Are you always tired and grumpy when you come home from work or school? Do you lack focus and have difficulty in making decisions on your daily routine? Does your sleepiness greatly affect your efficiency in day-to-day activities? Maybe the problem lies with your lack of sleep.
Studies show that the gap between just getting enough sleep and getting a little sleep significantly affects your health, your mood, your weight, and even your sex life.
The way you feel when you’re awake depends upon what happens when you are sleeping. During sleep, your body is at work to maintain a healthy brain function and well-being. In children and teens, it helps with their growth and development.
So the next time you are planning to cut off some sleep, maybe you should consider the following importance of having a full night’s sleep:
Healthy brain function and emotional well-being
Have you ever felt like your brain is full? Maybe you’re brainstorming on some complex project or you’re starting a new job, and you’re not sleeping enough while constantly consuming new information. Well, if the answer is yes, your brain is actually full.
Your brain creates a connection when you are learning new things, but there are ad hoc connections. Your brain needs to prune a lot of those connections to build more efficient pathways, and clear your mind for space. These happen while you are sleeping and will help you to remember and to prepare you for learning the next day.
Studies show that sleep deficiency alters activity on some parts of the brain. If you’re sleep deprived, you may have trouble making decisions, solving problems, controlling your emotions and behavior, and adapting to change. Sleep deficiency has also been linked to depression, suicide, and risk-taking behavior.
Physical health
When you are sound asleep, your body also heals and repairs its heart and blood vessels. Ongoing sleep deficiency is linked to an increased risk of heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stroke.
Studies show that lack of sleep may cause obesity. Less than 6 hours of snoozing time can impact your appetite and BMI regulation.
A study, published in a special issue of the American Journal of Human Biology, revealed that the brain send signals which controls your appetite. Inadequate sleep influences the secretion of the signal hormones, ghrelin, which increases appetite, and leptin, which will signals that you are already full. This can lead to increased food intake without burning the food consumed.
In a poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation revealed that up to 26 percent say that their sex life tends to suffer just because they are too tired. Impaired sleep can also cause lower testosterone levels in men.
A study on college students showed that for every hour of sleep corresponds to higher sexual desire, greater vaginal lubrication and a 14 % increase in the chances of getting frisky the next day. It leaves you feeling refreshed, relaxed, energetic and more importantly — being sexy!
Daytime performance and safety
Getting enough sleep at the right time helps you to function well throughout the day. People who lack enough sleep are less productive and take longer to finish tasks, have slower reaction time, and tend to make more mistakes.
Even a loss of just 1-2 hours of sleep per night, can affect your ability to function as if you haven’t slept for a day or two.
Light sleepers are prone to microsleep, a brief sleep and unintended episodes of loss of attention that may occur when a person is tired.
You can’t control microsleep and you may not be aware of it. These may be a problem when you are driving or listening to a professor in a class.
Studies show that a driver’s sleepiness leads to yearly 100,000 car accidents, resulting to 1,500 deaths. This harms your driving ability as much as being drunk.
Drivers aren’t the only ones affected by the unwanted dozing. It affects people in all field of work. As a result, it’s not only harmful on a personal level, but can also cause large-scale damage.
So from now on, when you lie to bed at night, give yourself some beauty rest to restore and rejuvenate. Your body will thank you for it!