70 million people don't sleep well, don't get enough rest and feel groggy during the day.
The majority of these 70 million people are also at increased risk for over 20 health concerns, have compromised immune systems, and are physically exhausted.
After months of lying awake at night tossing and turning, waking up too frequently and being unable to get back to sleep, they grow more hopeless and helpless every day.
Many suffer from emotional problems like anxiety and depression, so severe they promote suicidal ideation.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the U.
S.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that approximately 100,000 police-reported crashes annually involve drowsiness and/or fatigue as a principal causal factor.
This means that 100,000 people this year will be injured by a sleepy or tired driver.
Lack of sleep also causes impairment in decision making skills, memory, focus, concentration, vigilance, judgment, and mental processing of complex information.
Is a person suffering from lack of sleep someone you want driving in the lane next to you? Would you want them operating machinery near you, analyzing your health test or judging your career performance? With lack of sleep contributing to heart attacks, obesity, stomach ulcers, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and gastrointestinal diseases, would you want to share in the health care tab for persons with sleep disorders? Well, actually you do.
And what about sleep medications that linger in the body, would you want insomniacs caring for your child, or managing your portfolio? In addition to accidents and medical expenses, chronic sleep problems also cost the nation lost productivity, with all three of these expenses adding up to billions of dollars lost each year.
With our economy in such distress this situation can only get worse, and as our economy continues to spiral downward, so do our people.
And, as is true in so many cases, our ignoring this issue only contributes to our own decline.
When we don't address our problems as a nation, they eventually catch up with us.
We don't care about the poor, but when we hear about a mother killing herself and her children due to overwhelming stress, it breaks our heart.
We don't care about addictions, but when an addicted person suddenly perpetrates a crime against us in desperation; it harms us emotionally and physically.
We don't care about the unemployed, but when our neighbor suddenly loses his home, it devalues ours.
It just seems to work that way.
For whether we care to realize it or not, we are all interconnected.
Perhaps the other thing we should realize about the butterfly effect is that there really is a straw that breaks the camel's back and we should realize that it may also break ours.
Especially in this difficult economic climate, at any given time the person next to us could be struggling not only with daily thoughts filled with intense anxiety, fear and depression, but suicidal ideation due to feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, failure, and despair.
Should this person act on those feelings, what could this mean for us? In the past, sleep disorders have been overlooked, under treated, and relegated to insignificance in our minds.
But can we for a moment put ourselves in the place of someone struggling with this disorder and imagine how bad he feels every day, not only from the consequences mentioned above, but from the very real negative biochemical changes taking place in the brain from lack of sleep? When we finally decide to care, we can offer hope to someone struggling with this disorder before their back is broken.
We do this by forwarding information on new treatment which is always preferable, to turning our backs and hoping they and their problems go away.
While we may not feel this to be a big thing that impacts our life, it could significantly impact theirs, and with those butterfly wings, who knows?