Dead Tired
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? Or that a third of all workplace accidents have fatigue as a contributing factor? The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, Chernobyl and the Challenger space shuttle disaster have all been attributed to human error, with fatigue being a factor.
Without enough sleep:
-
Your brain chemistry changes, possibly triggering depression or even psychosis. Children with sleep problems at three years old are more likely to suffer from depression as adolescents. Adults with insomnia are five times more likely than others to become depressed.
-
Parts of your brain go to sleep even while you’re awake and apparently functioning normally. This leads to unpredictability and mental disorientation.
-
Your memory becomes impaired because your mind encodes and stores memories while you are sleeping – not enough sleep and it cannot do so.
-
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 responding to glucose and the body can’t process glucose normally.
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.
Of course, motor vehicle accidents involving fatigue are a well-known consequence of lack of sleep. It is a factor in 18% of all car accidents in Australia. The NRMA estimates that driver fatigue is involved in one in six fatal road accidents. If you have been continuously awake for 17 hours, your brain function is similar to that of a person with a blood alcohol level of 0.05% - yet how many of us drive when we have been awake for much longer than that?
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 benefits). 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.
Not only is it the amount of sleep that is important, it is also the quality. We have different stages of sleep and we go through these in a ninety minute cycle (approximately). Various factors can change that cycle, leading to feelings of fatigue, even although we have been sleeping.
Some of these are:
-
Exposure to noise at night can suppress immune function, even if the sleeper doesn’t waken. Unfamiliar sounds and noise during the first and last two hours of sleep has the greatest effect.
-
Some sleeping tablets, such as barbiturates, suppress REM sleep which can be harmful over a long period.
-
Digital alarm clocks can disturb your sleep as the light turns off a ‘neural switch’ in the brain causing levels of a key sleep chemical to decline within minutes.
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”.
