Not getting enough sleep can negatively affect your health. Whatever the cause is, it can put your vital organs and systems at risk, and diminish the quality of your life. Usual day-to-day tasks, such as driving or working out at the gym, can become dangerous, as you need to be alert and focused when carrying out these activities for your own and everybody else’s safety.
Sleep medicine experts say that people should not treat sleep as something that is optional or a luxury. They want everyone to know that sleep is a necessity that the human body requires to function and work well. If you lose a lot of hours of sleep, you will suffer from some major health problems that can be detrimental to you physically, mentally, and sexually.
Various sleep studies have found that people who get less than 6 to 8 hours of sleep each night have 12% more chances of early death. To prevent that, you should listen to what the experts say, and make sure that you get about 7 to 9 hours of sleep every night.
Below are some big impacts of sleep deprivation that you should watch out for:
1. You will feel fatigued
Everyday, you should get enough sleep to allow your body to rest and recover. If you fail to do that, you will end up feeling exhausted.
At work, you might wind up nodding off, and unable to accomplish the tasks assigned to you. If your boss catches you, you might get reprimanded. While driving, if you fall asleep, you might crash your car, injure yourself, and even hurt others. Dealing with the trauma, damage costs, and others can be so stressful, and might make sleeping a lot more difficult than it already is. During intimate moments, getting hard might be a challenge, as your body does not feel up to it. Because of that, you and your partner might get into conflicts and have a strained relationship.
2. You will gain weight
If you are sleep deprived, your body experiences a decrease in its levels of leptin, which is the hormone that creates that feeling of fullness. As a result, you will feel hungry all the time, and will be very likely to binge on foods that are high in calories, sugars, and fats. The more frequent this happens, the more weight you gain.
Because being overweight or obese has a lot of negative effects on the body, you should strive hard to find a solution to your sleep problems. Your risk of suffering from high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and high sugar levels increase, and eventually, you may develop type 2 diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, and other disorders that may put you closer to death’s door.
3. You will have a slower reaction time
According to health professionals, a lack of sleep can mess up a person’s sense of orientation. As a result, he or she may lose track of what day of the month it is, what time it is, where he or she is, or why he or she is doing what he or she is doing.
Furthermore, a study focused on the link between sleep and driving found that drivers who suffered from sleep deprivation are prone to losing focus while driving due to sleepiness, and they are at great risk of getting into road accidents. In fact, according to the data gathered, about 20% of all car crash incidents in developed countries are primarily because of sleep-deprived drivers.
4. You will experience mood swings
Spending hours and hours of your night tossing and turning in bed or staring at the ceiling can put you in a terrible mood that can carry over to the next day and make you lose concentration at work or in school.
If you are getting less than the recommended hours of sleep, your body’s cortisol levels skyrocket, causing you to feel a lot more stressed out. But, with a good night’s sleep, you can keep your cortisol levels down, and experience less crankiness.
With better mood, you can be at your best mentally, emotionally, and physically. You can also enjoy your sexual moments with your partner a lot more.
5. You will suffer from low sex drive
Because of insufficient sleep, your body will not be able to produce the right amount of hormones for your good health and wellbeing. This includes your male sex hormone — called testosterone — which will see a decrease and have a major impact on your sex life.
If you have low testosterone levels in your body, you will experience a long list of changes that can negatively affect different aspects of your health. You will have a lower sex drive, which can cause problems in the bedroom. Your muscles will lose mass and strength, which can make doing physical activities hard. You will gain weight and lose body hair, which can affect your self-esteem. You will also feel increased fatigue, hot flashes, and the likes, which can stop you from doing a lot of things that you enjoy.
6. You will have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease
If you like to stay up late to play video games, watch movies and television series, or partying, you are not doing your body any favors. You are depriving yourself from getting enough sleep, and thus, increasing your risk of different health problems that strike your major bodily organs and systems, most particularly your cardiovascular system.
For you to stay alive and well, your heart, arteries, veins, and the rest of the cardiovascular parts work hard day in and day out to pump blood around your body. Every night, they need you to get enough sleep so that they can be at tip-top shape for a long time. If you fail to do so, you are in danger of high blood pressure, irregular heartbeats, heart attacks, and other heart-related illnesses, which can impair your brain, immune, digestive, and reproductive functions.
