Institute for Continuing Education

Sleep and Culture

Course Objectives

Upon successful completion of this module, you will be able to:

• Define cultural competence in healthcare and explain its application to sleep medicine practice, including awareness of one's own cultural beliefs, knowledge of diverse cultural perspectives on sleep, and skills for providing culturally sensitive care.
• Describe cross-cultural variations in sleep practices, beliefs, and patterns including co-sleeping arrangements, sleep timing preferences, sleep duration norms, and cultural explanations for sleep disorders across diverse populations.
• Identify health disparities in sleep disorders and sleep health outcomes across racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups, understanding epidemiological differences in OSA prevalence, insomnia rates, access to care, and treatment adherence.
• Recognize cultural factors influencing pediatric sleep practices including infant sleep position, bed-sharing customs, sleep training approaches, and family sleep arrangements that vary across cultures and their implications for SIDS risk and sleep development.
• Apply culturally competent communication strategies in sleep medicine encounters including effective use of interpreters, health literacy considerations, building trust with diverse patients, and addressing cultural beliefs that may affect diagnosis and treatment.
• Adapt sleep assessment and treatment approaches to accommodate cultural diversity, including modifying sleep history questions, selecting culturally appropriate interventions, and recognizing when cultural practices may conflict with Western sleep medicine recommendations.
• Demonstrate awareness of structural and systemic factors affecting sleep health equity including racism's impact on sleep, socioeconomic barriers to care, environmental sleep disruptors in underserved communities, and the sleep technologist's role in reducing health disparities.

Course Information

For all that the topic of “sleep” has been studied, researchers do not seem to know exactly why we humans need sleep, but they do know that it is an essential part of life. Missing even a few hours of sleep can affect your emotional well being. Studies in rats have shown that sleep deprivation can actually kill. Rats normally live two or three years, but when they were completely deprived of sleep they only lived for up to five weeks, their immune system weakened, their body temperature changed, and they developed sores. Humans who experience lack of sleep commonly report symptoms such as being delusional and hallucinations.

Understanding the prominent role of sleep in life and learning exactly why people need sleep are topics of much debate and speculation among sleep scientists. Recent animal studies have suggested that sleep is necessary for survival. For example, while rats normally live for two to three years, those deprived of REM sleep survive only about 5 weeks on average, and rats deprived of all sleep stages live only about 3 weeks. Sleep-deprived rats also develop abnormally low body temperatures and sores on their tail and paws. The sores may develop because the rats’ immune systems become impaired. Some studies suggest that sleep deprivation affects the immune system in detrimental ways.