Effect of Sleep on Your Mental and Physical Health
A lack of sleep has a huge effect on your mental and physical health. Everything that you do throughout the day relies on the amount of sleep of the previous night. Sleep is defined as a biological imperative critical to the maintenance of mental and physical health. It is a state of lessened consciousness and decreased physical activity during which the organism slows down and repairs itself. Looking at the definition of sleep, you can see that sleep is a time during which the body repairs itself. Logically this would imply that a lack of sleep causes the body to not be able to repair itself.
Sleep disorders affect 50 to 70 million Americans of all ages and socioeconomic classes. Disorders such as insomnia, sleep apnea, narcolepsy, restless legs syndrome, and REM sleep behavior disorder prevent people from getting a good night’s sleep. But why is a good night’s sleep so important? Getting adequate rest has been shown to help prevent excess weight gain, heart disease, and increased illness duration. (Watson, 2020) So sleeping is not only good for you, but it is a vital part of our lives.
Your mental health is arguably the most important thing throughout your life. Sleep disruption, i.e. waking up from REM sleep due to a disruption or disease, wreaks havoc in the brain, impairing thinking, and emotional regulation. The brain processes a large amount of information during REM sleep and when disturbed this information becomes scattered. You can think of the brain during sleep as a professor grading exams. You are going over all the material that your students learned throughout the year, remembering everything that was done over the course of the class, and storing them away. This is exactly what the brain does. It remembers pieces of emotions and thoughts that occurred throughout the day and stores that information. You can see how something like this would be important. If a process such as this is disrupted that information is not stored. It can have great effects on bodily processes such as memory.
The effect a lack of sleep has on your physical health can be just as bad as your mental health. Something that is very important to many people, especially in today’s world is your immune system. A lack of sleep can greatly impair your body’s ability to properly defend itself. Studies have been shown that the receptiveness of vaccines can be greatly increased by the amount of sleep that you get at the end of each day. (Hestetun, I., Svendsen, M. V., & Oellingrath, I. M, 2018) As stated above, sleep is a time during which your body repairs itself. If your immune system becomes compromised then sleep would be the ideal time to repair itself. The risk of obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes are all disorders that increase greatly when a lack of sleep is introduced to the body. This isn’t something that occurs right away, it would take years of consistent lack of sleep for these disorders to develop.
Now that I have discussed some of the different disorders that develop due to the lack of sleep, I want to talk about how a lack of sleep can affect your daily life.
Most people are awake for at least 15 hours during the course of a 24-hour day. The CDC recommends staying awake for no more than 17 hours at a time. While sleep deprivation itself won’t kill you it can be fatal in many circumstances such as drowsy driving. In 2015, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported that 90,000 motor vehicle crashes involved sleep-deprived drivers. Most people begin to experience sleep deprivation after 24 hours without sleep. According to the CDC, staying awake for more than 24 hours at a time is comparable to having a blood alcohol content (BAC) of 0.10 percent. It is illegal to drive in the US with a BAC of 0.08 percent. Sleep deprivation also affects hormones that regulate growth, appetite, metabolism, and stress. (Feldman, 2017) Your body is also desensitized to certain things, increasing reaction speeds and thus causing more accidents than usual.
Everyone knows the struggle of not having a good night’s rest. If you’ve been in school you know that sometimes you prioritize assignments and homework over your own sleep and thus health. Sleeping can be beneficial for everyone helping them become more focused and determined to complete the task of their days. People that suffer from insomnia oftentimes wake up every day tired. As many as 10% of American adults suffer from chronic insomnia. The most common cause of insomnia is stress. This stress can be produced from a variety of things such as work, marriage issues, and financial strain. It is not all that surprising that many Americans suffer from insomnia especially when you consider the fact that most of it are caused by stress.
Overall sleep is a very important factor for your mental and physical health. Sleep may seem more of a want than a need at times, but as I have discussed here, it is definitely a need. The risk for accidents is greatly increased when you are drowsy and sleep-deprived. I highly encourage everyone reading this to evaluate their sleep schedule. Everyone deserves a good night’s rest and while the causes for many sleeping disorders such as narcolepsy are widely unknown, it is still a highly researched topic. Sleep is important for many different reasons such as preventing diseases and sicknesses. Sleep affects everything from your daily life to your mental health. I hope that everyone that has read this views sleeps in a different light. It is not a chance to be lazy, but a chance to recover from the stress, activities, and burdens of the day.
