The Health Cost of Cutting Sleep

Sleep procrastination is a big problem worldwide. Sleep procrastination is going to bed later than intended – despite knowing you’ll be worse off as a result. Females are more likely to be bedtime procrastinators than men. The chance of severe bedtime procrastination is more than twice as high for females than males. So you know ladies, I'm talking to you right now and reminding you that despite all the caring you do for others, your wellbeing matters too.

So here’s the problem with putting off going to bed- sleep is not simply rest. Some systems – such as your endocrine system, are busier during your sleep than they are when you are awake.

So, what are you actually cutting out when you are cutting out sleep? Here are some things sleep deprivation studies have shown us.

1.????? Clearance of toxins from the brain.

While we sleep, we remove twice as much toxic waste from our brain as when we are awake. When we are awake our brain builds up metabolic waste products, and although it does some cleaning as it goes, you can think of sleep as being like the cleaners that come into the office at night. Cleaners at night can often do a better job because there is more space to get into all the nooks and crannies to clear a lot more waste away. The same thing happens to your brain at night, things are better able to be moved around, so it gets a good clean out. This is important because the accumulation of waste products in the brain is a characteristic of many, if not all, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.

2.????? The ability to experience positive emotions

The biggest impact sleep loss has on your health is to your mental health. Most people know they get a bit cranky and irritable when they haven’t had enough sleep, but it’s potentially a lot more damaging than that. Not only does sleep loss prime you for anxiety, but the strongest and most robust finding on how sleep loss impacts your mental health, is that it diminishes your ability to experience positive emotions. All your emotions act as important feedback in keeping you healthy and safe. Think of your negative emotions as warning signs (don’t go this way) and your positive emotions as welcoming signs (come this way instead). Negative emotions act to protect us from the dark, but positive emotions power us up and lead us to the light. If we can’t experience those positive emotions, it’s difficult to see our pathway forward. Sleep loss sort of washes out the positive emotions bridge, so we get trapped in the grey zone.

?3.????? Your immunity, ability to heal and fight infections

When discussing sleep’s role in your immunity, sleep expert Dr Matt Walker says you can think of sleep as essentially being critical for restocking the weapons in your armoury to help you fight infections. We know for example, if you get the flu vaccination when you are sleep deprived it is 50% less effective. Essentially you have 50% less antibodies being created in response to what it would be if you had had a good night’s sleep. If you don’t like the gun analogy, think of sleep like restocking your internal medicine cabinet. If you don’t sleep enough, your medicine cabinet won’t get restocked. So, you won’t have what you need to fight infections.

?4.????? Your ability to lose weight.

Sleep loss impacts your metabolism, cardiovascular health and body weight in several different ways, including having negative impacts on your gut microbiome, appetite hormones, inflammation, insulin sensitivity and fat oxidation. For example, sleep loss disrupts leptin and ghrelin which are appetite hormones. One makes you feel hungry, the other makes you feel full. When you haven’t had enough sleep your body goes into survival mode and it tells you to eat a lot, so you have the energy you need to survive and then when you do eat, it stops you from feeling full.? Sleep loss also mucks with glucose and fat oxidation. Growth hormone which stimulates metabolism of fat, is secreted at higher amounts during slow wave sleep (SWS). Reducing SWS, reduces growth hormone and therefore fat oxidation.

?5.????? Neuroplasticity and learning new information.

To grow and develop as humans we need the ability to learn. Sleep is incredibly important for our memory consolidation and sleep deprivation seems to be particularly detrimental to memory and learning. Neuro-plasticity refers to the ability for the brain to learn and adapt to change, but we can’t actually do that as well if we skimp on sleep. While learning itself occurs when we are awake and alert, sleep seems to sew the pieces of our memories together, helping us consolidate those new ideas with existing knowledge we have. We know that people who sleep on new knowledge tend to do better in tests, than those who skimp on sleep. It won’t be surprising to anyone how forgetful we can become when we are sleep deprived. As one researcher put it. “Sleep is the price the brain pays for plasticity.” ?

So if it is not rest - what purpose does sleep play?

When you cut out sleep, you are cutting out essential processes to keep you healthy. You can think of sleep being a bit like what your computer and phone do overnight. It’s a shut-down period for essential maintenance and upgrades. First it does an overall a scan of the different areas of the body and brain that need repair and then it takes the appropriate action to fix what needs to be fixed. Forget about beauty sleep, there is a lot more you are missing out on than fewer wrinkles. Who cares about wrinkles anyway.

Note - I studied Sleep Science at the Sleep/Wake Research Centre at Massey University. For the full reference list and more information on sleep see my website and look out for my upcoming sleep podcast.

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