Have you ever had to stay up all night studying for a final? Or maybe you just stayed up watching TV before bed because you didn’t care about paying attention in class tomorrow. Are you a nurse working nights one day, mornings the next?
No matter who you are, what your profession is, or where you are in your life, you’ve probably experienced a night of poor sleep or very little sleep and thus experienced the horrible effects the next day.
It comes as no surprise that sleep is immensely important for your performance in the world the next day. When you don’t sleep well the night before, you wake up feeling like a zombie and have no motivation to do anything of importance. You want to lay in bed and sleep for the rest of eternity.
Proper sleep is one of the most important habits a person can form in an attempt to increase overall performance, vigilance, mood, and quality of life in general.
A lot of people may not believe me when I say that. Maybe you’re one of them. You may think, “My body can handle sleeping less.”, “I’ve done it before and I passed my exam.”, “I’ll just drink some coffee and be more alert.”
While I do agree that some people can handle poor sleeping habits in the short term, when studying or whatever it may be, there’s no denying that in the long term, there can be drastic effects on a person’s life.
Research on Rest
Being tired, agitated, distracted, and having no motivation is a common complaint of some of my friends. Often times their sleep schedule comes into question. I’ve been talking with one of my housemates about his sleep and how he can fix it. I wanted to read more scientific studies and see what they say about sleep and how it affects a person’s life.
I read a few studies, but nowhere near enough to be an expert. There are tons of articles and studies out there for anyone to read, so you can feel free to do some of your own research and see for yourself. I linked the studies I read at the bottom of this page.
I will be briefly describing what I took from those studies without going into too much detail about the tactics they used or the full explanation of the results. Feel free to check them out for more detail.
The Science of Slumber
Study 1: Detriments of not sleeping vs the benefits of sleeping
When you go all night with little sleep or no sleep at all, you probably blame your poor performance/alertness the next day on the detriments of not sleeping. You aren’t experiencing unwanted consequences of not sleeping. You’re just not experiencing all the benefits you receive by sleeping.
It’s sort of a weird concept. As an example, say you have $1000 and you plan to just leave it in your dorm room. If that money is stolen, your losses may be calculated as the amount of money stolen. However, the real amount of money lost is the quantity stolen ($1000), plus that which would have been added had it been in the bank earning interest prior to being stolen.
So you’re not gaining negative consequences because you’re not sleeping, you’re actually losing positive benefits.
This study tested this idea by having individuals in their residency perform a computer task. Results were based on speed and accuracy of completing the task.
Those that had adequate sleep prior to the performance test show significantly greater improvement in performance when compared to the students who hadn’t slept before the test.
Other studies have copied this experimental design and have been successful at showing the benefit of sleep for several forms of neural processing. These include insight formation, novel-language perception, visual discrimination, and motor skills.
Consolidation of memories is another possible benefit of sleep that has yet to be thoroughly tested. Basically, when you’re awake your hippocampus stores memories. This memory is passed between the hippocampus and neocortex during your sleep cycles. This is how memories are formed and retained. The process has been seen in animals, so it’s highly likely to be the case in humans as well.
This new way of looking at sleep and the loss of benefits by not sleeping is interesting. It puts a new perspective on why people perform differently when they don’t sleep enough the night before. Also, it shows how little those things like coffee do for you after a long night. These stimulants may kickstart your alertness, but they do nothing for the neural processes discussed above.
Take Away: Sleeping has a ton of benefits and by not sleeping, you’re stripping away those benefits, leading to poor performance.
Study 2: Quality of sleep can alter performance, nutritional habits, obesity, lifestyle behaviors, and psychosocial status
Military personnel were evaluated to see how quality of sleep affects a person’s life. This included their physical health and the habits associated with it, as well as their emotional and social health.
Researchers found multiple correlations between poor sleep quality and negative healthy effects.
Those who scored themselves as experiencing poor sleep quality were 50% more likely to meet the USDA dietary recommendations for fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, and fish (basically all food groups). “Poor Sleepers” (based on self evaluation) were 77.2% less likely to be healthy eaters.
Poor Sleepers were 25.7% less likely to have a healthy BMI, 50% less likely to have a healthy waist circumference, and 17 times more likely to consider themselves to be in fair or poor health. In other words, obesity is more likely in these individuals.
In terms of their emotional fitness, Poor Sleepers were 23 times more likely to score in the lowest quartiles.
This study showed a strong connection between sleep quality and physical/emotional health. Those who had poor quality of sleep were much less likely to actively eat healthy foods, less likely to exercise, and have lower emotional/social fitness.
Take Away: It’s all connected. Your quality of sleep alters your mental and physical health and vice versa.
Study 3: Sleep quality has greater effects on health, well-being, and sleepiness than sleep quantity.
College students tracked their sleep patterns (time to bed, how long they slept, quality of sleep) leading up to their final exam. Students then took a survey the day before their final to measure mental health, physical health, and tiredness.
A second group replicated the above recordings. This time during a much less stressful time during the semester.
In both studies, there was a strong correlation between sleep quality and health.
Poor sleep quality correlated with increased physical health complaints and increased feelings of tension, depression, anger, fatigue, and confusion. Each showed similar results: health and well-being has no correlation with sleep quantity.
Take Away: The quality of your sleep has drastic effects on your physical health and your mental health. Poor sleep quality leads to poor health.
Study 4: Loss of sleep might affect sensitivity to disease by altering central and neuroendocrine stress systems that support metabolic processes and physical activity, as well as brain function, cognition, and mood.
Researchers studied the serotonin-1A receptor system and the corticotropin-releasing hormone receptor system in rats. Both these systems have been connected to depression.
Each rat received an injection with chemicals that either induced a response of the system or blocked its processes. Experimental rats slept for four hours then kept awake by placing them on a slow moving wheel.
Sleep deprived rats showed a decrease in sensitivity of the serotonin-1A receptor and blunted ACTH responses to CRH. Patients diagnosed with depression have showed similar results.
The study shows that when you restrict sleep, your stress related receptor systems are altered and stunted in ways very similar to those found in patients dealing with depression and other mental health disorders. By disrupting or restricting sleep, the brain is more vulnerable to malfunction and disease.
Take Away: Losing sleep can result in increased chances of mental health disorders like depression.
Putting it All Together
That was a lot of information to look over and take in, but the basic messages should be relatively clear.
Sleep is one of the most important aspects of living a healthy life.
Every aspect of your mental and physical health is somehow connected. Something as simple as fixing your sleep schedule can drastically shift your physical health and alter your overall view of the world.
Your quality of sleep changes how well you perform in day-to-day tasks, how vigilent you are, how tired you are in any given situation, your stress levels, your mood, and so much more.
You can see by looking at these experiments that these results aren’t even long-term effects of less sleep. It takes a matter of days to see the consequences. These consequences accumulate indefinitely until it all boils over into mental health complications like depression, anxiety, and mood disorders. Even negative physical complications like obesity, heart disease, poor diet, gastrointestinal problems, and so much more can be seen.
It’s not always easy to fix your sleep schedule, especially not right away, but it’s 100% necessary to start taking the proper steps towards doing so.
Do you feel as though your mood has been altered? Do you feel less physically healthy? Does anything feel negative compared to your normal state? Take a look at your sleep. Not just how long you sleep either (oversleeping can be detrimental too). It’s mainly about the quality of your sleep.
Please, do whatever you can to fix your sleep. It can help you immensely, both in the short term and especially in the long term.
Check out the studies below:
