Do you get enough sleep? Chances are you don't. Many people living in modern industrial societies suffer from a chronic, and worsening sleep deficit.

Until a few decades ago, most people lived lives so very different from ours that we would scarcely recognize them. Until fairly recently in human history the majority of people lived in small villages or on farms, not in big cities. There were no electric lights. There weren't any faxes or e-mails. There was no Internet, and no television. Once the sun went down, most of the day's activities came to an end.

People worked very hard physically, and only a very small minority had what we would call "white collar" jobs. And most people, on average, slept nine to nine and a half hours each night.

For most of us today, an average of nine hours sleep each night is an impossible dream. In our very busy schedules, something has to give, and quite often the choice many of us are making is to cut back on our hours of sleep.

If you listen to, or read some of the popular current guides to success, you will usually be instructed to work hard, play hard, study hard, be more outgoing, and gain every advantage you can. The struggle to the top can be ruthless. Why, even the struggle to stay where you are and not to lose your place can be ruthless.

Where do many of these success guides and gurus tell you to cut back? Why, on your hours of sleep. They'll tell you that sleeping more than five or six hours a night is a waste of time. They'll tell you that the world is moving ahead while you are dozing, and that you'll never catch up if you indulge your desire to sleep. If you snooze, you lose!

They'll tell you that you don't really need those extra two or three hours of sleep each night. That it's just a bad habit you've developed. That it's self-indulgent. That a full night's sleep is the booby prize for losers in the game of life.

Unfortunately, this advice goes against thousand of years of human biology.

It's true that some of us really do need only five or six hours of sleep each night, but those people are in a minority. Most of us require seven, eight, or even more hours of good quality sleep every night in order to function at our best intellectually, physically and emotionally.

In sleep deprivation experiments conducted on volunteers, it has been found that even a few days of sleep loss produce a marked negative effect on a person's mental abilities. It becomes much harder to focus mentally and to process information. Decisions take longer to make, and are of poorer quality. Learning and remembering new information becomes more difficult, and it becomes harder to recall information that was previously learned. Creativity declines, while mistakes increase.

A person who hasn't had enough restorative sleep will have difficulty handling technical machinery. In addition, lack of sleep causes emotional impairment and difficulty with mental processing. As people become more sleep deprived, they may experience more depression and mood swings. Tempers flare more often, and sleep deprived people become less cooperative with others.

Lack of sufficient sleep is believed to have contributed to many well-known accidents, such as the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, the near meltdown at Three Mile Island, and the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. It is believed that lack of sleep contributed to poor decision making in each of these incidents, with disastrous results.

If you add to these examples the many hundreds of thousands of other accidents every year caused by sleep deprivation, it becomes clear that cutting back on our sleep may not really be the solution for greater productivity we are looking for.

If you are studying for important exams, you will be better off getting sufficient sleep the night before, rather than spending the whole night desperately trying to cram more information into your head. Remember that your brain uses its sleeping hours to process the information of the day and to consolidate new memories. Cutting back on sleep in order to study instead will interfere with this process.

About the author:
Royane Real is the author of several self help books, including "Your Quick Guide to Improving Your Learning Ability" Sign up today for her free newsletter filled with life improving tips at www.royanereal.com