sleep

Are You Burning the Candle at Both Ends?

In today’s busy world, we often think that sleep is expendable – when we’re tired we just grab a caffeine hit and keep going. We pride ourselves on getting by with a few hours sleep – after all, it’s wasted time, isn’t it?

Or is it?

The truth is that sleep deprivation kills! And I don’t mean falling asleep while driving. Your body can go longer without food than it can without sleep. That’s right – sleep is more important than food for your survival. When you’re asleep, your brain becomes more active. So what’s really going on?

You know the feelings of tiredness. You can’t think as clearly. It’s harder to concentrate. You get grumpy. But did you realise that you’re ten times more likely to make mistakes?

Without enough sleep:

your brain chemistry changes, possibly triggering depression or even psychosis

your immune system weakens

your heart function becomes impaired (One woman, who had untreated sleep apnoea, was waiting for a heart transplant. Six months after starting on a CPAP machine, which keeps the airways open while sleeping, her heart function was normal and she was taken off the transplant list.)

your blood pressure rises

you get hungrier. (You produce more of the hormone, ghrelin, which turns on the hunger switch in your brain and less leptin, which tells you you’re full. Ghrelin also slows your metabolism and makes you want to eat high calorie foods. You feel hungrier and it takes more calories to trip the ‘off switch’ in your brain.)

you become insulin resistant and the pancreas is actually stopped from increasing insulin production.

your brain stops recognising glucose.

Put all that together and you have a recipe for piling on the kilos and developing diabetes. Not enough sleep and you are 32% more likely to be overweight, 15% more likely to be obese and 50% more likely to develop diabetes type 2.

And if that doesn’t have you heading for bed, consider this. When you’re asleep, you produce HGH (Human Growth Hormone) which increases calcium retention, strengthening bones. HGH also reduces the liver’s uptake of glucose and promotes the growth of muscle mass (and a whole lot more of other things). So if you don’t get enough sleep, all that time and energy spent on exercising will only have limited benefits! To get the full benefit of your exercise regime, you must be getting enough sleep.

So, how much sleep is enough sleep? Well, like it or not, nature designed our bodies to have about eight hours sleep every day, although this varies. To find out how much sleep you need, try this. Sleep for as long as you want for four nights in a row. The amount of sleep that you take on the fourth night is your required daily sleep. You may not like the results but that is what your body needs!

Now try getting that much sleep every night for a week and notice how alert and energetic you feel! I guarantee that you’ll start to value sleep a lot more and really understand the meaning of the old saying “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”.