What is sleep deprivation? It is nothing but lack of sleep. Now you would wonder why that is so important because a lot of us think that sleep is the last thing that we need in this hectic and busy scheduled lives that we need. We think that other things are important to keep up we have deadline to catch up, things to do, chores to complete, before we finally fall asleep in bed, which may be late into the night and again the next day we wake up early to catch upon your next of the day’s chores and an early start to your day. Now this is taught to us that one should not sleep, sleeping is a sign of laziness, one needs to be more active, one needs to avoid sleep, students are told that they can get along with 4 hours of sleep and the rest of the time they need to be studying. Now all his has lead to most of us being sleep deprived without us knowing it and this accumulates and we reach pint where the sleep debt is so heavy that we cannot repay it, now all of us can go through some amount of sleep deprivation without any kind of chronic or short term impairment. If we have a late night deadline to catch up we get up early in the morning and the next day we may sleep up couple of hours early to catch up on our previous night’s sleep deprivation. Now what happens is when it is prolonged or when it is on a long term basis, the body is simply not able to cope and may lead to a breakdown, usually depression. the person may become withdrawn , the person may be agitated and after some pin, the person may be unable to sleep even those few hours that is disposal to his sleepy is estimated that we people need 6 to 8 hours of sleep and women need to sleep a little more than men. However it is estimated that most of us sleep less than 6 and a half hours of every 24 hours cycles which is certainly not in our interest. Now why is it so? Because sleep is restorative state. It restores both the body and the mind. The mind which has been like treadmill, running in different directions with all your chores you have to catch up, finally it gets its much needed rest and it’s found that it is in this stage that memories are strengthened, a lot of creative thinking happens and a lot of mental balance gets restored and physically you have been active throughout the day or you have been using our body or you have been sitting as most of us end up doing at the office, that our body needs to lie in a flat position to take rest, the muscles which are fatigued but this constant pressure on them need to be let lose and relaxed and this is healthy both for the mind and the body. So sleep deprivation is associated with depression. Now it is like a chicken and egg question where we wonder whether the sleep deprivation has caused the depression or the underlying depression causes sleep deprivation. In whatever case it is important to recognize that sleep is imperative to our mental and physical well-being and by taking proper steps, that is not only getting good quantity sleep, but also good quality sleep. One can get over, sometimes reverse some signs of depression. So when you go to bed, switch off all your gadgets, mentally and physical switch off all the chores that you have to do, stop being anxious, and upset. Let your body and mind rest so that you can face the challenges of the next day in a calm and a very peaceful state of mind which is very important to drift into sleep. Happy slumber.