Many people choose to sacrifice their sleep in order to get more done each day. While using a few hours of your nap time to work or study more may seem like a good idea, sleep deprivation can have a wide range of negative effects. Unfortunately, the disadvantages of not getting enough sleep go beyond daytime drowsiness and can’t be fixed with a daily dose of caffeine. Lack of sleep can jeopardize your safety and that of others around you. It can also lead to serious health consequences. Here are a few negative effects of inadequate sleep, some of which may surprise you…
1. Faster Aging
Sleep deprivation can affect the way you look and accelerate the aging process. After just a few days of sleepless nights, many people start to develop wrinkles, lackluster skin and dark circles under the eyes. Much of this is caused by higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol is elevated when you don’t get enough rest. At high enough levels, cortisol breaks down collagen, a protein that keeps the skin smooth, elastic and youthful looking.
2. Health Problems
A few nights of missed sleep can be easily fixed with more rest on subsequent days. That is unlikely to have long lasting effects on your health. However, not sleeping well for weeks, months, or even years will start to take a serious toll on your health. It will put you at a much higher risk of developing a range of health problems including depression, diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure.
3. Increased Risk of Causing Accidents
Lack of sleep causes drowsiness which increases the risk of accidents when driving, operating machines and performing various other tasks. Drowsiness slows down your reaction times making it much more difficult to respond when needed. This is why fatigue is one of the leading causes of automobile accidents on the roads today.
4. Poor Mental Performance
When you’re sleep deprived, your cognitive responses do not function at peak levels. Your attention span, reasoning, sense of judgment and problem solving skills become impaired. Lack of sleep also affects the way your brain processes and stores information. You’ll tend to forget things more often. All of these factors make performing effectively and productively during the day very difficult.
5. Weight Gain
It may be hard to believe that inadequate sleep can cause you to pack on extra pounds. However, studies have found that shortened sleep time decreases the body’s levels of leptin (a hormone that suppresses your appetite) while also elevating levels of ghrelin (a hormone that induces hunger). A lack of sleep also reduces your human growth hormone (a hormone that stimulates muscle growth and fat burning) levels. This limits the rate at which your body burns fat. The result is that if you don’t sleep enough, you’ll be more likely to overeat and your body will burn off these excess calories at a slower rate.
Summary
As you can see, skimping on sleep is a bad idea. While it may seem like it’s not a big deal, it can have serious consequences on your health and performance. So make sure you’re getting at least 6 hours of high quality sleep every night to avoid these harmful effects.
