Nodding Off During a Boring Meeting is Normal

Is nodding off during daytime hours ever normal? What if you are watching a particularly dreary movie, or listening to an extremely boring lecture? The answer may surprise many people. It is never normal. It may be normal to feel less energized, particularly if in the late afternoon when most of our circadian rhythms lag a little. However, one of the main clues that someone is not sleeping adequately at night, is daytime drowsiness.
What can one do? The first thing to do is always to keep a sleep diary. This diary should note when one goes to bed, gets up in the morning, periodic naps taken during the day, descriptors of current functioning ability, and reasons why sleep was disrupted, if applicable. A review, after a week, may provide clues as to why a person is experiencing sleep deprivation.
It is interesting to note that there is a signficant difference between elderly and young people as to why sleep deprivation occurs. The number one cause with elderly people is the need to urinate during the night, especially if the man has benign prostatic hypertrophy and the woman has continence issues. With young people, sleep deprivation seem to due to purposefully deprive themselves of sleep. Purposeful deprivation is usually due to the need to finish work not done during the day, create a private space and time for oneself at the end of the day, or studying for tests/working on school projects which have deadlines.
Whatever the reason, sleep deprivation is cumulative. In other words, if you sleep 1 hour less than your body requires every night; at the end of the week, you will have been deprived of 7 hours of sleep. One can easily see, that over a course of time, this lack of sleep can have precarious consequences for the individual.