We have shared some effects of lack of sleep on your health. Here is the concluding part of the great article on sleeplessness by Pamela Weintraub.
If you think Pamela lied, why not try getting enough sleep for a while and compare your health then to how it was when you hardly slept?
Sleeplessness Can Cause Weight Gain
Researchers have found that your risk of weight gain can be influenced almost as much by your sleep as by your eating habits. Eve Van Cauter, PhD, at the University of Chicago, first hypothesized this was because the sleepless were overeating during those long stretches of night. To test the hypothesis, she recruited a group of young men to spend four nights in her lab.
For two nights the men were allowed to sleep only four hours, and for two nights their rest period was 10 hours. Importantly, two hormones that regulate appetite changed radically when the subjects slept less: Leptin, which signals the brain to feel full and stop eating, decreased by 18 percent, and ghrelin, the hunger hormone, increased by 28 percent.
For the first time, Van Cauter was able to establish that sleep deficits are capable of triggering a damaging hormone cascade. These hormonal changes, Van Cauter observed, suggest that if the subjects had unlimited access to food — which they did not — they would have eaten more and gained weight.
Since her work was published in 2004, countless studies have provided support. At Columbia University, researchers reported that those who regularly slept just four hours were 73 percent more likely to become obese than those sleeping between seven and nine hours. (Even people sleeping a more respectable six hours were 23 percent more likely to become obese.)
Researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden used MRIs to show that sleep loss triggered the area of the brain associated with hunger and the desire to eat. And Van Cauter ultimately concluded that sleep restriction disrupts the daily drop-off of the damaging stress hormone, cortisol, which should be at its lowest levels right before bedtime and which is implicated in weight gain.
How Much Sleep Do You Need?
Sleep scientist James B. Maas, PhD, has already shown the real-world power of these findings by training pro athletes looking for an edge. For example, after working with Maas to improve her sleep habits, U.S. figure skater Sarah Hughes reported improved performance, contributing to an Olympic gold medal.
Among Maas’s other recent clients are the high school educators at Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Mass., who were concerned by research showing that adolescents functioned poorly very early in the day. Under Maas’s guidance, Deerfield changed its starting time to allow students an extra hour of sleep, and the school’s average grades rose to a record winter-term high. Teachers reported students showed increased alertness, and visits to the health center were down 20 percent in a year when other schools reported substantial increases in flu and colds.
This raises a question that sleep scientists like Maas hear all the time: How much sleep does the average person need to function optimally, or even competently? Can some people really get by on, say, four hours of sleep a night (as Bill Clinton famously claimed was the case for him), or will chronic sleep deprivation ultimately catch up with everyone?
It depends, says Maas. While most people do well with seven and a half to eight hours, there are individuals who need less — or substantially more. “Some people find they need 10 hours,” says Maas, “and they can no more change that than they can change a size-9 shoe to a size 6. Women, especially, often need more sleep because of fluctuations in hormones, including testosterone, cortisol and melatonin during menstruation and pregnancy, and at the start of menopause. It’s ultimately in the genes.”
To figure out how much sleep you need, Maas suggests finding out what time you need to bed down to wake up in the morning without any grogginess or even an alarm. Each week go to bed 15 minutes earlier, he says, until you find how many hours you really need. He also advises getting most of your rest in a single stretch, and not in chunks. Fragmented nights compromise energy and cognition and lead to daytime exhaustion, he says. So consider sleeping alone if your partner’s snoring, wakefulness or restless legs disturb you. If you do lose time on any given night, says Maas, make up for it as soon as possible. Catch up by going to bed earlier, not sleeping in later. And make up the sleep over a number of successive days, not all at once.
There are those rare few who truly don’t need much sleep, Maas says, but they usually come from families with a particular genetic trait. For most of us, though, the belief that we don’t need much sleep is delusional. As Maas points out, “Clinton now says he made his worst decisions on those sleepless nights.”
More Risks of Sleeplessness
Anyone who’s ever pulled an all-nighter to meet a deadline or study for a test knows the day-after results aren’t pretty: The body feels sluggish, the mind fogged or frenetic. Recent research shows that a chronic lack of sleep is far more damaging than previously assumed by many experts. Sleep deficits as small as an hour a night can increase the risk of a wide range of conditions. Why? Because when we don’t get enough sleep, our immune systems go into overdrive, which causes systemic inflammation and turns on dangerous genetic switches.
Everyone’s immune system is unique, so how sleep deprivation affects you might be different from how it affects another person. Here are just some of the ways chronic skimping on sleep can affect your health:
1. Neuropsychiatric disorders, impaired alertness and cognition, and headaches
2. Vision problems, including blurred vision, floppy eyelid syndrome, glaucoma, even temporary blindness
3. High blood pressure
4. Increased levels of cortisol, a hormone associated with stress
5. Cancer
6. Difficulty with sexual functioning
7. Increased food cravings and hunger
8. Insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes
9. Hearing loss
10. Muscle weakness and decreased athletic performance
11. Heart disease
12. Skin problems and rashes, including eczema
13. Hair loss
14. Disrupted metabolism, weight gain and obesity
