites, which are related to the effects of sleep deprivation to the social lives

of the people involved.

Foreign

Sleep is known to be essential for everyone. According to Ted Abel, the senior author of a

2015 study called “Sleep, Neuronal Plasticity and Brain Function” and the new director of the

Iowa Neuroscience Institute, when we sleep, we experience non-rapid eye movement (NREM)

sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. NREM sleep is a deeper type of sleep, and it’s what

we experience when we first go to bed. Deep sleep helps the brain to store and consolidate

memories, which become long-term memories as we slumber.

Sleep deprivation is common among working adults, hard-working students and teens that

are too attached to their devices. William Dement, MD, PhD, founder of the Stanford Sleep

Disorders Clinic, the first of its kind in the world, said that he thinks high school is the real danger

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

spot in terms of sleep deprivation and it is a huge problem. He said that nobody performs at the

level high school students could perform, whether it is in school, on the roadways, on the sports

field or in terms of physical and emotional health. Social and cultural factors, as well as the advent

of technology, all have collided with the biology of the adolescent to prevent teens from getting

enough rest. Since the early 1990s, it has been established that teens have a biologic tendency to

go to sleep later — as much as two hours later — than their younger counterparts. (Stanford

Medicine news article by Christopher Silas Neal, 2015)

Sleep deprivation is divided into two kinds: acute and chronic sleep deprivation. Acute

sleep deprivation refers to no sleep or a reduction in the usual total sleep time, usually lasting one

or two days while chronic sleep insufficiency (also called sleep restriction) exists when an

individual routinely sleeps less than the amount required for optimal functioning. Chronic sleep

insufficiency is common in modern society and may result from a variety of factors, including

work demands, social and family responsibilities, medical conditions, and sleep disorders. As sleep

debt accumulates, individuals may experience reduced performance, increased risk for accidents

and death, and detrimental effects on both psychological and physical health. Sleep has two

dimensions: duration (quantity) and depth (quality). When individuals fail to obtain adequate

duration or quality of sleep, daytime alertness and function suffer. In response to sleep deprivation,

sleep is often both longer and deeper. In many cases, however, sleep intensity can change without

major changes in sleep duration. Sleep duration alone is therefore not a good indicator of how
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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

much sleep is needed to feel refreshed in the morning and function properly. (Chiara Cirelli, MD,

PhD, 2016)

It is well-known in past studies that both total and partial sleep loss affects a human’s

understanding. Total sleep deprivation (chronic) damages one’s attention and how they perceive

memories. Partial sleep deprivation (acute) is found to influence the vigilance of a person as stated

in a 2007 study called “Sleep deprivation: Impact on cognitive performance” by the researchers of

the Department of Psychology in the University of Turku which is still cited in present studies.

It is true that studies regarding the effects of sleep loss in more demanding cognitive

functions are still lacking until now. The results of past researches about the effects of sleep

deprivation to communication are still insufficient.

The integral part of one’s social life is communication. Reading, writing and listening

carefully are the three most important communication skills for students. Apart from reading and

writing presentations, reports and speeches are a part of school curriculum. This has been

introduced in schools and colleges for the overall development of students, thus, making

expressive skills important for them. Expressive skills are those which are used to express our

feelings, thoughts and expressions and thus get across our point successfully to the listener. To

develop expressive skills, students need to learn how to communicate effectively and get the full

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

attention of the listeners which is an important factor to develop communication skills in

relationships. (Your Comprehensive Guide To Effective Communication, 2017)

It is important to be friendly with others in school and college. Controlled verbal

communication and physical expression help students to make new friends and studying with good

friends relieve the stress. It is also really important in competitive environment and situation.

Good communication skills build strong friendships and give confidence. Students get

interested in visiting school and college daily because of it, but all is possible when someone

respect other, communicate when it is important and show positive expression in the certain

situation. That is how communication skills enhance the ability to understand and share the

feelings of each other. It will build a strong friendly relationship and that can often be converted

into business partnerships and love later in life. (Vijay Sharma, 2017)

Another important part of a healthy social life is the daily interpersonal interactions with

people, may it be one’s family, friends or relatives. A right socially interactive interaction with

peers is a necessity for humans especially children and teenagers because it will help them develop

strong language skills, creativity, social intelligence, and confidence.

Obviously, a student cannot function well in the society without communicating and

interacting with the people around them. Communication skills improve one’s presence of mind

which will also enhance their memory.

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

Local

Sleep is not merely a time when the body shuts off. While resting, the brain stays busy,

overseeing a wide variety of biological maintenance that keeps the body running in top condition,

preparing for the day ahead. Without enough hours of restorative sleep, people won’t be able to

work, learn, create, and communicate at a level even close to their true potential. Regularly skimp

on “service” and they are headed for a major mental and physical breakdown.

It is now believed that the “quality of our sleep directly affects the quality of an individual’s

waking life, including productivity, emotional balance, creativity, physical vitality, and even their

weight.” Sleep is therefore an essential human need, not a luxury, because it is in this state of rest

that the brain oversees the great work of biological maintenance to keep a human’s body running

in prime condition.

Mild sleep deprivation does not cause serious impairment but chronic deprivation does.

The range of impairment varies from feeling sleepy and irritable to having headaches, feeling

unmotivated, suffering body aches and pains, and generally feeling “stressed out.” Chronic sleep

loss affects our cardiovascular health, our energy balance and our ability to fight infections.

(Preciosa S. Soliven, 2016)

According to an article from PhilStar, lack of sleep is a major phenomenon that has been

gradually eroding the health of the Philippines. From the effects of unbearable traffic to the

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

explosion of the business process outsourcing industry to the geometric rise of Internet usage

nationwide, millions of Filipinos are choosing to sleep less, with dangerous effects. They seem to

think that staying awake to finish work is the lesser evil. Surely, it is not.

Aside from allowing the body to rest, sufficient, quality sleep allows the mind to refresh,

and facilitates the transfer of short-term to long-term memory. Proper sleep has been proven to

help students perform better in school the following day, particularly in complicated tasks like

mathematics. Decision-making and emotional stability are also affected by the right amount of

good sleep. (Bill Velasco, 2015)

According to Uratex foam Philippines (2012), in the article “How Many Hours of Sleep

Do we REALLY Need?” Sleepless nights can certainly cause all kinds of pains and frustrations.

Sleeping only 4 to 6 hours per night will eventually wear you down and stress you out. Losing

sleep will fog the mind and cloud your reflexes. It added that through the years, numerous studies

have revealed that being deprived of sleep for a few consecutive nights will slow your thinking

process.

A 2016 article by Stef dela Cruz, MD published in TheFilipinoDoctor.com stated the

effects when someone is sleep deprived which include: 1) After sleeping for less than five hours,

an otherwise-healthy adult will no longer be as alert as his peers; 2) After foregoing an entire

night’s sleep, a person will experience a decline in cognitive function; 3) Fatigue, such as that from

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

sleep insufficiency or chronic sleep deprivation, contributes more to motor vehicular accidents

than drinking.

Related Studies

This section of the second chapter is composed of theories and previous researches gathered

from different books and sites about the two variables pertaining to sleep deprivation and the social

lives of the high school students.

Foreign

A team of scientists at the University of Rochester discovered in 2013 that during sleep,

the brain purges itself, flushing out its own chemical waste through a hidden network of channels

that resemble a plumbing system which was showed in a study published in Science and funded

by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). These pipes simulate

opening up during sleep. In addition, researchers think that this cleansing process uses up a lot of

energy, which may explain why the brain waits until bedtime to take out its own trash. Also, your

body saves the energy it uses to see while you are sleeping, which possibly adds needed fuel to

this process. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine also revealed that growth hormone is

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

released in children while they are asleep. Of course, there is still some debate as to which is the

optimum time to sleep, some suggest 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., while others say midnight to 6 a.m. is best.

Studies have shown that, in the last few decades, children (and therefore, adults) have

been sleeping less and less. Adults whose parents enforced strict bedtime rules have been found to

function more efficiently at work and sleep more hour than those who grew up with no rules on

when to sleep. Other researches showed that if you deprive a healthy adult of sleep for six straight

days, his body chemistry will resemble that of someone literally twice his age, and it will take him

a full week to get his metabolism back to normal. (Bill Velasco, 2015)

At the Sleep Disorder Center of the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, a 2016 study was

conducted among college graduate students between 18 to 30 years old. It was discovered that 20

percent of them, who averaged seven to eight hours of sleep, still fell asleep quickly during the

day when they were allowed to be in a dark room. When one hour was added to their sleep, they

improved noticeably on performance tests measuring reaction time and other skills. (Preciosa S.

Soliven, 2016)

A new 2017 study called “Selective neuronal lapses precede human cognitive lapses

following sleep deprivation” led by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)’s Dr. Itzhak

Fried found that sleep deprivation causes the bursts of electrical activity that brain cells use to

communicate to become slower and weaker. It was discovered during an unusual study of patients

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

being evaluated for surgery to correct severe epilepsy. As part of the evaluation, doctors place

wires in the brain to find out where a patient's seizures are starting. That allows Fried and a team

of scientists to monitor hundreds of individual brain cells, often for days. Patients with epilepsy

are frequently kept awake in order to provoke a seizure, thus, the scientists had an ideal way to

study the effects of sleep deprivation. In the study, all the patients agreed to categorize images of

faces, places and animals. Each image caused cells in areas of the brain involved in perception to

produce distinctive patterns of electrical activity. Then, four of the patients stayed up all night

before looking at more images. And in these patients, the neurons were found to be responding

slower. These changes impair the cells' ability to communicate which leads to mental lapses that

can affect not only perception but memory. (BeauHD, 2017).

Previous studies have tied sleep deprivation to a heightened risk of depression, obesity,

diabetes, heart attacks and stroke. (Elaine Schmidt, 2017)

A few years ago, University of Sydney researchers surveyed about 3,000 adolescents and

young adults and discovered that for each hour of neglected sleep, levels of psychological distress

rose by about 5% the next day. In some people who suffered from anxiety, the

researchers believe sleep deprivation may have triggered the development of serious

psychological disorders like depression and bipolar disorder. The National Sleep

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

Foundation reports that the link between depression and sleep deprivation is complex, and one can

cause the other. (Tom McKay, 2014)

According to a 2016 article from WebMD, if you've been diagnosed with clinical

depression, you may be having trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep. One of the common signs

of depression is insomnia or an inability to fall and stay asleep. Most experts agree that adults need

seven to nine hours of sleep a night. But even without depression, according to the National Sleep

Foundation, the average American only gets about 6.9 hours. When you add depression to the mix,

the problems with sleep are compounded.

Meanwhile, deep sleep helps improve brain health and develop a proper and effective

sleep which is the key in managing the symptoms of depression. It also helps the brain convert

new memories into long-term ones and researchers at the University of Bristol’s Centre for

Synaptic Plasticity in England discovered in 2016 that sleep may help the brain sort through the

day’s information and keep what’s important.

When you don’t sleep well, your brain struggles to convert information into long-term

memories. Five hours of sleep deprivation can reduce connections between neurons in the

hippocampus, the area of the brain that’s associated with memory, according to a 2014 study called

“Transiently Increasing Camp Levels Selectively in Hippocampal Excitatory Neurons during

Sleep Deprivation Prevents Memory Deficits Caused by Sleep Loss” by the researchers at the

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the University of Pennsylvania. This may help

explain why previous research has found that sleep improves your memory and your ability to

recall facts, and helps you sort through the day’s information.

In addition, one of the ten real dangers associated with a sleep-deprived workforce is

decreased in communication wherein when workers are tired, they become poor communicators.

Researchers noted that sleep deprived individuals drop the intensity of their voices; pause for long

intervals without apparent reason; enunciate very poorly or mumble instructions inaudibly;

mispronounce, slur or run words together; and repeat themselves or lose their place in a sentence

sequence. (Sandy Smith, 2015)

One of the factors why a person cannot interact properly is because they are in a sour

mood. Unfortunately, poor mood appropriate behavior is also included in the ten real dangers

regarding sleep deprivation studied by Smith. Inappropriate mood-related behavior often occurs

in outbursts, as most sleep-deprived individuals are often quiet and socially withdrawn. However,

a single one of these outbursts can be enough to destroy the positive culture of a work environment

and cause an HR nightmare.

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

Local

High school students tend to neglect sleep just to finish their academic tasks with the

demanded time coming from their school. Those who take studying seriously also borrow time

from their sleep just so they can study for an upcoming examination. While some are just replacing

sleep with fun things to do at night.

For the past two decades, sleep studies conducted in the laboratories of cognitive

psychologists are showing the opposite. Students, as well as scientists, should have about eight

hours of sleep before an examination for a better performance. Adding a nap in the afternoon will

also improve memory. (Leonardo L. Leonidas, 2012)

Furthermore, as claimed by the 2014 book entitled “Brain Rules”, a study of soldiers

operating complex military hardware found out that one night of sleep loss resulted in about 30-

percent loss of cognitive skills and drop in performance. If soldiers are deprived of two nights of

sleep, a 60-percent drop in performance is the outcome. The drop in performance as one of the

outcomes of sleep deprivation was also confirmed in a past observation wherein a group of students

were given a series of math problems with some tips on how to solve these. They were told of a

shortcut solution to the problems that they should discover during the process. They were tested

12 hours after the training. Of the students who were not allowed to sleep before the math test,

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

only 20 percent discovered the shortcut. However, those students who were allowed eight hours

of sleep performed much better. Sixty percent of them found the shortcut.

As stated in a 2015 article from the Philippine Daily Inquirer, sleep-deprivation in the

Philippines affects half of the population or close to 50 million Filipinos, who sleep less than six

hours a day as observed. The staggering statistic makes sleep problems a serious national issue.

Unresolved, problematic sleeping habits can gravely affect one’s health, relationship, career, and

overall well-being. These problems can even prove fatal in extreme cases. Quality sleep is proven

a basic need for humans to properly function.

Studies said that sleep in a young adult normally consists of 4 to 6 cycles of non-Rapid

Eye Movement (NREM) alternating with Rapid Eye Movement (REM) periods, each cycle lasting

90 to 120 minutes. We enter sleep through the NREM phase which predominates during the first

one-third of the night when there is minimal mental activity during this phase and this is believed

to be the body’s time for rest and repair. In contrast, the brain is very active during REM sleep and

it is in this phase where learning and memory consolidation occurs. As people age, there are less

of the deeper stages of NREM sleep. REM sleep episodes are longer and predominate during the

last one-third of the night into the early morning. Therefore the presence or absence of dreaming

can be an indicator of the length and quality of your sleep. Sleeping less than 7 hours per night can

also affect our behavior and impair our performance. We can even become a workplace and public

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

health hazard because lack of sleep leads to an increased risk of occupational errors and driving

accidents. (Deborah A. Bernardo, MD, 2016)

According to a research from Men’s Health magazine, lack of sleep hurts one’s

cognition in many ways. First, it impairs attention, alertness, concentration, and problem

solving. This makes it more difficult for people to learn. Second, during the night, various sleep

cycles play a role in “consolidating” memories in the mind. If students don’t get enough sleep,

they won’t be able to remember what they have learned during the day. (Christian Dela Cruz,

2014)

Synthesis

As the studies said, sleep is essential to be able to function well in the society. High school

students as adolescents are found to be more prone to sleep deprivation together with working

adults. The said people are more likely to suffer from sleep loss since their rest hours are constantly

being borrowed because of their works and other interests.

The two kinds of sleep deprivation are partial sleep loss—the one that can still be

recovered—and total sleep loss which causes greater destruction not just with one’s brain health

but also to their communication skills since it is where people started getting used of being

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 San Pablo Diocesan Catholic Schools System
Liceo de Cabuyao
A. Mabini St. Brgy. Uno Cabuyao City Laguna
Junior High School Thesis Writing
S.Y. 2017 – 2018

deprived of sleep. Sleep has also two dimensions (duration and depth) wherein it was affirmed that

the duration of a slumber is not a good basis of how effective a sleep is.

Communication skills are needed to be able to interact interpersonally since the passing of

information, feelings and emotions from one person to another is necessary if two individuals are

trying to interact. The mentioned communication skills and interpersonal interactions are the

integral parts of one’s social lives. Sleep deprivation, though, has the effects to impede an

individual from these by denying them alertness, declining their cognitive functions and making

them vulnerable to the dangers around them. People need to be actively interact with their peers

and also become aware of the communication that is currently happening if they want to interact

interpersonally. However, sleep deprivation causes brain cells to have the trouble of transmitting

information between each other.

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